Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness

History:

2019 - Public camping legalized by Austin voters.

2021 - Austin voters ban camping.

2021 - Republican state legislature rams through a bill to make it a crime to be homeless on state land.

2023 - Austin voters criminalized being homeless with Prop B.

When you take people from one place, and offer them a Hobson's choice of jail or a housing not nearby in another place, it has a specific term: "concentration camp".

In the meantime, APD is critically understaffed, underfunded, morale is very low, and non-life-threatening service calls are largely ignored. APD officers are there to collect a paycheck and do as little as possible. As an ex-APD officer said: you take your life into your hands living or visiting Austin because it's unsafe by design of political extremists in the DA's office who refuse to prosecute repeated violent crime and property crime.

> When you take people from one place, and offer them a Hobson's choice of jail or a housing not nearby in another place, it has a specific term: "concentration camp".

So just let people live outside indefinitely? You can offer help but a lot of them will turn it down, then what? Now consider that a lot of these people are hurting themselves and insisting on continuing down that path, which inevitably leads to their death. In other words, doing nothing means people destroy themselves, and doing something requires force because many these people are not in the right state of mind to help themselves.

The Housing First initiative was hugely successful. The idea being all of the causes of homelessness are easier to treat when someone has a home: mental illness, drug addiction, health conditions etc

Turns out you don’t have to force people to have a home. If you provide it they’ll take it. And you can provide treatment once they had an address to visit. Treating them in the home is 5x more cost effective than treating them on the street and in emergency rooms and cleaning up the streets and dealing with the fallout of living outdoors.

The house first initiative was hugely successful, but got defunded by people who ideologically didn’t believe it could work and didn’t bother to check the evidence that it was working smashingly. That language about “tough love and junkie degenerates” is an example of exactly the ideology that killed the most successful effort we’ve ever had to combat homelessness.

I’m not a junkie degenerate. I’ve done a lot to fall in line and become a productive member of society.

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