Public Health Committee (PHC) Meeting Transcript – 10/1/2025 Title: ATXN-1 (24hr) Channel: 1 - ATXN-1 Recorded On: 10/1/2025 6:00:00AM Original Air Date: 10/1/2025 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== Please note that the following transcript is for reference purposes and does not constitute the official record of actions taken during the meeting. For the official record of actions of the meeting, please refer to the Approved Minutes. [10:01:25 AM] hi everyone, I'm Vanessa Fuentes. Mayor pro tem and chair of our public health committee. I call to order this meeting of the Austin city council public health committee meeting. The time is 10:01 A.M. On Wednesday, October 1st. Happy October everyone. And we are in city council chambers. I am joined virtually by our vice chair, councilmember duchen, as well as on the dais by councilmember Velazquez. Thank you all for being here with us today. We have a quick agenda. Actually, we don't have a quick agenda, but just to go over it quickly, we will start with public communications and then we'll move to considering the September committee meeting minutes. From there, we will then discuss appointments to the sobering center board of directors, and we'll head into executive session to take up those personnel matters. We will come back out where we will receive a briefing from the homelessness strategy office on the downtown homeless task force. And finally, but not least, we will receive another briefing on [10:02:25 AM] another briefing on homelessness prevention and rapid exit services from zo and partners, including sunrise and housing connector. Any questions on this agenda? Very good. We'll start. We'll welcome speakers from the community. May the clerk's office please call the roll. >> We do not have any speakers today. >> All right. Thank you so much. Seeing no speakers, we'll move on to approval of the previous committee meetings for item number one. Can I get a motion? Motion by councilmember Velazquez, seconded by vice chair duchen. Is there any objection to approving the September 3rd, 2025 committee meeting minutes as presented? Seeing none, those committee meetings stand approved. Moving on to item number two. This is discussion and possible action on appointment to the sobering center board of directors. I'd like to take a pause on this item and take this conversation into executive session. The committee will now go into closed session to take up one item pursuant to section 551.074 of the government code, the committee will discuss personnel matters related to item number five, discussion [10:03:26 AM] item number five, discussion and selection of a member to the sobering center board of directors. Is there any objection to heading to executive session? Seeing none, the committee will now go into executive session. Thank you. All right. Our public health [10:14:33 AM] All right. Our public health committee is has is now back on the dais reconvening. We took a pause on the executive session, and we'll continue the conversations and consideration of the applicants for the sobering center board of directors, hopefully later this committee meeting. But until then, we are now back in open session, and we'll move on to item number three. I'd like to welcome David gray, director of the homeless strategy office, to provide a briefing on the downtown homelessness task force. Welcome, Mr. Gray. >> Thank you very much, madam chair. And good morning, council members. David gray, director of Austin homeless strategies and operations, also want to wish you a happy new fiscal year for fy 26. So we are launching into our new names. I'll give a brief overview today of the downtown homeless task force, so I'll provide you with an overview of the objectives of the task [10:15:34 AM] the objectives of the task force. The organizations who are participating in this work, and our meeting timeline. Just to provide some context, when we look at homelessness nationwide, we've seen an increase in unsheltered homelessness as well as sheltered homelessness throughout the country. Here in Austin, we've also seen some increases. But when it comes to downtown specifically, we've seen a pretty significant decrease in the number of tents and structures that people are living in and encamping in. Throughout the downtown community. We've also have relatively low rates of people who are camping in downtown, but the number of unsheltered individuals remains kind of stubbornly set. Between 400 and 550. And it cycles up and down as the seasons go. But despite a lot of our best efforts and initiatives targeted to get people off the streets of downtown and keep them off the streets, we've just kind of [10:16:35 AM] streets, we've just kind of been stuck at this 400 to 550 level, and that's really what led us to launch a task force bringing together partners from a variety of fields and backgrounds together under one roof, to talk about the challenges that we're having with helping folks get off the streets of downtown and stay off the streets of downtown. And so we brought together this group to align on a common goal, which is shaping a robust set of policy and partnership frameworks. That does two things. First is looking upstream. How do we curb the inflow of new people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness in downtown Austin? And the second is, how do we maximize our efforts to get folks who are currently living unsheltered on the streets, off the streets, and into appropriate shelter, housing or diversion programs? And so our objectives here are to leverage the collective expertise of the task force members to identify a set of policy and partnership strategies that we can use to [10:17:36 AM] strategies that we can use to reduce unsheltered homelessness in downtown and assign ownership to those strategies. So some of those things will live with the city and city departments, but some might live with the county or other task force partners. We also want to make sure that we have a table of strategic partners who endorse the strategies, and that they're committed to seeing these strategies through. You know, we are not interested in having a task force that's putting out recommendations that go nowhere. And so we will also establish a timeline to implement the policy and partnership strategies that are within our control, and make sure that we regularly report out on the progress that we're making as we do this work. When we talk about the participating organizations, again, we pulled together a variety of partners, both from within the city, but also organizations that we work with and rely on every day to get this work done. This includes our medical community, like representatives from ascension and central health and integral care, to our transportation partners at capmetro, our nonprofit service [10:18:37 AM] capmetro, our nonprofit service providers like caritas and change one and lifeworks and the Trinity center and our business community, the downtown Austin alliance. We've also pulled together our county commissioners office that represents the downtown area, as well as the county's government relations office. And we pulled together our partners from the criminal justice system, both the county da and the district attorney's office. And last but certainly not least, we have a number of state departments that are also engaging in this work, including the Texas department of criminal justice and our clc lead agency, echo. And so, again, you know, oftentimes we're having conversations and doing work with these entities anyway. But what we find is sometimes the work exists in a silo. You know, when we talk about folks who are chronically homeless, we tend to have conversations with our health care professionals. We're talking about folks who are being diverted from jail or who are reentering from reentering society. Upon release. We tend to have that conversation with [10:19:38 AM] to have that conversation with the criminal justice silo. This task force is meant to pull all those different silos together under one roof, because all of our systems are connected. And to truly help people get off the street and stay off the street, it's going to take all of us working together around a shared set of priorities to to bring a meaningful reduction to unsheltered homelessness in downtown Austin. And so, in terms of our meeting cadence, we set out a pretty aggressive agenda that began in August and will wrap up in December. In August, we had our kickoff meeting to have everybody introduce themselves, make sure that everybody was aligned around our goals and our mission, and understood