Mayor Steve Adler of Austin shares his 40-year journey in public service, detailing the city’s council-manager system and its struggles—like court-mandated supermajority votes for housing reforms—to tackle 3,000 homeless residents amid a "perfect storm" of financial crises. His $50M plan for 250 counselors and rapid rehousing aims to cut chronic homelessness costs while leveraging federal funds, but he criticizes other cities’ failures. During COVID-19, Adler canceled SxSW despite backlash, citing rising cases in Seattle and California, and later regretted his own travel advice as conditions worsened. Austin’s obesity rates (78% of ICU patients) and vitamin D deficiencies exposed systemic health gaps, yet its measured approach outperformed strict lockdowns, proving adaptability over bureaucracy. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, and then, you know, the way it stands now, it's such a strange time, right?
Like, everything was fine.
I mean, so many mayors across the country had, you know, you have your standard mayor problems, but then COVID hits and you have everything is exacerbated.
And like, what kind of like massive change has this been for you?
It's hard, you know, because you know your community is scared.
And you know that the community is looking to you to try and gauge how scared it is that they need to be.
You know, we had the FBI and APD.
We had other law enforcement that was working on it.
I was kind of like the translator.
You know, they would listen to the official reports by law enforcement and then they would look at me and say, so how are we supposed to be feeling for this?
What's our swing thought?
I mean, what are we supposed to be thinking about right now?
And you read, start reading, you know, about other situations, other mayors that have gone through a similar kind of thing looking back in time.
And so many of these things end where it just stops.
They don't catch anybody.
There's no finality to it.
So there's this lingering, unsettled place where you just never know when it's going to come back again.
It was a scary, frightening time, except for watching those guys work, because you watch those guys work.
And I knew that I got to the place where I knew that if that guy kept sending off bombs, they were going to catch him.
You know, they ended up tracing the packages that were coming in.
They ended up getting a video at, I think it was like a FedEx place.
You know, they knew that Bobs had been mailed at different locations, and they had pretty sophisticated equipment to be able to determine in two completely different places what cars happened to be in the same in those two spots over a defined period of time.
So they were doing that.
They were checking the kind of the ring cameras on places where they knew somebody had probably driven by.
If you have someone doing something like that in your city and there's really no way to figure out why and there's no way to understand, it's random, you're sending them out to random people.
We were down to like 25, 30 percent, and I was beginning to get shopped, you know, these multi-billion dollar proposals to pipe in water from aquifers from east of here.
One of the best things I did as mayor soon after I was elected is I made it rain and Lake Travis filled right up.
When you say not a strong mayor, could you explain that to people, the difference between the way government works here versus the way it would work in, say, like Chicago or somewhere like that?
So the mayor in a lot of cities is the CEO of the city.
Sometimes they don't serve on city council, and the city council is kind of like the Congress or the legislature.
In a lot of cities, it's the mayor that appoints the police chief and the executives and the head of the departments.
That system is in a lot of cities.
There's also a lot of cities in the country where the city manager appointed by the city council is really the chief operating officer of the city and really makes all the appointments in the city.
The city council operates almost like a board for a company and deals with policy-related issues, not the management or the executive issues.
And that's what we have in Austin.
So I'm on the city council.
I have no greater vote or power than any of my peers on the city council.
So it makes it difficult to come into a city and lead when the other 10 people on your council have identical powers that you have, with the exception of I have probably a better ability to be able to convene people because I'm the mayor, and I have better access to the bully pulpit than they do.
So you learn an entirely different way to lead than I was used to in my companies, in my law firm, because there I was the executive.
I mean, and, you know, I'll give you another example.
In Texas, because of the open meetings requirement, I'm not allowed to talk to half of my city council about an issue before it comes up at a city council meeting.
If I know what a majority of my city council is going to do on an issue when I walk out onto the dais, then there's a good chance that something went wrong.
You know, I wanted to get a land development code rewrite in the city.
One of the, you know, there are so many things that are going right about this city.
You know, we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, an economy that's on fire.
We are one of the safest big cities in the country from a public safety standpoint.
