Houston Mayor John Whitmire’s administration plans to ramp up the effort to remove homeless people from public spaces in July.
“Our goal is to get the homeless off the streets of Houston,” Whitmire said at a press conference last week.
Larry Satterwhite, Whitmire’s Public Safety and Homeland Security director, told Houston Public Media that the administration will seek a modification to city rules in the second week of July.
The “civility ordinance” currently prohibits lying down, sitting or placing personal possessions on sidewalks during the day in 12 parts of the city.
Satterwhite said the change would expand that to all hours. It would require the City Council’s approval.
The rule change would take effect “for the Downtown and the East End side, or EaDo side, for starters,” Satterwhite told reporters last week. “It’s 24/7 that you can’t lie down, you can’t sit down, you can’t sleep. But guess what — when we are addressing them, we’re saying, ‘We have a bed for you to go to. We have a place for you to go. And then we have resources to offer up.'”
The administration discussed the civility ordinance expansion at a committee meeting in February, when housing director Mike Nichols said “it obviously hasn’t come before council yet because the idea is you need to have a rehousing plan and a mental health plan if you’re really going to enforce this and make it effective.”
At the time, the city was about $50 million short of its $70 million annual goal for Whitmire’s initiative to end street homelessness in Houston. Since then, the Harris County METRO Transit Authority gave the city $10 million, and Harris County Commissioners Court approved $8 million of the county’s own efforts to address homelessness. The city is also planning to spend $40 million of federal disaster recovery funds on programs for homeless people.
“We believe we can get to equilibrium,” Nichols said at a press conference last week, “which means if somebody comes forward and is homeless, in 90 days, we can find them a place to be.”
Nichols emphasized partnerships with service providers like the Harris Center for Mental Health and Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities as well as the Houston Recovery Center. Nichols said the city also plans to set up four to five “hubs” with services and temporary beds for homeless people.
“I will keep saying we have to save our powder to make sure we continue to house people,” Nichols said. “If we just move them into shelters and then they don’t have outward into housing… it becomes a failure.”
Starting in October, Whitmire said addressing homelessness was one of his top priorities. He’s criticized efforts by previous administrations — even as the region’s homeless population plummeted from more than 8,000 in 2011 to 3,300 last year — and has set an ambitious goal of completely removing all homeless people from the streets within city limits.
Since then, the Houston/Harris County Coalition for the Homeless, in partnership with the city, successfully cleared three encampments in central Houston — putting more than 75 people on the path towards housing.
According to the coalition, 1,100 of the 3,280 homeless people in the Houston area last year lived outside shelters on the streets.
One of those people, a homeless man in Midtown named Dave, said “there’s gotta be other alternatives” to the civility ordinance expansion.
“If you sleep on the sidewalk or any public area, we’re gonna either arrest you or fine you — it’s like, oh, so that’s gonna solve the problem,” Dave said.
The civility ordinance was in effect during the day in Midtown, where Dave was violating the rule. He said he would rather go to jail than a temporary shelter, where he wouldn’t be able to keep his shopping cart full of items.
“This is my stuff here. I can’t leave this,” he said.
The expansion of the civility ordinance in Downtown and EaDo to a 24/7 rule will test the partnership’s ability to remove people from the streets and put them on the path to permanent housing while ensuring they don’t return.
Violators of the ordinance will first receive a warning by police officers. The civility ordinance section of city code does not specify a penalty, but under another ordinance, blocking a sidewalk can result in a $200 to $500 fine.
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