AUSTIN, Texas — The Downtown Austin Alliance is launching a new pilot program in collaboration with the nonprofit Urban Alchemy to assist people experiencing homelessness downtown.
The collaboration seeks to find the root of homelessness in the city, with a plan of recruiting trained practitioners with Urban Alchemy who have experienced homelessness in the past to help the current homeless population.
“Their practitioners are people who are trauma informed and have lived [this] experience [with] homelessness ... Perhaps lived experiences incarcerated, lived experiences [with] substance abuse recovery,” said Bill Brice, the senior vice president of Investor Relations for the Downtown Austin Alliance.
The new Homelessness Engagement Assistance Response Team will be downtown Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., working to de-escalate issues and disturbances involving the homeless population.
Urban Alchemy has done several similar successful homeless outreach programs in major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“We know that the program has been effective in areas that have some of the worst homeless problems in the country, and we believe it will be very effective here and help prevent us from ever becoming like some of the other cities that we know have a lot worse problem than we do in Austin,” Brice said.
The Downtown Austin Alliance also hopes this program will help alleviate pressure on the Austin Police Department with all the non-emergency calls they get.
“That's really important right now because we know the police department has diminishing resources, and to keep the resources that they have on the street focused on serious crime, not responding to non-emergency issues is really important,” Brice said.
The pilot program will start on Feb. 1 and run until July 31. Afterward, an evaluation process will take place to decide whether or not to continue the program.
The Homelessness Engagement Assistance Response Team will operate in the downtown area around Sixth Street and Congress Avenue all the way to the South Interstate 35 frontage road.