The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1657 - Mayor Steve Adler

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:14.000 Thanks for doing this, man.

00:00:15.000 Appreciate it.

00:00:15.000 No, I appreciate the invite.

00:00:17.000 What's it like being the mayor of Austin?

00:00:18.000 You know, it's a real trip.

00:00:22.000 If you could go back and do it again, would you?

00:00:24.000 I keep reminding Diane that we volunteered to do this.

00:00:29.000 Yeah, because there's so many things about it that are spectacular.

00:00:33.000 But it is also the most frustrating thing I've ever done.

00:00:36.000 Have you ever done anything in public service before this?

00:00:40.000 Not in any kind of elected office.

00:00:42.000 What gave you the motivation to do it?

00:00:45.000 You know, I was in and around politics, but I worked on some campaigns.

00:00:51.000 I had a friend who became a state senator and I took some time off helping him set up his office.

00:00:56.000 I think, you know, really it was, you know, literally the city had been real good to me.

00:01:04.000 You know, I came here as a pretty poor student passing through town, never left, stayed here for the music and the breakfast tacos.

00:01:11.000 You know, 40 years later, I've achieved so many things that I didn't even know existed.

00:01:19.000 And it was a chance to give back.

00:01:21.000 This is the classic case of no good deed goes unfunished.

00:01:25.000 Well, and then, you know, the way it stands now, it's such a strange time, right?

00:01:31.000 Like, everything was fine.

00:01:33.000 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.

00:01:43.000 What kind of massive change has this been for you?

00:01:48.000 You know, it actually starts before that.

00:01:51.000 Let's go back.

00:01:52.000 We've had three 100-year storms in my seven years where people have died.

00:01:58.000 We had a bridge wash out way north of here sending silt downstream and we ended up having to do a water boil in Austin.

00:02:09.000 And this was at a time… Water boil meaning people had to boil their tap water so the processing wasn't working?

00:02:14.000 In a city of a million people, you couldn't drink the water.

00:02:17.000 I mean that never happens.

00:02:18.000 But yet in my time as mayor in seven years, it's happened twice.

00:02:22.000 We had a bomber that was putting bombs on people's porches, mailing people, and people were dying.

00:02:30.000 You know, we had a thousand law enforcement agents here.

00:02:35.000 We were talking about that.

00:02:36.000 And then COVID. What was the bomb about?

00:02:40.000 What was that about?

00:02:41.000 It was no motive.

00:02:43.000 I mean, it was just a kid who's obviously had significant problems.

00:02:49.000 I mean, he was evil.

00:02:52.000 He was just randomly sending bombs.

00:02:55.000 Of course, when it started, we didn't know that it was random.

00:02:57.000 Everybody was trying to figure out who's next and what the plan is.

00:03:02.000 It was fascinating to watch the FBI and Austin Police Department work on that.

00:03:09.000 How long did it take to catch them?

00:03:11.000 You know, it was over in a matter of just a few weeks.

00:03:15.000 And I don't even remember now.

00:03:16.000 It could be even shorter than that.

00:03:18.000 It could be two weeks.

00:03:19.000 I remember it being a really long period of time because every day lasted forever.

00:03:26.000 But it was relatively, relatively quick.

00:03:29.000 What is it like being the mayor while something like that is going on?

00:03:33.000 While you're trying to sleep and you're thinking, like, when's the next one going to blow and how do we catch this guy?

00:03:38.000 Like, what is that feeling like?

00:03:40.000 It's hard, you know, because you know your community is scared.

00:03:47.000 And you know that the community is looking to you to try and gauge how scared it is that they need to be.

00:03:56.000 We had the FBI and APD. We had other law enforcement that was working on it.

00:04:00.000 I was kind of like the translator.

00:04:02.000 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?

00:04:10.000 What's our swing thought?

00:04:12.000 I mean, what are we supposed to be thinking about right now?

00:04:15.000 And you start reading about other situations, other mayors that have gone through some similar kind of thing looking back in time.

00:04:25.000 And so many of these things end where it just stops.

00:04:30.000 They don't catch anybody.

00:04:31.000 There's no finality to it.

00:04:33.000 So there's this lingering, unsettled place where you just never know when it's going to come back again.

00:04:39.000 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 gonna catch him.

00:04:56.000 And how did they wind up catching him?

00:04:59.000 You know, they ended up tracing the packages that were coming in.

00:05:05.000 They ended up getting a video at, I think it was like a FedEx place.

00:05:10.000 You 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.

00:05:34.000 We're good to go.

00:05:44.000 Yeah, that's a thing, right?

00:05:46.000 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.

00:05:58.000 And when it started off, you didn't know that it was random, right?

00:06:02.000 So some of the first...

00:06:03.000 How many bombs went off?

00:06:06.000 You know, I am not sure.

00:06:09.000 My recollection is probably about four, five maybe.

00:06:13.000 But the first couple hit children of some pretty prominent black families in the city.

00:06:22.000 So 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.

00:06:33.000 When you only have two or three data points, it could be anything, and everybody imagines each one of those scenarios.

00:06:43.000 So you've had that, you've had the storm which washed out the bridge, and then this crazy ice storm.

00:06:49.000 Bass dropped nearly Burned up, you know, a city just east of here.

00:06:55.000 Wildfire came.

00:06:56.000 You know, when I came into office, we were in the middle of a historic drought.

00:06:59.000 Right.

00:07:00.000 That was when Lake Travis had shrunk, right?

00:07:03.000 It did.

00:07:03.000 It was crazy.

00:07:04.000 Crazy.

00:07:05.000 Some pictures of friends that I know that live out here sent me pictures.

00:07:08.000 I was in California at the time, but I was like, that is nuts.

00:07:11.000 It was like hundreds of yards between their dock and where the actual water was.

00:07:15.000 We 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.

00:07:29.000 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.

00:07:37.000 Didn't it fill up in like a day?

00:07:38.000 Yeah.

00:07:39.000 That's crazy.

00:07:40.000 That's all it takes.

00:07:41.000 Wow.

00:07:42.000 Yeah.

00:07:43.000 The ice storm out here was pretty bananas.

00:07:46.000 The frozen snow ice storm that lasted a week is very strange.

00:07:52.000 And that's also a 100-year sort of event, right?

00:07:57.000 Yeah.

00:07:59.000 Almost in recorded history, I mean, it was the most—and to have that happen at a time when you're in the middle of a pandemic, right?

00:08:07.000 So all the things that you would have done now gets limited.

00:08:11.000 You know, you're trying to get people off the street and put them into some kind of congregate warming station.

00:08:15.000 It impacts that.

00:08:16.000 It impacts everything that you want to do to have that happen in the middle of a pandemic.

00:08:22.000 And then we lost power in the city.

00:08:24.000 Yeah.

00:08:25.000 So no one had water, no one had electricity.

00:08:31.000 It was pretty interesting.

00:08:32.000 One thing I did find, though, when you went to the supermarkets, that people were kind of like bound together with a sense of community.

00:08:39.000 People were very friendly here, period.

00:08:43.000 It's a very friendly city.

00:08:44.000 But there were even more.

00:08:46.000 It seemed like instead of just flat-out panic, people were talking to each other more.

00:08:52.000 People were offering up possible solutions to different people's problems and how to handle things.

00:08:58.000 It felt good.

00:08:59.000 And you live here now.

00:09:00.000 I mean, I really do think this is kind of a magical place, and I think that is one of the elements.

00:09:04.000 I 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.

00:09:11.000 You know, frankly, when something like that happens, it's like way too big for government relief efforts to be able to get to people.

00:09:18.000 You need neighbors that are stepping up to help other neighbors.

00:09:23.000 And that would happen all over the city.

