On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the mayor of Austin, Texas talks about the bombings that have terrorized his city over the past week, and what it's like to be a mayor in a city of a million people. Austin s mayor, Greg Austin, has been in office for 7 years, and in that time, he's seen a lot. He talks about how he's dealt with the bombings, and how he s managed to keep his community safe. He also talks about what it s like being mayor of a city where bombs have been sent to random homes and businesses, and why it s important to have a plan in place to deal with something like this in order to prevent more bombs from going out at random addresses. The mayor also shares his thoughts on the ongoing investigation into the bombings and how the FBI and APD are doing their best to catch the culprit. The Joe Rogans Experience is a series of interviews with well-known and influential people from the Austin community where they discuss what it means to be mayor, and the challenges that come with the job of leading a community in the midst of a time where bombs are being sent out in the streets and mailers are sent to homes across the country. This episode is a must-listen! episode. Thanks for listening and share it with your friends, family, and family! Tweet me if you liked it! to let us know what you think! Timestamps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21. 22. 23. 26. 27. Intro Music: Intro & Outro Music: "I Don't Care About You (featuring: "Good Morning America" by Jeff Perla ( ) Music: Fair Weather Fans ( ) - "I'll See You Soon" by: "The Good Morning Podcast" by Skating Song: "Let's Get Into It (feat. ( ) by Jeffree Starz & "Feat. ) - "Solo ( ) ( ) & "I'm Not So Good ( ) " by Ferg & I'm Not Gonna See You ( ) ? ) & ( ) )
00:01:33.000I 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.
00:01:43.000What kind of massive change has this been for you?
00:01:48.000You know, it actually starts before that.
00:04:02.000They 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?
00:04:33.000So there's this lingering, unsettled place where you just never know when it's going to come back again.
00:04:39.000It 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 gonna catch him.
00:04:56.000And how did they wind up catching him?
00:04:59.000You know, they ended up tracing the packages that were coming in.
00:05:05.000They ended up getting a video at, I think it was like a FedEx place.
00:05:10.000You know, they knew that bombs 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 location.
00:05:46.000If 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.
00:05:58.000And when it started off, you didn't know that it was random, right?
00:06:09.000My recollection is probably about four, five maybe.
00:06:13.000But the first couple hit children of some pretty prominent black families in the city.
00:06:22.000So it initially looked like there may be a link between who was getting bombed, and this might actually be something that was race-driven, because you just don't know.
00:06:33.000When you only have two or three data points, it could be anything, and everybody imagines each one of those scenarios.
00:06:43.000So you've had that, you've had the storm which washed out the bridge, and then this crazy ice storm.
00:06:49.000Bass dropped nearly Burned up, you know, a city just east of here.
00:07:05.000Some pictures of friends that I know that live out here sent me pictures.
00:07:08.000I was in California at the time, but I was like, that is nuts.
00:07:11.000It was like hundreds of yards between their dock and where the actual water was.
00:07:15.000We were down to like 25-30% and I was beginning to get shopped, you know, these multi-billion dollar proposals to pipe in water from aquifers from east of here.
00:07:29.000One of the best things I did as mayor soon after I was elected is I made it rain and Lake Travis filled right up.
00:09:00.000I mean, I really do think this is kind of a magical place, and I think that is one of the elements.
00:09:04.000I mean, there were not only in the grocery store, but there were people all over the city that didn't have food and didn't have water.
00:09:11.000You know, frankly, when something like that happens, it's like way too big for government relief efforts to be able to get to people.
00:09:18.000You need neighbors that are stepping up to help other neighbors.
00:09:23.000And that would happen all over the city.
00:09:25.000When you first became mayor or when you were running for office, did you have certain objectives that you wanted to fulfill?
00:09:31.000And when you got into office, what was the difference between your ideas of what you could do and the reality of doing them once you got in there?
00:09:41.000Well, you know, when I ran, the highest priority, if you polled people, was do something about transportation.
