Name: Austin Mayor Steve Adler on Tackling the Homeless Problem
Uploaded: 2021-05-25T17:10:18.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Austin Mayor Steve Adler on Tackling the Homeless Problem' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Austin Mayor Steve Adler on Tackling the Homeless Problem' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-25. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience the biggest issue by far over this past year has
been the homeless crisis right that's the biggest thing is the increase in the
tents and the chaos and you know 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 like
what what was the motivation for allowing people to camp in public places
well that's account that's the action the council took two years ago but so
let's go okay 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 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 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 you this challenge is not when you can just make
go away you can move it but 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 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 neighborhood a
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 jesus and and I don't know that he
actually meant that but but there was that was the fervor and the feel and I
had as as a
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 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 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 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 we
we
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 percent success rate that
that
person will either reintegrate back into society or will sustain themselves in
a
in a positive way wherever it is 90 95 percent 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 it's it's it's 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
a hundred thousand
people like what's the number of homeless people in Austin right you are you're
dead on and and quite
frankly that's the the the gamble or the the what the city council was trying
to do two years ago
so on our streets on any given night there's about 3,000 people that are
experiencing homelessness
LA City almost 50,000 it's I think it's more than that 70 some odd thousand
then my my numbers could I don't even think they
know you know but it's it's it's increased to the point where 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 six times as many people
experiencing homelessness you know I was with the mayor
in LA and I 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 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 ten years ago to prevent being where you are today what he said
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's it is like the political issue right
now in LA and in San Francisco it's like yeah important deep they said I wish
that we were
as resolved to fix it eight ten 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
now 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 like taking advantage of all their
services taking advantage of the food and shelter and the ability to do
whatever you want and you know 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 and for some people the freedom of
And for some people, the freedom of just being able to camp and do whatever you
want, they're checked out, right, 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.
Like, how do you make that distinction?
Well, you know, so much of the debate and the discussion around homelessness
has turned so political, like so many other kinds of discussions, but
homelessness is one of the big ones.
So 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, 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.
So I had one of them tell me once that there's not a voter's 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, you know, 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.
But the – so I'm just – you know, we just need to get –
That's not how to handle it.
We need to get people off the streets.
So what the council did was we said – 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.
And part of the reason was is because people didn't see the challenge.
So there would 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.
If somebody is 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 you –
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.
Right.
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.
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 end up bench warrant issues for their arrest.
And then you can't get – six months later, they have trouble getting a job or
an apartment.
So now they have a criminal record.
And 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 we – 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?
Like 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 if I take someone like this,
they're going to trash out the place and it would take me 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 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?
You know, 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 vets, if
you can find places for them, we'll start prioritizing them for giving them
services.
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Austin Mayor Steve Adler on Tackling the Homeless Problem

the Joe Rogan experience the biggest issue by far over this past year has
been the homeless crisis right that's the biggest thing is the increase in the
tents and the chaos and you know 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 like
what what was the motivation for allowing people to camp in public places
well that's account that's the action the council took two years ago but so
let's go okay 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 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 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 you this challenge is not when you can just make
go away you can move it but 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 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 neighborhood a
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 jesus and and I don't know that he
actually meant that but but there was that was the fervor and the feel and I
had as as a
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 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 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 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 we
we
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 percent success rate that
that
person will either reintegrate back into society or will sustain themselves in
a
in a positive way wherever it is 90 95 percent 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 it's it's it's 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
a hundred thousand
people like what's the number of homeless people in Austin right you are you're
dead on and and quite
frankly that's the the the gamble or the the what the city council was trying
to do two years ago
so on our streets on any given night there's about 3,000 people that are
experiencing homelessness
LA City almost 50,000 it's I think it's more than that 70 some odd thousand
then my my numbers could I don't even think they
know you know but it's it's it's increased to the point where 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 six times as many people
experiencing homelessness you know I was with the mayor
in LA and I 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 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 ten years ago to prevent being where you are today what he said
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's it is like the political issue right
now in LA and in San Francisco it's like yeah important deep they said I wish
that we were
as resolved to fix it eight ten 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
now 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 like taking advantage of all their
services taking advantage of the food and shelter and the ability to do
whatever you want and you know 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 and for some people the freedom of
And for some people, the freedom of just being able to camp and do whatever you
want, they're checked out, right, 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.
Like, how do you make that distinction?
Well, you know, so much of the debate and the discussion around homelessness
has turned so political, like so many other kinds of discussions, but
homelessness is one of the big ones.
So 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, 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.
So I had one of them tell me once that there's not a voter's 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, you know, 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.
But the – so I'm just – you know, we just need to get –
That's not how to handle it.
We need to get people off the streets.
So what the council did was we said – 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.
And part of the reason was is because people didn't see the challenge.
So there would 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.
If somebody is 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 you –
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.
Right.
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.
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 end up bench warrant issues for their arrest.
And then you can't get – six months later, they have trouble getting a job or
an apartment.
So now they have a criminal record.
And 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 we – 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?
Like 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 f