what it is we're setting out to do. Last month, we met to talk about factors that are contributing to the inflow of homelessness in downtown. And a couple of weeks we'll be meeting again to focus on practical and effective ways to get more people off the street and to keep them off the street. By the time we get to November, we'll have started to draft our recommendations, and we'll have our partners review those [10:20:39 AM] our partners review those recommendations and strategies that we're all going to begin aligning around. And then come December is when we expect to publish the final set of strategies. And so this is our timeline and our action plan. Today we've been moving at a at a relatively good clip. All of our partners have been actively engaged in the discussions, and they've also all been doing their homework, which I'm really appreciative of because it takes people doing the work in between the meetings for the actual meetings to be very productive. And so we're grateful to have partners who are committed to the work. And so that's the overview of the task force. You know, we look forward to returning to this commission and also talking to the public about the recommendations that will be putting out in December. I don't have any specific recommendations to preview today, but of course, I'm happy to answer any questions that you all have about the task force's orientation and the work that we have underway. So with that, madam chair, I'll yield back to you. >> Thank you. I appreciate you providing a list of the [10:21:40 AM] providing a list of the stakeholders. Are you still adding to the list of people who are part of the task force? >> So we we do. And the way that we do it is we've been inviting some folks in for some very specific conversations. So at the last meeting that we had that looked at inflow factors, we had some new partners come just for that conversation because they bring a unique perspective around what's causing people to become homeless and why those folks might be making their way downtown. As far as the core group goes, we're really trying to keep that core group kind of set the way it is, but we're always welcoming new members. That being said, you know, we tried to be very clear that our membership is systems leaders, organizational partners. We know there's a lot of individuals, you know, who are interested in this work, but a lot of our focus right now is on systems change. And how do we design a better homeless response system? How do we close gaps in existing systems. And so that's really where our [10:22:41 AM] And so that's really where our focus is right now. >> Okay. But you are incorporating individuals who have lived experience with homelessness or previously were homeless. >> Absolutely. Around that table are individuals who have personal lived experience. For example, Courtney Jones, who's the founder and executive director of change one, has lived experience both with the foster care system and, as you know, a young person who experienced homelessness. And so we do have representation of people with lived experience on the task force. And that's critical because you need people who bring that expertise to this work so that we can learn about their experiences from that unique perspective. >> Very good. I look forward to hearing about those recommendations come. I guess we'll get briefed in January on the recommendations. >> Yes, ma'am. So so our intention right now on the current timeline is for us to publish the final set of recommendations in December. We'll be more than happy to return in January and present on those. >> Perfect colleagues. Any questions? [10:23:43 AM] questions? >> I it's half a question. Half. Just a comment. You know, I think we all want the downtown area to be as inviting and and safe as possible. And whether real or perceived right, when someone sees an individual walking around and either they're having a mental health issue or just, you know that there are perceived dangers that just let's makes downtown especially feel less safe. And and so what I want to just be sure, though, that we don't have happen in this is in an effort to improve upon downtown. We just disperse the problem, which I think when we, you know, what has continued to stick out to me when looking at the the heat map of the point in time count over the years. Right? It was downtown, downtown, downtown. And then all of a [10:24:43 AM] downtown. And then all of a sudden, once the camping ban was. Reinstated and we saw that dispersal from downtown, all of a sudden you got slowly the second heat point in south Austin and in the area I represent. And so we know that when we clean up one area, whether it's someone just on a corner and we tell them to move and they go to a different corner, or more broadly, we're telling people to leave downtown that we have somewhere for them to go. And so the question then is, is. I know you're in the early stages, but, you know, our shelters are pretty much full. Our our housing programs are pretty much full. So what tools do we have available aside from just telling people you can't be in this space and moving them to a different space, but actually getting them indoors? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Council member. And so kind of three thoughts on on that. The first is that a lot [10:25:45 AM] that. The first is that a lot of the work that we're talking about here is looking at how our systems work, or in some cases they don't work. And so you have somebody who might be getting discharged from a hospital back to the street. That person might stay at that area downtown if they're getting discharged from a downtown hospital. But if they're getting discharged from saint David's south, then they also might be lingering right down there in district five. And so we truly believe, by identifying some of these pain points and how the systems work, and then addressing and fixing them so that those types of again, in this scenario, hospital discharges don't result in somebody becoming homeless in that area. We expect that the systems changes will benefit everybody. It's just our focus kind of geographically with this commission is downtown, but hopefully the system changes help everybody. The second is that we're not abandoning any of our commitments in any other parts of the city. We're still doing our heel activities across the city. We're still doing our outreach activities across the city, and we're [10:26:46 AM] across the city, and we're having conversations with these partners about taking this model and applying it to other geographic hotspots in the city. Based off of how we feel. This model worked downtown. And so this is a model that we've used with the foster youth task force that we convened recently. We're trying a different kind of application here, but if it's successful and if it comes out with good results here, then we plan to take it to other parts of the city as well, where those hotspots exist. The third is that, you know, when we look at our existing resources, you know, we are continuing to try to build more shelter, bring on more housing through our partnerships with program like housing connector and keep people housed. I think what we're finding in some of these early stages is that there are opportunities today for us to better optimize the resources that exist. One example is our bridge shelters. We still use those bridge shelters predominantly for heel activities, but we don't quite [10:27:47 AM] activities, but we don't quite have the same number of very large encampments that we service through heel, as we did several years ago. You know, we've been pretty effective at getting those large encampments under control, getting people into shelter and keeping a lot of those sites clear. And so as we potentially do fewer heels, you know, might there be an opportunity for us to take one of those shelters and reimagine what those beds can be used for? So can those beds be used as a safe landing spot for somebody who's being discharged from a jail? Can the bed be used for somebody who is coming out of a hospital and doesn't need respite care, but does need a safe place to discharge from, and then get connected with a housing resource? So so I think there's some some opportunity for optimization even within our existing resources. And we're we're looking at that. And that would be the short term solution as we continue to do the work to add more capacity into the system. >> And the last thing I'll ask if you can in this discussion [10:28:49 AM] if you can in this discussion and study is I have heard both anecdotally as well as in the