Still Looking for a Home

(Page 2 of 2)

Finding the Money

Mayor Pro Tem Sheryl Cole has visited both Miami and San Antonio in search of best practices to bring home. She suggests that the city governments in those places have formed extensive partnerships. "Both cities have a model – a new model – that I think is probably one of the most critical aspects of what we need to implement here," she says. "It involves a collaboration between the government sector, the faith-based community, social services, and the business community.

"In Austin, at this stage," Cole continues, "the government sector is taking a primary role in trying to address the issue. ... But we do not want to do that alone, and we do not think we can do that alone. We have to have the other prongs of the model at the table."

Much of the solution comes down to money. Miami-Dade reeled in millions of dollars in federal funding, thanks to its considerable local match. It can also depend on $14 million annually from the food and beverage tax. San Antonio, by contrast, is subject to the same lack of state social services funding we are – but managed to give just over $7 million to Haven for Hope alone in fiscal year 2012. San Antonio's Department of Human Services funded a raft of community programs to the tune of $36.1 million from the city's general fund.

The city of Austin can provide only a fraction of its already severely diced $25 million in social services funds to address homelessness. Private investment did help establish such efforts as the ARCH, but Council Member Mike Martinez isn't sure that's an adequate precedent. "We've got to get the right partners at the table," he says. "You can't go to the business community every time and say, 'Hey, we need you to pony up some money and help us solve this.' We've already tried that, and it hasn't worked. They stepped up heavily for the ARCH and helped fund that and embraced it being Downtown, and it's done good – it's done a lot of good things – but it certainly didn't solve our issues."

Proposition 15 was supposed to help. On Nov. 6, the city of Austin asked its voters to approve $78.3 million in bonds for rental housing and affordable ownership opportunities for low- to moderate-income residents and Austinites with special needs who are working toward self-sufficiency. It wasn't the annual $95 million infusion that helps fund Miami's programs, but it would have been a substantial investment.

The citizens of Austin said no.

There's been plenty of speculation, including in this paper, about why Prop. 15 failed. Martinez suggests it was insufficient education. "It's not that [Austinites are] opposed to it. ... They just want to know where we are going to stick all of these units," he says. "Obviously, we'd love to have a road map, but ... when the opportunity arises and a property becomes available that's cheap and can have a big impact, you have to be ready and capable of moving on it quickly, and sometimes it may not be according to the plan."

Whatever the explanation, the defeat of Prop. 15 was a considerable blow to the overall effort to diminish homelessness. And there's a paradox embedded in the problem that makes the failure of Prop. 15 even more frustrating: There is strong evidence that an investment in permanent supportive housing, though expensive up front, is ultimately cheaper than doing nothing. And that calculation brings us back to Patient No. 1.

Patient No. 1 is a member of what social scientists call "a cohort," a group of individuals who share a set of measurable experiences. Patient No. 1's cohort is the top 20 most frequent users of emergency care in Travis County. They are all homeless and dependent on city services to address their complicated sets of needs. This means hospital emergency room visits, frequent contact with Emer­gen­cy Medical Services, and mental health or detox care courtesy of Travis County Central Booking. The cumulative costs are daunting – in 2010 alone, almost $800,000 spent on just 20 people – and make investments in permanent solutions seem economical by comparison.

There are also, says ECHO, hospital costs for those members of the homeless population who need more attention than can be provided by EMS. ECHO puts that figure at over $1.5 million in emergency room costs and $1.4 million in other hospital fees. The DAA's Brice succinctly summarizes the situation: "We're spending millions and millions of dollars to not solve the problem."

It also means that despite the substantial start-up costs, investing in permanent supportive housing could save the city (and the county, and the taxpayers) a lot of money.

Collaborations in Progress

While much of Austin was preoccupied with Formula One weekend (for or against), the city's veterans consultant, Allen Bergeron, was engaged in a different sort of civic enterprise. In September, Mayor Lee Lef­fing­well and the Veterans Affairs Office – with help from state and federal programs – kicked off a furniture donation program designed to provide furnishings to veterans and their families who are transitioning to new housing. In about a month, the participating organizations and their sponsors had collected enough household goods to furnish dwellings for seven vets. It was a relatively small effort that, nonetheless, had a large impact (as Bergeron puts it, a program might get a vet into housing, but it can't keep him or her from sleeping on the floor) and was accomplished quickly and efficiently. "We have a warehouse full of furniture," says Bergeron – in theory, the seed of several more furnished homes.

Key players in local efforts to combat homelessness – including those both at City Hall and on the front lines – argue that what's on the ground now could benefit from better focus. A broadly accessible, centralized, and comprehensive database of services would be a good start; more case managers would be helpful, too. But they insist that there is already quite a bit of service infrastructure. "We have so many of the same components at work that other cities have," says Brice. "It's just a matter of coming to grips with how all of these parts come together."

A close-up of such efforts as Bergeron's is encouraging. In addition to the furniture drive, the city Veterans Affairs Office has also organized an arrangement whereby local faith organizations step in to watch children of single female veterans while they take care of necessary activities like job interviews. Bergeron is also partnering with the U.S. VETS in an arrangement that he hopes will acquire more permanent, full-time transitional housing for vets over the next six months or so.

Bergeron and his staff are employing a broad range of programs to get homeless veterans into long-term housing by providing the wraparound support that is required to do the job. And he's doing it at a very low cost. His department relies on partnerships – federal, state, faith-based, private, whatever – to get things done. The office's basic operations are funded by a federal grant.

Although it might not seem so to the casual observer, there are in fact fewer homeless in Austin than in other U.S. cities; that means the problem should be relatively more solvable here than in, say, New York or Los Angeles or even Houston. Bergeron estimates Austin's homeless veteran population at 150 to 200; if the citywide figure is something that can be tackled, Bergeron's focus is even more manageable, and the progress made by the Veterans Affairs Office illustrates that a lot can be accomplished for not much funding.

Indeed, the pieces of a solution may be in place, but the funding most certainly isn't. Cole does not mince words about the stakes. "The homeless issue has been called the last major civil rights issue," she says. "Now as you see ... the public order initiatives with many cities throughout the country, with large amounts of the homeless population, you're seeing a crackdown, sometimes, on their civil liberties." In recent months, the Austin Police Department has responded to a rising incidence of homeless-related crime – both as victims and perpetrators – with its own public order initiative, to a mixed public response (see "Downtown Stopgap"). But neither APD Chief Art Acevedo nor social services advocates consider such responses permanent or sufficient solutions.

If we do nothing more, says Cole, "I don't think [homelessness] will go away, especially as we decrease our safety net." Unless the city finds a way to fill that gap, the line will continue to form behind Patient No. 1.

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Correction: The cutline on the first image of this feature previously misidentified the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless and has since been corrected.