00:09:25.000 When you first became mayor or when you were running for office, did you have certain objectives that you wanted to fulfill?

00:09:31.000 And 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?

00:09:41.000 Well, you know, when I ran, the highest priority, if you polled people, was do something about transportation.

00:09:47.000 A lot of people moving into the city.

00:09:49.000 Everybody's, you know, looking at congestion issues that they'd never seen before.

00:09:53.000 Do something about transportation.

00:09:55.000 We have no real mass public transit.

00:09:57.000 We have an I-35 here, one single high state.

00:10:02.000 Interstate going through the city.

00:10:04.000 One of the most congested in the country.

00:10:08.000 So transportation I knew I had to focus on.

00:10:10.000 I need you guys to stop talking about your traffic because it's a joke.

00:10:13.000 Your traffic here is literally a joke.

00:10:16.000 My friend Tony calls it adorable.

00:10:18.000 It is adorable, right?

00:10:20.000 Jamie's from out of town.

00:10:21.000 We're from LA. Traffic here is a joke.

00:10:23.000 It's hilarious.

00:10:24.000 People are like, this traffic is crazy.

00:10:26.000 It took me an extra five minutes to get somewhere.

00:10:29.000 You guys don't have traffic.

00:10:30.000 I know.

00:10:31.000 If that's your biggest problem, you literally live in Narnia.

00:10:33.000 This is a utopian village.

00:10:35.000 There's no traffic.

00:10:37.000 And we've been accused of that.

00:10:38.000 That's true.

00:10:39.000 On lots of occasions.

00:10:42.000 But coming in, there were two things that I hadn't anticipated.

00:10:45.000 The first one was the level of incoming volume was something that I hadn't anticipated.

00:10:51.000 When did it start?

00:10:52.000 When did it ramp up the people moving here?

00:10:55.000 Because it wasn't just the pandemic, right?

00:10:57.000 I'm just talking about people reaching out to me in the job.

00:11:00.000 I mean, you could spend your entire time not doing anything but responding to constituents.

00:11:05.000 Or you could spend all your time doing nothing but trying to mediate the zoning cases that show up every week.

00:11:12.000 I mean, you could spend your whole time never doing anything that's actually big picture and affirmative in a city.

00:11:17.000 And I used to blame city councils before me that they would never actually get in to deal with the really big issues.

00:11:23.000 Well, it was real apparent to me three weeks into this why it is that that happens.

00:11:28.000 It's really hard to do that.

00:11:32.000 The second thing was that government is hard in Austin.

00:11:37.000 One, you know, you're not a strong mayor like in Houston or New York.

00:11:44.000 So the city manager has significant administrative and executive powers in the city.

00:11:50.000 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?

00:11:58.000 Right.

00:11:59.000 So the mayor in a lot of cities is the CEO of the city.

00:12:04.000 Sometimes they don't serve on city council, and the city council is kind of like the Congress or the legislature.

00:12:10.000 In a lot of cities, it's the mayor that appoints the police chief and the executives and the head of the departments.

00:12:18.000 That system is in a lot of cities.

00:12:20.000 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.

00:12:30.000 And really makes all the appointments in the city.

00:12:33.000 The city council operates almost like a board for a company and deals with policy-related issues, not the management or the executive issues.

00:12:45.000 And that's what we have in Austin.

00:12:46.000 So I'm on the city council.

00:12:48.000 I have no greater vote or power than any of my peers on the city council.

00:12:53.000 So 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,

00:13:08.000 because I'm the mayor, and I have better access to the bully pulpit than they do.

00:13:14.000 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.

00:13:24.000 So the difference between the way it seemed the job was versus your actual ability once you got in was pretty stark.

00:13:35.000 Yes.

00:13:36.000 Yes.

00:13:36.000 So this is why things don't get done.

00:13:38.000 It makes it hard.

00:13:41.000 I'll give you another example.

00:13:46.000 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.

00:13:57.000 I'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.

00:14:08.000 Because then you would collude?

00:14:10.000 The 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.

00:14:18.000 That sounds like fun.

00:14:19.000 And just set that.

00:14:21.000 You make decisions that way.

00:14:23.000 Families make decisions that way.

00:14:25.000 I go to my daughter and I say, we're going to have a family talk about this issue.

00:14:29.000 Before we go, tell me what you're scared of.

00:14:32.000 Tell me what you're worried about.

00:14:33.000 Tell me what you need.

00:14:34.000 Tell me what you want.

00:14:35.000 You can't have these conversations with your city council?

00:14:37.000 You can't.

00:14:38.000 And any kind of business does that kind of thing.

00:14:42.000 Now, 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.

00:14:50.000 That seems...

00:14:51.000 Crazy.

00:14:52.000 Yeah, it seems...

00:14:53.000 I get the motivation for doing something like that, but it doesn't seem like an efficient way to handle things.

00:14:59.000 It seems like the more talking you can do and work things out, the better.

00:15:02.000 The idea is you're supposed to be representing your constituents, right?

00:15:06.000 That's what everybody would hope.

00:15:08.000 The best way to do that would be to communicate and see, what's the solution?

00:15:11.000 How do we solve these problems?

00:15:12.000 Right.

00:15:13.000 Right.

00:15:13.000 Well, you know, you used an interesting word in your description, which was efficient.

00:15:17.000 You know, I come from private market, private sector, and efficiency is key to operating and running and the results that you make.

00:15:28.000 In government, efficiency is not what is prioritized.

00:15:32.000 In efficiency, engagement has a greater value, currency value.

00:15:41.000 Openness, transparency with government is a higher value.

00:15:46.000 All of those things are not about efficiency.

00:15:50.000 But that's the values that people have placed with government.

00:15:58.000 Under the premise that they're trying to avoid corruption.

00:16:01.000 Correct.

00:16:02.000 So what were things that you wanted to get done that you haven't been able to get done?

00:16:08.000 You know, I wanted to get a land development code rewrite in the city.

00:16:12.000 One of the, you know, there are so many things that are going right about this city.

00:16:18.000 You know, we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, an economy that's on fire.

00:16:23.000 We are one of the safest big cities in the country from a public safety standpoint.

00:16:29.000 We're the fastest growing large metropolitan area and have been I think for like each of the last nine years.

00:16:34.000 There are so many things that are happening right.

00:16:37.000 But one of the things that follows from that is housing prices are just off the charts.

00:16:42.000 Now, for somebody who's just coming here from California or from New York, it looks like deals.

00:16:48.000 If you're living here, kind of like traffic, you get used to being able to get anywhere in 15 minutes.

00:16:54.000 But housing prices in Austin is...

00:16:58.000 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.

00:17:06.000 But 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.

00:17:16.000 How do you increase density?

00:17:18.000 How do you increase the number of units?

00:17:19.000 How do you increase height?

00:17:21.000 How do you increase the change so that you can increase housing supply?

00:17:25.000 We were – that was like a big battle for years.

00:17:29.000 We inherited that battle in the process.

00:17:31.000 We were about seven days away from adopting a new land development code and then the court stopped us.

00:17:39.000 Trevor Burrus What was the goal, this new land development code?

00:17:42.000 Was the goal to increase density?

00:17:44.000 It was to increase more housing supply in the city of all different kinds.

00:17:48.000 Do you get resistance from the residents, the current residents that don't want you to overbuild?

00:17:52.000 They don't want their neighborhood to change?

00:17:54.000 Is that the idea?

00:17:54.000 You get resistance from neighborhoods that are trying to preserve a certain quality of life or neighborhood character that's important to them.

00:18:06.000 And is there a common ground or a middle ground rather?

00:18:09.000 I think so.

00:18:10.000 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, OK, what is it that is achievable?