data show that we are seeing our kind of collar jurisdictions Georgetown, round Rock, Leander. Westlake literally bring people on a bus downtown, whether it's in front of the arch or caritas, and say, not our problem. You can get services here if you could, in the best of your ability, help identify any kind of volume or just so we can understand what's going on. I think it's past time that we go to these other jurisdictions, and at a minimum, they need to be contributing to the solution. I would like for them to be participating in the solution, but it's unsustainable. And so if you could help us with that through this or whatever other [10:29:50 AM] through this or whatever other work you're doing, I'd really appreciate it. >> Yes, sir. And I'll say we've started some of that work. It's a very light data collection effort, but we're having some real talk about that and it happens. You know, we have folks who we know through our street outreach programs were brought to Austin from a mental health facility in Georgetown, or they were driven here from, you know, by a sheriff from a neighboring city. But we don't have happen as much. Are other large cities sending people to Austin? And I know that there's been some narrative that, you know, oh, people are coming here from San Francisco or new York or Chicago, and we don't typically see that as much. Oftentimes it is our smaller neighboring jurisdictions that don't currently have the infrastructure to help. And a lot of times, it's some pretty well-intentioned folks who think getting somebody to the arch is is the the strategy. Right. But it's not. And so as we collect more data about where people are coming from, whether it's homegrown [10:30:52 AM] whether it's homegrown austinite who got evicted or it's somebody from central Texas who's making their way to Austin, we do plan to have some conversations with those neighboring jurisdictions about how they could either contribute into our system, because we have a system today, and we're happy to take contributions into it, or how we can lend our technical expertise to help them develop infrastructure and resources that's right sized to their needs. >> I appreciate that. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> Well, and just to add on to this conversation, you know what was flagged to us during the legislative session from our state representative, Gina Hinojosa was the transitional facility that we have in del valley, where we have individuals who don't have any. From my understanding, any case management support. And so once they were released and finished their term at the transitional facility, they're coming into our into our city. And we need state support. We need state funding. We need our state leaders involved so that [10:31:54 AM] leaders involved so that they're aware of the key role that they have in funding our response and our system. >> Yes, ma'am. And you're you're spot on, madam chair. And that's part of the reason why we have the state department of criminal justice part of these conversations. And we've talked specifically about atc. I'm grateful for our state colleagues to be willing to sit down with us and have some honest conversation about what atc is intended to do and what we're actually seeing on the ground and hearing from our partners at dac about atc residents going to dac for services, even nonprofit partners. I was at a conference last week and ran into some folks from the harm reduction alliance who told me that they also see a large number of atc residents going to their service center for helping for services. And, you know, I think as we continue to dig into this with our state colleagues, there will be some opportunities for us to collaborate as we head into the [10:32:55 AM] collaborate as we head into the next legislative session. I think around some acts for more resources to help atc really be set up to provide the housing, navigation and the on site services that I know that they want to be able to provide. >> That's right. Very good. Thank you. Okay, colleagues. Yes. Vice chair duchen. >> Thank you, mayor pro tem, I've just got one question for the homeless strategy officer about the data. That first slide that he's got. I'm curious if I know when we had the point of time count and we saw a bump. And I think you issued a statement about that, but it sounds like there wasn't or my recollection wasn't, that there was no kind of working theory behind that bump. I'm curious if your thinking has evolved. There's new data. You've got obviously a bump nationwide, you've got a bump in the area. The downtown numbers are holding steady. Do you have a sense of what is [10:33:55 AM] you have a sense of what is going on at a kind of meta level with, is it the economy? Is it, you know, national politics? Is it things being cut at the federal level? Is it you know, what? What are the sort of factors involved in your thinking right now? Or is it still too early to make a judgment about what's going on with those numbers? >> Yeah, I think as we had time to sit with more of this data, we've had a chance to really reflect on what caused some of that increase. I'll say first is a good thing. We we have more shelter beds in our community now than we've had before. And when you look at the pit count data and the pit count gives you that number of people experiencing homelessness, it includes the number of people who are in shelter. And I don't remember the number offhand, but I think we saw a 50% increase in the number of people in shelter in the pit count data than what was reported in the previous year. In fact, for the first time in our history, the pit count showed more people in [10:34:56 AM] count showed more people in shelter than unsheltered. And so that that was pretty awesome to see, I think. Second, related to that is we've done a better job as a community funding street outreach. We've launched the sunrise hotline in partnership with sunrise, so also giving more people new ways to engage with our system. And that's allowed us to do a better job counseling homelessness here in Austin. And so getting a better sense of how many people are truly homeless, even outside of the pit count data. And then the third is economics. You know, Austin is still a pretty expensive place to to live. High cost of living. I think there was a presentation last week or maybe the week before last, to some of your colleagues on the housing commission, and it looked at eviction rates in Travis county, and it showed that right now we're on track for more evictions in our county this year than what we had last year. And last year was pretty much a record for evictions in our area. And so, you know, this is [10:35:57 AM] area. And so, you know, this is not meant to be a segue into the next presentation, but but when you talk about like, people becoming homeless, a lot of it has to do with economic factors that families are not asset rich to, to respond to, which is part of the reason why our office is investing more in those housing stabilization and early intervention initiatives that I know I'll touch on in the next presentation. >> Thank you. Any thoughts on the national data trend. >> For some of the national data trends? It's also very similar. A lot of rising and cost of living. But every geography is different. And so we we hear different things from different places. And some it could be due to natural disasters, others it could be due to a different way that they conducted their pit count. But for a lot of our colleagues who we speak to, a lot of it has to do with the economic [10:36:57 AM] has to do with the economic situation that we find ourselves in as a country. >> Thank you. I realize that wasn't entirely the purpose of that presentation, but I do appreciate you adding some context to it. >> Thank you sir. >> Very good. Thank you. We're going to now move on to item number four. And I would like to welcome back again, director gray and our esteemed partners, Marc Helbling. I hope I pronounce it okay. Executive director of the sunrise homeless navigation center and Shayna doenitz, managing director of Austin housing connector, for a briefing on prevention, diversion and rapid exit homelessness services. Welcome. >> Awesome. Thank you, madam chair. Allow me to reintroduce myself as Jake, says David gray, director for Austin homeless strategies and operations. And pastor Marc is here, right there. I'll give the presentation, but pastor Marc is available for any questions about his program. Shayna messaged me this morning. She sends her regards. [10:37:57 AM] sends her regards. Unfortunately, she will not be able to