Vote No on Prop B
There’s a young man i can’t stop thinking about when i think about Prop B. Let’s call him H.
H and i crossed paths at the nonprofit community bike shop where i used to work. When i first met H, he was living in a group home. He and a couple of his friends had come to the shop to take part in the Earn-A-Bike program, where folks volunteer time, learn skills, and eventually get to fix up a bicycle to keep for themselves. The graduation rate was extremely low — it was easy to show up once or twice, patch a few tubes, and then move on to other things in life — but H and his friends were committed and kept showing up week after week. H was exceptionally kind, patient, and open-hearted for a teenage boy, especially one growing up in a system as troubled as Texas foster care, so it was a thrill for us to see him succeed and ride away on the bike his months of hard work built.
Some time passed before H dropped in again. He came back looking exhausted. There were bits of leaves in his hair, and his bike was a mess. During the hours spent struggling to make it rideable again, H disclosed that he’d been living outdoors. When he turned 18 and aged out of foster care, there was no other safety net waiting for him. Like many unhoused Austinites prior to City Council’s vote to decriminalize camping, sitting, and lying down in June 2019, H was living in the woods.
We tried to talk H into taking a bike that needed less work than the one he’d earned, but he was proud of his own, loyal to it despite some terminal defects. He kept coming back regularly for a while, spending at least as much time with a wrench on his transportation as with his feet on its pedals. He found a trailer that was donated without its hitch and MacGyvered a solution so he could use it to carry groceries back to his tent. His persistence was admirable, but these snapshots of a single, shoestrung element of his daily life brought cause to the deeply tired look in his eyes.
Proposition B, a ballot measure to recriminalize the unhoused, couldn’t come before Austin voters at a more pivotal moment. The city’s housing crisis — snowballing through logarithmic population growth, boom times for the tech sector, and constant roadblocks to adaptation from longtime homeowners and the antagonistic Texas lege alike — had already reached a fever pitch by the time the pandemic hit. After a catastrophic year for the service, arts, and entertainment industries — whose workers, oft-overlapping, are the blood beating through the heart of Austin’s heavily marketed cultural appeal — February’s freeze made matters even worse, rendering entire apartment complexes uninhabitable in a place where the stock already fails the demand. The tenuous grasp most people have on shelter in Central Texas has never been shakier.
With whole communities being priced out of town and neighborhoods disappearing below new construction without new beds, Save Austin Now, the Prop B campaign led by Travis County GOP Chair Matt Mackowiak, still insists on painting the person who goes unhoused inside a pigeonhole. An adult man, working age but unwilling to work, addicted with no desire to get clean, mentally ill but physically fit, a threat is the way SAN and their supporters insist we should imagine the homeless. If hope holds true and SAN lacks the majority, they’ve still been disturbingly effective at centering an image that transforms circumstances — being poor, unsupported, and unsheltered — into a specific type of person. It’s a preconception that’s saturated conversation and leaked across headlines about “homeless housing,” as though someone who has a home still remains a homeless through permanent flaws in their character.
The stereotype serves not only to demonize the people pitching tents downtown, but also to distort the picture of who goes unhoused. For instance, when SAN cofounder Cleo Petricek sells Prop B as a measure to keep children safe, she’s ignoring at least 2,000 Austin ISD students experiencing homelessness annually, including at least 27 who slept on the streets in the 2017–2018 school year. Most of those pupils are also among the 5 million Texans without health insurance, individuals and families a bad break away from the medical debts that factored into loss of housing for a quarter of folks surveyed by Grassroots Leadership and Gathering Ground Theater in 2018. The grain of reality SAN inflates into its grotesque — that chronically unhoused, unsheltered single adults are the most visibly homeless population — masks the families, the folks in transitional shelter (both toward a home and away from a home, through official facilities or spare bedrooms), and the people sleeping in vehicles (who, under Prop B, could once again be ticketed for doing so). During the last decade of no-sit no-lie, a third of individuals as well as most families experiencing homelessness, totaling about 60% of unhoused Texans, were in some form of shelter (though trends in those stats also betray the tenuousness of “shelters” that are less than homes).
If the turbulence of the moment can help us separate homelessness from its caricatures and recognize it as a circumstance that we’re only separated from by fortune, perhaps we can open a lens to the harm Prop B would cause. Much of it is spelled out very clearly in that 2018 survey, where most respondents said criminal ordinances caused severe sleep deprivation, regular police harassment, and financial strain from ticketing. Some respondents said they never felt safe, nowhere at all. 84% agreed the criminalization of their daily lives “caused more stress.” If all that is unimaginable, try panning to the perspective of service providers — ECHO, Integral Care, street outreach, the mutual aid groups who kept hundreds of people from freezing to death two months ago. Imagine trying to do what they do while playing an endless game of hide-and-seek, the people you’re trying to help made hard to find by design.
At the core, in an upended place at an uncertain time, Prop B is forcing a deep question of our collective humanity. It is a uniquely brutal thing to put on a ballot. Can you name another time you’ve been asked to vote, directly, whether people — people you can go out and look straight in the eye — are criminals or not?
The last time i saw H, his life had changed again. He’d connected with services. He had a place to call his own, a job, a new bike he’d bought for himself. He was the happiest i’d ever seen him.
Early voting is April 19-April 27. Election Day is May 1. Polling locations, complete sample ballots, and the nonpartisan League of Women Voters Guide are available at https://countyclerk.traviscountytx.gov/elections/current-election.html
To help defeat Prop B, visit https://noonpropb2021.org/