00:18:26.000 How much of what we need to do can we get done and get the votes for?

00:18:30.000 What the court said was in order for us to pass what we were doing, we needed a supermajority to get it done.

00:18:36.000 So on our 11-person council, we needed nine votes as opposed to seven votes.

00:18:43.000 There weren't nine votes.

00:18:44.000 Now, this is to increase—like, what is the actual—what are you trying to achieve?

00:18:51.000 Like, what is the actual stated goal?

00:18:54.000 It's to increase the number of units, of housing units, that can be built under our land development code.

00:19:03.000 So for particular, like per acre, like how's it set up?

00:19:06.000 Yeah.

00:19:07.000 So a certain amount of houses per acre?

00:19:09.000 It depends on the area.

00:19:10.000 Each area has its own rules.

00:19:12.000 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.

00:19:20.000 So if you want to put on a floor above the commercial use that's residential use, we're going to do that.

00:19:26.000 So we're going to enlarge what you can build in a commercial area.

00:19:29.000 So you could add condos to the top of an office building perhaps.

00:19:32.000 Right.

00:19:32.000 And maybe it's letting more people build auxiliary dwelling units or apartments in the backyard.

00:19:37.000 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.

00:19:48.000 So it's increasing the number of units perhaps.

00:19:51.000 It's increasing the square footage that you can put on a lot relative to the total area.

00:19:58.000 Maybe it's increasing the height that you can put in a particular zone property.

00:20:04.000 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.

00:20:13.000 And is there any consideration to the idea that maybe the city shouldn't grow?

00:20:18.000 Yes.

00:20:19.000 I'm sure there must be some resistance about that.

00:20:22.000 People are like, look, we should keep it exactly the way it is as long as we can.

00:20:25.000 Don't let more people build.

00:20:27.000 And if they're going to move here and there's no houses, guess what?

00:20:30.000 You can't move here.

00:20:31.000 Or move outside of town or figure it out.

00:20:34.000 But don't ruin this thing.

00:20:36.000 When I ran for re-election, there were lots of people coming up to me, and their one ask was that I would stop the city from growing.

00:20:42.000 You know, but as I explained to people, there's only one way to really stop a city from growing.

00:20:47.000 Bring in crime.

00:20:48.000 Bring in crime.

00:20:49.000 Make it an undesirable place to live.

00:20:50.000 Anything short of that.

00:20:52.000 I know.

00:20:53.000 And a desirable place is going to grow. 0.91

00:20:55.000 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.

00:21:01.000 It's too good here. 0.54

00:21:03.000 It's such a good city.

00:21:05.000 It really is.

00:21:06.000 There's so many good things about it.

00:21:08.000 Like, you think you know what city life is.

00:21:10.000 You think you know what it's like living in a city.

00:21:12.000 Oh, there's a certain amount of crime, a certain amount of this, a certain amount of that.

00:21:15.000 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.

00:21:20.000 It's an unusual combination of things.

00:21:23.000 It's not too big.

00:21:24.000 It's not too small.

00:21:25.000 What does Matthew McConaughey say?

00:21:27.000 He goes, this is a place where everybody's good enough and no one's too good. 0.98

00:21:30.000 I fucked it up. 0.98

00:21:31.000 Everyone's too good. 0.92

00:21:33.000 No.

00:21:33.000 No one's too good and everyone's good enough.

00:21:35.000 That's what he says.

00:21:36.000 Yeah.

00:21:36.000 Which is a great way to say it.

00:21:37.000 But I think he's on to something.

00:21:40.000 It'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.

00:21:52.000 It had a good comedy scene before.

00:21:54.000 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.

00:22:03.000 You started describing what this vision is, the future of Austin, as kind of a center for this, and I love that.

00:22:11.000 Yeah, 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.

00:22:27.000 But the reality is, over the last few years, that's all shifted anyway to the internet.

00:22:33.000 And now comedians have found it's much more profitable and more fun to be independent.

00:22:37.000 And there's more freedom.

00:22:39.000 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.

00:22:48.000 It'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.

00:22:57.000 You can be yourself.

00:22:59.000 And 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.

00:23:15.000 And we'd be better off if we're independent.

00:23:18.000 So, so many of us are moving here and about 10 friends have moved here within the last year.

00:23:23.000 And it's continuing to pile up.

00:23:25.000 And as more comics hear about the great Austin scene, more will move here.

00:23:30.000 And you describe something that is cultural, I think, to the city.

00:23:35.000 I 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...

00:23:42.000 You know, the watchword in Austin, and I think we've talked about this in the past, is keep Austin weird.

00:23:48.000 You can, like, buy it on a coffee mug.

00:23:50.000 They've ruined that saying, though, with those shirts.

00:23:52.000 My daughter has one of those.

00:23:53.000 I'm like, take that off. 0.97

00:23:54.000 That's ridiculous. 0.83

00:23:55.000 Get rid of that shirt. 0.93

00:23:56.000 You know, but what does that mean?

00:23:57.000 What does it mean?

00:23:58.000 That it's okay to be weird.

00:23:59.000 I think everybody probably has to move answers to that.

00:24:00.000 They have them in Portland, too.

00:24:01.000 You don't want to be weird like Portland.

00:24:02.000 You don't.

00:24:03.000 You only want to be weird like Austin.

00:24:05.000 But I'll tell you what I think it means in Austin.

00:24:07.000 In Austin, I think what it means is it's okay to be different.

00:24:10.000 It's okay to take risks.

00:24:12.000 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.

00:24:18.000 It's okay to try stuff.

00:24:22.000 And if you don't succeed, you don't get punished the way you do in many other cities.

00:24:26.000 I mean, you're expected to, like, learn from that and try again fast.

00:24:31.000 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 this city than anywhere else.

00:24:42.000 It's a city of early adopters.

00:24:45.000 It'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.

00:24:56.000 I like how you said he finished second.

00:24:58.000 Imagine if you lost to that guy.

00:25:00.000 Really?

00:25:00.000 You'd be like, oh my goodness, I've got to go back to the public or private sector.

00:25:05.000 The biggest issue by far over this past year has been the homeless crisis, right?

00:25:10.000 That's the biggest thing is the increase in the tents and the chaos and you know when Dave Chappelle and I were doing stubs, we'd go down 8th Street and there's that underpass and it was just like a village down there.

00:25:21.000 It was crazy.

00:25:23.000 What happened?

00:25:24.000 How did that all get going?

00:25:26.000 Like what was the motivation for allowing people to camp in public places?

00:25:34.000 Well, that's the action the council took two years ago, but so let's go back before two years ago.

00:25:39.000 You know, when I came into office, we had an outdoor area that kind of looked like, you know, what you have downtown in Skid Row in L.A., but ours was just in a block area.

00:25:52.000 But that's what everybody talked about.

00:25:54.000 And where was that area?

00:25:56.000 It was over toward I-35, toward the highway.

00:26:00.000 It was at the Arch, which was a shelter.

00:26:04.000 But most of the people there never went inside.

00:26:07.000 They kind of gathered outside.

00:26:08.000 It was an open-air market of all kinds of horrible things.

00:26:13.000 And people wanted that to disappear.

00:26:18.000 The problem with making that disappear is that this challenge is not one you can just make go away.

00:26:25.000 You can move it.

00:26:26.000 But if you close it down anywhere, the people don't disappear, so they'll come back.

00:26:32.000 But that was a challenge coming into office.

00:26:35.000 But in my second, third, and fourth years in office, I started going to neighborhood association meetings.

00:26:42.000 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.

00:26:55.000 They were blaming the petty crime happening in the neighborhood on them.