attend today's presentation. She got called away to Seattle for for business purposes. So today's presentation, we'll talk a little bit about our homeless prevention and our diversion and why these strategic investments make sense for the city of Austin. And so I'll provide you with a brief overview of what homeless prevention and diversion is and what that means for her. Highlight some of the benefits of each strategy and why it is that we are starting to enhance our investments in both of these strategies. Explain why these strategies are specifically critical to our system and what they mean for austinites. And then we'll do two program spotlights, one about the wayfinder program, which is administered by the sunrise navigation center. And the second is our landlord engagement program, which is administered by our friends at housing connector. So when we talk about homeless prevention and what is this? These are programs and services that [10:38:58 AM] programs and services that provide support to households who are at imminent risk of homelessness so that they can maintain their housing. The goal here is to keep families who are housed stably housed through strategies such as emergency rental assistance, utility assistance, landlord mediation, case management and other forms of either one time financial investment or short term case management to help them stabilize in their existing housing. The benefits of this are very clear, but I'll cover them. The first is it reduces the inflow into homelessness. You know, a lot of our cities efforts have focused on folks who are chronically homeless and have been on our streets the longest, as it should be. 30% of our population is chronically homeless, but we also have to get upstream. We have to stop the inflow of new households, new individuals and new families onto the streets and homeless prevention allows us to do that. It also allows folks to maintain their stability within their existing community. You know, when somebody gets evicted or they [10:39:59 AM] somebody gets evicted or they lose their housing, if we're able to rapidly rehouse them, oftentimes that's not in the neighborhood where their social relationships already exist. And so by homeless prevention, we're able to help that community remain stabilized and prevent some of the displacement that I know we're all very concerned about. It's also much more cost effective compared to shelter and rapid rehousing. Typically, homeless prevention and diversion services are a one time, 2 to $3000 cost compared to shelter, which carries an ongoing cost of about $24,000 per bed annually, and rapid rehousing, or dsh, which is closer to about 35 to $40,000 per unit annually. And so getting upstream is significantly less expensive. It's a greater return on investment for our taxpayer dollars. And last but certainly not least, is that it minimizes the trauma associated with housing loss. This is especially important for our nearly 2000 aid students who are experiencing homelessness, [10:40:59 AM] are experiencing homelessness, and the 50% of aid families that are housing insecure. We know that if we can help somebody avoid the trauma of homelessness, not only does that help them today, but it also helps their kids in terms of their life outcomes. If you are a young person and you experience homelessness as a young person, you are ten times more likely to experience homelessness again as an adult. And so by keeping these households stably housed, we're solving problems today, but we're also getting ahead of intergenerational cycles of homelessness and trauma. Diversion and prevention are sometimes conflated as the same thing, but they're different. Diversion are interventions that help people who have lost their housing. They're about to enter a system like a shelter, but instead of having to bring them into shelter for shelter care, we are able to quickly help them find an alternative housing solution. So these are things like family and friend mediations and reunifications or short term financial assistance or rapid problem [10:42:00 AM] assistance or rapid problem solving. And so instead of bringing somebody into the shelter system, we're able to kind of save that that bed for somebody else who probably has a more severe need by quickly diverting those folks away from the homeless response system and back into a housing opportunity. This has its own benefits off the top. It's reducing demand for shelter and rapid rehousing services. It also provides a quicker pathway to stability than our shelters are sometimes able to provide. It allows us to strengthen and build upon some natural support networks, especially if we're able to facilitate family and friendship reunification and allows the rest of our homeless response systems like our shelter beds, our rapid rehousing programs, and our psa to take those resources and focus them on people who have greater needs and need more time to stabilize their living situation. Now we are investing in these services as a city [10:43:00 AM] in these services as a city first, because it aligns with our overall goal to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring. And it especially speaks to rare and brief. We do not want people to have to spend multiple weeks in a shelter bed, or multiple months in a rapid rehousing program, or multiple years in psh. We much rather get them quickly rehoused or keep them stably housed. The second, as I mentioned, is that it reduces overall system costs and pressures, improving the efficiency of our system. It is a much lower dollar cost intervention than shelter rapid and psh. The third is that it supports our households before crises deepen. You know, in the system that we inherited, that focus predominantly on the most vulnerable. That system required folks who recently became homeless to be homeless for multiple months, experience multiple traumatic events and become more vulnerable and score higher on a vulnerability assessment before they can qualify for help. They were essentially stuck in the middle [10:44:02 AM] essentially stuck in the middle of a donut hole between being stably housed and then being extremely victimized. These services allow us to fill that donut hole. It is the the donut hole filler that my kids love from Shipley's little donut hole. It allows us to make sure that these folks get that sweet support before their crisis becomes even worse. And then last, it allows us to build a balanced portfolio. And you've all heard this from me and my team before, that it's important for us to prop up all parts of our homeless response system to level set the the resources in the system with the needs as we're seeing them. We inherited a system that did not invest a lot in prevention and diversion, and now we're trying to level set that portfolio and make sure it's balanced. So to do the two program spotlights, the first is the wayfinder program, the program that the city of Austin seed funded with about $500,000 in support. Sunrise has successfully raised another approximately $500,000 in private funding and [10:45:05 AM] private funding and philanthropic funding. And so we're really appreciative for our partners who are able to bring in multiple funding streams to help us maintain these programs. Wayfinder focuses on the ability to house, meaning it is a diversion program that's helping folks who are housing insecure or recently, recently homeless. But they can quickly get rehoused. We want to make sure that those households are able to get quickly rehoused and at disproportionately serves multi-person households. I think the majority of people who have been served so far are families with young children. And so when you look at how this program stands up to some of the other diversion programs in our community, wayfinder has become the number one source of rehousing in Austin since it launched last year. In fy 25 alone, it served just over 950 individuals, a third of which were rehoused with the $500,000 in support from the city of [10:46:05 AM] in support from the city of Austin. The average household size of individuals that move in is 2.1. I don't know how you get to a point one of a person, but that that's what the math says. So there we go. And more than 440 children were rehoused through this program in its first 11 months of operating, which accounts for over 90% of all child move ins across our entire homeless response system. And so, again, kind of speaking to how effective this program into diversion programs are at helping households get housed and stay housed, the average cost per move in is $1,700 one time or the if you look at it from a per