- Coming up on "Austin InSight": an in-depth look at the state of homelessness in Austin.

We'll get an update on the city's latest strategy and meet some of the people who've experienced homelessness firsthand.

- Plus, we will look at a unique program that helps people who've been homeless cope with trauma through artistic expression.

A very special edition of "Austin InSight" begins now - [Announcer] Support for "Austin InSight" comes from: Sally & James Gavin, and also by Suerte, Este, and Bar Toti restaurants, bringing Austin together around culinary excellence to celebrate creativity, conservation, and culture in Central Texas.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - Good evening, and thanks for joining us here on "Austin InSight."

I'm Laura Laughead.

- And I'm Danielle Banda.

- Well, if you're watching this, you're probably at home in front of your TV or on your phone or tablet, but for more than 6,000 people in Austin, that simple experience is out of reach.

- In this constantly-growing and expensive city, people experiencing homelessness struggle to find shelter, healthcare, resources, support, and something that all humans want and deserve: dignity.

- In today's show, we're exploring the vigorous effort underway to address homelessness in Austin, including an innovative shelter program.

But to really understand what it's like to live unhoused, it helps to talk with and get to know some people who've lived it.

- That's true of the four people whose faces that you see on the screen behind us.

So as we begin, we'd like you to meet David, Kelas, Tiffany, and Shannon.

(gentle music) - I love video games, especially "Mass Effect" and "Dragon Age" are probably my favorite.

I love "Star Trek," "Babylon 5," basically sci-fi, I love.

- I used to ride BMX bikes and do back flips in concrete skate parks, and that takes quite a bit.

- My children and grandchildren are here, so I'm fortunate.

I have my family here.

That's my fun time.

That's my hobby.

(laughs) - Metal art, I do wood burning, leather burning, stuff like that also.

- I have a fantastic cat who is very needy and very loud, but he's adorable and cuddly and perfect.

- At some point, I will try to take my art somewhere to bring that to a broader audience.

- I would like to travel.

I mean, that's what I would like to do.

Maybe get an RV.

- I just ended up like liking the man arts, I guess, the, (laughs) I don't know what else you would call them.

But mechanics has always interested me.

I love tinkering.

- I'm a retired hobo.

I spent over a decade hopping freight trains and traveling the whole country.

(tender music) - My income is disability.

It doesn't keep up with the cost of anything so I've experienced homeless twice.

- I had a roommate and he attacked me and it was his house so I moved.

- My significant other at the time was pretty much dealing with a state of psychosis.

It became safer for me, believe it or not, to be on the street.

- I was escaping domestic violence in a small town further away.

And I just left there with, well, I didn't even have a purse on my arm.

- The rent just got to the point where disability wasn't even covering the rent of a room in a house.

- Thankfully, thank God, I did not go through any of the staying in the woods or anything.

Like I said, I do have children, so I might have spent a night or two at my daughter's, but I'm not, mm, dependent upon them there.

- It seemed like every time I try to get myself situated, something would happen in the world that would change that.

- I tried for a while to stick around and a lot of friends helped me.

I got to couch surf for a while, so thankfully I wasn't on the streets.

- I was on the streets probably for about two years before just being moved around all the time and saying, you know, it was just scary.

It was really scary.

- "Go back to school."

I've had that yelled at me plenty of times.

You know, I've had people tell me to go get a job.

- It is incredibly stressful.

My physical disabilities include a lot of chronic pain.

So if I would have to sleep somewhere that wasn't a bed, I would be in a lot of pain.

Like even floors.

If I sleep on a floor at a friend's place, I wind up having a lot of difficulty moving around the next day.

- In the beginning, I was with nothing but a backpack and the clothes on my back, a change of clothes.

I generated enough money holding a sign to go get myself a tent.

- I'm very good with budgeting 'cause you have to be when you don't have much.

And yeah, it's still just, I still wound up in that situation.