00:27:00.000 Every one of them had a wife or a daughter that had a horrible experience related to them.

00:27:05.000 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.

00:27:16.000 I had one of them here in the neighborhood.

00:27:20.000 A 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.

00:27:28.000 Jesus.

00:27:29.000 And I don't know that he actually meant that, but that was the fervor and the feel.

00:27:35.000 And I had, as a member of the city council, nothing to offer that neighborhood association.

00:27:43.000 They were complaining about people that were under an overpass at the highway not too far away from them.

00:27:50.000 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.

00:28:04.000 So all they're going to do is move up the highway or down the highway or somewhere else.

00:28:11.000 And I was going to more and more neighborhood associations that were complaining more and more about encampments.

00:28:16.000 And I had no solution to that.

00:28:21.000 And what hurt was is we knew what worked.

00:28:23.000 So in that same period of time, we said, let's house every vet in our city that's experiencing homelessness.

00:28:32.000 You know, there was a national program doing it.

00:28:35.000 A lot of cities participated.

00:28:36.000 Austin was one of a handful of cities to successfully get that done.

00:28:39.000 Community came together.

00:28:43.000 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.

00:29:01.000 90-95%.

00:29:03.000 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.

00:29:14.000 You might be able to do that with all these homeless people.

00:29:17.000 Whereas if you're in a place like Los Angeles and dealing with 100,000 people, what's the number of homeless people in Austin?

00:29:24.000 You're dead on.

00:29:25.000 And quite frankly, that's the gamble or what the city council was trying to do two years ago.

00:29:34.000 So on our streets, on any given night, there's about 3,000 people that are experiencing homelessness.

00:29:40.000 L.A. City, almost 50,000.

00:29:42.000 L.A. County, 70-some-odd thousand.

00:29:45.000 My numbers could be old.

00:29:47.000 I don't even think they know.

00:29:49.000 It'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.

00:29:59.000 The numbers are going up.

00:30:00.000 And in Seattle, San Francisco, smaller cities than Austin have three to six times as many people experiencing homelessness.

00:30:08.000 You know, I was with the mayor in LA, and I said to him, I said, God, I don't even know what you do.

00:30:15.000 I mean, the scale of your challenge is so great.

00:30:18.000 The cost to actually turn this around, I said, I don't know what you do.

00:30:23.000 And I said, so I'm not here asking you what you do.

00:30:26.000 But I'm asking you, what do you wish you had done eight years ago, ten years ago, to prevent being where you are today?

00:30:34.000 What did he say?

00:30:34.000 He gave me the same answer that the experts gave me in San Francisco and Portland and Seattle.

00:30:39.000 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.

00:30:48.000 But at that point, it's going to be too big for you to actually meaningfully deal with it.

00:30:52.000 They said it is like the political issue right now in LA and in San Francisco.

00:30:58.000 It's like important.

00:31:00.000 They said, I wish that we were as resolved to fix it eight, ten years ago as we are today because we would have been able to set up the systems so that we could have reached equilibrium and now we wouldn't be here.

00:31:14.000 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.

00:31:23.000 People 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.

00:31:33.000 You could actually get money from certain services in San Francisco.

00:31:38.000 There's like a fine line between helping and encouraging people to continue the lifestyle.

00:31:43.000 And for some people, the freedom of just being able to camp and do whatever you want, they're checked out, right?

00:31:51.000 For whatever reason.

00:31:52.000 Whether it's mental illness, whether it's just...

00:31:55.000 They prefer this sort of vagabond lifestyle.

00:31:59.000 I don't know what it is, but...

00:32:03.000 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?

00:32:12.000 You want to encourage them to take advantage of these things you were trying to set up where you're talking about providing them with wraparound services where you can actually reintegrate them to society.

00:32:22.000 Like, how do you make that distinction?

00:32:25.000 Well, you know, so much of the debate and discussion around homelessness has turned so political.

00:32:33.000 Like so many other kinds of discussions, but homelessness is one of the big ones.

00:32:37.000 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.

00:32:48.000 Intersect with our homelessness system.

00:32:50.000 About 3,000 people on any given day in our city experiencing homelessness.

00:32:55.000 And I've asked that question.

00:32:56.000 Are we pulling people in?

00:32:58.000 And what they tell me consistently for the last six years, seven years, is that you can find anecdotally where that has happened.

00:33:08.000 But generally speaking, the overwhelming number of people experiencing homelessness in our city are people who fell into homelessness here.

00:33:16.000 The people that are coming into our city, most of them are coming from the areas immediately around us.

00:33:21.000 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.

00:33:36.000 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.

00:33:46.000 So 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.

00:34:03.000 Did he say that?

00:34:04.000 He said that.

00:34:05.000 Not true.

00:34:06.000 I mean, no.

00:34:07.000 Wait a minute.

00:34:08.000 That guy lied about something?

00:34:09.000 That's crazy.

00:34:09.000 That's what I hear.

00:34:14.000 So I'm just – we just need to get people off the streets.

00:34:21.000 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.

00:34:32.000 And part of the reason was is because people didn't see the challenge.

00:34:36.000 So there'd be some neighborhoods that were willing to do it.

00:34:39.000 I knew as sure as the sun was going to come up the next day that this was now accelerating in our city.

00:34:46.000 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.

00:34:55.000 If somebody's doing that, they should be arrested and ticketed and put in jail.

00:34:59.000 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.

00:35:20.000 Why is it a worse place for them to be camping in the woods than to be camping on a public street?

00:35:25.000 Well, one, you don't want anybody camping on a public street either.

00:35:29.000 So that's not a solution to the challenge.

00:35:32.000 You can't have that happen either.

00:35:34.000 But if somebody is in the woods or down by the streams, They're not interacting with anybody else.

00:35:41.000 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. 1.00

00:35:55.000 So you mean if a homeless woman moves to the woods, she's in danger because there's no one around her to protect her?

00:36:02.000 Unless she picks a protector.

00:36:03.000 Unless she picks a protector.

00:36:05.000 She's not in a community of homeless people.

00:36:07.000 And so this is one of the reasons why these people gravitate towards these places like that 8th Street underpass because there's a lot of them together and there's a sense of belonging.

00:36:16.000 And it's public and they can see it.

00:36:17.000 Our health officials can find them.

00:36:19.000 We're now vaccinating our entire population of people experiencing homelessness because we can find them.

00:36:24.000 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.

00:36:35.000 And we didn't do that.

00:36:37.000 We didn't manage the public spaces, the shared spaces, the way that we should have.

00:36:42.000 So what the council did that summer is we said, okay, we're going to decriminalize it because...

00:36:51.000 In 2016, thereabouts, we wrote like 18,000 tickets.

00:36:56.000 And as you imagine, very few of those people ended up in court the following Thursday to pay their fine.

00:37:01.000 They 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.

00:37:08.000 So we said we're just not going to do that anymore.

00:37:12.000 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?

00:37:23.000 And for lots of reasons, that never happened.

00:37:27.000 And that's where we made our mistake.

00:37:30.000 So if you could go back and do it all over again from the moment you got into office, what would you have done differently?

00:37:39.000 Well, what we did initially in terms of the veterans was real successful.

00:37:44.000 I would do that again.

00:37:45.000 It proves up the model.

00:37:46.000 Can you explain how that works?

00:37:48.000 What did you do exactly for the veterans?

00:37:51.000 Well, veterans are a little bit easier because they come with resources.

00:37:54.000 So they come with what are called VASH vouchers from the federal government, which is support to help do rent supplements.

00:38:01.000 But then it was reaching out to everybody in the city that had apartment buildings, big managers of apartment buildings with these vouchers.

00:38:09.000 And we would say, would you take in these vets?

