Austin Mayor Steve Adler on Tackling the Homeless Problem

? The biggest issue by far over this past year has been the homeless crisis, right? That's the biggest thing, the increase in the tents and the chaos. When Dave Chappelle and I were doing stubs, we'd go down 8th Street and there's that underpass and it was just like a village down there. It was crazy. What happened? How did that all get going? What was the motivation for allowing people to camp in public places? Well, that's the action the council took two years ago, but so let's go back before two years ago. You know, when I came into office, we had an outdoor area that kind of looked like, you know, what you have downtown in Skid Row in LA, but ours was just in a block area. But that's what everybody talked about. And you... Where was that area? It was over toward I-35, toward the highway. It was at the arch, which was a shelter. But most of the people there never went inside. They kind of gathered outside. It was an open air market of all kinds of horrible things and people wanted that to disappear. The problem with making that disappear is that this challenge is not one you can just make go away. You can move it, but if you close it down anywhere, it's going... The people don't disappear, so they'll come back. But that was a challenge coming into office. But in my second, third, and fourth years in office, I started going to neighborhood association meetings. And whereas in the past, people would want to talk about zoning or flooding, now all they wanted to talk about was this homeless encampment that was near them somewhere in the woods, in the streams, somewhere nearby. They were blaming the petty crime happening in the neighborhood on them. Every one of them had a wife or a daughter that had a horrible experience related to them. And I was going to these neighborhood association meetings and people were as angry as I have ever seen at a public meeting, demanding that something be done. I had one of them here, a neighborhood guy came up to me after it was over and he said, Your mayor, fix this, and if you don't, I have a gun and I will fix this myself. And I don't know that he actually meant that, but that was the fervor and the feel. And I had, as a member of the city council, nothing to offer that neighborhood association. They were complaining about people that were under an overpass at the highway, not too far away from them. And I knew that if we fenced in that overpass, which of course we couldn't do because it's not city property, it's state property, but if the state fenced it in so that those people weren't there anymore, they don't disappear. So all they're going to do is move up the highway or down the highway or somewhere else. And I was going to more and more neighborhood associations that were complaining more and more about encampments. And I had no solution to that. And what hurt was is we knew what worked. So in that same period of time, we said, let's house every vet in our city that's experiencing homelessness. You know, there was a national program doing it. A lot of cities participated. Austin was one of a handful of cities to successfully get that done. Community came together. When you take someone who's experiencing homelessness and you put them into a home and get them wraparound services, there's like a 90, 95% success rate that that person will either reintegrate back into society or will sustain themselves in a positive way, wherever it is. 90, 95%. And it seems like Austin being a fairly small city, you're dealing with a much smaller, even though it's a large number of people per se. It's almost manageable number. Like you might be able to do that with all these homeless people. Whereas if you're in a place like Los Angeles and dealing with 100,000 people, like what's the number of homeless people in Austin? Right. You're dead on. And quite frankly, that's the gamble or what the city council was trying to do two years ago. So on our streets on any given night, there's about 3000 people that are experiencing homelessness. LA City, almost 50,000. It's 70 some odd thousand. My numbers could be old. I don't even think they know. You know, but it's increased to the point, it's hard to say whether or not it's increased or its exposures increased because they've all moved to like Venice Beach where there's just thousands of tents. The numbers are going up. Yeah. You know, and in Seattle, San Francisco, smaller cities than Austin have three to six times as many people experiencing homelessness. And I was with the mayor in LA and I said to him, I said, God, I don't even know what you do. I mean, the scale of your challenge is so great. The cost to actually turn this around. I said, I don't know what you do. And I said, so I'm not here asking you what you do, but I'm asking you, what do you wish you had done eight years ago, 10 years ago to prevent being where you are today? What did he say? He gave me the same answer that the experts gave me in San Francisco and Portland and Seattle. They all said, if you hide this challenge, it's going to continue to grow until it is so big you can't hide it anymore. But at that point, it's going to be too big for you to actually meaningfully deal with it. They said, it is like the political issue right now in LA and in San Francisco. It's like, yeah, important. They said, I wish that we were as resolved to fix it eight, 10 years ago as we are today, because we would have been able to set up the systems so that we could have reached equilibrium and that we wouldn't be here. You've got places like San Francisco that have such tolerant policies towards homeless people that people gravitate to San Francisco to be homeless, which is really kind of crazy but true. People have actually moved there with the intention of taking advantage of all their services, taking advantage of the food and shelter and the ability to do whatever you want. You could actually get money from certain services in San Francisco. There's like a fine line between helping and encouraging people to continue the lifestyle. For some people, the freedom of just being able to camp and do whatever you want, they're checked out for whatever reason, whether it's mental illness, whether it's just they prefer this sort of vagabond lifestyle. I don't know what it is, but is there a line that you have to make sure you don't cross over where you don't make it easier for them to be homeless? You want to encourage them to take advantage of these things you were trying to set up where you're talking about providing them with wraparound services where you can actually reintegrate them to society. How do you make that distinction? So much of the debate and discussion around homelessness has turned so political, like so many other kinds of discussions, but homelessness is one of the big ones. I have continued to ask the people that are working daily with the universe of people experiencing homelessness in our