Growing San Antonio homeless tent city being call a 'mini-Austin' скачать в хорошем качестве

Growing San Antonio homeless tent city being call a 'mini-Austin'

SAN ANTONIO – There’s a growing tent city underneath the downtown highway where Highway 281 becomes I-37 near Brooklyn Avenue. The dozens of tents are drawing comparisons to a mini-Austin. News 4 Trouble Shooter Emily Baucum takes you there and finds out what it will take to not see encampments in our community. “This is like our last resort here,” a homeless man tells us. "Does anybody really want to be living here?" On the outskirts of the tent city, we meet this 50-year-old man who doesn’t want his face shown but gives us a few minutes of his time to explain what life is like here. "There is a community here. This is our community here,” he says. “You’ll have to leave if you break our rules.” He says a drinking problem led to this life, and that you’re safer in numbers in a tent city. At night, he says he hears screams and gun shots. The man says one of his neighbors under the bridge is a doctor who has fallen on hard times and that we are all just one lost paycheck away from ending up in their shoes. "We're people, too. We have emotions, feelings, family too,” the man tells us. Affordable housing advocate Michael Shackelford called the trouble Shooters because he could no longer drive past and stay silent. "It's inhumane the way they are living and it's not San Antonio. I believe it’s a mini-Austin” Shackelford says. “How does this happen? And how do we fix this?" To find out how this happens, we head across downtown to Haven For Hope. You might be thinking, why don’t they just swoop in to clean things up? The shelter’s top leader says it’s not that simple. "We visit the camps daily,” Haven For Hope CEO Kenny Wilson says. "People ask me all the time, very good friends of mine say, 'Why don't they came to Haven? Why can't you get them?' We can't force them." He says Haven is set up to help people on its campus, and there are several reasons people won’t go there: addiction, mental health, and frankly because well-meaning people are making tent cities possible. "The more people that provide food and medical care there and tents, I think it's going to make it harder for them to want to come to Haven For Hope or anywhere else that could help them,” Wilson says. Okay, so how do we fix this? The Trouble Shooters hold Mayor Ron Nirenberg accountable. "Can you tell me what tangible steps you'll be taking when we leave this interview to help those people at 281 and Brooklyn?" reporter Baucum asks. "Number one, we have to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place,” Mayor Nirenberg answers. “What I am calling for is some additional resources into our eviction prevention programs including our Emergency Housing Assistance Program." He says through the pandemic, San Antonio is providing more emergency housing help than any other major city he’s seen. It’s projected to total more than $133 million. "We have to understand that what we see in terms of the encampments is a symptom of a larger issue,” Mayor Nirenberg says. "Is the pandemic an opportunity to say: this has been a problem for too long - let's fix it?” Baucum asks. "I believe it is,” Mayor Nirenberg answers. "I've likened this pandemic to a great earthquake in our country that has basically rattled everything back to the ground. It is only through that kind of catastrophic disruption that we can see the foundations that were uneven and broken that we were building on." He says you see that in downtown’s tent city. Moving forward, the Mayor is beefing up outreach teams so they can go inside encampments and build trust. "This is not the San Antonio we have to be,” Mayor Nirenberg says. And hopefully, the outreach teams can convince people who feel living on the streets is all they have that more is waiting. "Just don't forget us. That's all I ask,” the homeless man we met tells us. More Trouble Shooter stories: https://news4sanantonio.com/news/trou...