00:38:12.000 And people were willing to do that.

00:38:15.000 We 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.

00:38:22.000 And it would take me six months to evict them.

00:38:24.000 So I got together with some private businesses in the lake.

00:38:27.000 We created a risk fund outside of city government.

00:38:31.000 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.

00:38:41.000 All the landlords said they don't believe me because it's going to take you five months.

00:38:45.000 I said, it's not in the city.

00:38:47.000 It's privately funded.

00:38:48.000 We're doing it outside the city.

00:38:50.000 That's a great solution.

00:38:51.000 It was great.

00:38:52.000 And it took trusting the landlord that they weren't going to be making claims unless they actually had problems.

00:38:57.000 So you start with this.

00:39:00.000 You take the veterans.

00:39:01.000 You have these vouchers.

00:39:04.000 You bring them into apartment buildings.

00:39:06.000 You get them places.

00:39:07.000 That's step one.

00:39:08.000 So now they have a roof over their head.

00:39:10.000 But how do you help them clean up?

00:39:12.000 The service providers.

00:39:13.000 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. 0.87

00:39:34.000 I said, let's do that with veterans.

00:39:35.000 It was part, again, of a federal program.

00:39:38.000 What percentage of the homeless folks are veterans?

00:39:40.000 You know, I think it's probably right now about 6%, something like that.

00:39:44.000 The number was higher back then because we had more veterans on the streets.

00:39:50.000 But the service providers all came in and said, okay, if you can house vets, if you can find places for them, we'll start prioritizing them for giving them services.

00:39:58.000 So how do you let these vets know about this and how do you locate the vets?

00:40:01.000 Well, the people are on the streets right now.

00:40:04.000 I mean, the service workers, the mental health interventionists.

00:40:08.000 And they basically go tent to tent and they ask folks, are you a veteran?

00:40:12.000 If you are, there's special programs.

00:40:15.000 What I had thought was is that once we were successful there, we would be able to scale it up to everybody.

00:40:20.000 But much to my distress, I learned that a lot of people were involved not because they wanted to help people experiencing homelessness.

00:40:26.000 They wanted to help vets.

00:40:28.000 And I understand that.

00:40:30.000 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.

00:40:37.000 And so for two years, we were Really unable to get the resources necessary to do it.

00:40:45.000 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,

00:41:03.000 Because of everybody getting so engaged...

00:41:05.000 We should explain to people the vote.

00:41:06.000 The vote is that now it's illegal to camp on the city, on the city streets.

00:41:10.000 There was a referendum and the community said, we don't like tents, get rid of the tents that we're seeing.

00:41:16.000 Let's criminalize it again. 0.88

00:41:18.000 You know, as a practical matter, criminalizing it isn't ultimately going to help.

00:41:22.000 We have to enforce the new law, so the manager and the police chief are charged with doing that.

00:41:28.000 But what we need to do is scale up the same thing we did with veterans.

00:41:32.000 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.

00:41:51.000 And 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,

00:42:07.000 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?

00:42:20.000 Let's take The lion's share of that money put it to one challenge.

00:42:24.000 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.

00:42:32.000 This is the moment because it's only 3,000 people on any given night, going back to what you said earlier.

00:42:40.000 It's a theater full of people.

00:42:42.000 We can do this.

00:42:42.000 It's not that big.

00:42:43.000 We can do this.

00:42:44.000 It's workable.

00:42:46.000 We can set up the system.

00:42:47.000 And 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.

00:42:56.000 If there was no fiscal considerations, if someone could come to you and said, Steve, you've got an open check.

00:43:01.000 Tell me what you need to do.

00:43:03.000 What do you want to do?

00:43:05.000 How would you handle it?

00:43:06.000 There's no worries whatsoever about money.

00:43:08.000 If you could just build structures and house the homeless.

00:43:11.000 And then it's not just about getting them housed and cleaned up and fed.

00:43:16.000 It's also about figuring out drug programs.

00:43:20.000 It's figuring out mental health programs.

00:43:21.000 It's figuring out how to get them gainfully employed.

00:43:25.000 How to get them counseling.

00:43:27.000 Maybe there's some serious psychological issues that are leading to them being on the street.

00:43:31.000 Everyone is different.

00:43:32.000 You've got a wide spectrum of problems and issues.

00:43:36.000 What would you do?

00:43:39.000 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%.

00:43:53.000 Why is that?

00:43:58.000 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.

00:44:05.000 It makes it harder for them to get a job when their address is in a congregate shelter somewhere.

00:44:10.000 They lose their papers.

00:44:12.000 Life is that much harder if every moment of every day you're trying to survive to the next moment.

00:44:19.000 Get somebody into a home, then they can work with their social worker and actually begin to pull things together.

00:44:25.000 So if you get them into the home, much more successful those services.

00:44:29.000 So we have to get places for people to be, plus those wraparound services.

00:44:33.000 Most of the people that is experiencing homelessness are not people that have mental health challenges or substance abuse challenges.

00:44:41.000 Most people Are the victims of the perfect storm.

00:44:43.000 I mean, they are literally people, married, family, and then there's this, like, huge medical bill.

00:44:50.000 And they can't pay it.

00:44:52.000 And it starts causing problems between them and their spouse.

00:44:55.000 They have a bill collector that's now calling them all the time.

00:44:59.000 So they start paying that bill sometimes and not their car bill all the time, and then they lose their car.

00:45:04.000 That causes friction in the household.

00:45:07.000 Things are getting really ugly at this point.

00:45:10.000 They don't have the car, and one of them loses their job.

00:45:13.000 And 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.

00:45:22.000 And they end up on the streets.

00:45:23.000 And they raise their hand, and they say, I need help.

00:45:26.000 I don't know who to call because they literally have no one to call.

00:45:30.000 And 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.

00:45:37.000 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.

00:45:49.000 But the longer you leave them on the street...

00:45:52.000 The longer they're there, the harder it's going to be for them to be able to pull back.

00:45:55.000 The wait list right now in Austin for somebody in that situation who raises their hand is like a year, year and a half.

00:46:04.000 So we're creating a lot of the challenge that we're dealing with because we don't have the capacity.

00:46:11.000 And that's been the frustration.

00:46:13.000 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.

00:46:22.000 We have the resources from the federal government.

00:46:25.000 I think we're having foundations now that are in discussions, willing to step up and take a big piece of this.

00:46:32.000 Before I leave office here in the next year and a half, my number one priority is to track this issue.

00:46:42.000 Now, if you could, what would you do?

00:46:46.000 Would you build large apartment structures?

00:46:49.000 And when you do that, how do you connect that to guidance?

00:46:55.000 How do you connect that to counseling?

00:46:57.000 How do you connect that to...

00:46:59.000 Healthy meals for these folks.

00:47:01.000 How do you connect that to, you know, someone who's going to give them counsel?

00:47:06.000 Someone who's going to tell them, like, here's the steps that you need to take to get back on track.

00:47:10.000 Let's work on this together.

00:47:12.000 Here's your project.

00:47:12.000 This is what you have to do today.

00:47:14.000 And this is what I'm going to do to help you.

00:47:16.000 You don't create any living situation without already having those support services part of it.

00:47:23.000 So you don't just put them up in a hotel...

00:47:26.000 No.

00:47:26.000 It wouldn't work.

00:47:28.000 Right, right.

00:47:29.000 And there are lots of different models about what that could look like.

00:47:31.000 So we're buying now some motels, hotels, because it's cheaper and better for taxpayers to do that than it is to build something new.

00:47:44.000 We're working with developers in the city that have a track record of success.

00:47:47.000 We have people like Mobile Loaves and Fishes and Alan Graham that have built small I mean, there are lots of different ways.