00:11:32.000The second thing was that government is hard in Austin.
00:11:37.000One, you know, you're not a strong mayor like in Houston or New York.
00:11:44.000So the city manager has significant administrative and executive powers in the city.
00:11:50.000When 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?
00:12:20.000There'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.
00:12:30.000And really makes all the appointments in the city.
00:12:33.000The city council operates almost like a board for a company and deals with policy-related issues, not the management or the executive issues.
00:12:48.000I have no greater vote or power than any of my peers on the city council.
00:12:53.000So it makes it difficult to come into a city and lead when the other ten 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,
00:13:08.000because I'm the mayor, and I have better access to the bully pulpit than they do.
00:13:14.000So 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.
00:13:24.000So the difference between the way it seemed the job was versus your actual ability once you got in was pretty stark.
00:13:46.000In 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.
00:13:57.000I'm not allowed to have – you can't have a majority of the city council that spoke to each other prior to a meeting about an issue.
00:14:10.000The thought is that government would then be in the smoke-filled back rooms cutting deals and making things and they would show up in public.
00:14:38.000And any kind of business does that kind of thing.
00:14:42.000Now, 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.
00:16:58.000Appreciating 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.
00:17:06.000But when you start talking about increasing the housing supply in the city, you immediately run into the culture wars on real estate development that you see neighborhoods.
00:17:54.000You get resistance from neighborhoods that are trying to preserve a certain quality of life or neighborhood character that's important to them.
00:18:06.000And is there a common ground or a middle ground rather?
00:18:10.000And 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, OK, what is it that is achievable?
00:18:26.000How much of what we need to do can we get done and get the votes for?
00:18:30.000What the court said was in order for us to pass what we were doing, we needed a supermajority to get it done.
00:18:36.000So on our 11-person council, we needed nine votes as opposed to seven votes.
00:19:12.000It 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.
00:19:20.000So if you want to put on a floor above the commercial use that's residential use, we're going to do that.
00:19:26.000So we're going to enlarge what you can build in a commercial area.
00:19:29.000So you could add condos to the top of an office building perhaps.
00:19:32.000And maybe it's letting more people build auxiliary dwelling units or apartments in the backyard.
00:19:37.000Maybe 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.
00:19:48.000So it's increasing the number of units perhaps.
00:19:51.000It's increasing the square footage that you can put on a lot relative to the total area.
00:19:58.000Maybe it's increasing the height that you can put in a particular zone property.
00:20:04.000So you can go from only three stories to four stories if you build a certain amount of residential along with that or affordable residential.
00:20:13.000And is there any consideration to the idea that maybe the city shouldn't grow?
00:21:40.000It's a utopian-sized 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.
00:21:54.000But 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.
00:22:03.000You started describing what this vision is, the future of Austin, as kind of a center for this, and I love that.
00:22:11.000Yeah, I think Austin easily could be the center for comedy because 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.
00:22:27.000But the reality is, over the last few years, that's all shifted anyway to the internet.
00:22:33.000And now comedians have found it's much more profitable and more fun to be independent.
00:22:39.000Because 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.
00:22:48.000It's not you from The Tonight Show or you from this show where you'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.
00:22:59.000And comedians now have found this sort of community thing going on where we support each other and 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.
00:23:15.000And we'd be better off if we're independent.
00:23:18.000So, so many of us are moving here and about 10 friends have moved here within the last year.
00:23:25.000And as more comics hear about the great Austin scene, more will move here.
00:23:30.000And you describe something that is cultural, I think, to the city.
00:23:35.000I mean, that ability to be able to come here and be who you are and to be able to think outside the box and set up different kinds of systems...
00:23:42.000You know, the watchword in Austin, and I think we've talked about this in the past, is keep Austin weird.
00:23:48.000You can, like, buy it on a coffee mug.
00:23:50.000They've ruined that saying, though, with those shirts.
00:24:12.000And 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.
