The city’s navigation center plan

With the city’s help, the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center has provided homeless support services for 10 years at its location on Menchaca Road and Redd Street, off West Ben White Boulevard. Joslin Elementary school sits just across from the center.

Under pressure from the surrounding Western Trails neighborhood and the state attorney general, who sued Sunrise in an effort to shut it down, the city rushed to purchase property for a new resource center. Despite strong opposition from our Southeast Austin community, the city bought a building in the heart of our neighborhood — directly across from Travis Early College High School and within a mile of three elementary and middle schools. 

The new South Austin Housing Navigation Center site at 2401 S. I-35 Frontage Road bumps right up against backyards where kids play and is next door to a supportive housing community whose residents have worked hard to escape homelessness.  It is a short walk from two parks where encampments and confrontations are common, and very close to the Southbridge Homeless Shelter. Though Austin’s Homeless Strategy Office claims crime has gone down in the area since the shelter opened in 2021, nearby residents say it actually has gone up significantly — and criminals have gotten bolder because they know they won’t be prosecuted in the unlikely event they are arrested.

When HSO announced plans for the new center, it claimed the site would focus on helping housing-insecure families find stable housing. Sunrise neighbors were led to believe that center would close. But HSO now says Sunrise will remain open to serve families, while the new center in our neighborhood will serve chronically homeless single adults with the highest needs.

HSO also has invited the Sunrise team to bid on providing management for the new center, despite their inability to control negative activities at their current center.

And now, instead of focusing on housing assistance as promised, it turns out the new facility will likely offer hot meals, showers, mail services, laundry, prescription storage, job training and a food pantry. These would occur both inside the 12,000-square-foot building and in a large outdoor area surrounding it.

Instead of recognizing that our neighborhood is already struggling to manage the Southbridge shelter’s significant impact, the city regards this concentration of residential and support services as an advantage for the large chronically homeless population they seem intent on consolidating in our community.

We believe these services are necessary, but that our community shouldn’t be forced to carry the bulk of the burden when it comes to providing them ⏤ especially when the city has shown it cannot effectively address the negative impacts we’re already experiencing.

We know that most homeless folks are law-abiding citizens just trying to survive.

But the scale, scope and volume of services the city plans to concentrate in our community —combined with the new center’s focus on chronically homeless single adults — leads us to believe it will draw the most problematic members of the homeless population, and they will want to remain nearby for easy access. That will lead to encampments, squatting in vacant properties and the kinds of activities cited in the Sunrise lawsuit.

The city evidently plans to create a kind of “supercenter” in our neighborhood, offering both shelter and support services for chronically homeless adults, while keeping less-controversial resources in “better” neighborhoods. (And if a neighborhood is rich enough, it can avoid hosting any homeless resources at all.)

City officials like to say that residents “just don’t like to see homelessness.” That’s both unfair and condescending.

While the majority of our homeless neighbors pose no threat to our community, multiple studies prove that mental illness and substance abuse occur at substantially elevated levels in homeless populations, and that homeless individuals experiencing mental illness and/or addiction commit or become victims of crime at higher rates than general populations. (See links below.)

That segment of the homeless population — some of the most vulnerable and unstable in our society — absolutely deserve help. But that help shouldn’t be provided at the expense of our  community’s safety.

Links

The prevalence of mental disorders among homeless people in high-income countries: An updated systematic review and meta-regression analysis, National Library of Medicine, 2021.

Homelessness and Crime: An Examination of California, Institute of Labor Economics, 2024.

DA Shares First-of-Its Kind Crime Data, Proposes Three-Point Plan to Address Intersection of Crime and Homelessness, County of San Diego District Attorney’s Office press release, 2022.

Criminal Behavior and Victimization Among Homeless Individuals With Severe Mental Illness: A Systematic Review, Psychiatry Online, 2014.

Base-rate estimates of criminal behavior by homeless mentally ill persons in New York City. Psychiatric Services, 1995.

We don’t believe the city should concentrate residential and daily-needs resources for the most volatile members of the homeless population just steps from a high school and an intersection where heavy drug use has been an ongoing issue.

We object to providing resources that encourage loitering, concentrated encampments and criminal activity, especially on a property that literally adjoins backyards where kids play and is very close to recurring camping areas.

We’re against opening Austin’s largest homeless resource center in our community without plans for maintaining, much less increasing, public safety, or any solid commitment to reducing crime, encampments and fire hazards.  

We’re upset with the way the city is making rushed, expensive and deeply flawed decisions under pressure from state officials and (understandably) angry citizens tired of experiencing problems related to the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center, while ignoring the pleas of the already besieged community surrounding the new center’s site.

We’re angry with the city’s decades-long practice of forcing controversial projects on Austinites considered less likely to protest, or whose voices leaders believe they can ignore: public school kids, the working class, minorities and immigrants.

We support providing needed services for our homeless neighbors (yes, even the highest-needs folks) in carefully selected locations reasonably distant from schools, homes and parks.

We support using the new center for in-office housing navigation services for families, mothers and children.

We deserve increased crisis support, public-safety resources and camping enforcement in a 2-mile radius surrounding any shelter or navigation center.

We seek legally binding commitments from the city, crafted in cooperation with our community, to ensure that officials make promises in good faith — and keep them.