Michael
Urubek says
the city council is dreaming if it thinks the new encampment ordinance will
succeed in solving the homeless problem. His view may not sound radical until
you know who he is: Urubek is the Austin police lieutenant in charge of
fielding questions about the city-wide camping ban. As spokesman for the
municipal entity responsible for enforcing the new ordinance, Lt. Urubek knows
he’s supposed to toe the party line about how the new law will aid police in
cracking down on the homeless population. But the man just can’t seem to lie.
“What were the city council’s expectations after this [ordinance] was passed?
The police department is not targeting the homeless. We don’t have the staff to
round them up or the room to put them away,” Urubek huffs. “Maybe the council
should have thought this through a little more.”
Urubek likens the council’s action to a political game. “[The councilmembers]
said, `We’ll talk our game; we’ve done our job [by passing the ordinance]. And
now we are not going to have homelessness anymore,'” he says. “But the only
problem is, it’s not going to work in the long run… [Violators] will go in
court one day and come out the next.”
Therein lies the crux of the problem: How do you get Austin’s estimated
6,000 homeless people off the streets? Do you put more resources into drug
treatment and job-training programs, as homeless activists advocate? Or do you
take the city council’s approach and try to make Austin a less desirable
stopping place for transients? And if you do enforce a camping ban, will it
actually succeed, and is it legal?
Some of Austin’s homeless want help, desperately. But a great many say they
are content with life on the streets. After all, it’s a free country. But when
do their rights to access public property infringe on the rights of taxpaying
residents to enjoy the same stretch of land?
On Thursday, January 25,
the first day that the ordinance went into effect, making it a Class C
misdemeanor for an individual to sleep, store personal belongings, cook, or
build fires in public areas, about 200 people gathered on the steps of the
Capitol building to protest its passage. Among the activists, reporters, and
undercover police officers present were scores of Austin’s homeless population,
ranging from the bearded “old-timers” who have hopped trains from town to town
for the last 20 years, making the greenbelts of Austin home during the mild
winters, to the teen-aged, tattooed “crusties” who hang out on the Drag on
Guadalupe Street across from the University of Texas day and night, smoking and
panhandling.
One young homeless man wearing an army jacket addressed the audience with a
few loud, angry words that summed it up for many in the crowd: “We don’t
fuckin’ deserve this fuckin’ shit. We have to eat. We have to sleep. We have to
shit. You can’t take that away from us.”
To the dismay of several ordinance protesters, a drunken homeless man took
that anger a step further with a message even the least paranoid would find
offensive. “We [homeless Vietnam veterans] are trained killers. If the
revolution goes down, we’ll take you out. I’ll kill you without thinking about
it,” he slurred. “There ain’t enough cops in this damn town to handle us.”
But most of the demonstrators were a peaceful lot. Speaker after speaker
talked about the unfairness of an ordinance that they say makes being poor a
crime. Homeless advocate Amy Edwards tried to explain why many fear those who
live on the fringes of society. “Homelessness is like a mirror. We know who the
victim is — the homeless. The victimizer is all of us who turn them away,” she
said. “We turn them away because we are afraid to see ourselves.”
Among the “mirrors” to which Edwards was referring is “Meek,” 24, a college
dropout who travels around Canada in the summer but hops trains to Texas when
the weather turns cold. Meek is good-looking, and, along with a confident
smile, sports a backwards baseball cap and earrings on both ears. He says he
lives outdoors by choice, and likens the homeless society to a “self-sufficient
Utopia” whose members rebel against mainstream norms. “They don’t mind being
dirty. They don’t care if their clothes stink,” he says. Meek believes the Drag
is enhanced by the presence of homeless people. “If the cops did wipe out
everyone off the Drag — the place wouldn’t be the same, and I think a lot of
the [UT] students would miss that,” he says. “[The homeless] add a certain part
of society that’s different from theirs. A lot of these kids are really
artistic.”
But not everyone appre-
ciates the bohemian allure of the street people along the Drag. The homeless
leave trash and rotting food in front of churches and in doorways. Business
owners have complained for years that their intimidating presence interferes
with customers and tourists. They say that panhandlers often go beyond simple
begging — glowering and hurling insults at those who don’t comply. In what
homeless advocates would surely call bad timing, on the day before the
ordinance went into effect, four transient youths were arrested for attempting
to rob a female UT student on the Drag, according to a police spokesperson. The
woman was reportedly beaten and kicked by up to 10 youths after she refused to
hand over her purse.