00:24:22.000And if you don't succeed, you don't get punished the way you do in many other cities.
00:24:26.000I mean, you're expected to, like, learn from that and try again fast.
00:24:31.000It'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 this city than anywhere else.
00:24:45.000It's a city where 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.
00:24:56.000I like how you said he finished second.
00:25:00.000You'd be like, oh my goodness, I've got to go back to the public or private sector.
00:25:05.000The biggest issue by far over this past year has been the homeless crisis, right?
00:25:10.000That'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.
00:25:26.000Like what was the motivation for allowing people to camp in public places?
00:25:34.000Well, that's the action the council took two years ago, but so let's go back before two years ago.
00:25:39.000You 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 L.A., but ours was just in a block area.
00:25:52.000But that's what everybody talked about.
00:26:26.000But if you close it down anywhere, the people don't disappear, so they'll come back.
00:26:32.000But that was a challenge coming into office.
00:26:35.000But in my second, third, and fourth years in office, I started going to neighborhood association meetings.
00:26:42.000And 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.
00:26:55.000They were blaming the petty crime happening in the neighborhood on them.
00:27:00.000Every one of them had a wife or a daughter that had a horrible experience related to them.
00:27:05.000And 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.
00:27:16.000I had one of them here in the neighborhood.
00:27:20.000A guy came up to me after it was over and he said, Fix this, and if you don't, I have a gun, and I will fix this myself.
00:27:29.000And I don't know that he actually meant that, but that was the fervor and the feel.
00:27:35.000And I had, as a member of the city council, nothing to offer that neighborhood association.
00:27:43.000They were complaining about people that were under an overpass at the highway not too far away from them.
00:27:50.000And 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.
00:28:04.000So all they're going to do is move up the highway or down the highway or somewhere else.
00:28:11.000And I was going to more and more neighborhood associations that were complaining more and more about encampments.
00:28:43.000When 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.
00:29:03.000It 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.
00:29:14.000You might be able to do that with all these homeless people.
00:29:17.000Whereas if you're in a place like Los Angeles and dealing with 100,000 people, what's the number of homeless people in Austin?
00:29:49.000It's increased to the point where it's hard to say whether or not it's increased or its exposure has increased because they've all moved to like Venice Beach where there's just thousands of tents.
00:31:00.000They 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.
00:31:14.000You'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.
00:31:23.000People have actually moved there with the intention of taking advantage of all their services, taking advantage of the food and shelter and the ability to do whatever you want.
00:31:33.000You could actually get money from certain services in San Francisco.
00:31:38.000There's like a fine line between helping and encouraging people to continue the lifestyle.
00:31:43.000And for some people, the freedom of just being able to camp and do whatever you want, they're checked out, right?
00:32:03.000Is 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?
00:32:12.000You 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.
00:32:22.000Like, how do you make that distinction?
00:32:25.000Well, you know, so much of the debate and discussion around homelessness has turned so political.
00:32:33.000Like so many other kinds of discussions, but homelessness is one of the big ones.
00:32:37.000So 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.
00:32:48.000Intersect with our homelessness system.
00:32:50.000About 3,000 people on any given day in our city experiencing homelessness.
00:32:58.000And what they tell me consistently for the last six years, seven years, is that you can find anecdotally where that has happened.
00:33:08.000But generally speaking, the overwhelming number of people experiencing homelessness in our city are people who fell into homelessness here.
00:33:16.000The people that are coming into our city, most of them are coming from the areas immediately around us.
00:33:21.000I 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.
00:33:36.000We 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.
00:33:46.000So where I'm looking at here, and I know that the governor, Gavin Newsom in California, told people that Austin and Texas were giving people tickets and sending people to California.
00:34:14.000So I'm just – we just need to get people off the streets.
00:34:21.000So 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.
00:34:32.000And part of the reason was is because people didn't see the challenge.
00:34:36.000So there'd be some neighborhoods that were willing to do it.