We're the fastest-growing large metropolitan area and have been, I think, for like each of the last nine years.
There are so many things that are happening right.
But one of the things that follows from that is housing prices are just off the charts.
Now, for somebody who's just coming here from California or from New York, it looks like deals.
If you're living here, kind of like traffic.
You get used to being able to get anywhere in 15 minutes.
But housing prices in Austin is appreciating more rapidly, I think, in Austin right now than any other city in the country, which means we have to increase the housing supply in the city.
But when you start talking about increasing the housing supply in the city, you immediately run into the cultural wars on real estate development that you see neighborhoods.
How do you increase density?
How do you increase the number of units?
How do you increase height?
How do you increase the change so that you can increase housing supply?
We were, that was like a big battle for years.
We inherited that battle in a process.
We were about seven days away from adopting a new land development code, and then the court stopped us.
And before I leave my office, I hope this summer we're going to be able to join with people that were on opposite sides a year and a half ago and say, okay, what is it that is achievable?
How much of what we need to do can we get done and get the votes for?
What the court said was, in order for us to pass what we were doing, we needed a supermajority to get it done.
So on our 11-person council, we needed nine votes as opposed to seven votes or nine votes.
It begins with saying on commercial corridors where our zoning says you can just build commercially, we're going to let people build residences there too.
So if you want to put on a floor above the commercial use that's residential use, we're going to do that.
So we're going to enlarge what you can build in a commercial area.
And maybe it's letting more people build auxiliary dwelling units or apartments in the backyard.
Maybe it's going to people and saying if you preserve the house that's on the lot, we'll let you build two other houses on the back of the lot instead of one house on the back of the lot.
So it's increasing the number of units, perhaps.
It's increasing the square footage that you can put on a lot relative to the total area.
Maybe it's increasing the height that you can put in a particular zone property.
So you can go from only three stories to four stories if you build a certain amount of residential along with that or affordable residential.
It's really, I mean, I hate to keep saying this because I've said it too many times on the air, and I think I've fucked it up.
It's too good here.
It's such a good city.
It really is.
There's so many good things about it.
Like, you think you know what city life is.
You think you know what's like living in a city.
Oh, there's a certain amount of crime, certain amount of this, certain amount of that.
And then you come here and you're like, oh, no, this is like most of the good stuff and very little of the bad stuff.
It's an unusual combination of things.
It's not too big.
It's not too small.
What does Matthew McConaughey say?
He goes, this is a place where everybody's good enough and no one's too good.
I fucked it up.
Everyone's too good.
No, no one's too good and everyone's good enough.
That's what he says.
Yeah.
Which is a great way to say it.
But I think he's on to something.
It's like it's a utopian size city with great values and really friendly people and amazing restaurants and a great art scene and a great music scene and now a great comedy scene.
It had a good comedy scene before, but since the pandemic, when a lot of places were shut down, there's been three new comedy clubs, four new comedy clubs that have opened up here just within the last year, which is crazy.
Yeah, I think Austin easily could be the center for comedy because it's comedy doesn't need show business, but we've always been connected to show business because comedians have gotten jobs on sitcoms and gotten jobs on television shows and movies.
But the reality is over the last few years, that's all shifted anyway to the internet.
And now comedians have found it's much more profitable and more fun to be independent.
And there's more freedom because being independent and being able to say whatever you want and do whatever you want, then the audience finds you and they know what you really are.
It's not you from the tonight show or you from this show.
We've got to kind of pretend to be something that fits some sort of a corporate mold of what they would like a host to be.
You can be yourself.
And comedians now have found this sort of community thing going on where we support each other.
We get on each other's podcasts and we put each other on each other's comedy shows.
And it's just, we don't need show business anymore in that sense, like the Hollywood show business.
And we'd be better off if we're independent.
So so many of us are moving here and 10 friends have moved here within the last year.
And it's continuing to pile up.
And as more comics hear about the great Austin scene, more will move here.
But I'll tell you what, I think it means in Austin.
In Austin, I think what it means is it's okay to be different.
