Homeless housing is actually getting built
Your tax dollars do build things.
In my inbox this morning is a press release from the Austin Housing Dept announcing a groundbreaking ceremony for "a 120-unit supportive housing community" at Tillery St & Lyons Rd on the east side "for youth exiting homelessness, including youth aging out of foster care."
Kids aging out of Texas's horrific foster care system are particularly vulnerable; the foster care system comes up with just about anybody you talk to in homelessness services.
The supportive housing project is part of a larger 360-unit master development that will include market-rate housing and "workforce" housing.
Like most affordable housing projects, it's funded by a variety of sources, including $8 million from the city and $13 million that Travis County got from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act.
(The city committed almost all of the $100M it got from ARPA to homelessness initiatives. Travis County got $247M from ARPA and committed $110M of it to build supportive housing)
It has become fashionable in certain quarters of the internet to claim that the city has spent [insert grossly inflated figure] on homelessness for nothing. Well, that's definitely not true. This project and many others are proof of it.