00:47:58.000 And the people that are doing this, again, are like 90%, 95% successful.

00:48:02.000 I don't know what you do, Joe, about poverty.

00:48:05.000 I don't know what you do about wealth disparities on racial lines.

00:48:16.000 Issues that are societal issues that are so big, I don't know what you do with it.

00:48:19.000 But homelessness?

00:48:20.000 We know exactly what works.

00:48:23.000 And it's purely a question of is a community serious enough about putting the resources against it to fix it.

00:48:29.000 Has any community brought homelessness back from like a very high level to a much more manageable level?

00:48:39.000 Has anyone been successful?

00:48:41.000 Houston, just down the street is real successful.

00:48:44.000 But what Houston did is they started doing this 20 years ago.

00:48:48.000 So 20 years ago, they went to HUD in D.C. and they said, we want to start building and buying places for people to go.

00:48:56.000 We're going to give them services because we think this will work.

00:48:59.000 And HUD supported them like as a pilot program.

00:49:02.000 And it was successful.

00:49:03.000 So every year they've gotten more and more.

00:49:04.000 What does HUD stand for?

00:49:05.000 Housing and Urban Development, one of the Cabinet offices in D.C. So they got funding.

00:49:13.000 They were successful.

00:49:14.000 So every year they've gotten more and more funding.

00:49:16.000 So every year, I think this past year or recently, they got over $40 million.

00:49:20.000 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.

00:49:29.000 We need to do it over the next three years.

00:49:31.000 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.

00:49:38.000 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.

00:49:48.000 Once 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. 0.59

00:50:02.000 And then you keep filling, backfilling those spots.

00:50:05.000 Then once you reach equilibrium in that system, then it doesn't cost.

00:50:12.000 LA budget this year, did you see that?

00:50:14.000 The LA line item for homelessness this year in their budget, a billion dollars.

00:50:21.000 Billion dollars.

00:50:22.000 I don't even know what you do.

00:50:24.000 I mean, it's crazy.

00:50:25.000 And guess what?

00:50:26.000 It's not going to do anything.

00:50:27.000 And it won't.

00:50:28.000 Their numbers are so big that it won't set up their systems.

00:50:32.000 It's insane.

00:50:32.000 Yeah.

00:50:33.000 And then it becomes just massive bureaucracy and nothing gets done.

00:50:39.000 The problem with a place like L.A. is that it's too big and there's too many people and it's just not going to get done.

00:50:44.000 And that's the one thing that I look at Austin.

00:50:46.000 I go...

00:50:47.000 This might work.

00:50:49.000 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.

00:50:57.000 When you're talking about 3,000 homeless folks, how many counselors do you need?

00:51:03.000 How many people do you need working on this problem?

00:51:07.000 You're obviously going to need folks that are experts in helping people rehabilitate and getting back into society.

00:51:16.000 And you're going to deal with a bunch of different kinds of scenarios.

00:51:19.000 Some people have extreme mental health issues.

00:51:21.000 Some people have drug addictions.

00:51:23.000 Some people are like the story that you just laid out earlier.

00:51:27.000 Just a bunch of things happen in the perfect storm and they wind up being homeless.

00:51:32.000 So our Chamber of Commerce got together with our Criminal Justice Advocacy Group.

00:51:43.000 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.

00:51:53.000 They engaged in a facilitated conversation.

00:51:58.000 Chamber, DA, Downtown Austin Alliance, ECHO, the Umbrella Organization, a facilitated conversation.

00:52:04.000 They invited me to participate.

00:52:05.000 It felt like a marriage counseling session.

00:52:08.000 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.

00:52:19.000 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.

00:52:32.000 But the fact that they could agree on it was the first time I had seen that in my lifetime in this city.

00:52:39.000 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.

00:52:49.000 And that's where we are right now.

00:52:51.000 So 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.

00:53:09.000 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?

00:53:27.000 Is it giving them hope in the sense of marking progress and making a...

00:53:37.000 A show of it, like saying, this is fantastic.

00:53:40.000 Look what we're doing.

00:53:41.000 We're all working together.

00:53:42.000 I know everybody here is down and out, or you're in a situation where you'd rather be in a better situation.

00:53:47.000 We can all help and look at these examples of ways we've done it.

00:53:51.000 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.

00:53:57.000 And maybe some of those folks can even come back and help.

00:54:00.000 And offer counseling and maybe even speak to these people and say, hey, I was in the position that you were in.

00:54:06.000 And we can all get out of this together.

00:54:07.000 And they do.

00:54:09.000 But remember that this universe of people that are experiencing homelessness run the gamut.

00:54:15.000 And most of them don't have the mental health challenge or the substance abuse challenge.

00:54:20.000 Most of them don't.

00:54:21.000 So it's a question of just helping those people right themselves and then get back.

00:54:26.000 And there will be some people who are just gone.

00:54:31.000 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.

00:54:43.000 How do you do that?

00:54:44.000 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.

00:54:56.000 The frequent flyers in our emergency rooms and in jails and all that are costing our collective community about $220,000 a year.

00:55:08.000 250 people.

00:55:10.000 250 people each $220,000 a year.

00:55:13.000 Each person?

00:55:14.000 Each person.

00:55:14.000 About $50 million our community pays every year for those 250 people.

00:55:20.000 That seems like a problem.

00:55:21.000 You think?

00:55:22.000 Yeah.

00:55:23.000 That's how reality shows like the Hunger Games get started.

00:55:26.000 Somebody goes, I got an idea.

00:55:30.000 There's a better idea.

00:55:32.000 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.

00:55:48.000 Most of the people are eager to be able to actually get a job.

00:55:53.000 There's a dignity in having a job.

00:55:56.000 Right.

00:55:57.000 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.

00:56:05.000 And we're trying to train people in our city.

00:56:07.000 We have tons of great jobs in this city.

00:56:10.000 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.

00:56:19.000 We don't have people that are trained to do them.

00:56:21.000 We have a lot of people who can step into a $150,000-a-year job Plus.

00:56:26.000 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.

00:56:35.000 By the way, a welder in this city right now with a brand new certificate makes $80,000 and $90,000 a year.

00:56:43.000 And that's not a two-year degree.

00:56:47.000 So, our Workforce Solutions, I asked the number the other day, how many people have you brought into your program that self-identifies experiencing homelessness?

00:56:56.000 It was like 650 people in their program over the last two years.

00:57:01.000 I said, what success do you have of actually putting somebody into a job?

00:57:05.000 It's 65%.

00:57:06.000 We ought to be doing that kind of thing.

00:57:09.000 So part of it is new people.

00:57:10.000 Part of it is giving greater capacity to the services that exist so they can create more slots.

00:57:18.000 But that's where we are right now.

00:57:19.000 I mean, it's pulling all those pieces together.

00:57:22.000 So that we can actually do that.

00:57:24.000 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.

00:57:34.000 And it only happens because our challenge at this point is about average.

00:57:40.000 I mean, people see it in this city right now because of what the council did two years ago.

00:57:44.000 So it is in everybody's face right now.

00:57:49.000 And people want to do something about it, which is great.

00:57:53.000 But what they don't want to do, I don't think, is send people back to the woods.

00:57:57.000 They want people out of tents.

00:57:58.000 It is inappropriate.

00:57:59.000 It is wrong.

00:58:00.000 To have people tenting on our streets or in our overpasses.

00:58:04.000 That is not a good place for them.

00:58:05.000 It might be better than being in the woods, but it is a bad place for people to be.

00:58:10.000 And we have to get tents gone.

00:58:12.000 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?

00:58:27.000 I 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.

00:58:33.000 I think the money will have been committed and raised.

00:58:37.000 And there'll be a glide path for three years.

