Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller Reason

Homelessness has been rising in America’s West Coast cities for more than a decade. Entire blocks of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland are occupied by tent encampments plagued by violence, drug overdoses, and disease.

But the problem is concentrated in a handful of cities; nationwide the homeless population has been shrinking for a decade. To figure out why some places are so much more successful than others, we took a trip to Texas where the homeless population declined almost 30 percent over the last decade. (It grew by more than 40 percent in California in that same time span.) Today, the Lone Star state counts 90 homeless people per 100,000 residents. In California, the problem is almost five times as bad.

Not only does Texas have vastly different politics and policies from the West Coast, but it’s also home to three large cities with three very different approaches to homelessness: Austin, San Antonio, and Houston.

From a privately run village of tiny homes just outside Austin to a nonprofit serving San Antonio’s homeless with an intensive, no-excuses treatment and skills training program to a single, centralized provider in Houston that’s streamlined its approach to quickly house thousands of the city’s homeless residents, what we found in Texas was innovation.

But the federal government doesn’t fund innovation. For decades, it’s committed to a one-size-fits-all approach known as “Housing First.” States like California have followed suit, leaving many charities with a choice to either fall in line or turn down millions in federal and state grants.

The result: More people living—and dying—on the streets as governors and big city mayors promise that the much-awaited free, permanent housing is just around the corner.

Our first stop was the city of Austin, where progressive activism exists in the shadow of a conservative state house. It’s a boom-and-bust town—a magnet for business and tech innovation, which has lured some of Silicon Valley’s top performers. When the ultrarich moved in, housing prices started to resemble San Francisco’s, and the homeless population climbed.

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