person cost. We're talking about a one time cost of less than $800 per person. So again, an extremely cost effective solution that's also helping a lot of people avoid a lot of trauma of homelessness. And when you think about the staying power of this program, to date, 94% of those clients [10:47:07 AM] to date, 94% of those clients who were served through this program have remained housed and have not returned to homelessness, meaning that they have not reconnected to our homeless response system. So in summary, it's a it's a low price point for us to serve a lot of people. And we're seeing that folks who are housed this program are able to stay housed. Housing connector takes a slightly different approach. Housing connector is our program that's focused on recruiting landlords to make more units available. So while wayfinder is focused on getting people housed. Housing connector is focused on creating the housing opportunity. And so through this program, over the course of the last eight months that we funded this program, 40 residents have been directly housed through wayfinder into wayfinder units. Now there's another hundred folks who've been successfully housed through through housing connector assistance. And so I'll I'll break this down. So we fund housing connector to [10:48:09 AM] we fund housing connector to both recruit landlords, but we've also capitalized them with essentially an emergency housing fund at $600,000. And so housing connector could either help facilitate the direct housing placement, which they've done for 40 residents, or organizations like lifeworks or caritas or change. One can contact housing connector and say, hey, we have a family or an individual who is ready to move into housing that they've identified. They just need help paying that first last month rent deposit, or they need help paying off pass through arrears that we've negotiated down. And through the partnership with housing connector. That, folks, is those individuals are able to get access to the resources in that stabilization fund and then move in. So I think of it in basketball terms of direct basketball versus assist. So how is it connector has 40 direct points and about 100 assists. The average household size is two meaning that oftentimes it's couples or [10:49:10 AM] oftentimes it's couples or single parents with children. Housing connector has successfully recruited more than 40 properties across the city, totaling about 8000 units that are committed to that will be available to folks who are experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness. When we look at the racial diversity of the households who are taking advantage of these programs, 67% are households of color. I had mentioned that partnership program that housing connector has with folks like lifeworks and caritas. So we currently have 13 community partners, including some of our fellow agency partners like college. And just this morning we started talking with aisd's project help facilitating relationship there so that our aid families who are housing insecure can have a direct pathway into housing. Connect the resources to remain stably housed, and typically the amount of time it takes from a household to identify their housing to move in is 15 days, which is lightning fast. [10:50:12 AM] days, which is lightning fast. I think when we last looked at the data for coordinated entry, the amount of time it took for somebody to move in from their first coordinated entry assessment to their move in was around 400 days. So to go from 400 days down to 15 days is in no short order. Like a significant improvement. So just some key takeaways. You know, our prevention programs are designed to keep people who are currently housed stably housed in their community. We want to avoid the costly crisis that comes with homelessness. Diversion is predominantly looking at people who are newly homeless. And so how do we give them safer alternatives to quickly get rehoused and reduce reliance on our shelter beds, so that we could focus our shelter beds on some of the more extreme cases in our community. Both of these strategies are extremely cost effective, again, costing anywhere between 2000 to $3000 for that one time intervention. [10:51:12 AM] for that one time intervention. And they're also trauma informed, and that they don't require people to score high on a vulnerability index in order to get access to the service. These types of interventions reduce pressure across our homeless response system. They save our taxpayer dollars, and again, they allow our more intensive resources to focus on our higher need clients. And so we're going to continue to make these investments. You should expect to see more from us by way of these investments. And as we launch our public facing dashboards around program performance, we're going to make sure that our dashboards are include the references to our prevention and our diversion services. And so with that, madam chair, I'll yield back to you, but I'll also invite pastor Marc to come join me in case you or your colleagues have questions for him. Thank you. >> Very good. Thank you, councilmember alter. >> Do you have to ask? I do have a couple questions for Marc. If I see him down here. [10:52:12 AM] Marc. If I see him down here. Well, first, at least you know, off the top, I think this is not only so promising and impressive, but it is the future for us. It is the only intervention that I see that is scalable and scalable quickly. We as you mentioned earlier, we have to build out the whole system. But if we can't turn off that spigot, we're just flowing through constantly and never seeing any kind of results. So I'm really excited that we're trying new things and seeing what works, seeing what doesn't. And this appears to be one of those things that works. My question for you, Marc, is what is your estimated need if you had unlimited dollars in this program, how many people do you think could be served by this or right now, like on an annual basis? And the cost of that? >> Thank you. Good morning, [10:53:13 AM] >> Thank you. Good morning, council members. Thank you for having me. And thank you to director gray for such a great presentation. It's a good question, and I want to thank all, all three of you here on the dais, because we've had really good conversations about this particular thing in the past. And, and love to have it with you, councilmember duchen, as well. But what I would like to say to that is we have about a year and a half of data right now on wayfinder, and that's part of the data that that director gray was presenting here. But what I would like to say is that we our numbers right now say that if we could raise about $5 million annually, we could. We think in theory, we could house about 40% of the homeless population that's being seen outside, which would be absolutely remarkable. So one of the things that was not presented here, but I'll just kind of say, is if you if you look at the annual database kind of presentations that happen at the end of the year, and these are going to come out probably in February or March of 2026. And you look at the [10:54:14 AM] of 2026. And you look at the data that's on the dashboard, you will see very little. Even with the massive investments we've made, you will see very little movement on psh, very little movement on rapid rehousing. Those those parts of the graph stay pretty stable. They've increased a little bit as we've invested, but they haven't increased to the level that we've invested in them. When you look at what's going to come and what we predict will come in when they pull these numbers in spring of 2026, you're going to see something like a three times growth in the amount of total people housed next year, which is going to be absolutely wild. We haven't seen a growth like that in our community in decades, and that's going to be almost entirely a result of these, what we call minimal housing interventions, these his. And that is what we're talking about here. And so right now we're processing about $1 million of pass through money. And that's going to that's getting us about 150 people a month. So it's going to end up being in the range of 1800 people in a calendar year. We believe we can push that number [10:55:15 AM] believe we can push that number to about 4 million without losing, without scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. Clearly, this is not intervention, is not for everyone. It's for people that have income. It's for people that can potentially get income. And that is not everyone. But our estimation and the numbers that we have so far point us towards