00:58:39.000 There'll be a group that is in charge of governing this and holding people accountable that operates outside of government.

00:58:47.000 It won't be the city or the county because these challenges are too big for the city or the county.

00:58:53.000 There's got to be a place that has funders and foundations and businesses all part of the governance of this process. 0.98

00:59:03.000 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. 0.97

00:59:10.000 And then why should we help them? 0.97

00:59:12.000 Nobody helped me.

00:59:13.000 That kind of thought process.

00:59:15.000 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,

00:59:34.000 like, there's two different schools of thought, right?

00:59:36.000 There's a school of thought, you know, these people need to figure it out on their own.

00:59:40.000 There'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.

00:59:46.000 Like, what arguments do you get, pro and con, in that direction?

00:59:50.000 Like, what What arguments do you get in terms of the 250 problem people that keep getting arrested and wind up in the hospital?

00:59:58.000 There are two extremes.

01:00:00.000 There's the one group of people who say, I am only concerned about the aesthetics of this issue.

01:00:06.000 This is not my challenge.

01:00:08.000 I don't want to see it.

01:00:09.000 Put it somewhere where I don't have to deal with it.

01:00:12.000 Just make it go away.

01:00:14.000 And then there are the people that are only concerned about taking care of people.

01:00:21.000 And 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.

01:00:32.000 They're only concerned about the person experiencing homelessness.

01:00:35.000 What I have found in our city is that while those two extremes exist, Almost everybody in this city has some of both.

01:00:45.000 They don't want to see it.

01:00:46.000 There's got to be a better answer to it.

01:00:49.000 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.

01:00:58.000 Yeah.

01:00:59.000 It's almost like...

01:01:00.000 I 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.

01:01:12.000 If you could turn any of these 250 people into working, productive members of society, figure out how to...

01:01:20.000 Clean them up, counsel them.

01:01:21.000 I wonder what could be done if there was like real incentive, you know?

01:01:25.000 Say 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.

01:01:35.000 Take a person who's completely down and out and just go over their record, look at what's happened in their life.

01:01:44.000 It seems like it could be done with enough resources and attention.

01:01:48.000 You could change people's lives, but how much would that cost?

01:01:54.000 If you're thinking about $250,000 a year for each one of these people, that's what you're saying?

01:01:58.000 $220,000.

01:01:59.000 $220,000 a year. 1.00

01:02:01.000 It seems like you pay someone $100,000 a year just to babysit these fucking people. 0.98

01:02:06.000 You'd save $120,000 a year, and you might be able to fix it. 0.99

01:02:11.000 Some of these people, there's got to be a way to get through to them.

01:02:15.000 People can change.

01:02:16.000 It's really hard.

01:02:18.000 But they can change.

01:02:19.000 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 like manageable goals that they could sort of get momentum going and start recognizing that, oh,

01:02:34.000 if I do these things and continue to do these things, I can actually live a better and healthier and happier life.

01:02:40.000 It seems like...

01:02:41.000 Elijah, I'll vote for you.

01:02:42.000 Yeah.

01:02:43.000 And I would love to see that.

01:02:47.000 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.

01:02:58.000 They're just not dealing with it.

01:02:59.000 Yeah.

01:03:00.000 Which 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.

01:03:09.000 Unless steps are taken to mitigate it.

01:03:11.000 Because people aren't.

01:03:12.000 They're hiding it.

01:03:13.000 They're letting it in places people don't see.

01:03:16.000 It's got to come out.

01:03:17.000 This is a national issue.

01:03:19.000 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.

01:03:34.000 We've got to fix this.

01:03:35.000 Yeah, it seems like...

01:03:38.000 It has to be, again, there's this thing that people want personal accountability.

01:03:42.000 They want people to just go and figure things out on their own.

01:03:45.000 But it has to be recognized that different people start off in life at different places.

01:03:52.000 This idea that we all have equal opportunities is nonsense.

01:03:57.000 It's just not the case.

01:03:59.000 And so if equal opportunity doesn't exist, you can't have equal expectations.

01:04:03.000 You just can't.

01:04:04.000 Some 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.

01:04:19.000 And as a community, the compassionate thing to do is to try to give those people a hand.

01:04:27.000 Reach out.

01:04:27.000 Give them a hand.

01:04:28.000 But it's like, how much?

01:04:29.000 How much do you do?

01:04:31.000 And how much is it...

01:04:32.000 How much are you doing where you're just enabling and encouraging people?

01:04:35.000 You don't want these...

01:04:36.000 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.

01:04:48.000 You want to kind of guide them, right?

01:04:50.000 Right.

01:04:51.000 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,

01:05:11.000 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.

01:05:22.000 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.

01:05:33.000 And then there's just dignity and work.

01:05:36.000 There's dignity and community.

01:05:38.000 When you start giving people back, That measure of dignity, that's what most all of these people want.

01:05:46.000 Not everybody, but most all do.

01:05:50.000 Yeah, and you've got to have, I guess, different plans in place for different kinds of problems, right?

01:05:57.000 Different 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.

01:06:05.000 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.

01:06:18.000 And 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.

01:06:29.000 What was that like?

01:06:31.000 Horrible.

01:06:32.000 And especially horrible here in Austin.

01:06:37.000 Because we had South by Southwest, which is a huge festival.

01:06:41.000 It brings in 250,000, 300,000 people from all over the world coming into our city the second week in March.

01:06:50.000 And we're looking at this virus that is moving across the world and people are dying.

01:06:58.000 Seeing it now hit in California and Seattle, and we're just about to bring 5,000 people from Seattle into our city.

01:07:06.000 We could be bringing in 10, 15, 20,000 people from Asia into our city.

01:07:13.000 So 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.

01:07:27.000 How much resistance did you get for that?

01:07:32.000 There was a lot of resistance.

01:07:34.000 There was also a lot of support because people were seeing what was happening.

01:07:38.000 You know, within 10 days, it wasn't an outlier anymore.

01:07:42.000 I mean, everybody was pulling down big events in cities across the country, and it all happened within 7 to 10 days.

01:07:50.000 But that first one, I mean, it was hard all year long with businesses because you want to keep things open.

01:07:59.000 You know, Austin has done this well so far.

01:08:02.000 The mortality rate in Austin is half of the state average.

01:08:06.000 The mortality rate in Austin is less than half of the national average.

01:08:10.000 Don't you think that has to do with a lot of the active people here, though, too?

01:08:13.000 It does.

01:08:14.000 I mean, we're a younger population, healthier population, but it's also true about cases.

01:08:19.000 And it doesn't explain the number in cases, you know, as the same way it does death or hospitalizations.

01:08:28.000 You 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.

01:08:40.000 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.

01:08:49.000 And in the city, the people leaned into it.

01:08:52.000 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?

01:09:03.000 What is the right path to take?

01:09:05.000 Is the path to give people personal responsibility?

01:09:07.000 Is the path to insist on very strict government-inspired lockdowns?

01:09:13.000 How did you sort of navigate that?

01:09:16.000 We had an incredible team of people.

01:09:19.000 We had the University of Texas, the physicians at the Dow Medical School, but also the statisticians and the modelers.

01:09:31.000 Modeling out all kinds of different scenarios and the data getting better and better for the models as each week passed.

01:09:41.000 We had a really good health authority here in Dr. Escott, a director of the public health department, Hayden Howard.

01:09:54.000 We just had good people and we got positive Results from some of the early steps we took.

01:10:07.000 But I watched what was happening in the country.

01:10:09.000 It was hard for everybody around the country because no one knew what to believe.

01:10:13.000 But I have to say, you guys handled it so much better here than so many other places.