So perhaps when Mayor Bruce Todd first proposed the ordinance last summer, he
saw it as a way to appease merchants who have clamored for years for aid in
protecting their customers from offensive behavior, annoying begging, and
physical intimidation. However, during council meetings where discussions about
the then-proposed ordinance took place, Todd, who refused to comment for this
story, cast the measure as a way to reclaim public parks for Austin’s
taxpayers. He said the land on which the homeless camp should be accessible to
everyone. (Odd that on the day the ordinance went into effect, the Parks police
announced that officers would no longer patrol the deep recesses of the park;
instead they would stick to the trails. If that isn’t an invitation for the
homeless to quit the city’s more public places in favor of the parks, what is?)
Councilmember Max Nofziger, who spent time as a transient in the Seventies and
in 1989 proposed building a homeless shelter near Town Lake, disappointed many
constituents when he backed the mayor’s ban. At a council meeting last July he
announced: “I don’t want Austin to be the homeless capitol of the world.” The
final tally on the ordinance had Todd and Councilmembers Ronney Reynolds,
Nofziger, and Gus Garcia voting in favor; Jackie Goodman voted against. (Eric
Mitchell abstained, and Brigid Shea was absent.)
Another city that, like Austin, has gained nationwide attention for defying
its reputation as the liberal bastion of its state by cracking down on the
homeless is San Francisco. City leaders there launched a campaign two years ago
to ticket homeless people for some of the same offenses detailed in Austin’s
new ordinance. According to an article in the Washinton Post on January
1, the move was widely criticized as having little impact other than wasting
police resources and inconveniencing homeless people. Police issued more than
27,000 tickets with little effect. “Several million dollars have gone down the
drain so this mayor’s office can give the business community the perception
they’re addressing the problem, by having fewer homeless people visually
present,” Paul Boden of the Coalition on Homelessness told the Post.
At the rally on the first evening of the enforcement of Austin’s ordinance, Fort Worth
Star-Telegram and syndicated political columnist Molly Ivins spent the
night in a sleeping bag on a Congress Avenue sidewalk with local musician Steve
Fromholz and 85 other protesters. “You cannot solve homelessness by getting
people out of sight or by just sweeping them off the streets,” Ivins said while
young activists, somber gaunt-faced men, and happy drunks milled about the
sidewalk, some clutching “House the Homeless” and “Honk for the Homeless”
posters.
“If you own a store and some drunken person pees on your sidewalk or if he is
harassing people, there are already laws against that,” Ivins said. “Some of
these people are alcoholics, mental cases, and some are just damn poor, but
don’t tell me those guys who line up [at the labor corner] don’t want to
work… How could you give somebody who’s homeless a $500 ticket? If they had
that, they wouldn’t be homeless.”
Jose Martinez, executive director of the Downtown Austin Alliance, which
represents businesses in the downtown area, says that Austin’s ordinance is
necessary to pave the way to cleaner streets and to promote a more
user-friendly downtown experience for shoppers and tourists. He commends the
council’s actions supporting the Alliance’s downtown security measures. “This
ordinance sends out a clear message to people who choose to sleep in our
right-of-ways and public sidewalks that we will not stand for it.”
Police in Austin have yet to embark on an all-out push to write citations, and
Lt. Urubek says they have no plans to do so. He worries that the council is
throwing the homeless problem into the laps of the police, who are ill-equipped
to solve it. The police department, he says, views the camping ban as just
another ordinance — no more, no less. “This ordinance is not a tool for us to
clean up anything,” he says. “It’s just something to assist us in special
situations, such as removing somebody who’s lying around a business.”
Not, he notes, that there weren’t ordinances dealing with the problem already
in place. According to assistant city attorney Deborah Thomas, among the
ordinances police can use to curb the actions of Austin’s homeless are those
that ban urinating and/or defecating in public, littering, drinking alcohol,
and carrying open containers in certain areas, lighting fires, and begging in
public places. In fact, there was already an ordinance on the books making it
illegal to sleep in public places until the recent camping ban replaced it. “In
the past, if we wanted to target the homeless, we could have easily found them
all in violation of an ordinance,” Lt. Urubek says. “But we have not done that
to this date. If they end up in jail, they’ll just bounce back out.”
The Alliance’s Martinez counters that the ordinance does give the police
greater authority. “This gives the police more confidence to enforce a policy
of `zero tolerance’ with habitual offenders,” he says.
But some homeless people,
such as Dwight, who would not give his last name, say the police stand little
chance of getting rid of them. On the night of the anti-ordinance rally, the
shaggy-haired Dwight doused his nightly fire at “the horseshoe pit,” the
homeless camp near the railroad tracks off the intersection of Barton Springs
Road and Lamar, and headed down the tracks to a more out-of-the-way place to
sleep. “The police came in last Wednesday and put up an eviction notice [at the
camp] and told us that when the ordinance goes into effect, move on,” Dwight
says. “Next week we’ll just patch it up and climb back in.”
