Governor should address homelessness crisis for all of Texas

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." - Matthew 25:40

The Trumpian tropes trotted out by the Governor and local Travis County GOP figures in the Austin homelessness debates - all while President Trump and Fox News frenetically amp up anti-homeless sentiment as a national-election wedge issue - make Grits feel tired and sad. It looks to me like a lot of state leaders doubling down on the wrong side of history, as happened not so long ago when opposing gay marriage was the wedge-issue de jeur.

For all the weeping and gnashing of teeth over Austin's homelessness problems, in reality this is something faced by communities around Texas and beyond, some of which have confronted the situation more honorably than others.

In Dallas, local media say there are no solutions in sight for the local homeless problem. But the governor isn't threatening them, and the troopers he sent in to fight crime left quietly after three months.

Houston's no-sit/no-lie ordinance, implemented under Mayor Sylvester Turner, is just pushing the population around the city. But what did work were large federal grants to pay for tracking homeless and connecting them with services.

The folks dispensing much-ballyhooed homeless services in San Antonio openly admit their must-be-sober-and-take-drug-tests-to-receive-help approach leaves much to be desired and keeps many people on the streets who might be helped by a housing-first approach.

Even places like Plano, Frisco, Lubbock, Midland, Tyler, Longview, Nacogdoches, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Sugar Land, Victoria, and Montgomery County struggle with homeless problems they don't advertise but cannot ignore.

Anti-homeless activists have spuriously suggested that California cities may send their homeless to Austin. But if anybody's doing that, it's Waco, where they're forcibly clearing out homeless camps using police and Sheriff's deputies. Then they use forced labor from county jail inmates to clean up the aftermath, with local journalists tagging along for the poverty porn.

Amarillo started down that same path, but city leaders had a change of heart and issued housing vouchers to people in a local encampment instead. Abilene, similarly, has chosen to empty its homeless camps by finding their residents housing instead of chasing them out. These jurisdictions don't have to deal with the scale of big-city homeless problems, to be sure, but their example complicates what the governor, speaking from his walled compound in Austin, might reasonably portray as a "Texan" approach.

Governor Abbott appears to have singled out Austin for political purposes, tying local debates into a national GOP effort to use homelessness as a wedge issue in the culture wars and blaming this decidedly capitalist problem on political liberalism. In doing so, he trivializes a human-rights crisis faced by numerous Texas cities, including the ones still controlled by Republicans. He's missing an opportunity to exercise leadership that could demonstrate to swing voters the Texas GOP can govern as well as it campaigns.

Perhaps what jumped out to Grits most in Abbott's letter was the threat to use "quarantines" to ban the homeless from certain quadrants. Texas' quarantine laws haven't been used since the Ann Richards administration, and that time it was also a politicized abuse of power. She disingenuously declared a quarantine to keep away the press in the aftermath of the Branch Davidian catastrophe in Waco, which incidentally is the only known use of quarantine authority by a US governor in the last century. Richards' quarantine was done in secret, but Gov. Abbott has now openly threatened to use this same authority to coerce a local city council to reinstate a repealed ordinance. Really?

As Sir Thomas More asked of his accusers, "when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, ... the laws all being flat?"

Austin Mayor Steve Adler declared that he took Gov. Abbott's entreaties as evidence that state government wants to "help" - a reaction that could only be taken as tongue in cheek. But what if Gov. Abbott did want to help solve homelessness?

For starters, the governor could begin to prioritize grants for housing, directing available funds for that purpose and working with Texas' congressional delegation to champion the cause of more federal housing grants from HUD. But as Texas Monthly's Christopher Hooks lamented:

There’s a notable and telling omission among the list of agencies Abbott has said will “help” Austin with its problems: the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, the state agency that helps build affordable housing. There’s been no real effort from state government to actually aid the city here, just a demand that they “fix” things.

He could work with legislators heading into the 2021 legislative session to develop funding packages for housing, mental-health services and prisoner reentry to help mitigate the causes of the problem. The state could fund urban "rest stops" like those on the side of the highway where homeless folks could shower and use the restroom. The governor could use his bully pulpit and personal appearances to fundraise for housing programs like Austin's Community First (at least, in between campaign fundraising for a race that's three years out).

That's what state-government leadership would look like on this issue. What we're seeing, everyone will notice, looks very different.