It's okay to take risks.
And one of the neat things about this city is that there's a higher risk tolerance than any other city in the world that I've ever been in.
It's okay to try stuff.
And if you don't succeed, you don't get punished the way you do in many other cities.
I mean, you're expected to learn from that and try again fast.
It's that culture of try something, learn, try something, learn, which is behind startups, which is why there are more startups per capita here in the city than anywhere else.
It's a city of early adopters.
It's a city where, you know, a mayoral candidate a few years back who finished second in the race was a guy who drove through town on a thong on his bicycle and just finished second.
You'd be like, oh my goodness, I've got to go back to the public or private sector.
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 would 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 was the motivation for allowing people to camp in public places?
Well, that's the action the council took two years ago.
So let's go back before two years ago.
You know, when I came into office, we had an outdoor area that kind of looked like what you have downtown in Skid Row in L.A., but ours was just in a block area.
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 this challenge is not one you can just make go away.
You can move it.
But if you close it down anywhere, 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 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, you're mayor, fix this.
And if you don't, I have a gun and I will fix this myself.
Jesus.
And I don't know that he actually meant that, but that was the fervor and the feel.
And I had, as a member of this city council, nothing to offer that neighborhood association.
They were complaining about people that were under an overpass at 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 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 I had no solution to that.
And what hurt was 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.
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% success rate that that person will either reintegrate back into society or will sustain themselves in a positive way wherever it is.
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 almost a 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 100,000 people, like what's the number of homeless people in Austin?
You know, but it's increased to the point where it's hard to say whether or not it's increased or its exposure's increased because they've all moved to like Venice Beach where there's just thousands of tents.
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 is like the political issue right now in L.A. and in San Francisco.
It's like important.
They said, I wish that we were as resolved to fix it eight, 10 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 just being able to camp and do whatever you want, like 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 like, 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 that you were trying to set up where you're talking about providing them with wraparound services where you can actually reintegrate them to society.
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: Are we pulling people in?
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.
The people that are coming into our city, most of them are coming from the areas immediately around us.
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.
But the so I'm just, you know, we just need to handle it.
We need to get people, we need to get people off the street.
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 because people didn't see the challenge.
So there'd 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's 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 it's an even worse place for them to be.
Well, one, you don't want anybody camping in a public street either.
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.
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 the public and they can see it.
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, you know, in 19, 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 because now they have a criminal record.
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 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.
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's taking me six months to evict them.
So I got together with some private businesses and 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 city.
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, I mean, 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.
You know, I think it's probably right now about 6%, something like that.
I think 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, you can find places for them, we'll start prioritizing them for giving them services.
What I had thought was that once we were successful there, we would be able to scale it up to everybody.
But much to my distress, I learned that a lot of people were involved not because they wanted to help people experiencing homelessness.
They wanted to help vets.
And I understand that.
But when we moved out of vets, I had trouble getting the commitment to raise the resources to be able to do it for everybody.
So for two years, we were really unable to get the resources necessary to do it.
The reason that I feel optimistic right now on homelessness, and I do, more than I have in the last 10 years in this city, is because in our city right now, because it's become a political issue, because of the vote we just took, because of everybody getting sales.
There was a referendum and the community said, we don't like tents.
Get rid of the tents that we're seeing.
Let's criminalize it again.
You know, as a practical matter, criminalizing it isn't ultimately going to help.
We have to enforce the new law, so the manager and the police chief are charged with doing that.
But what we need to do is scale up the same thing we did with veterans.
And for the very first time, we have our Chamber of Commerce business organization, downtown Austin Alliance business organization, locked arm in arm with the Austin Justice Coalition and our homelessness leftist advocates, all agreeing on what it is that is the plan.
And for the very first time, we have, I think, the access to the resources using the $1.9, our share of the $1.9 trillion coming out of DC.
And what several of us on the council, and I think a majority of us on the council have said is rather than taking that dollars from the federal government and splitting it up 50 different ways and sending it out to people, what if we actually took those dollars and put them toward the homelessness challenge in our city?