the number of 40% of the homeless population that we think we could reasonably rehouse. Now, I will say every 10% you grow in that number, it's going to get slightly harder, right? Like it's really easy to get that first 10% through this program. It might be easy to get the second 20, the second 10%. As you get into the 30 and the 40%, it's going to get a little bit harder. But we have strategies kind of thought, thought out about that. But to think about the actual possibility of housing 40% of the homeless population for $5 million when our total annual budget, you know, that we've just proposed is well over 100. It would would be a shocking achievement if we could possibly do it. And I'll just say like, this is something we are actually getting questions from other major cities about already, because the numbers are just so, so huge. >> Yeah. Well, and that I think [10:56:15 AM] >> Yeah. Well, and that I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, we can't build thousands of psh units on a, you know, that would take decades. We can't build or secure other you know, whether it's shelter or other interventions this this and prevention. You know, I think are our way to really see a meaningful change. And we have to continue to invest in those other interventions. But I will also cheat a little bit. I've seen your slide deck. So just offer a little context here that we have over 36,000 vacancies citywide in our apartments, with another almost 60,000 units to be built over the next 3 to 4 years. And so if you're talking about trying to house around 6000 people, you know, that's 10% of our not even of our units available. So [10:57:18 AM] even of our units available. So we have the solution. We just have to get people into those units. And and I think we can do it if we're, if we're aggressive. And so I, you know, let us know what we can do, how we can help. And I'm really hope to have you back in six months and just see what, if anything, has changed and how we can continue to make this progress. Thank you. >> Thank you for Marc. Since you're here, can you just talk us through? Because I mean, incredibly successful rates here at the wayfinder program. How are you identifying individuals who are can be served by the wayfinder program? >> That's a great question. I it goes to an earlier comment that David made around the hotline. I mean, I think there's been a couple changes here that have dovetailed simultaneously and that thanks to great leadership by the homeless strategy office, one of those is that there has been more of a centralization of of access points. And I think that [10:58:20 AM] access points. And I think that that we have for too long asked ourselves what is good for nonprofits when we really should be asking ourselves what is good for the for the end user? Right. So if my sister becomes homeless tomorrow, what what do we want for her? We want an easy access point where we can do as many things right away as possible, that that's that's what we should be doing. And that's the cheapest thing to do, because then they come with all of the assets, all of the assets that they bring personally, not just money. They bring their family supports, they bring their furniture, they bring their in fact, they still have their kids and they haven't fallen into addiction. Like that's when we should. That's when we should reach people. And so I think that as we move forward in that we really just have to think about being able to reach people in that space where they're coming into where they're coming into that experience of homelessness. And as we do that, we're going to continue to see a significant amount of a significant amount of achievement. But I think as we as we identify people, the advancement of the hotline, the hotline took 5000 calls last month, which is just wild. It is far surpassed any in-person [10:59:21 AM] is far surpassed any in-person day center that we have in our community. And now, now that we have these video pods that we're putting out across the community, we're also increasing access points for people experiencing homelessness to be engaged where they are not have to go somewhere to engage. And so most of these interventions are happening digitally. A lot of these people we never even meet and they're happening all across central Texas. And so we're able to use the digital tools that we've got in our tool bag to be able to also make this happen. So the fact that the hotline exists is probably the number one thing that we're we're using to identify. It's also going to be really helpful with the new prevention project that's coming on as well. I will caution that, though, to say, and this is a kind of a question, an answer to councilmember alder's question. One of the things is that we've kind of also become a victim of our own success in the sense that if you look at the the demand over the last 12 months, people have realized that this works. Not only individuals, but agencies have realized that this works and it works as well as anything in our community. And so the demand has continued to grow every single month. And [11:00:22 AM] to grow every single month. And we could where we were six months ago, we were running out of money at day 29 or day 28 of the month. We are now at the point where we're running out of money at day ten of the month, which means for 20 days of the month, I've just got demand, demand, demand, demand, demand and not able to meet those demands. So that's where we're at. We could be housing at least double the amount of people that we're housing right now through this program, if it was correctly funded. >> So walk me through this. So if I, you know, my neighbor becomes unhoused, we call the hotline. Someone picks up from your team, are they then guiding them through the housing connector piece, where they have a property identified that will take them in? Or do you have your own set of identified properties? >> Yeah. So the beauty of this is it really capitalizes on the assets that the person brings. And one of the best assets is the person who is the end user, has the most immediate need for this service. For for years we relied on case managers and other case managers were motivated enough to go and do this work. The person that's the most motivated is the person that's on the receiving [11:01:23 AM] person that's on the receiving end of it, right? And a lot of times they're mom with kids. And, you know, whereas I might be able to go sleep three nights under a TRE, sleeping under a TRE when you've got three kids crawling all over you is a whole different thing. So these moms are highly motivated, and it is not uncommon that we get a phone call at 10 A.M. And that person's housed by 4 P.M. That same day, which is absolutely wild. And what is going on, to answer your question more directly, is that these are entirely, at this point, entirely units that these people are identifying. So, to council member alter's point, we're talking about something in the range of 50 to 60,000 units in our community where we could house the entire homeless population seven times over. Right now. If everybody could do this task. But we're not only incentivizing them to kind of go do the work. I think the foundational change in this that should not be ignored is that for a decade, what I've been doing homeless services, we've basically been telling people to wait. We've been telling people to do an assessment and to wait. And they do. And they listen to us. They go wait under a bridge or [11:02:24 AM] They go wait under a bridge or under a TRE and they deteriorate. And that is just absolutely a waste of their time and energy when we can now tell them to go. So I'm going to steal a pop culture reference since David already had one. My pop culture reference is the office and in the office, Michael Scott says to a group of school children, if you can graduate from high school, I will pay your college. And it motivated those kids to graduate. Now, he didn't pay for their college, but he motivated them to all graduate. What my team started doing about a year and a half ago is we just started promising people, hey, if you can go find yourself a 12 month unit, we will pay for you to move in. And what it did was make them active participants in their own rehousing. And for the first time, we just saw people instead of leaving to go sit under a bridge or leaving to go push a cart, they left to go to apartment complexes and go hit him up and try to get a unit. And that that cannot be understated. Having people be play an active role in their own rehousing is such a powerful thing that we have not really been