AUSTIN, TX — Last Saturday we marched on Matt Mackowiak’s office, the genocide-supporting Republican strategist behind Prop B and Save Austin Now.
We first rallied at the Texas State Capitol with a small camp tent, and distributed literature against Prop B and the myriad of other repressive unlawful measures that aim to criminalize or otherwise force our street friends and neighbors to put up with displacement, coercion, targeting and abuse by the City of Austin and the State agents. Police showed up briefly at the end, but we continued to take the street and the intersection outside the home of Save Austin Now.
Prop B, the proposal put up in the brightest lights, would not only bring back a city-wide camping ban (currently, camping is mostly just banned near shelters), it would unconstitutionally make several prohibitions: Establish no rest for anyone (no sit/no lie) in the zones downtown and near the University of Texas campus; ban “panhandling” (free speech) — ‘flying a sign’ [panhandling with a sign] — overnight; potentially close parks to all poor people.
There is a quieter more predictable victory being organized by the genocidists of the Texas Legislature. HB 1925 and SB 987 are both bills working their way through the House and Senate that would deny funding to cities that relax camping bans. All of these laws are steeped in Austin’s racist past of vagrancy laws aimed at people of color.
The city’s current strategy to clear camps, the HEAL initiative, is just one of these. This program is currently targeting four camps containing a couple hundred people with “housing” that consists of hotels staffed by almost a dozen police officers each, with only 50 rooms currently available. Once people at a camp are “housed”, the camp will be permanently “closed” to keep Austin from seeing the future houselessness created by the City’s hyper-development/hyper-inflated high-rise condos real estate market, poverty wages, and a profit-centered ineffective healthcare system.
We called out all of these programs and more for their dehumanizing approach to people suffering the economically and socially-determined ills of houselessness. We will not accept the further abuse of our friends and neighbors.
Thanks to allies from the Challenger Street Newspaper, Downtown Camp, ATX Camp Support, Concordia Co-op, Star Power Black Kollective, Little Petal Alliance, and Homes Not Handcuffs.
For a more detailed version of this article, please see People’s Tribune Latest News.
