The background
The council’s governance committee March 20 formally recommended the whole council be briefed in April about various measures that city officials could take to expand outreach to unsheltered people, and identify and clean up encampments set up by homeless individuals.
City officials said many San Antonio residents in summer 2023 identified homeless outreach and encampments as a top concern in the citywide budget priorities survey for fiscal year 2023-24.
The approved FY 2023-24 budget contains funding for more outreach coordinators, additional homeless shelter space, and abating encampments around town.
What they’re saying
District 7 council member Marina Alderete Gavito said the entire council must decide where exactly to spend budgeted funds to boost homelessness outreach and clean out encampments.
She also said there has been an increase in complaints from constituents, including members of District 7 neighborhood associations, about encampments in residential neighborhoods, near schools, in parks, and in drainage ditches.
“Treating the unsheltered population with compassion and connecting them to care should be a priority, but if we do not act now, the level of frustration will reach a tipping point where that compassion erodes,” Alderete Gavito said in a statement.
Alderete Gavito said chronically unsheltered individuals are not receiving the resources and support they need where they are at, be it in an alleyway or a drainage ditch. She added that the accumulation of debris in such locations poses a health and safety risk to both sheltered residents in those neighborhoods and to the unsheltered population.
“Thanks to our newly adopted budget measures, help is available, and we are targeting the problem, not the individual,” he said in a statement.