- Can you imagine going to your house and having to pick out, you know, as much as you could carry and having to carry it all day long if you don't want to get robbed or have to do without?

Food, water, you have to carry it all with you.

- So when you're that stressed, you can't think, you can't really plan.

There's not a lot of hope when you're that stressed.

It's just a constant pressure inside of you that eats your energy, eats your brain, and you just keep spiraling down.

- And I never panhandled or anything like that, but I did a whole lot of, I guess you would say, on the clean side of hustling.

I would go out, "Man, what do you need?

Anybody?

I see your yards full of stuff."

Sometimes I would work 12 hours for $10 and three meals.

- We had to do a Thanksgiving out of an old Ford Econoline van.

But we were together, and to me that meant everything.

So that was probably the hardest holiday that I've had.

(soft music) You see a group of homeless people on the corner and they look like they're having the time of their lives.

Typically, what you're gonna notice is, if they do have bad habits, is they're coping with that lack of community.

They don't have anybody, a real support system, other than people encouraging you to do bad things.

- It's safe to think, it's comforting, to think that homeless people have earned it, that they've done something wrong, because that way you can think that you're doing all the right things and you're safe.

You are not going to wind up homeless.

But that's not true.

It happens to anyone.

- It's very easy for people to make judgment and fill in these gaps.

They'll make up a story, whatever's easiest.

Believe it or not, it's not the easiest thing in the world that gets everyone to homelessness.

Sometimes it's the hardest struggle of your life.

- Just because you're homeless does not mean you don't have options.

It doesn't mean that you don't have a purpose.

- You know, we're all just a couple of paychecks away from being here.

- It's not until you go through it that you could possibly understand it 100%.

- Opening up like this on camera definitely takes a lot of courage, and we are very grateful to them for sharing their stories with us.

- Now, let's go ahead and zoom out a bit to take a broader view of the scope of homelessness in Austin with data from Austin's Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, ECHO.

Now, as of July reporting, there are an estimated 6,300 people experiencing homelessness in Austin and Travis County.

Breaking that number down into different categories, about 30% experience chronic homelessness, that is, they're not able to secure permanent housing, mainly due to not enough permanent support housing available.

30% are domestic violence survivors, like some of the people that you met in our first segment.

- More than 9% are families with children.

While more than 8% are veterans, 60.8% of those seeking homelessness resources are men, 38.7% are women, 0.05% identify as transgender, 16.5% are under age 17, nearly 10% are ages 18 to 24, nearly 20% are over the age 55.

Another key fact to keep in mind here, a Black person in Austin is six times more likely to experience homelessness than a white person.

- Austin's homelessness response programs have grown, partly due to an influx of federal funding from the COVID-19 relief program.

With that increased capacity, the number of people served by what's called the Homelessness Response System has skyrocketed to more than 24,000, and that's up 60% in 2023 versus 2022.

- Now let's look at housing development.

It seems we're on a rapid expansion track with 1,200 new permanent supportive housing units being built now through 2027.

As you can see on the map here, these projects are geographically dispersed across the city with 344 new housing units this year, 268 next year, another 350 permanent supportive housing units are set to be built in 2026, and 247 more in 2027.

With extra federal funding and a new Homeless Strategy Office, the City of Austin has ramped up efforts to support the homeless community, including: prevention programs, pathways to permanent housing, services like access to healthcare, and other support.

- A lot has changed in the last couple of years, including a camping ban approved by Austin voters in 2022.

But even with growing programs, the need for housing and other services exceeds available resources.

(upbeat music) Joining us in studio is Austin's homeless strategy officer, David Gray, who's coming up on his one-year anniversary in this role.

Thanks so much for being here, David.

- Thank you for having me.

- Absolutely.

Now to start, you know, with the scale of homelessness in Austin, data from the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition shows that in 2023, actually more than 24,000 people in Austin and in Travis County received services that are related to being unhoused.

And that's actually a huge increase, 42% more than back in 2022.

