City of Austin prioritizing funding for homeless response
The Brief
City of Austin said it is committed to finding funding to tackle homelessness
According to a resolution, the city needs about $350 million over the next 10 years
AUSTIN, Texas - Austin City Council held its first meeting of the year. One of their commitments is finding funding to tackle homelessness for the next decade.
The backstory
Austin City Council passed a resolution directing the city manager to look at funding sources.
According to the resolution, the city needs about $350 million over the next 10 years.
"We need our federal and state partners on board as well. This is a community-wide crisis that will take the entire community to solve," Matt Mollica, executive director of ECHO, said.
American Rescue Plan funding, also known as the COVID stimulus package, is encumbered.
The city also needs to work through which programs use other federal funding sources and how what's happening in Washington will affect that.
"Even with the confusion at the federal level regarding our grant funding and funding programs and offerings at the federal level, it really underscores why the time is critical now for us to act," Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes said.
The resolution says the cost for funding rapid rehousing and emergency shelters is about $15.4 million per year. Austin has a higher rate of homelessness than other cities.
"Unfortunately, the number of people entering our system outpaces the number of people exiting," Fuentes said.
State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt (D-Austin) says she's brainstorming options.
"We should look at all state properties within the city of Austin and within Travis County that would be appropriate for repurposing or co-locating deeply affordable housing," she said.
Local perspective
Alfredo Reyes of Vocal Texas shared his story. His first step off the street came after hearing about a cold weather shelter.
"I'm a U.S. veteran, and I was homeless for seven and a half years. For most of that time I slept on a bridge near the airport," he said. "I got connected with services. I got rapid rehousing, then got a voucher and I got housing. Then I got a job with Vocal Texas, and now I'm moving into my new house on February 1."
Reyes hopes others can get help like he did.
"I'm one of the lucky ones. You know, there's a lot of other people out there on the street. It's hard to find help when you need it," he said.
The Source
Information from Austin City Council meeting
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Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, 'the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled. 'It's nice to have free speech,' he said, before carrying right on. Article originally published at The Atlantic