Let's take the lion's share of that money, put it to one challenge.
Let's get the county to do it.
Then let's go to the foundations in the community and say, we're going to take this challenge off the table in our city.
This is the moment because it's only 3,000 people on any given night.
If there was no fiscal considerations, if someone could come to you and said, Steve, you've got an open check, tell me what you need to do, what do you want to do, how would you handle it?
If there's no worries whatsoever about money.
If you could just build structures and house the homeless, and then it's not just about getting them housed and cleaned up and fed.
It's also about figuring out drug programs.
It's figuring out mental health programs.
It's figuring out how to get them gainfully employed, how to get them counseling.
Maybe there's some serious psychological issues that are leading to them being on the street.
Everyone's different.
You've got a wide spectrum of problems and issues.
We know that there are a lot of people that need services.
But we also know if you try to give those services to people while they're in tents or while they're in congregate living situations, the success rate is down like a 20%.
Because you can't always find them because they'll move in and out of those places.
So it's hard to actually know where they are to focus.
It makes it harder for them to get a job when their address is in a congregate shelter somewhere.
They lose their papers.
It just, life is that much harder if every moment of every day you're trying to survive to the next moment.
Get somebody into a home, then they can work with their social worker and actually begin to pull things together.
So if you get them into the home, much more successful those services.
So we have to get places for people to be, plus those wraparound services.
Most of the people that are experiencing homelessness are not people that have mental health challenges or substance abuse challenges.
Most people are the victims of the perfect storm.
I mean, they are literally people married, family, and then there's this like huge medical bill, and they can't pay it, and it starts causing problems between them and their spouse.
They have a bill collector that's now calling them all the time.
So they start paying that bill sometimes and then not their car bill all the time, and then they lose their car.
That causes friction in the household.
Things are getting like really ugly at this point.
They don't have the car, and one of them loses their job.
And then the next thing you know, the spouse leaves with the kids, car's gone, the bill collector is still coming, and then the person loses their apartment.
And they end up on the streets, and they raise their hand, and they say, I need help.
I don't know who to call, because they literally have no one to call.
And they say, if you can just help me, help me for a month or two or three, I can write this ship and get back.
If you can get them off the street and into a home with a job training program or even just stabilize them, get them what they need, real good chance they can get back into life.
But the longer you leave them on the street, the longer they're there, the harder it's going to be for them to be able to pull back.
The wait list right now in Austin for somebody in that situation who raises their hand is like a year, year and a half to get.
So we're creating a lot of the challenge that we're dealing with because we don't have the capacity.
And that's been the frustration.
But for the very, very first time, we actually have the agreement on the plan, the way we measure it over time, exactly what it's going to cost.
We have the resources from the federal government.
I think we're having foundations now that are in discussions, willing to step up and take a big piece of this.
Before I leave office here in the next year and a half, my number one priority is to track this issue.
Housing and urban development for the cabinet offices in D.C. So they got funding.
They were successful.
So every year they've gotten more and more funding.
So every year, I think this past year recently, they got over $40 million.
I think Dallas was like at $11 and Austin was like at $3.
What we need to do in Austin is what Houston did over the last 20 years.
We need to do it over the next three years.
I mean, it works, but it's going to be more expensive for us in the next three years or so than it is in Houston.
But once you get there, once you set up a system, because people move in, you know, one, you divert as many people as you can before they get to that place.
Once they, if they get past the diversion, you didn't diversion, then you get them into some kind of rapid rehousing, emergency housing, exiting them to permanent supportive housing, hopefully exiting them back to society.
And then you keep filling, backfilling those spots.
Then once you reach equilibrium in that system, then it doesn't cost L.A. budget this year.
Did you see that?
The LA line item for homelessness this year in their budget, a billion dollars.
And then it becomes just massive bureaucracy and that nothing gets done.
The problem with a place like LA is that it's too big and there's too many people and it's just not going to get done.
And that's the one thing that I look at Austin, I go, this might work.
Like you can kind of it seems like you can kind of manage things way better when you're dealing with a million people than when you're dealing with whatever Los Angeles has now.
