AUSTIN (Talk1370.com) -- The person responsible for leading the City of Austin's efforts to face homelessness challenges says the city's focus will remain on housing the homeless, regardless of what happens with efforts to reinstate the public camping ban.
Dianna Grey, who began her role as the city's Homeless Strategy Officer about a month ago, held a virtual media question and answer session on Friday.
"My division’s core work is the same regardless of what happens with the camping ban, at the local or the state level," Grey said. "Our goal, and what the community truly needs, is strategies to permanently house folks and strategies to provide more humane conditions until people get into permanent housing."
Grey said the answers to Austin's homelessness challenges lie in what she's seen in other cities - namely, the housing-first model adopted by the City of Houston.
According to Grey, Houston's homeless population decreased 55%, from a high of 8,400 in 2011, to 3,800 in 2019. "We have a lot to learn from them and have already begun to implement some of those same strategies," Grey said.
Grey has lived in Austin for roughly three decades, graduating from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in 2001. She brings 20 years of experience in affordable housing and homelessness services to the position.
"I share the urgency that I know all Austinites are feeling around this issue and the dedication to solving this in our city," Grey said. "One of the things I want to make clear is we have a lot of strengths in this community. I think we have largely shared values around how we want to help our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness."
Grey's office will be responsible for handling the city's efforts under the new Housing-Focused Homeless Encampment Assistance Link (HEAL) initiative that City Council passed last week. The first step is for the Homeless Strategy Office to report back in March with new recommendations to help people experiencing homelessness move out of encampments and into housing with support services.
While the initiative did not alter the enforcement of existing camping rules, Grey said, it did direct City staff to be "more intentional about ways we can connect folks to housing who are in unsafe encampments and provide those alternatives to citations or enforcement by the police."
"When an area is designated as a non-camping area there are a lot of proactive strategies that we can take that aren’t coercive," Grey said. "First of all there is communication, signage. We have found that continued outreach and engagement by service providers around a site can be really effective at enforcing the message and also making it well known enough that there is word of mouth among people experiencing homelessness, which is a very strong channel of communication in our community and most communities."
Sanctioned encampments are another idea the city will look at. "We want to make sure that we choose the strategies that are most effective and that are right for our community and for our neighbors experiencing homelessness," she said.
Grey also said the city's hotel conversion strategy is best viewed as "a very targeted intervention for that small but persistent group of people experiencing homelessness who really need long term housing with lots of rental support and most importantly robust services that help them maintain housing stability."
Last week, the Austin City Council gave its approval to the purchase of a fourth hotel to provide permanent supportive housing, despite objections from neighborhood residents and nearby business owners.
"There are case managers that are in contact with tenants, making themselves available every day to assist them in any number of ways, providing access to mental health services, transportation resources, and really just working through the challenges of reestablishing that stability on their own homes," Grey said. "It’s really key to understand this is not just four walls – we are providing the support and services there that really will be needed for folks to stay housed and truly exit their homelessness."