01:10:17.000 So many other places, they put these very draconian methods into place and it just ruined the economies of these places.

01:10:26.000 You guys didn't do that here.

01:10:28.000 Right now, we have not only...

01:10:31.000 A mortality rate that's less than half of what it is in the state.

01:10:34.000 If our state mortality rate was the same as in Austin, there'd be over 25,000 Texans still alive today.

01:10:41.000 But we also have one of the lowest unemployment rates of any city in the country.

01:10:46.000 It's pretty amazing.

01:10:48.000 I think, unfortunately, obesity is a factor in Texas.

01:10:52.000 I mean, the food here is just too damn good.

01:10:55.000 Breakfast tacos.

01:10:56.000 It's a real issue.

01:10:57.000 Well, a lot of tacos.

01:10:58.000 Barbecue.

01:10:59.000 But that seems to be a gigantic...

01:11:01.000 I mean, 78% of the people that are in the ICU with COVID are obese.

01:11:05.000 You know, it's a real issue.

01:11:08.000 And so, fortunately, Austin is an incredibly active city.

01:11:12.000 You know, you go down the lake and you see all these people running around.

01:11:15.000 It's like...

01:11:16.000 It'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.

01:11:31.000 Magical place.

01:11:33.000 Welcome home. 0.98

01:11:34.000 It's pretty fucking awesome man. 0.92

01:11:35.000 You 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. 0.94

01:11:45.000 I was already gone.

01:11:47.000 What was that about?

01:11:49.000 What was that storm like when people got upset at you?

01:11:52.000 It was a mistake on so many different levels.

01:11:55.000 I went on a trip at a time when it was okay to take a trip.

01:11:58.000 I got information while I was on the trip.

01:12:01.000 I should never have warned people back home.

01:12:04.000 What was the motivation to warn people?

01:12:06.000 What were you thinking?

01:12:07.000 I got new information that as I was gone, I got new information that indicated that there was a growing cloud.

01:12:15.000 And I reported it.

01:12:16.000 And I should have come home first, then reported it.

01:12:20.000 And I didn't.

01:12:21.000 How did you get busted?

01:12:23.000 How did you get busted?

01:12:26.000 You know, it was nothing I was hiding, you know, so I was publishing pictures of it and I just didn't think there was anything.

01:12:34.000 I hadn't realized it, but it was a month afterwards, so it happened like the first week in November.

01:12:39.000 And then in December you got...

01:12:40.000 Yeah, in December somebody raised it.

01:12:41.000 So people figured it out.

01:12:43.000 They put the two and two together and said, oh my god, the guy was on vacation when he was saying to not do anything.

01:12:48.000 Right, right.

01:12:49.000 So 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.

01:13:07.000 Well, it was quite a long time ago, but there was these different schools of thought about how to handle the pandemic, right?

01:13:15.000 Some people said, just leave, like the governor, when he said, we're going to be 100% open, no mask mandate, do whatever you want.

01:13:24.000 Everybody was like, this is crazy. 0.92

01:13:26.000 You're going to kill people. 0.96

01:13:28.000 The president called it Neanderthal thinking. 0.99

01:13:30.000 But then months later, everything's fine.

01:13:34.000 I mean, it turned out he was correct.

01:13:36.000 And it was a good move.

01:13:38.000 You know, if I was governor, I probably would have done things a little bit differently.

01:13:44.000 What would you have done differently?

01:13:45.000 I probably would have extended some of the stuff another couple weeks.

01:13:48.000 But why?

01:13:49.000 If you see how it worked out.

01:13:51.000 Well, I'll remind you, our mortality rate is half in Austin as what it is in the rest of the state.

01:13:58.000 So there was no question but that it was time now to open things back up again.

01:14:03.000 But, you know, we encouraged our city to keep their masks on and not to do big blowout parties on New Year's Eve.

01:14:12.000 And I think that that reduced our numbers from doing that.

01:14:17.000 So, you know, I don't know.

01:14:20.000 I don't know either.

01:14:21.000 That's the question.

01:14:22.000 I mean, it's like everybody's a Monday morning quarterback in this thing, right?

01:14:26.000 Except for the governors and the mayors.

01:14:28.000 You know, you folks are the ones that have to make the tough calls. 1.00

01:14:30.000 And when you're looking at it, like, I talk a lot of shit. 0.99

01:14:33.000 But the reality is, I'm not a mayor. 0.99

01:14:36.000 I'm not a governor.

01:14:37.000 You know, I would not know what decision to make or not to make.

01:14:40.000 My inclination is to always give people freedom.

01:14:42.000 But I also know that some people are way more vulnerable than others.

01:14:46.000 And if you're a person like myself who's always exercised and ate healthy, that's one thing.

01:14:50.000 But if you're a person who has not, I'm a compassionate person.

01:14:55.000 I 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... 0.99

01:15:03.000 Picks you out. 1.00

01:15:05.000 Yeah, just for whatever reason.

01:15:07.000 It finds people like that and it's much more dangerous to them.

01:15:10.000 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?

01:15:24.000 Because those are the steps that we've shown to absolutely help in increasing the potency of your immune system.

01:15:32.000 And I think, you know, cities need to play in that space.

01:15:36.000 That's why we've really put resources against the running trail around Lake Austin.

01:15:42.000 You know, and there are tens of thousands of people that are on there all the time.

01:15:47.000 You know, we do pretty big programs with the employees' cities.

01:15:51.000 So, you know, 14,000 people.

01:15:54.000 And then we, you know, encourage kind of contents and motivational stuff with other large employers in the city.

01:16:01.000 Is there something you could do, though, to get the word out about that to the rest of the population?

01:16:05.000 Just to let people know.

01:16:06.000 I 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.

01:16:13.000 Those are the only two options.

01:16:15.000 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.

01:16:24.000 Just telling people to supplement with vitamin D would have a huge impact on people's health and immune system.

01:16:31.000 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.

01:16:37.000 All 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.

01:16:46.000 And we should have been doing a better job of that.

01:16:48.000 We should be doing a better job of that.

01:16:50.000 You know, if this pandemic's told us anything, this virus sought out people with comorbidities.

01:16:57.000 This virus sought out people.

01:16:59.000 You know, not everybody.

01:17:00.000 There were some healthy people that got really sick, too.

01:17:03.000 There were really healthy people who died.

01:17:05.000 But by and large, the lesson of taking care of yourself really shone to be true in this virus.

01:17:14.000 Did you do anything different with yourself over this past year?

01:17:18.000 Recognizing that it does make you more vulnerable?

01:17:20.000 You know, I should have been doing more than I was.

01:17:23.000 I ended up creating a little studio like this right off of my bed, and I'm not sure I ever moved very much from the screen.

01:17:32.000 I mean, it's been really hard.

01:17:34.000 Mostly working remotely?

01:17:36.000 Yeah.

01:17:37.000 Well, listen, man, you don't have an easy job.

01:17:40.000 It's thankless, it's very difficult, but you're the mayor of one of the best cities.

01:17:44.000 And again, welcome home.

01:17:46.000 It's great to have you here, and I can't wait for you to open up the The club and, you know, this is a magical place.

01:17:55.000 And the people that are moving in are adding such richness to the community and you're part of that.

01:18:02.000 So thanks for being here.

01:18:03.000 Thank you very much.

01:18:03.000 Really appreciate it.

01:18:04.000 Good luck to you.

01:18:05.000 I hope you can do something about this homeless situation.

01:18:08.000 I really hope your plan's on track.

01:18:09.000 And if you need anything, I'm here.

01:18:11.000 Thank you.

01:18:11.000 Thank you very much.

01:18:12.000 All right.

01:18:13.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 25, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1657 - Mayor Steve Adler

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