00:34:39.000I knew as sure as the sun was going to come up the next day that this was now accelerating in our city.
00:34:46.000So 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.
00:34:55.000If somebody's doing that, they should be arrested and ticketed and put in jail.
00:34:59.000But 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.
00:35:20.000Why is it a worse place for them to be camping in the woods than to be camping on a public street?
00:35:25.000Well, one, you don't want anybody camping on a public street either.
00:35:29.000So that's not a solution to the challenge.
00:35:34.000But if somebody is in the woods or down by the streams, They're not interacting with anybody else.
00:35:41.000So 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.
00:35:55.000So you mean if a homeless woman moves to the woods, she's in danger because there's no one around her to protect her?
00:36:05.000She's not in a community of homeless people.
00:36:07.000And 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.
00:36:19.000We're now vaccinating our entire population of people experiencing homelessness because we can find them.
00:36:24.000The 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.
00:36:37.000We didn't manage the public spaces, the shared spaces, the way that we should have.
00:36:42.000So what the council did that summer is we said, okay, we're going to decriminalize it because...
00:36:51.000In 2016, thereabouts, we wrote like 18,000 tickets.
00:36:56.000And as you imagine, very few of those people ended up in court the following Thursday to pay their fine.
00:37:01.000They end up bench-worn 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.
00:37:08.000So we said we're just not going to do that anymore.
00:37:12.000But 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?
00:37:23.000And for lots of reasons, that never happened.
00:37:48.000What did you do exactly for the veterans?
00:37:51.000Well, veterans are a little bit easier because they come with resources.
00:37:54.000So they come with what are called VASH vouchers from the federal government, which is support to help do rent supplements.
00:38:01.000But then it was reaching out to everybody in the city that had apartment buildings, big managers of apartment buildings with these vouchers.
00:38:09.000And we would say, would you take in these vets?
00:38:15.000We had some landlords that were suspicious of and say, I'm not going to do this because if I take someone like this, they're going to trash out the place.
00:38:22.000And it would take me six months to evict them.
00:38:24.000So I got together with some private businesses in the lake.
00:38:27.000We created a risk fund outside of city government.
00:38:31.000And 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.
00:38:41.000All the landlords said they don't believe me because it's going to take you five months.
00:39:13.000In 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.
00:39:35.000It was part, again, of a federal program.
00:39:38.000What percentage of the homeless folks are veterans?
00:39:40.000You know, I think it's probably right now about 6%, something like that.
00:39:44.000The number was higher back then because we had more veterans on the streets.
00:39:50.000But 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.
00:39:58.000So how do you let these vets know about this and how do you locate the vets?
00:40:01.000Well, the people are on the streets right now.
00:40:04.000I mean, the service workers, the mental health interventionists.
00:40:08.000And they basically go tent to tent and they ask folks, are you a veteran?
00:40:30.000But when we moved out of vets, I had trouble getting the commitment to raise the resources to be able to do it for everybody.
00:40:37.000And so for two years, we were Really unable to get the resources necessary to do it.
00:40:45.000The 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,
00:41:03.000Because of everybody getting so engaged...
00:41:18.000You know, as a practical matter, criminalizing it isn't ultimately going to help.
00:41:22.000We have to enforce the new law, so the manager and the police chief are charged with doing that.
00:41:28.000But what we need to do is scale up the same thing we did with veterans.
00:41:32.000And 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.
00:41:51.000And for the very first time, we have, I think, the access to the resources using our share of the $1.9 trillion coming out of D.C. And what several of us on the council, and I think a majority of us on the council, have said is,
00:42:07.000rather 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?
00:42:20.000Let's take The lion's share of that money put it to one challenge.
00:42:24.000Let'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.
00:42:32.000This is the moment because it's only 3,000 people on any given night, going back to what you said earlier.
00:42:47.000And if we set up the system, then that system, then that equilibrium place, then takes this challenge off the table for us for an indefinite period of time.
