“When you think about things like the slow impact of long-term economic pressures, the increased cost of living, the fact that my neighbors are slowly disappearing, and I experience a loss of culture and a sense of cultural erasure. It’s harder to think of that as violence directly. I think we don’t always identify it as violence for that reason. We think maybe it’s tough, brutal, but this is just the game of capitalism, and this ultra-commodified society that we’re all stuck in.” – João Paulo Connolly
As Texas After Violence has grown as an organization, we’ve expanded our focus to include the stories of those affected by and working to end more insidious forms of state violence. When we were awarded a grant earlier this year as part of Austin’s Reimagining Public Safety Grant Fund, we thought carefully about the forms of harm inflicted by the state within the city, and which issues have most catalyzed its residents. Over the past several years, community advocates have worked to decriminalize homelessness in Austin. The resulting visibility of people who had previously been forced to hide has led to a vicious backlash, which most recently culminated in the passage of Prop B this May. Many interviewees, including those directly impacted, have been working to decriminalize homelessness and discussed their experiences in the wake of the passage of Prop B in May. By collecting these accounts, we hope to shed light on the inherent violence of criminalizing basic human needs such as rest and shelter, and the work that’s being done by our interviewees and others to advocate for realistic, meaningful, and just solutions.
João Paulo Connolly, who is the director of organizing at Austin Justice Coalition, spoke with TAVP at AJC’s offices in East Austin on June 11 of this year. Of Prop B, JP said, “[it] really recriminalizes acts and behaviors that are inevitable for people who do not have a home, a house, for our unhoused neighbors. Things like sitting down on the sidewalk, or sleeping on the sidewalk, or even just hanging out in some spaces has now been criminalized. That also includes camping and a whole number of other things.”
According to JP, Austin is not just failing to provide for those already experiencing homelessness and other forms of housing instability, but also failing to prepare for the future:
“Austin’s last affordable neighborhoods are becoming incredibly unaffordable. There’s actually a much larger crisis of people experiencing homelessness that is looming right now because we have giant, old apartment complexes throughout the city in Austin’s historically Black and Brown lower-income neighborhoods that were all placed in those neighborhoods […] as a result of a long history of segregation that was not only the 1928 master plan and Jim Crow in Austin, but continuous pattern of zoning policies that constantly warehoused, stacked all of Austin’s Black and Brown and low-income people in certain parts of the city. As a result of that, we have a large population concentrated in parts of East, Central East, Northeast, South East Austin, that live in apartment complexes that are quite old and rundown. These apartment complexes are treated like hot potatoes by their property management companies and landlords who buy them and sell them off after two or three years. At some point, they will face the risk of being torn down and redeveloped. Even if they’re not, the cost of rent in those apartments keeps going up, but the maintenance and improvements are not there. The apartments are falling apart and the rent is going up. Unless there is a massive new program for tenants rights and tenant stabilization in Austin, the wave of evictions that’s coming coupled with people who just aren’t able to find places to live is going to lead to complete displacement of low income Black and Brown people who don’t have some other support system from this city.”
To read the transcript of JP’s interview, click here.
Previous interviews related to decriminalizing homelessness and affordable housing in Austin include Alvin Sanderson, Marina Roberts, and Tandera Louie. For more information about Austin Justice Coalition, visit their website.
