AUSTIN, Texas — An Austin organization has a plan to effectively end homelessness in the city.
The Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, or ECHO, proposed a $35 million-per-year, 10-year investment that would emphasize building hundreds of permanent supportive housing units, while also providing resources to divert and prevent homelessness.
“It will take a substantial investment from our community, but it’s not an undoable investment,” ECHO’s vice president of homelessness response strategy Kate Moore said.
The city of Austin has been working to address homelessness for many years. Moore says homelessness can take different forms and last for many different spans of time, but it has drastically increased over the years.
“In 2019, we served about 15,000 people experiencing homelessness, and in 2023 we served about 24,000,” Moore said.
Moore says it’s a crisis that Austin is starting to address, but is behind compared to other cities.
According to ECHO, Austin’s inventory to shelter and house people remains the lowest among large cities in Texas and among the lowest compared to peer cities across the country.
Partnering with the city’s Homeless Strategy Office and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Moore says the organization came up with a plan to “functionally end homelessness” over a 10-year span.
“What that means is that we would be able to house everybody who’s currently experiencing homelessness, and then we would also be able to catch, very quickly, anybody who happens to fall into homelessness in the future,” Moore said.
Based on expected demand, unit turnover rate and the current capacity, Moore says the goal is to build hundreds of supportive housing units while also providing forms of diversion and prevention resources in order to catch up.
Moore says that can something like providing a bus ticket somewhere or rental assistance. But she says people also need a safe place to go and will focus on developing more emergency shelters, rapid rehousing and Permanent Supportive Housing over a 10-year span.
For example, Permanent Supportive Housing is designed for people with the highest needs and provides rental assistance and other support services for those with disabling conditions.
Moore says it’s the biggest thing needed to tackle chronic homelessness. Austin currently provides over 1,500 units for single people, but estimates that they will eventually need 575 units annually, adding up to 4,175 units over 10 years to have enough space for everyone’s needs.
Moore says the plan is fluid and may change depending on circumstances, but is projected to cost $35 million annually to make it happen.
“This is not impossible,” Moore said. “This is an amount of money that some of our peer cities have definitely been able to fundraise over time. That doesn’t mean it’s not gonna be hard. We have barriers in our community about the amount of money that we can spend as a city, for instance. I truly believe that if we are committed to this, we can find very realistic, doable ways.”
Moore says they hope to keep an ongoing conversation with the city council’s Public Health Committee about where funding for this can come from to put this plan into action.