Austin's irresponsible leadership promotes homelessness

Thomas Lifson:

I think that it is no coincidence that the cities with the farthest left political cultures – San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, for example – seem to have the largest number of homeless people living on their sidewalks, in their parks, and under their freeway overpasses. The mainstream media have no curiosity whatsoever as to why this might be the case, or even bother to make a connection.

It may come down to something as simple as the eternal truth that whenever you subsidize something, you get more of it. But along the way, there are many other aspects of the progressive ideology that contribute to the tens of thousands of individual decisions that result on people living on the streets instead of providing for their own housing, from the artificially high price of housing dues to land use restrictions and zoning in deep blue cities, to the refusal to hold people responsible for their own actions.

An experiment of sorts in underway in Austin, Texas, the city whose progressive denizens beg their fellow citizens to “Keep Austin Weird.”

KXAN TV reports:

 For the next six weeks you may see violet-colored trash bags in certain sections of Austin.

It’s a new program the city is trying out to encourage those experiencing homelessness to clean up after themselves. 

...

It was giving 18-year-olds the vote that made Austin weird.  Before that, the city was basically run by business interests and the students at UT kept their weird thoughts to themselves.  While the student population has doubled since then, the city's population has quadrupled.  Apparently, many of the new residents are as weird as the students.  BTW, the slogan originated with a hippie who may have been into the drug scene who was named Oat Willie.  He promoted it with the sale of T-shirts with that slogan.