When you're talking about 3,000 homeless folks, how many counselors do you need?
How many people do you need working on this problem?
How many, like, you're obviously going to need folks that are experts in helping people rehabilitate and getting back into society.
And you're going to deal with a bunch of different kinds of scenarios.
Some people have extreme mental health issues.
Some people have drug addictions.
Some people are like the story that you just laid out earlier, just a bunch of things happen in the perfect storm and they wind up being homeless.
So the plan that, so our Chamber of Commerce got together with our criminal justice advocacy group.
And I've watched them over the last five years be at town hall meetings where they argue with each other over what it is that's supposed to happen.
They engaged in a facilitated conversation.
Chamber, DA, Downtown Austin Alliance, ECHO, the umbrella organization, a facilitated conversation.
They invited me to participate.
It felt like a marriage counseling session.
And they brought in an outside person, and they were trying to come up with a small exercise project that they could do together to build trust.
And what became apparent when they actually got in the room with the facilitator is they could agree on what it was that was the whole plan from A to Z. They couldn't fund it, but they could agree on what the plan was.
But the fact that they could agree on it was the first time I had seen that in my lifetime in this city.
And then more and more people started surrounding that and saying, you know, if they're going to agree that this is the right way to go, then we ought to figure out how to fund this thing.
And that's where we are right now.
So that plan that they came up with with the facilitator, by the way, one of the architects of the practice in Houston, came in, and I think that it said that they have to increase their capacity of people to do the kind of casework that you're talking about by about 250 people.
So they bring in about 250 counselors slash rehab experts slash job specialists, people that can help these people become gainfully employed, people that can help these people clean up.
And then what could be done to incentivize these people?
Is it giving them hope in the sense of marking progress and making a show of it, like saying, this is fantastic.
Look what we've doing.
We're all working together.
I know everybody here is down and out, or you're in a situation where you'd rather be in a better situation.
We can all help and look at these examples of ways we've done it.
And look at these examples of people who've been like you, who've gone through this program and are now happy, normal members of society.
And maybe some of those folks can even come back and help and offer counseling and maybe even speak to these people and say, hey, I was in the position that you were in, and we can all get out of this together.
But remember that this universe of people that are experiencing homelessness run the gamut.
And most of them don't have the mental health challenge or the substance abuse challenge.
Most of them don't.
So it's a question of just helping those people right themselves and then get back.
And there'll be some people who are just gone.
Right.
And really what you're really trying to do is to find a safe place for them to be and decrease the frequency with which they're interacting with police and showing up in emergency rooms.
Well, you know, in our city, just by way of example, the 250 people that are most chronically experiencing homelessness, that have the most significant challenges they're dealing with, the frequent flyers in our emergency rooms and in jails and all that, are costing our collective community, our collective community, about $220,000 a year.
But to take those 250 people and really get them to a safer, better place, all the statistics, all the studies show they're going to end up in emergency rooms less, end up in the hospitals less, end up in jails less.
Most of the people are eager to be able to actually get a job.
There's a dignity in having a job.
And, you know, in our city, we have Workforce Solutions, which is the local arm of the federal Department of Labor where they bring in programs.
And we're trying to train people in our city.
We have tons of great jobs in the city.
What we don't have in this city are the middle-skilled, trained people to take the middle-skilled jobs because we have a lot of them that are available.
We don't have people that are trained to do them.
We have a lot of people who can step into $150,000 a year job plus.
So we have a program to train people to give them less than a four-year degree, less than a two-year degree, a certificate, so that they can go do something.
By the way, a welder in this city right now with a brand new certificate makes $80,000 to $90,000 a year.
And that's not a two-year degree.
So our workforce solutions, I asked the number the other day, how many people have you brought into your program that self-identify as experiencing homelessness?
It was like 650 people in their program over the last two years.
I said, what success do you have of actually putting somebody into a job?
It's 65%.
We ought to be doing that kind of thing.
So part of it is new people.
Part of it is giving greater capacity to the services that exist so they can create more slots.
But that's where we are right now.