So, I mean, why do you think there's an increase and do you think that the homelessness, you know, situation is growing in Austin?

- So there's a couple of things at play when it comes to the data.

First is that the city of Austin and Travis County and all of our partners have gotten much better at counting who is actually coming to the system and trying to receive services.

And so we've worked with all of our community partners, with all of our vendors to make sure that everybody is inputting their data into one place.

So we actually know how many households need help, how many individuals, do they have children, and what are their needs?

We're also able to better understand what are some of the drivers into homelessness.

We know that our region's increasing cost of living is causing some people to lose their housing, there's also a lot of youth who are aging out of foster care, individuals with behavioral and mental health needs who just cannot live independently.

And that information allows us to create the strategies that we need to help the 24,000 people who are seeking our services today, and hopefully begin to bring those numbers down as we move forward.

- Absolutely.

And what do you think might be the biggest misconception about homelessness in our city?

You know, its causes and the programs to solve it?

- You know, I think the biggest misconception sometimes is that we lump anybody experiencing homelessness into one category and usually that category is whatever our bias is towards homelessness.

And so the category might be that everybody's violent, or everybody has a mental disability, or everybody's lazy.

But the truth of the matter is, the 6,000 people experiencing homelessness here in Austin are just as diverse as you or I.

Their pathway into homelessness, it varies for everybody.

For some, it's single moms who just cannot afford living in Austin on their own while trying to raise their children.

For somebody else, it might be a person who had a stable job, got in a car accident, had a high medical bill, and fell behind on their rent.

And so the strategies in our approach to solving homelessness have to be just as unique and diverse and innovative as the people who are living unsheltered on our streets.

- Yeah, it really can happen to any of us.

So I mean, how would you describe, or maybe even just summarize the city's overall strategy when it does come to homelessness?

It is of course multifaceted, but you know, how have you and your team helped to reshape this in your new role?

- So since I've been here, our office has put a lot more emphasis on getting upstream of unsheltered homelessness.

We talk a lot to the public about the new housing units that are coming online and things that we're doing for individuals who have been homeless for more than a year.

And those programs are gonna continue.

But beginning this year, we've invested a lot more upstream.

What I mean by that is we have new contracts in place with vendors who are helping people prevent homelessness.

So when somebody contacts us and they say that they're at risk of losing their apartment or losing their home, we now have interventions to help them remain housed.

And for folks who have recently become homeless, we have interventions there so that within their first 30 days of losing their housing, we're able to reconnect them with family or help them find a stable living condition.

We also now have more homeless shelter beds in our city than we've ever had in the city's history.

So what this means is more opportunities for us to bring people indoors to help triage their situation, kind of get them stable, and then from the shelter, help them find a permanent housing destination.

- Okay.

Well this is good to know.

Now, I do think that many people in Austin recall the days of, you know, the camping ban.

And in your view, what do you think might be some of the most significant steps that we've taken since that since then?

- So we now have a formal standard operating procedure.

It's entered into by about two dozen different city departments and it defines how we go about balancing, enforcing our local and our state camping ban with also trying to respect the rights and the humanity of people.

And essentially what it gets at is it says in certain situations we are gonna take an immediate enforcement posture, and that's mostly for the safety and the wellbeing of the people living unsheltered, homeless, as well as the general public.

And so those situations might be if somebody's setting up an encampment in a major intersection, we don't want a traffic fatality, so we're gonna move that encampment.

Or you know, recently we finally got rain in Central Texas after weeks of not having it, but we also know in those circumstances, there's a potential for flooding.

And so in areas where we think a creek might flood or a watershed might flood, if there's an encampment there, we will move quickly to enforce the camping ban.

There are certain scenarios though, where we won't take that emergency posture if we're working to move a community from their encampment into shelter, what we'll do is create a by-name list of everybody in that encampment, hold shelter beds for them, and then move those people into shelter as a community.

That process sometimes takes a couple of weeks to a couple of months, depending on the number of people who are there.