00:42:56.000If there was no fiscal considerations, if someone could come to you and said, Steve, you've got an open check.
00:43:39.000We 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%.
00:44:52.000And it starts causing problems between them and their spouse.
00:44:55.000They have a bill collector that's now calling them all the time.
00:44:59.000So they start paying that bill sometimes and not their car bill all the time, and then they lose their car.
00:45:04.000That causes friction in the household.
00:45:07.000Things are getting really ugly at this point.
00:45:10.000They don't have the car, and one of them loses their job.
00:45:13.000And then the next thing you know, the spouse leaves with the kids, the car's gone, the bill collector's still coming, and then the person loses their apartment.
00:45:23.000And they raise their hand, and they say, I need help.
00:45:26.000I don't know who to call because they literally have no one to call.
00:45:30.000And they say, if you can just help me, help me for a month or two or three, I can right this ship and get back.
00:45:37.000If 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.
00:45:49.000But the longer you leave them on the street...
00:45:52.000The longer they're there, the harder it's going to be for them to be able to pull back.
00:45:55.000The wait list right now in Austin for somebody in that situation who raises their hand is like a year, year and a half.
00:46:04.000So we're creating a lot of the challenge that we're dealing with because we don't have the capacity.
00:46:13.000But 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.
00:46:22.000We have the resources from the federal government.
00:46:25.000I think we're having foundations now that are in discussions, willing to step up and take a big piece of this.
00:46:32.000Before I leave office here in the next year and a half, my number one priority is to track this issue.
00:49:14.000So every year they've gotten more and more funding.
00:49:16.000So every year, I think this past year or recently, they got over $40 million.
00:49:20.000I 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.
00:49:29.000We need to do it over the next three years.
00:49:31.000I 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.
00:49:38.000But 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.
00:49:48.000Once they, if they get past the diversion, you didn't divert them, then you get them into some kind of rapid rehousing Emergency housing, exiting them to permanent supportive housing, hopefully exiting them back to society.
00:50:02.000And then you keep filling, backfilling those spots.
00:50:05.000Then once you reach equilibrium in that system, then it doesn't cost.
00:50:12.000LA budget this year, did you see that?
00:50:14.000The LA line item for homelessness this year in their budget, a billion dollars.
00:50:49.000It 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.
00:50:57.000When you're talking about 3,000 homeless folks, how many counselors do you need?
00:51:03.000How many people do you need working on this problem?
00:51:07.000You're obviously going to need folks that are experts in helping people rehabilitate and getting back into society.
00:51:16.000And you're going to deal with a bunch of different kinds of scenarios.
00:51:19.000Some people have extreme mental health issues.
00:51:23.000Some people are like the story that you just laid out earlier.
00:51:27.000Just a bunch of things happen in the perfect storm and they wind up being homeless.
00:51:32.000So our Chamber of Commerce got together with our Criminal Justice Advocacy Group.
00:51:43.000And 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.
00:51:53.000They engaged in a facilitated conversation.
00:51:58.000Chamber, DA, Downtown Austin Alliance, ECHO, the Umbrella Organization, a facilitated conversation.
00:52:05.000It felt like a marriage counseling session.
00:52:08.000They 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.
00:52:19.000And 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.
00:52:32.000But the fact that they could agree on it was the first time I had seen that in my lifetime in this city.
00:52:39.000And 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.
00:52:51.000So that plan that they came up with, with the facilitator, by the way, one of the architects of the practice 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.
00:53:09.000So 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?
00:53:27.000Is it giving them hope in the sense of marking progress and making a...
00:53:37.000A show of it, like saying, this is fantastic.
00:54:21.000So it's a question of just helping those people right themselves and then get back.
00:54:26.000And there will be some people who are just gone.
00:54:31.000And 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.
00:54:44.000Well, 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.
00:54:56.000The frequent flyers in our emergency rooms and in jails and all that are costing our collective community about $220,000 a year.
00:55:32.000But 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.
