Grumet: Wintry blast hit even harder for Austin's homeless residents impacted by sweeps

When you live outside, you pay close attention to the arrival of winter. You prepare for it. You stock up on blankets and coats and extra socks. You gather propane tanks, and if you’re lucky, a small generator.

The homeless encampment where Ann Marler lived with about 20 people last fall had amassed all of those things — then lost them, she said, when city crews bulldozed the camp off Bluff Springs Road about two months ago.

“They came at 7 a.m. one morning and told us we had 5 minutes to get our stuff. I lost everything,” Marler, 60, told me Sunday afternoon, thinking of the extra clothing and blankets that would have come in handy as this week’s arctic blast rolled over Texas.

“We had cold-weather stuff ready,” she said, shaking her head. “They took it all.”

I met Marler at her new campsite off Onion Creek, as an outreach team from the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center brought her a black knit blanket, a backpack with toiletries and a bag of mandarin oranges. They told her about the city shelters, but she decided to brace for the bitter cold with her dogs in her blanket-covered tent.

As I spoke with her and others camping in the wooded pockets of Southeast Austin, I heard a common refrain: Surviving a hard freeze, with overnight temperatures falling into the teens Monday and Tuesday night, is difficult enough. The city’s sweeps of homeless camps in recent months — tossing people’s belongings, scattering people from their support network — plainly made this dangerous weather harder.

“This is the third year we’re once again scrambling to support our neighbors with survival gear, and honestly, we’re tired and our resources are low,” Sasha Rose, the organizing lead of Austin Mutual Aid, told me. The group relies on donations for everything people might need: tents, blankets, gloves, hats, sleeping bags, tarps, nonperishable food and other camping supplies.

Partnering with Sunrise and other organizations in the Austin Winter Collaborative Effort, Rose estimated they reached at least 1,000 people around this freeze event with cold weather supplies, as well as rides and support to three non-city-run shelters.

“But it’s all just a Band-Aid when we know two days after the freeze, everything we’ve come together to provide will be trashed in a sweep,” Rose added. “It’s so discouraging to us all.”

Indeed, this was the outcome that homeless advocates feared when Austin voters in 2021 reinstated a ban on homeless camping. The Legislature that year outlawed homeless camping statewide, too — as if putting such a prohibition on the books magically resolved homelessness.

In reality, these bans are heartless half-measures in a city that lacks enough shelter space or transitional housing for the roughly 6,600 people experiencing homelessness in Austin. People are banned from camping, but there's nowhere else for them to go.

Those who live outside — a good number of them on waiting lists for housing — could wake up any morning and discover crews are going to scrape away their home and trash their belongings. The city offers housing to some people during these sweeps. But many of the people living out there are still living out there, the difficulties of day-to-day existence made even harder by having to replace what they’ve lost.

The city of Austin provides 72 hours’ notice before cleaning out a camp so residents have time to move their belongings and connect with social services, spokeswoman Jenny LaCoste-Caputo said. But residents can be removed immediately if they resume camping at a site that was previously cleared, she said, especially if there are safety concerns.

LaCoste-Caputo noted residents can store their belongings at Violet KeepSafe Storage, a free storage facility for those experiencing homelessness. But the storage facility is in downtown Austin, while the laws banning encampments have pushed many people to out-of-sight camps around the city. Getting from the Onion Creek camps to Violet KeepSafe Storage, for instance, would involve a trip across two or three bus routes, and walking 1 to 1.5 miles, for an excursion totaling about an hour and 15 minutes — and that’s just one way.

That's quite a trek to store or retrieve some blankets.

LaCoste-Caputo said the city’s focus has been getting people out of the cold and into city-run emergency shelters during this freeze event. More than 600 people found warmth and meals at those shelters.

But thousands more took their chances elsewhere. Marler thought she couldn’t take both of her dogs — a black Labrador named Lucy and an energetic Chihuahua named Chance — with her to a shelter (in fact, city officials told me there’s no limit on the number of pets). Several others told me they worried about leaving their belongings unattended.

And for some, the shelter experience itself can be overwhelming. Having gone to a shelter during the 2021 winter freeze, Kent Romines told me he will never return to one.

“It was hell: A hundred men on cots, side by side,” said Romines, 64, who’s been homeless for about six years. “People have no manners. They don’t know what boundaries are. I got out as fast as I could.”

Then his voice softened. “There’s a lot of broken people out here and they’re just doing the best they can,” Romines said. “Society put a lot of demands on them that they can’t meet.”

I followed the Sunrise outreach team up the road. Kelley Jura-Myrick, Sunrise's mobile and shelter services program manager, parked behind the Home Depot at Interstate 35 and Slaughter Lane, then walked into the woods, looking for a small camp that was there a month ago. She found only the tire tracks of earth-moving equipment across the clearing where a few tents used to be.

Jura-Myrick circled the clearing in disbelief. She was worried about one resident in particular, a veteran on a waiting list for housing.

“He’s working with a case manager, but he doesn’t have a phone,” she said. “Now it makes it hard for anyone to find him.”

Jura-Myrick asked everyone about the veteran as her team handed out a couple of fleece and mylar emergency blankets, along with food kits carrying peanut butter, applesauce and other nonperishables, to residents at another encampment across the way. Finally someone pointed to a tent along the side of the road.

Jura-Myrick found the veteran. He assured her he’s in touch with his case manager.

He’d moved all of 400 feet. But it was just like starting over.

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or via Twitter at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/news/columns.

How to helpEmergency outreach efforts are coming to an end, but the homeless service providers around Austin can always use volunteers and donations. The Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center can be reached at 512-368-2685 or sunrisenavigationcenter.org.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Hard freeze in Texas made even harder for Austin's homeless: Grumet