So this procedure though, it gives some certainty to the public about how we're enforcing the camping ban and it allows our departments, all the partners who are part of this work, to understand what the terms of our enforcement will look like.

- Yeah, and on the note of those shelters, there's a lot happening there, and with permanent housing development, so many great groundbreakings really.

So what does the future of homelessness look like in Austin, do you think?

- So our goal is to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-reoccurring.

And we have a lot of investments in the system right now that are literally building the infrastructure that we need to realize that vision.

And so you touched on it.

Right now we have over 1,200 units in the development pipeline.

These are new housing units for people who've been living on the streets in some cases, 10 or 15 years.

So what that means is the chronic homelessness in our community goes down.

I mentioned before, we have more shelter beds available now.

So anybody who's entering homelessness for the first time now has a place to go to get triaged, get their situation assessed, and hopefully they get rapidly exited out of homelessness.

And we want to prevent homelessness in the first place.

We don't want anybody to have to spend any nights in the streets or in a car.

And so the future of homelessness also looks like us getting upstream of the issue, keeping folks and families stably housed so that we could really begin to take that population that's experiencing homelessness on our street and start to drive that number down to zero.

- Absolutely.

Well, this is very helpful, very important information.

So thank you again for dropping in.

We appreciate you.

- Hey, it's my pleasure.

Thank you.

- Very good.

All right, well, there you have it.

If you would like more information regarding this discussion here today and the city's role in addressing homelessness in our community, you can visit austintexas.gov.

(bright music) - The work of David's team at the Homeless Strategy Office is most impactful when it directly intersects with the people they are intended to serve.

- An example is the Esperanza Community Shelter, a program from the nonprofit called The Other Ones Foundation, which is an innovative approach that gives residents a safe place to live, to escape the streets or a difficult situation, but with a space that's all their own.

And with that, Esperanza Shelter delivers on the promise suggested by the meaning of its name: hope.

(gentle music) - The Other Ones Foundation is a local Austin, Texas-based nonprofit that builds sustainable pathways to housing and independence for people experiencing homelessness.

The thing that makes Esperanza such an important part of the overall homelessness response system of Austin is that it's non-congregate and low barrier.

- This is home.

I'm Tiffany Miller.

I've been here for four years.

It's been a home to me.

It was nice not to be out there.

And I've done as much as I can to help.

A lot of people who are here, are here because of suggestions I've made to say my thank yous to society for offering this place.

It really has been a blessing.

We're making art that they're gonna let us sell at the festival.

- That's cool.

- Yeah, this is a claustrophobic hell.

(chuckles) That's my favorite.

- We allow people who have struggled to engage with traditional homeless response mechanisms like congregate shelter.

So by having a non-congregate shelter, having individual cabins that are locking and climate controlled that people can live in, and also single-stall bathrooms, that's particularly responsive to people who may want a more dignified, private, and independent approach to getting back on their feet.

(gentle music) - I'm thankful to be here, thankful to have the people that we have helping us.

And it takes a lot of stress off knowing that you don't have to be in 100% complete survival mode every second of every minute of every day.

We have our showers and sinks and commodes, and they're all-in-one.

- Right now, we have a hundred individual cabins for folks to stay in, as well as four bathroom units and two large central communal gathering areas where people can get food, ice, coffee, and just hang out and kind of relearn to live in a community and be neighborly.

So we just broke ground on phase two, and we'll be doubling in size.

There is no other non-congregate shelter in Austin.

We are a transitional emergency shelter.

So people are coming to us from the woods, from under bridges, out of prison, fleeing domestic violence situations.

People are coming to us in moments of crisis, and they're experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

And our job is to sit with them, figure out a plan in partnership with them about how they want to move to the next phase of their life, what they want the next phase of their life to be, and how we can support them in doing that.

- My recovery was so scary for me because I went from a mentally-well person and all of a sudden to not.

To know that I had recovered so much that I could actually be out there helping mentally you know, unwell and unhealthy people.