I mean, it's pulling all those pieces together so that we can actually do that.
And if we do this, if we do this on this timing, I think we're going to be the first city to be able to accomplish that kind of turn in that period of time.
And it only happens because our challenge at this point is about average.
I mean, people see it in this city right now because of what the council did two years ago.
So it is, you know, in everybody's face right now.
And people want to do something about it, which is great.
But what they don't want to do, I don't think, is send people back to the woods.
They want people out of tents.
It is inappropriate.
It is wrong to have people tenting on our streets or in our overpasses.
That is not a good place for them.
It might be better than being in the woods, but it is a bad place for people to be.
So buying up hotels and motels, buying up places that are available, and then having all these people in place, you think this can all be ramped up and become a successful program by the time you're out of office?
Now, the hard asses amongst us would look at this and say, this is a personal accountability issue, and these people need to get their shit together.
And then why should we help them?
Nobody helped me.
That kind of thought process.
But then the more compassionate would look at maybe those 250 people that keep getting arrested over and over again and saying, how much would it cost to talk to those 250 people and work with those 250 people and figure out a way to change their perspective and bring like there's two different schools of thought, right?
There's a school of thought, you know, these people need to figure it out on their own.
There's a school of thought as they are, regardless of their circumstance, they are a part of our community and we need to figure out how to help them.
Like what arguments do you get, pro and con in that direction?
Like what arguments do you get in terms of like the 250 problem people that keep getting arrested and wind up in the hospital?
They're only concerned about the person experiencing homelessness.
What I have found in our city is that there are, well, those two extremes exist, almost everybody in this city has some of both.
They don't want to see it.
And there's got to be a better answer to it.
But they want you, in a city that has so much going for it, as much resources as this city has, we ought to be able to solve for this in a way that we're proud of.
It's almost like I wish there was like a contest where people from around the country or around the city or wherever it would be could come in and like there would be a prize if you could turn any of these 250 people into working productive members of society.
You figure out how to clean them up, counsel them.
I wonder what could be done if there was like real incentive, you know?
If like say if there was like a million dollar prize for whoever could take these people and turn them, turn whether it's a small number of them or even just one.
Take a person who's completely down and out and just go over their record, look at what's happened in their life.
It seems like it could be done with enough resources and attention.
You could change people's lives, but could you, you know, like how much would that cost?
And would it be, if you're thinking about $250,000 a year for each one of these people, that's what you're saying?
It seems like you pay someone $100,000 a year just to babysit these fucking people.
You'd save $120,000 a year, and you might be able to fix it.
Some of these people, there's got to be a way to get through to them.
People can change.
It's really hard, but they can change.
If you get enough attention and enough motivation, you hit the right frequency with them, talk to them in a way that resonates with them, give them manageable goals that they could sort of get momentum going and start recognizing that, oh, If I do these things and continue to do these things, I can actually live a better and healthier and happier life.
And there's going to be, has to be more and more of that because what Austin is dealing with right now is not very dissimilar from what's happening in a lot of cities around the country right now.
They're just not dealing with it.
Which means like in another four to six to eight years, what you're seeing happening in L.A. is going to start happening in many, many more bigger cities.
And then my hope is, well, I would love to have it happen today.
But at some point in the next four to six to eight years, it's got to be that nationally the government's stepping into this and saying, this is an emergency.
Yeah, it seems like it has to be, again, there's this thing that people want personal accountability.
They want people to just go and figure things out on their own.
But it has to be recognized that different people start off in life at different places.
This idea that we all have equal opportunity is nonsense.
It's just not the case.
And so if equal opportunity doesn't exist, you can't have equal expectations.
You just can't.
Some people come from horrific abuse and drug-abused families and violence and crime.
And they're just, they didn't start at the same spot as you or I. They got unlucky with where their station in life is.
And as a community, the compassionate thing to do is to try to give those people a hand, reach out, give them a hand.
But it's like, how much?
How much do you do?
And how much is it?
How much are you doing where you're just enabling and encouraging people?
You don't want these sort of like really overly progressive programs that ultimately do more harm than good because they just enable people to continue to live this life.
