The last decade of homeless policy has been an abject failure. Currently the United States is facing the highest levels of homelessness and encounters with the mentally ill are increasing in Texas’ large cities. The blame can be squarely fixed on ‘Housing First’ which has prioritized a ‘one size fits all’ approach while ignoring the underlying causes of chronic homelessness. When the policies of Housing First were implemented programs that focused on rehabilitation and returning individuals from the street to self-sufficiency were defunded and funding was redirected to rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing. Both of these programs have an important niche to fill in the homeless environment, but neither are designed to help address the mental health, public safety, and drug abuse realities of homelessness. The result is a system that is built around managing instead of solving the problem costing taxpayers millions.
The last ten years have only seen increases in Texas’ homeless population and cities are still refusing to adapt their policies to match reality. The City of Austin has released a plan to open a navigation center in a neighborhood just a 10-minute walk from the local high school. The Request for Application to run the center is nominally competitive but it is so narrowly tailored that it seems to be specifically built to be helmed by Sunrise. This has obviously put residents on edge since two years ago in a similar situation Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Sunrise Navigation Center for facilitating public drug use and violent incidents next to an elementary school.
The initial purchase alone was $4.3 million without even speculating on the recurring costs of upkeep. This purchase comes amid an environment of property taxes so outrageously out of control that, after the defeat of Proposition Q in Austin, the Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax proposed cutting millions of dollars from emergency medical services. As a perfect example of how cities mismanage taxpayer dollars, the same navigation center that is currently underway could have been built for a fraction of the cost on the much more secure campus of the Esperanza Community run by The Other Ones Foundation.
While it is a noble effort to help those who are less fortunate the city should not do so at the expense of public health or safety.