That, I mean, that speaks volumes as to how far I've come.

- Just because you're homeless does not mean you don't have options, it doesn't mean that you don't have a purpose.

They believe in second chances.

- You can visit toofound.org for more information on additional resources offered at the Esperanza Community Emergency Shelter here in Austin.

- We mentioned human dignity at the beginning of this program, the idea that all of us have worth and value, no matter our differences or what difficulties we face.

- Our next story focuses on a unique organization that helps its participants heal from trauma through artistic expression.

You see, for more than 30 years, the group called Art from the Streets has provided people experiencing homelessness a creative outlet, income, and dignity.

(subdued music) - Because of this studio, my life has completely changed.

It's the motivation that you don't find on the streets, and I get that here.

I'm surrounded by people that encourage me and inspire me.

I believe in myself for the first time in a long time.

(subdued music continues) - I am Marla Johnson.

I am the director of development of Art from the Streets.

For 33 years, we have provided a place and an opportunity for unhoused or at-risk adults to connect and to find purpose through art.

We do this by providing open studio sessions, free supplies.

We also offer exhibitions throughout the year where we sell artwork.

Artists retain 95% from the proceeds of the sales of their original artwork.

All of these opportunities allow our artists a chance to make a dignified income through the sale of their artwork.

We have people come in having never created anything before, and they pick up a paintbrush and just immediately feel the healing power of hand to paintbrush to paper.

(gentle music) - I've been with Art From the Streets, this program, for going on 9 to 10 years now.

There's a comradery between the staff, that's to say the volunteers and the artists.

There's food, there's air conditioning, there's music.

It's just a comfortable environment to be creative in.

This is what we call studio time.

Oddly enough, the first year I sold zero, but the second year, I broke the ice.

I did sell one painting.

The third year, I did well.

As my art aged and appreciated (chuckles) so did the financial aspect.

- I'm just blown by the reality that we live in, and I try to simplify it for the general audience.

Could that be real?

Most likely it is somewhere.

Somewhere in the universe this is a reality.

- I do the Bob Ross method and I watched him on TV all the time.

So I'm used to going fast 'cause he goes fast.

I can't go do it like him, but I can get one done in a sitting.

- I've been making a couple of lino cuts, which are, you know, you carve into linoleum to make basically stamps and I wanted to make another lino cut that was, well, one of my favorite animals, the whale shark.

I think painting a lot of it's about the vibe, the feelings that you're feeling at the moment, where your mind's at, and you put that onto a canvas.

Nothing else is quite like that.

- All of it's new to me and all of it feels very therapeutic.

Every brush stroke, whether it's the result I wanted or not, I'm learning the whole way.

I'm almost scared to ride a bike down the sidewalk these days, but it's coming back.

All that's coming back because of what I'm learning about my own life through this studio.

- Trauma is core to what people on the streets have experienced and have not fully recovered from.

They need to feel like they're connected to other people, that they have a relationship with other people.

They need to find purpose within a group, and they need to find a community.

- Just the fact that I can create stuff and people will respond to it and appreciate it, that gives me hope.

There's a chance to maybe one day have a business of my own and have very secure housing that's not like a studio.

- Art really does have healing powers.

And an update on Art from the Streets, at their big art show last month, more than a thousand people turned out with artwork sales totaling more than $51,000 and 95% of all that goes directly to the artists.

- We hope this program has helped you see and better understand homelessness as well as learn about local groups in action to help address it.

- Thank you so much for joining us.

We're gonna see you next Thursday at 7:00 p.m. on Austin PBS.

Don't forget, you can stream "Austin InSight" on the Austin PBS app.

(energetic music) (energetic music continues) - [Announcer] Support for "Austin InSight" comes from: Sally & James Gavin, and also by Suerte, Este, and Bar Toti restaurants, bringing Austin together around culinary excellence to celebrate creativity, conservation, and culture in Central Texas.

(cheerful music)