seizing on in the past. [11:03:24 AM] past. >> Very powerful, and certainly would love to see our city invest more, particularly in this very effective program. Is this so the individuals who are housed through wayfinder, they do not have to complete a coordinated assessment. >> They don't have to. They can, but they don't have to and usually don't. >> Okay. And thank you. My next question is for director gray. What percentage of folks remain housed through the housing connector program? >> I'll have to get that data from housing. I don't have it readily available. I know it's pretty high. I just don't want to give you a specific number right now, but I'll get that for you. >> Sure. And then, because I know in your presentation you said there's 40 properties that are identified with landlords who are willing to work with us on getting people housed. Do we know the capacity of those landlords or those housing properties, like do they have ten units each, or any sense of how far we could go in connection? >> Yeah, I mean, some of the properties list a couple of units at their site, some of them list all as the units become open. So I might be a landlord with a over a 50 unit [11:04:25 AM] landlord with a over a 50 unit apartment community as apartments become available and vacant and ready for lease through my housing connector partnership, I can either lease those kind of market rate on apartments.com or whatever, or I could I could put them up as available on the housing connector platform, which then the service providers like Marc and others have exclusive access. And on that platform is where somebody can apply at a reduced rate and also with different screening criteria. And that's part of the landlord commitment is both making the unit affordable and also making it more accessible. So whereas for everyday person like David, they might do a criminal background check. And if I have more than one criminal offense in the last three years, then they're going to screen me out. Whereas through housing connector they might say, look, we'll consider up to three and they have to be the most serious offenses. But if it's three misdemeanors we don't care. We'll still consider your [11:05:25 AM] care. We'll still consider your application. And so so housing connector makes the resource available. That way the units get listed as they become available. So in total there's about 8000 units that we have access to. But of that 8000 I think the last time I checked with Shayna, there's maybe about 150 that were currently listed on their platform. Now, I do think, like pastor Marc said, you know, because of our rental market and where it's at now, there's a lot of self motivated people who are finding great deals on their own. There are a lot of great landlords out there who are offering move in with six months of free rent. And so for folks who can and do find their own unit, it's a great resource for housing connector. A lot of their folks tend to be maybe younger people who don't have the ability to find and negotiate and kind of really understand what makes a good unit. And so they're going through a life works or change one and a case manager, and that case manager is working with the client using the housing connector platform to identify a housing property that works for their client, [11:06:27 AM] that works for their client, and then to help their client through that application process. >> Very good. Thank you. Colleagues. Any other questions? Yes. Vice chair. >> First, I really appreciate the presentation and certainly look forward to connecting with you. Pastor Marc, to get some additional details and learn more about the work you've been doing. I really had one clarification question and one history question, and I think the clarification question is for director gray, you had talked about when talking about housing connector, you used a sports analogy from one of tennis or rowing or whatever. It was, direct points and assists. I think I understand the direct points, but can you expand on what the assists are? >> Sure. The assists could be something like, let's say somebody calls I'm a youth pastor. Marc and his team at sunrise as an example. This actually might be true. So you can fact check me on this. But let's say somebody calls into the hotline and says, hey, you [11:07:28 AM] the hotline and says, hey, you know, I found a unit that I'm ready to move into, but I need help paying the security deposit. If pastor mark's. >> Housing fund, that's the $600,000 house, right? >> That's the $600,000 housing fund. So pastor mark's team, if he's not able to fill that gap on his own through their partnership with housing connector, housing connector through the housing fund can cut that check, but it's counted as a sunrise placement. But housing connector gets the assist. And that that's the basketball analogy. >> Got it okay. Basketball. So the direct points and it's sort of you've got a way to connect with landlords. And then you've also got this housing fund as a supplementary way to solve the problem. Is that about right? >> Absolutely. And I think it really gets back to a point that pastor Marc said that we don't want to lose sight of. It's how do you make the process easiest for the client? And rather than force sunrise or lifeworks or caritas or ACC [11:08:28 AM] or lifeworks or caritas or ACC to tell somebody, hey, you have to go talk to housing connector and sign up for their program and meet with their case manager in order to get funds. It's a simple call from the agency to the other agency saying, I have a client right now who's ready to move in. Can they tap into your funds to do the move in and how the connector is cutting the check? Now, people can go directly to housing connector and receive that quality of support to if they need it. But we are trying to make the systems as useful for the clients as possible because it saves the client's time, it helps them avoid trauma, and frankly, it makes our system more efficient, which is something that all of us want. >> Okay, thank you for helping me understand that. The history question is when I go back and I look at the 2020 airport, it pretty clearly, in my view, identifies that diversion in particular, but also prevention are far more economical. And pretty much most other approaches. And so I'm [11:09:28 AM] approaches. And so I'm wondering, can you help me from a historical perspective, understand was it a case where we had to figure out the specific implementation that's taken us to where we are today? What what accounts for the five years when we we kind of knew that that was the economical way versus where we are today, where we've got programs that look like they're highly successful and could be expanded. But there's been a gap of several years where I'm not sure I fully appreciate what the journey has been between understanding that information and delivering the solutions. >> Yes, sir. So. So I was with the city of Austin during those years, but I was not in this role. So I'll tell you the story as the story has been relayed to me, which is during the covid pandemic, you know, there was a real focus on folks who are medically vulnerable, folks who are chronically homeless and wanting to find opportunities to get those folks first into prologis, our system of care, to keep them [11:10:29 AM] system of care, to keep them safe from the covid pandemic, but also make sure that we had housing opportunities for those individuals. So a lot of the focus at the time went into rapid rehousing programs as a strategy to get folks rehoused quickly, especially folks who had been the most vulnerable and homeless the longest. And then as we receive federal dollars that were one time dollars, strategically investing those one time dollars into one time efforts, which is how we wound up building a lot of psh, and now funding a lot of a lot of psh services. You know, 30% of our population is chronically homeless. And so we have to keep an eye on that extremely vulnerable community. And I think that that was the orientation of my predecessors. But I think, you know, as we've come in, we haven't lost sight of that group. We're still investing heavily in rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing. We built over 400 units in the last year. [11:11:29 AM] over 400 units in the last year. We have over 700 still in the development pipeline. But again, we got to make sure that we're not forcing people to become extremely vulnerable before they can get help, just like that, poppy report said five years ago is what we're saying today, which is if we invest more in the upstream interventions, it's