Austin gets a chance to vote against the evils of liberalism

 City Journal:

It was a decision made in the dead of the night: on June 20, 2019, at 2 A.M., Austin’s city council legalized homeless camps and panhandling. A year later, in August 2020, the council voted to defund the city’s police budget by more than a third. These decisions sparked immediate consequences for public order—and eventually a fierce backlash from a not-so-silent majority that rejected the council’s progressive agenda on homelessness (though the effects of these policies linger in parts of the city).

This November, Austin voters will have another chance to vote in favor of restoring order. Pending the outcome of Proposition A, Austin could become one of the first major American cities to have its citizens vote to “refund” and restaff the police.

Restoring order will be an uphill battle. The council’s decision to allow homeless encampments had an abrupt impact on Austin. “We quickly saw a difference,” said Greg McCormack, executive director of Front Steps, a local homeless-services provider. Craig Staley, owner of local bodega chain Royal Blue Grocery, agreed: “They changed the world downtown in about three weeks.”

After having been flat for years, homelessness in Texas’s capital exploded. Homeless from other cities migrated across Texas to camp in public. The situation rapidly became unstainable—and deadly. Exposed to the elements and to each other, 10 percent of the city’s homeless died in 2020 alone, with substance abuse being the leading killer. The wave of death continued despite record sums of spending on homeless services: nearly $70 million this fiscal year, combined with over $200 million in federal funding. A study of public spending on the 250 “most expensive” homeless individuals in Travis County tallied a combined annual cost of $223,000 per person.

It was in these circumstances that Proposition B, a grassroots referendum to reinstate the city’s camping ban, made it on the ballot. Thanks to the efforts of Save Austin Now—a bipartisan coalition spearheaded by Republican consultant and county party chair Matt Mackowiak and Democratic activist Cleo Petricek—the proposal made its way through the legislative process, shepherded along by leaders with bulldog organizational instincts. “We didn’t agree on national politics,” Mackowiak acknowledged, describing his relationship with Petricek, “but we had to turn our city around.” The pair put aside their differences to give residents a say on public disorder, even if the increasingly progressive city council didn’t want to listen.

To get Prop. B on the ballot, the group conducted foot campaigns during the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns to collect the necessary tens of thousands of signatures; it faced early rejections of original petitions, battles for city council seats, and even a 1 A.M. argument between Mackowiak and avowed Communist councilmember Greg Casar over the amount of human waste a typical homeless person produces.

Austin mayor Steve Adler predicted the vote would be “very close.” It wasn’t: Prop. B won a decisive 58–42 percent victory this May. The camping ban, despite opposition from the mayor and nine out of ten council members in Austin, garnered more than 40 percent support from Democratic voters, 88 percent from independents, and 92 percent from Republicans. Prop. B won in nearly every neighborhood, too.

It was an important win, but homelessness has been only half the story of Austin’s turn toward disorder. The movement to defund the police also worsened the situation. Amid a national wave of anti-police campaigning, Austin’s fiscal 2020 police budget dropped from $434.5 million in 2019 to $292.2 million. The city council also cut three cadet classes and 150 officers from the budget.

Proposition A, another brainchild of Save Austin Now, would require the city to reverse course, hiring and maintaining more police officers (two per every 1,000 residents), doubling their training, and increasing their presence in the community—all to achieve levels of policing Austin enjoyed just a few years ago.
...

I lived in Austin back before the liberals too over.  It was a pleasant city back them.  The liberal infestation started happening shortly after the voting age was lower to 18 and liberal college students at UT gave the libs a majority of votes.  That trend continued after the population growth of the city made the student vote less determinative.  The city has been poorly run and traffic problems also persist.  Since they defended the police the murder rate in the city has nearly doubled.  Hopefully, the voters will wise up and quit electing liberal Democrats.