Austin City Councilmember Kathie Tovo defends the idea of adding more homeless shelters in more areas.
Councilmember Kathie Tovo said they are hearing more and more about a better shelter system. “the best practices we are hearing about, are much smaller shelters, more geographically located. “
Tovo said as they look into improving the ARCH, Council has been told, having services offered in downtown and not much anywhere else only forces people into the downtown area. “and so locating services in different areas across the city would be a really important strategy.”
She believes as a community, Austin is ready to take that next step in combating the city’s homelessness crisis, “and make sure that we’re locating services as well as shelter in different parts of the city.” Tovo said, the city should be proactive and identify an area in every council district, so that is an option people have. “I think that’s the path that I’m going to continue to suggest that we take, rather than allowing camping in multiple places, that we identify we proactively identify different areas.”
During the Downtown Austin Alliance’s Homelessness Forum, the City’s Interim Homelessness Coordinator Veronica Breseño explained while the city has not identified another possible shelter location, they have outlined a few criteria for such a location. Chief among them the shelter has to be where homeless people are and it has to have access to medical and transportation services.
(Photo:shutterstock/Philip Arno)
