City Council to Begin the Year With Adoption of 10-Year Homelessness Plan

photo by Jana Birchum

Next week marks the beginning of the 2025 City Council calendar, with Council convening for their first meeting of the year, Jan. 30.

The meeting will be the first for the three new Council members in districts 6, 7, and 10 (Krista Laine, Mike Siegel and Marc Duchen, respectively) and the first meeting of Mayor Kirk Watson’s first full term. And the fully Democratic Council will begin its work at a time of Republican dominance at the state and federal levels of government.

In next week’s issue we’ll have an in-depth look at what that dynamic means for each CM, and what they hope to accomplish during the reign of state and national government that is likely to be hostile to the goals of leaders in blue cities. But this week’s agenda offers its own preview of what’s to come.

One of the major items up for approval is adoption of a 10-year plan to drastically reduce unsheltered homelessness in Austin. The plan, authored by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO, the lead agency in charge of coordinating efforts to end homelessness in Austin-Travis County), calls for a sizable investment from all of Austin – that is, not just city government. Travis County, the city of Austin, health care providers like Central Health and Integral Care, philanthropic funders, and others will all have to increase their homelessness response funding to meet the plan’s ambitious $350 million, decadelong goal.

That money, the ECHO plan indicates, would fund thousands of new permanent and short-term housing units for people exiting homelessness, with hundreds coming online every year. The plan also acknowledges that housing is the surest, most sustainable way to help a person exit homelessness. Funding housing solutions is especially urgent over the next two years as hundreds of units (especially of the short-term variety) had been funded by the federal government through former President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act. All of the money from ARPA has been committed, so local leaders are scrambling to find permanent funding sources to replace it.

Council’s formal adoption of the plan just means that city leaders are declaring their intent to contribute a yet-to-be-determined amount of the city’s budget to the $35 million-per-year communitywide funding goal needed to fulfill the ECHO plan. That could include more staffing within the city’s Homeless Strategy Office, development of strategies to better utilize existing shelter and short-term housing solutions, capital funds to expand capacity of housing and services needed to help people living on the streets, and further investment in programs that can help prevent people from falling into homelessness in the first place.

Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes chairs Council’s Public Health Committee, which formally recommended the plan to Council for approval in December. Fuentes said it was important to get the plan on Council’s first agenda of the new year because it would signal to city residents, and community partners, how high a priority the issue will be for City Hall in the coming year. She also said the inherently collaborative nature of the plan represents the approach local leaders will need to prioritize during President Donald Trump’s second administration.

“With the [ARPA] cliff looming,” Fuentes said, “we have to come together as a community to help our unhoused neighbors. With new leaders at Central Health and Integral Care, we are already seeing considerable progress.”