There are discussions throughout Austin surrounding the criminalization of homeless encampments. Recently, Save Austin Now garnered enough signatures to get reinstating a camping ban on the May ballot. I not only agree with them – despite legal precedent that camping bans are in violation of the Bill of Rights amendment protecting citizens from cruel and unusual punishment – but I believe that we can take it further.
The most important goal is to keep our city family-friendly, and therefore visually pleasing, but the result is a dull board game, with neighborhoods pushing pieces back and forth. Yes, it engages the whole city: Nobody can say frustration with the homeless isn’t a bonding experience. The fact remains, however, that, as a game, it’s rather boring and, even worse, it never ends.
I present to you my personal solution: 1) Divide Austin city into 64 sections to make it an 8×8 board. 2) Play chess! Assign pieces to camps, and charge them with felonies for moving outside their space. Whenever a piece is “taken” we can send a police raid. Cleaning up our streets has never been so fun!
Both sides are incentivized to play to move pieces out of their neighborhoods, but there is also a prize: Whoever wins gets to choose the location of the next homeless shelter, presumably on the loser’s side.
Yes, it sounds inhumane at a glance. But we can make each turn two days, giving camps over half a week’s notice to vacate, which is more warning than most encampments across the country receive for sweeps, if any. Besides, the HEAL initiative made camping illegal only in certain areas just last week; this initiative is not only more fun but you’ll also have a shelter approved within three months. You can’t deny the end results.
“Wait!” you say. “Won’t this expend our city’s limited resources unnecessarily?” My first rebuttal is that it already costs the average taxpayer more to criminalize homeless people than to house them, but we seem to have no qualms with doing that anyways. A street homeless person costs taxpayers $35,000 per year, whereas with housing that number falls on average by $5,000. My second rebuttal is that it expends only slightly more resources than Save Austin Now’s bland, non-strategic camping ban, and comes with an end result they don’t offer, which makes it net less wasteful.
It gets better! You can customize camp themes for different pieces based on societal failures that inform homeless demographics in Austin. Here are some “starter kit” examples:
Assigning victims of our country’s mismanagement of the opioid epidemic as knights for the “horse” theme is enough recognition of the problem that you won’t have to bother with safe injection sites or other harm reduction strategies. You can choose a camp with queer youth as your queen – a nice way to balance out the discrimination that probably rendered them homeless in the first place. Formerly incarcerated people make great pawns: Employment and housing discrimination being legal against them means you’ll always have enough, and them getting “taken” more often is made less unfair by current policies already all but explicitly encouraging recidivism.
Consider making your king a symbolic territory for those who are “hidden” homeless despite working because stagnant wages don’t meet inflating rent costs. There are too many to fit in one space, and when the eviction moratorium ends the number will skyrocket, but it’s symbolic so you can pretend.
Additionally, there is a silver lining to Austin largely remaining racially segregated: It makes assigning which sides of the board are white and black easy. Despite making up 8% of Austin’s total population, Black people make up almost 40% of our homeless population, due to a myriad of systemic failings, one of which is being disproportionately targeted by police. No biggie: White is systemically favored in chess, but the game is still considered quintessentially logical – a true beacon of meritocracy. Anyone can win if they try hard enough.
One final rule: If the game ends in a stalemate, you restart!
Summer Wright has experienced homelessness intermittently since she was a teenager. She is currently housed in a Rapid Rehousing program through LifeWorks and serves as a member of the Austin Youth Collective and the Austin/Travis County Continuum of Care Governing Board.
This article appears in February 12 • 2021.