Austin's Homeless Services Reform

On Thursday a Community Homeless Advocate filed an injunction in Travis County District Court in an effort to block the renewal of City’s contract with the managing agency responsible for the city’s homeless shelter operations. This action will not interrupt shelter operations. According to court documents, the filing calls for an inquiry into alleged misappropriation of funding, misconduct by staff, deficiency in internal control over compliance, having all financial IRS 990 forms current & available for public review, maintaining the ARCH building, exterior criminal loitering, and public health issues. The shelter’s managing agency is a 501(c)(3) organization which also obtains its operations funding from the United States Department of Housing & Urban development through the City of Austin, State of Texas contributions, and public/private donors. The shelter’s managing agency is obligated to the accountability of transparency to both the city and to tax-payers.

The filing in District Court comes in the aftermath of attempted failed discussions with Austin’s Public Health Department, who is responsible for solicitation of the contract for Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, the Mayor Pro Tem, and the shelter’s managing agency’s executive staff to include the President of the board of directors. The shelter has steadily been reducing services while creative pay increases and utilization have occurred over the past year.

In July 2018 the CITY OF AUSTIN, TEXAS Purchasing Office issued a REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) for the city’s shelter operations and quoted The National Alliance to End Homelessness (“the Alliance”), which provides data and research to policymakers and elected officials stated, “The goal of emergency shelter in Austin should be to focus on re-connecting people to housing as quickly as possible.” The RFI also includes data from OrgCode Consulting, Inc. who works with non-profits, government, private companies, and non-governmental organizations. Austin Public Health contracted with the “Alliance” to provide recommendations to improve emergency shelter services and specific design recommendations for the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless (ARCH) to the City of Austin. The Alliance, with the assistance of OrgCode Consulting Inc. (“OrgCode”), collected, assessed and synthesized data on existing shelter services and outcomes provided by local leadership, as well as input from community and stakeholder interviews and consumer surveys occurring in conjunction with the Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation teams (i-teams).

Competing with the data from “the Alliance” and “OrgCode” is Austin’s Homeless Coalition’s “Austin’s 2018 Action Plan to End Homelessness” approved by Austin City Council back in April 2018. With the Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation teams (i-teams) work still in progress, and other plans already approved, it brings to question if these novice ideas fall adjacent to the extinguished CodeNEXT. The Advocate explains, “ The City has allowed organizations to corporatize homelessness. The complexity of a very simple task has really eaten away at the core of “housing the homeless” objective. These anomalies have created the smoke screen in which organizations have deviated from standard accountable community standing and the city has encompassed itself in bureaucracy unable to execute appropriate oversight over its contracts. "It’s time to pause and really reassess where we are with our commitment to actually house individuals. That’s what this injunction is meant to do. Providing front-end maintenance in making sure that we don’t lose focus of what we are really doing.”, the advocate explains.

The Advocate contends that there is currently not enough housing to meet the need of the city’s homeless. “When we don’t have the end means to our object (housing) then all we have is a circulatory system alternating between homeless services and housing. A revolving door if you will. The complexity that has been engaged in the interim actually draws and depletes valuable financial resources away from the homeless population and instead caters more favorably to the organizations. https://bit.ly/2Otm6vY