00:55:48.000Most of the people are eager to be able to actually get a job.
00:55:57.000And, 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.
00:56:05.000And we're trying to train people in our city.
00:56:07.000We have tons of great jobs in this city.
00:56:10.000What 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.
00:56:19.000We don't have people that are trained to do them.
00:56:21.000We have a lot of people who can step into a $150,000-a-year job Plus.
00:56:26.000So 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.
00:56:35.000By the way, a welder in this city right now with a brand new certificate makes $80,000 and $90,000 a year.
00:56:47.000So, our Workforce Solutions, I asked the number the other day, how many people have you brought into your program that self-identifies experiencing homelessness?
00:56:56.000It was like 650 people in their program over the last two years.
00:57:01.000I said, what success do you have of actually putting somebody into a job?
00:57:24.000And 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.
00:57:34.000And it only happens because our challenge at this point is about average.
00:57:40.000I mean, people see it in this city right now because of what the council did two years ago.
00:57:44.000So it is in everybody's face right now.
00:57:49.000And people want to do something about it, which is great.
00:57:53.000But what they don't want to do, I don't think, is send people back to the woods.
00:58:12.000So 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?
00:58:27.000I don't think it will be finalized because I think we'll be in the middle of this three-year period of time, but I think it'll be tracked.
00:58:33.000I think the money will have been committed and raised.
00:58:37.000And there'll be a glide path for three years.
00:58:39.000There'll be a group that is in charge of governing this and holding people accountable that operates outside of government.
00:58:47.000It won't be the city or the county because these challenges are too big for the city or the county.
00:58:53.000There's got to be a place that has funders and foundations and businesses all part of the governance of this process.
00:59:03.000Now, 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.
00:59:15.000But 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,
00:59:34.000like, there's two different schools of thought, right?
00:59:36.000There's a school of thought, you know, these people need to figure it out on their own.
00:59:40.000There's a school of thought that they are, regardless of their circumstance, they are a part of our community and we need to figure out how to help them.
00:59:46.000Like, what arguments do you get, pro and con, in that direction?
00:59:50.000Like, what What arguments do you get in terms of the 250 problem people that keep getting arrested and wind up in the hospital?
01:00:14.000And then there are the people that are only concerned about taking care of people.
01:00:21.000And they don't believe that there is a need to manage shared public spaces in a way that actually preserves for the public the use of public spaces.
01:00:32.000They're only concerned about the person experiencing homelessness.
01:00:35.000What I have found in our city is that while those two extremes exist, Almost everybody in this city has some of both.
01:00:46.000There's got to be a better answer to it.
01:00:49.000But 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.
01:01:00.000I wish there was a contest where people from around the country or around the city or wherever it would be could come in and there would be a prize.
01:01:12.000If you could turn any of these 250 people into working, productive members of society, figure out how to...
01:01:21.000I wonder what could be done if there was like real incentive, you know?
01:01:25.000Say if there was like a million dollar prize for whoever could take these people and turn them, whether it's a small number of them or even just one.
01:01:35.000Take a person who's completely down and out and just go over their record, look at what's happened in their life.
01:01:44.000It seems like it could be done with enough resources and attention.
01:01:48.000You could change people's lives, but how much would that cost?
01:01:54.000If you're thinking about $250,000 a year for each one of these people, that's what you're saying?
01:02:19.000If 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 like manageable goals that they could sort of get momentum going and start recognizing that, oh,
01:02:34.000if I do these things and continue to do these things, I can actually live a better and healthier and happier life.
01:02:47.000And 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.
01:03:00.000Which means like in another four to six to eight years, what you're seeing happening in L.A., It's going to start happening in many, many more bigger cities around the country.
01:03:09.000Unless steps are taken to mitigate it.
01:03:19.000And 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.
01:04:04.000Some people come from horrific abuse and drug-abused families and violence and crime, and they didn't start at the same spot as you or I. They got unlucky with where their station in life is.