city, about 10,000 people in any given year intersect with our homelessness system, about 3,000 people on any given day in our city experiencing homelessness. And I've asked that question, are we pulling people in? And what they tell me consistently for the last six years, seven years, is that you can find anecdotally where that has happened, but generally speaking, the overwhelming number of people experiencing homelessness in our city are people who fell into homelessness here. The people that are coming into our city, most of them are coming from the areas immediately around us. I had one of them tell me once that there's not a voters guide to cities for people experiencing homelessness and Austin would be in danger going from two stars to three stars and people would start coming. We have enough challenge getting people experiencing homelessness to go from one side of the city to the other side of the city once they have a place. So where I'm looking at here, and I know that the governor, Gavin Newsom in California told people that Austin and Texas were giving people tickets and sending people to California. Did he say that? He said that. Not true. I mean, no. Wait a minute, that guy lied about something? That's crazy. That's what I hear. That's not how to handle it. We need to get people off the streets. So what the council did was we made it work with veterans and then I tried to scale up what we did with veterans, but I couldn't get the resolve to spend the money. Part of the reason was because people didn't see the challenge. So there'd be some neighborhoods that were willing to do it. I knew as sure as the sun was going to come up the next day that this was now accelerating in our city. So what we said was we're going to maintain the ordinances that say if you threaten public safety or public health, you can get arrested and ticketed and put in jail because that's important. Somebody's doing that. They should be arrested and ticketed and put in jail. But if they're not doing that, if all they're doing is surviving, then it is inhumane to either put that person in jail or to force that person to live down in the streams and in the woods because it's an even worse place for them to be. Why is it a worse place for them to be camping in the woods than to be camping on a public street? Well, one, you don't want anybody camping on a public street either. So that's not a solution to the challenge. You can't have that happen either. But if somebody is in the woods or down by the streams, they're not interacting with anybody else. So you have hundreds of women that are getting assaulted every night as the price to be able to live in that environment because they're secluded and they're not safe. So you mean if a homeless woman moves to the woods, she's in danger because there's no one around her to protect her? Unless she picks a protector. She's not in a community of homeless people. And so this is one of the reasons why these people gravitate towards these places like that 8th Street underpass because there's a lot of them together and there's a sense of belonging. And it's public and they can see it. Our health officials can find them. We're now vaccinating our entire population of people experiencing homelessness because we can find them. The mistake that we made is that when we did something that meant people were going to come out of the woods and the streams, we should have identified at that point where people could go and not go. And we didn't do that. We didn't manage the public spaces, the shared spaces, the way that we should have. So what the council did that summer is we said, okay, we're going to decriminalize it because every person who, in 2016 thereabouts, we wrote like 18,000 tickets. And as you imagine, very few of those people ended up in court the following Thursday to pay their fine. They ended up bench warring issues for their arrest and then you can't get, six months later they have trouble getting a job or an apartment because now they have a criminal record. So we said, we're just not going to do that anymore. But on the same day we did that, we asked the city manager to come back with a set of rules that would say, okay, so where is it that people can go and can't go? And for lots of reasons that never happened and that's where we made our mistake. So if you could go back and do it all over again from the moment you got into office, what would you have done differently? Well, what we did initially in terms of the veterans was real successful. I would do that again, it proves up the model. Can you explain how that works? What did you do exactly for the veterans? Well, veterans are a little bit easier because they come with resources. So they come with what are called VASH vouchers from the federal government, which is support to help do rent supplements. But then it was reaching out to everybody in the city that had apartment buildings, big managers of apartment buildings with these vouchers and we would say, would you take in these vets and people were willing to do that. We had some landlords that were suspicious of it and say, I'm not going to do this because I take someone like this, they're going to trash out the place and they can be six months to evict them. So I got together with some private businesses in the lake. We created a risk fund outside of city government and we put it into the community foundation and we said, if you take a tenant and they trash out your place or create a problem, you call in the morning, you get a check in the afternoon. All the landlords said they don't believe me because it's city, it's going to take you five months. I said, it's not in the city. It's privately funded. We're doing it outside the city. That's a great solution. It was great and it took trusting the landlords that they weren't going to be making claims unless they actually had problems. So you start with this, you take the veterans, you have these vouchers, you bring them into apartment buildings, you get them places. That's step one. So now they have a roof over their head, but how do you help them clean up? The service providers in the city all said, because we all got everybody together and we said, let's get to equilibrium with veterans, which means that you can never end homelessness, but what you can do is get to a place where the rate at which you house people and they come out of housing back to life is the same rate at which they show up experiencing homelessness. I said, let's do that with veterans. It was part again of a federal program. What percentage of the homeless folks are veterans? I think it's probably right now about 6%, something like that. The number was higher back then because we had more veterans on the streets. But the service providers all came in and said, okay, if you can house that so you can find places for them, we'll start prioritizing them for giving them services. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.