And what the studies show is that most of these people, and it is not everybody, but most of these people, if you can give them a key to a room, they will take that room rather than being out on the street.
So long as they can bring their pet or their girlfriend, so long as they're not being asked to do another 10-point program because they've done 20 of those and they're just not going to do that again.
But if you can get some into a place where they're safer and then get them the services, you'd be surprised at the number of people, the success rate of getting people to stabilize themselves.
And then there's just dignity and work.
There's dignity in community.
When you start giving people back that measure of dignity, that's what most all of these people want.
Different plans for the people that just are unfortunate.
This last year, I would imagine, as a mayor of a city, had to be insanely challenging with all the issues regarding whether or not to open or not to be open.
I mean, this is the only time in our lifetimes where the government has actually stepped in and said, hey, we have to shut down businesses and we have to deem certain businesses essential.
And especially horrible here in Austin because we had South Buy Southwest, which is a huge festival.
You know, brings in 250,000, 300,000 people from all over the world coming into our city the second week in March.
And we're looking at this virus that is like moving across the world and people are dying, seeing it now hit in California and Seattle.
And we're just about to bring 5,000 people from Seattle into our city.
We could be bringing in 10, 15, 20,000 people from Asia into our city.
So the very first thing that I had to do was working with the South Buy folks who were incredible and the doctors and the data was to say, we're going to pull down this event.
I mean, we're a younger population, healthier population, but it's also true about cases.
And it doesn't explain the number in cases, you know, is the same way it does death or hospitalizations.
You know, this, and a lot, and as I was, as I've said to my community from the very beginning, this is not about laws or ordinances because ultimately you can't enforce these things anyhow.
It's trying to get the information out to people as best you can, and then a community makes a decision about what it's going to do culturally in its communities.
What was it like watching different cities all across the country have different responses, different states have different responses, and to try to figure out who's doing this the right way?
What is the right path to take?
Is the path to give people personal responsibility?
Is the path to insist on very strict government-inspired lockdowns?
We had the University of Texas, you know, the physicians at the Dow Medical School, but also the statisticians and the modelers modeling out all kinds of different scenarios and then the data getting better and better for the models as each week passed.
We had a really good health authority here and Dr. Escott, you know, a director of the public health department, Hayden Howard.
So we just had good people and we got positive results from some of the early steps we took.
But I watched what was happening in the country.
It was hard for everybody around the country because no one knew what it was.
I mean, it's like everybody's a Monday morning quarterback in this thing, right?
Except for the governors and the mayors.
You know, you folks are the ones that have to make the tough calls.
And when you're looking at it, look, I talk a lot of shit, but the reality is I'm not a mayor.
I'm not a governor.
You know, I would not know what decision to make or not to make.
My inclination is to always give people freedom.
But I also know that some people are way more vulnerable than others.
And if you're a person like myself who's always exercised and ate healthy, that's one thing.
But if you're a person who has not, I'm a compassionate person.
I don't think you should be thrown to the walls because you've overindulged and you drink too much and you should just die now because there's a disease floating around that you miss.
Yeah, it just, for whatever reason, it finds people like that.
It's much more dangerous to them.
Was there ever a time where you guys decided or thought about some kind of a program put together to try to get people to exercise and to eat better and to supplement with vitamins?
Because those are the steps that we've shown to absolutely help in increasing the potency of your immune system.
Is there something you could do, though, to get the word out about that to the rest of the population?
Just to let people know.
Particularly things about vitamin D supplementation, which you really, you don't get vitamin D unless you get it from the sun or you supplement it.
Those are the only two options.
And one of the studies showed that out of the people that were in the ICU for COVID, 84% of them had insufficient levels of vitamin D. It has a tremendous impact on your immune system.
Like just telling people to supplement with vitamin D would have a huge impact on people's health and immune system.
Getting people to take multivitamins, getting people to drink more water, getting people to cut a lot of crap and process foods out of their diet.
All these things, you know, could be promoted and really should be at a time like this where it really does make a big impact on who lives or dies.