safe, folks, a lot of trauma. It saves the taxpayers some resources and it keeps people off of our streets, which which ultimately is the improvement for everybody. So I don't I don't know that it took five years to implement. I just think priorities shifted as the pandemic happened. But now that we're coming out of that pandemic and you have an Austin homeless strategies and operations department, we've we've taken a more holistic look at our homeless response system. And this is one of the ways in which we're investing to make that system more balanced across all the interventions. >> Okay. That's what I was looking for. I appreciate that context. Thank you David. >> Yes, sir. Thank you. [11:12:30 AM] >> Yes, sir. Thank you. >> All right. Any further questions or comments. >> I actually sorry. Obviously we've highlighted this diversion program, the housing connector. There are other diversion programs out there. You know, I'm more familiar with lifeworks, but I know they're not also the only ones. I'm curious what type of overlap you think. Like, let's just say we poured it all into wayfinder. How much overlap do you have with these other organizations? With the diversion services they're providing? >> Yeah, I think that was directed at me, but I'll take it. And actually, as an answer, I almost jumped in to answer councilmember duchen question because I think that there's a there's a tie in here, and that is that this is a relatively new concept in homeless housing across the country. This is not the whole concept of diversion. And rapid exit is so new that within the last two years, they literally just started, they [11:13:31 AM] literally just started, they switched the definitions of what they were two years ago, just randomly. It's such a new concept that we are very much we talk with folks around the country. Austin is very much on the front edge of this, which is why we're getting phone calls from other cities. This is this is very innovative work. And to your point, it maybe shouldn't be innovative work, but in homeless services, sometimes simple solutions are innovative and cost cost reasonability decisions are fairly innovative, unfortunately. So we are leading the way. I think that that that's something I would say. The other piece to answer that question is that we didn't have the centralization five years ago to pull this off, this sort of a system for the system to work or for a prevention system to work, you need a centralized central access point. And until the hotline existed, we really didn't have that as a community. And so that's really what's changed the game to enable us to have the tracks for these trains to run on or the, the, the backbone for this. But I think that I'm sorry. Can you [11:14:31 AM] think that I'm sorry. Can you ask your question again? >> Just just wondering like if, if how much if you took care of everyone, you think how much the other providers. >> What I was going to say to that is this diversion means very different things to very, pretty much every organization. That's one of the problems. It's kind of like one of those catch phrases that a lot of means. A lot of things like trauma can mean many different things to many different people. And diversion is one of those words. And so to answer your question, there are many different versions of diversion. Some people count diversion as things you do for people while they're still housed. We call that in our community, mostly prevention, but there are communities that call it that. There are, you know, we have a mental health diversion center in our community, right? They are not doing any of the stuff. Wayfinder's doing that is a completely different definition of the word diversion. I actually stopped using the word diversion because it was so confusing to the people that we talked to, and we just started using the word rapid exit or using quick resolution terminology, because it's so confusing. The other pieces within homelessness, that diversion can mean, for instance, Toof has a very good program called going home, but [11:15:32 AM] program called going home, but their program is entirely putting people on trains and planes to send them to family members. That is diversion, but it's not what we do. Mostly what we do is, is, is kind of paying people's movement fees. And unfortunately, they're all called diversion. What lifeworks calls diversion actually is, is a is a different thing altogether than either of those two things. So one of the challenges here is that, yes, there is crossover. And yes, we do hand people off to each other when necessary. Probably the only other version of diversion in the community that's similar to ours is we can now we can now is actually recently developed a program that's fairly similar to ours. Because we have some similar, some similar thought partners. But I will say diversion can mean very different things across the board. But what is interesting is that those of us who work in the family space especially, have found, and this is lifeworks and safe and sunrise and a few others, we have found that this is very much the thing that is that is our new strategy. It's interesting how when you talk [11:16:33 AM] interesting how when you talk to lifeworks, when you talk to safe, when you talk to sunrise, all of us are shifting our programs in this direction. It is something that even it's not even something that David's telling us to do. We're just all naturally going this direction, because it's the direction that we feel like in a system where we're going to have limited resources and anticipate federal changes. This is the way and we're all kind of naturally inclining in that direction anyways. But the diversion means different things to different people, which is why we call it wayfinder. >> Sure. >> Well. >> And I love that it is serving our families and, you know, putting four people in a unit for a similar cost of putting 1 or 2 people and just they're the future of that family can't go into unstated and understated. So. All right. That's all I got. Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you all so much for the presentation and for the insight. Colleagues. We are now going to go back to our sobering center board of director interviews. But before [11:17:33 AM] director interviews. But before we do that and go into executive session, I just wanted to see if there are any future items the committee would like to discuss or receive a briefing on at a future committee meeting for me, I'd like to request a briefing on bond priorities from the departments in the purview of the public health committee, which includes Austin public health, Austin animal services, homelessness strategy office and operations, as well as the Austin public library. If we can please that to our next committee agenda. Anything else? Okay, so we are going to now take a pause on item number two and take this conversation of discussion and possible action on appointment to the sobering center board of directors into executive session. The committee will now go into closed session to take up one item pursuant to section 551.074 of the government code, the committee will discuss personnel matters related to the discussion of the selection of a member to the sobering center board of directors. Is there any objection to going [11:18:35 AM] there any objection to going into closed session? Seeing none, the committee will now go into executive session. All [11:58:14 AM] All right. We are out of closed session and closed session. We discuss personnel matters related to item number five. We are resuming an item number two. I just want to thank colleagues for the great conversation and discussion. During executive session. We had the opportunity to review to interview applicants for the sobering center board of directors. The committee will now make a recommendation on the appointment for the sobering center board of directors, which will then go to the full city council for consideration. >> Yes. And if I may, I would like to nominate India Gardner as our recommendation to the full council. >> Very good. Councilmember Walters made a motion, seconded by vice chair duchen. Anyone opposed to that recommendation? Seeing none, that recommendation stands approved. That recommendation is for India Gardner to be a city council, or to be considered by city council for appointment to the sobering center board of directors. All right, [11:59:15 AM] directors. All right, colleagues, that concludes today's committee meeting. Thank you, everyone, for your participation there. If no, if there's no further business, I will adjourn us at 11:59 A.M. Thank you.