Austin City Council members on Tuesday will continue discussions on a spending framework for hundreds of millions of dollars aimed at lessening the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, and hear an update on the annual point-in-time count of the city’s homeless population.
The council already has pumped more than $30 million into relief efforts targeting individuals, businesses, nonprofit organizations, musicians, venues and childcare services since social distancing orders went into effect in March. However, funds from the federal CARES act, which will bring an estimated $240 million to the community, still need to be divvied up.
Council members have said they hope to use the influx of cash to address the immediate needs of people struggling to get by, while also building programs that can continue after the current crisis abates. Such initiatives include establishing an Austin Civilian Conservation Corps to provide jobs related to conservation and sustainability, like wildfire brush removal, planting trees or building urban farms and orchards, and a Healthy Streets program to provide more safe outdoor recreation space. Council members have not indicated how much funding might go to each program.
While the majority of discussion from the council in recent months has circled around the response to the coronavirus, Austin’s homeless crisis has not fallen out of focus.
The homeless community has been identified as one of the most vulnerable populations to the virus. The Salvation Army’s downtown shelter was forced to close for several days in April for cleaning after experiencing an outbreak. City officials have tapped hotels as temporary housing facilities for people living on the streets if they have symptoms or test positive. The city has also placed portable restrooms and hand-washing stations at homeless camp sites throughout the city.
Even before that, the city had embarked upon a plan to purchase hotels to convert into bridge housing communities to provide immediate shelter, which could later be converted into long-term housing complexes. This year’s point-in-time count, which took place on Jan. 25, marks the first count since council members made addressing homelessness a top priority.
Homelessness advocacy groups, however, say that the numbers are not a true depiction of a city’s homeless population, as the figures only account for a single night, and people fall in and out of homelessness every day.
Since 2010, the number of people who are homeless in Austin has fluctuated between 2,362 and 1,832 people, with anywhere from 448 to 1,086 unsheltered on the day of the count in a given year, according to data from the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition.
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