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Austin’s summer of discontent began with a sixteen-hour city council meeting. Council hearings are often marathon affairs, running into the wee hours, after sense and patience have gone to bed. The June 20 meeting was certainly a slog. By 2:20 a.m., the council had voted to effectively legalize sleeping, camping, and panhandling on sidewalks and in other public spaces. In doing so, city leaders upended an unspoken arrangement with the public that had persisted for more than two decades, one that criminalized homelessness and made the homeless less visible.
Here’s how the bargain had worked: Without enough shelter space to get people off the streets, Austin had tasked the police with enforcing ordinances that made it illegal to aggressively panhandle, sit or lie on sidewalks, and camp in public. In a never-ending game, the police would move the homeless around, sometimes pushing them into out-of-the-way, dangerous places like the banks of creeks. Those who refused to move along were given citations, which often then led to arrest and jail.
The Austin City Council, which has been moving to the left in recent years, deemed this an unacceptable situation. So at the June meeting, the council voted overwhelmingly to weaken the ordinances. Panhandling was now legal as long as supplicants did not engage in “aggressive confrontation.” So was sitting and lying on sidewalks, as long as the person in question didn’t block rights-of-way. Camping was no longer illegal in public spaces, including sidewalks and under bridges, though it was still expressly prohibited in places like public parks.
Proponents sold the move as smart, compassionate policy that would decriminalize homelessness and bring homeless folks out of the shadows, part of a broader push to add hundreds of new shelter beds, expand affordable housing, and increase funding for homeless outreach. Progressive, forward-thinking Austin would lead the way. “You and I spend millions of taxpayer dollars playing this perverse game of moving people around and solving nothing,” wrote Mayor Steve Adler in an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman. “I refuse to play any longer.” For the first time in a long while, Austin’s homeless were able to get a good night’s sleep. Then all hell broke loose.