Dwight is one of the working homeless, performing day labor for any contractor
who will have him. He used to work on oil rigs in the panhandle until he broke
his back in 1979. After a long stint in the hospital, he says, he lost his job.
He says the money he makes now covers food and clothing, but not much else. “If
I did get arrested [for violating the ordinance], I’d just have to sit it out
in jail,” Dwight says, shifting the sleeping bag slung across his back. “If the
citizens of Austin want to pay taxes for me to have a warm bed and a bologna
sandwich, it’s up to them. They are making it illegal to be poor.”
In addition to the question
of enforcement is the question of legality. Critics of the ordinance say it’s
simply unconstitutional, and will cost taxpayers a bundle to defend. Cecilia
Wood, attorney for House the Homeless, Inc., an education/advocacy
organization, points out that a similar ordinance barring sleeping in public
places in Dallas was struck down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals because,
the court ruled, it punishes a certain segment of the population for their
status rather than for their conduct. According to the court’s opinion, “As
long as homeless persons must live in public, their sleeping may not be
constitutionally criminalized.” Dallas is appealing the decision.
Santa Ana, California, fared better with its anti-homeless measure, which
assistant city attorney Thomas says was the model for Austin’s ordinance. After
a trip through the lower trial and appellate courts, the ordinance was upheld
by the California Supreme Court last April. That decision could still be
appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
So far there has been one case involving the ordinance that went before a
municipal judge in Austin, but it was dismissed because the offender, with the
whimsical name of Thomas Sawyer, 39, assured prosecutors that he would make
alternate sleeping arrangements. Todd fired off a press release the day after
the dismissal, assuring the public that the fact that Sawyer got off “in no way
means we won’t vigorously enforce this ordinance.” Police say they have issued
several tickets, which can cost offenders up to $500 or jail time if they don’t
pay up. It’s only a matter of time before the law is tested.
House the Homeless attorney Wood says she welcomes the chance to challenge the
law. She has gathered a packet of materials for lawyers and defendants to use
in a criminal trial “to help them preserve a good record for appeal after these
people are convicted,” she says.
House the Homeless President Richard Troxell, who is also director of Legal
Aid for the Homeless, says enforcing a camping ban “creates what would
essentially amount to a debtor’s prison,” costing taxpayers $67.50 a day to
keep a homeless inmate in jail. Troxell claims that for only $45 a day per
client, the city and private sponsors could provide a job training and alcohol
and drug detoxification program that would treat homelessness as a health
issue, not a criminal issue.
Ordinance supporters argue that groups like the Salvation Army, Helping Our
Brothers Out (HOBO), Austin Area Urban League, Caritas of Austin, and several
Austin churches are just some of the organizations that already offer various
social services to the homeless, ranging from labor connections and babysitting
services to transitional housing and Legal Aid. They are also quick to point
out that the federal government recently awarded a $3.5 million grant to Austin
and Travis County for homeless programs. However, Troxell says that none of
these agencies provide a comprehensive approach that homeless people need to
stay off drugs, qualify for jobs, and locate affordable housing.
Last summer the council created a “homeless task force” made up of people from
the business community, government, and homeless advocacy groups, charged with
the task of coming up with a comprehensive plan to address the problem of
homelessness. In a revised plan submitted last November, the task force
suggested that the city and private sponsors create a “homeless campus” similar
to that of Orlando, Florida. Supporters of the campus say it would solve two
problems: Not only would the facility provide comprehensive services to those
who want to move out of homelessness, it would also provide a place to take the
“homeless by choice” out of downtown and into a heated concrete pavillion in an
area where tourists and taxpayers never have to venture. Jean Flavelle,
executive vice president of the nonprofit group that runs the shelter in
Orlando, is visiting Austin this week to promote Orlando’s model.
Meanwhile, groups like HOBO continue grappling with meeting an ever-increasing
demand for services. Every day, about 150 people visit HOBO in downtown Austin,
estimates Adam Cantu, who says he is one of five HOBO staffers remaining after
the city trimmed the staff from 22. One thing he says he’s noticed since the
ordinance went into effect is that his clients are angry and hurt. He says that
when he recently watched the police rouse homeless men sleeping under I-35
between Fourth and Fifth Streets, he understood why. “Ten police came and
peeled the blankets right off their backs and said, `You ain’t welcome here no
more,'” Cantu recalls. “You’d have thought the guys had robbed the State of
Texas, but they were just sleeping. Makes you wonder how much a human life is
worth these days.” n
This article appears in February 16 • 1996 and February 16 • 1996 (Cover).