01:04:19.000And as a community, the compassionate thing to do is to try to give those people a hand.
01:04:36.000Sort of like really overly progressive programs that ultimately do more harm than good because they just enable people to continue to live this life.
01:04:48.000You want to kind of guide them, right?
01:04:51.000And 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,
01:05:11.000so 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.
01:05:22.000But 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.
01:05:33.000And then there's just dignity and work.
01:05:50.000Yeah, and you've got to have, I guess, different plans in place for different kinds of problems, right?
01:05:57.000Different plans in place for the people with mental health issues, different plans in place for the people who are drug addicts, different plans for the people that just are unfortunate.
01:06:05.000This 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.
01:06:18.000And 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.
01:06:32.000And especially horrible here in Austin.
01:06:37.000Because we had South by Southwest, which is a huge festival.
01:06:41.000It brings in 250,000, 300,000 people from all over the world coming into our city the second week in March.
01:06:50.000And we're looking at this virus that is moving across the world and people are dying.
01:06:58.000Seeing it now hit in California and Seattle, and we're just about to bring 5,000 people from Seattle into our city.
01:07:06.000We could be bringing in 10, 15, 20,000 people from Asia into our city.
01:07:13.000So the very first thing that I had to do was working with the South By folks who were incredible and the doctors and the data was to say, we're going to pull down this event.
01:07:27.000How much resistance did you get for that?
01:08:14.000I mean, we're a younger population, healthier population, but it's also true about cases.
01:08:19.000And it doesn't explain the number in cases, you know, as the same way it does death or hospitalizations.
01:08:28.000You know, 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.
01:08:40.000It'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.
01:08:49.000And in the city, the people leaned into it.
01:08:52.000What 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?
01:11:16.000It's a very very active city and there's a lot of people that engage in all sorts of different outdoor activities and you know all those things are conducive to good health and healthy immune systems and I think that's one of the good things about this city.
01:11:35.000You had a little problem during the pandemic with that one thing you did when you you kind of told people to stay home when you weren't staying home.
01:12:49.000So it was a mistake and I obviously regret that and it's been a sore spot and I wish I hadn't done it and I apologized but now I just need to focus on what it is that is the work to be done.
01:13:07.000Well, it was quite a long time ago, but there was these different schools of thought about how to handle the pandemic, right?
01:13:15.000Some people said, just leave, like the governor, when he said, we're going to be 100% open, no mask mandate, do whatever you want.
01:14:37.000You know, I would not know what decision to make or not to make.
01:14:40.000My inclination is to always give people freedom.
01:14:42.000But I also know that some people are way more vulnerable than others.
01:14:46.000And if you're a person like myself who's always exercised and ate healthy, that's one thing.
01:14:50.000But if you're a person who has not, I'm a compassionate person.
01:14:55.000I don't think you should be thrown to the wolves because you've overindulged and you drink too much and you should just die now because there's a disease floating around that...
01:15:07.000It finds people like that and it's much more dangerous to them.
01:15:10.000Was 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?
01:15:24.000Because those are the steps that we've shown to absolutely help in increasing the potency of your immune system.
01:15:32.000And I think, you know, cities need to play in that space.
01:15:36.000That's why we've really put resources against the running trail around Lake Austin.
01:15:42.000You know, and there are tens of thousands of people that are on there all the time.
01:15:47.000You know, we do pretty big programs with the employees' cities.
01:16:06.000I mean, particularly things about vitamin D supplementation, which you don't get vitamin D unless you get it from the sun or you supplement it.
01:16:15.000And 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.
01:16:24.000Just telling people to supplement with vitamin D would have a huge impact on people's health and immune system.
01:16:31.000Getting 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.
01:16:37.000All these things 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.
01:16:46.000And we should have been doing a better job of that.
01:16:48.000We should be doing a better job of that.
01:16:50.000You know, if this pandemic's told us anything, this virus sought out people with comorbidities.