Austin Undeterred In Helping Homeless Despite Camping Ban Call

AUSTIN, TX — The city will keep a focus on housing homeless people in Austin despite efforts to ban public camping, officials said Friday.

Dianna Grey, the city's new Homeless Strategy Officer, said the mission of her office created some 30 days ago is unchanged: “My division’s core work is the same regardless of what happens with the camping ban, at the local or the state level. Our goal, and what the community truly needs, is strategies to permanently house folks and strategies to provide more humane conditions until people get into permanent housing.”

Her comments came one day after Save Austin Now on Thursday said the city clerk's office had certified its petition calling for a reinstatement of a public camping ban for inclusion on the May election ballot. The group collected some 30,000 signatures calling for a ban on homeless camps, with more than 24,000 certified by the city clerk's office.

“I share the urgency that I know all Austinites are feeling around this issue and the dedication to solving this in our city," said Grey, a 30-year Austin resident with 20 years' experience working in affordable housing and homelessness. "One of the things I want to make clear is we have a lot of strengths in this community," she continued in her prepared statement. "I think we have largely shared values around how we want to help our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness.”

Photo of Dianna Grey provided by City of Austin.

Grey described the cooperative nature of solving the homeless issue: “We have some very effective non-profit service providers, but we are now at a point where we really need to come to scale," she said. "I view my role as Homeless Strategy Officer as helping the city identify the strategies that are right for our community, working to ensure that during implementation we are a great partner to our service providers and housing developers, and also ensuring that all of the departments at the city involved in this work are coordinating well.”

Grey noted she has used Houston as a model, where "great strides" have been made in reducing the homeless count by 50 percent over an eight-year period: “We have a lot to learn from them and have already begun to implement some of those same strategies,” she said.

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The Homeless Strategy Office on Thursday was directed by the Austin City Council as part of the Housing-Focused Homeless Encampment Assistance Link (HEAL) initiative to report back in March with new recommendations to help people experiencing homelessness move out of encampments and into housing with support services.

While the initiative did not alter the enforcement of existing camping rules, Grey said, it did direct city staff to essentially decriminalize homelessness by being “...more intentional about ways we can connect folks to housing who are in unsafe encampments and provide those alternatives to citations or enforcement by the police.”

To that end, Grey said engagement is needed with people living in encampments to provide them access to shelter, temporary housing, and permanent housing. She pointed out that there were a number of ways to tackle encampments without resorting to citations or arrests: “When an area is designated as a non-camping area there are a lot of proactive strategies that we can take that aren’t coercive,” she said. “First of all, there is communication, signage. We have found that continued outreach and engagement by service providers around a site can be really effective at enforcing the message and also making it well known enough that there is word of mouth among people experiencing homelessness, which is a very strong channel of communication in our community and most communities.”

While some people experiencing homelessness may initially be reticent about engaging with service providers, building trust with those individuals was “...almost always successful” in the end, Grey said. “We meet folks where they are, we continue to reach out and build relationships, and then we provide those options to people as they are ready to accept them. Our experiences doing street outreach is that it may take a while to develop that relationship but fundamentally people want housing and they acknowledge when they need support.”

Grey stressed the city’s commitment to complying with Centers for Disease Control guidelines to allow people who are living unsheltered, or in encampments, to remain where they are during COVID-19, to minimize community spread of the disease and maximize access to services.

However, exceptions would continue to be made “...in cases where there is a clear and present danger to health or safety,” Grey added. The city would “look again” at the idea of creating sanctioned encampments, she said but noted that such proposals had not previously been recommended by staff. “We want to make sure that we choose the strategies that are most effective and that are right for our community and for our neighbors experiencing homelessness.”

Converting Hotels for Housing

Grey explained that the city’s “hotel conversion strategy” involved purchasing hotels and converting them for use as permanent supportive housing, as “a very targeted intervention for that small but persistent group of people experiencing homelessness who really need long term housing with lots of rental support and most importantly robust services that help them maintain housing stability."

She added: “There are case managers that are in contact with tenants, making themselves available every day to assist them in any number of ways, providing access to mental health services, transportation resources, and really just working through the challenges of reestablishing that stability on their own homes. It’s really key to understand this is not just four walls — we are providing the support and services there that really will be needed for folks to stay housed and truly exit their homelessness.”

Community Summit

Grey said the city looked forward to participating in a forthcoming community summit addressing homelessness challenges in Austin, organized by the Downtown Austin Alliance and Austin Chamber of Commerce, among others.

“We anticipate an intensive community planning process to take place over the coming weeks and our goal as a community is to come out with broadly shared goals around increasing capacity in a number of areas,” she said. “We know we need more shelter beds, we know we need more rapid rehousing, we know we need more Permanent Supportive Housing. There are shared commitments to the creation of that capacity. Within that it will be very important that council and the city identify very clearly what our production goals are, and that we’re held accountable to those over the coming months.”