Housing and Homelessness
Austin is seeing improvement in addressing homelessness.
Let’s look at homelessness in Austin by the numbers.
Austin’s Homeless Strategy Office accounts for less than 0.5% of the City’s General Fund.
That means less than one penny of every city dollar goes to addressing homelessness.
Local organizations that receive public funding for homelessness services in Austin are, on average, audited 9 times every year by financial auditors, grantors, and local, state, and federal agencies.
Even with that minimal spending, the numbers show that Austin is actually preventing people from becoming unhoused:
2024 and 2025 saw massive declines in first-time homelessness, breaking a years-long upward trend.
The number of people moved into permanent supportive housing has increased by 40% since 2023.
Every year, roughly 6,000 people move from homelessness into housing, with around 3,000 of them doing so through assistance from the local homeless response system.
The number of available shelter beds has increased by 70% since 2022.
Thanks to the City of Austin’s investment and the nonprofit organizations doing the work, most people who experience homelessness never end up living on the streets long-term.
Independent analysis shows that without Austin’s homelessness response system, we would likely see 18,000–22,000 experiencing unsheltered homelessness on our streets tonight. Thanks to the work of the HRS, that number is just 3,800.
There is no question that Austin has a housing problem — but the problem isn’t that we spend too much money trying to solve it.
The City is spending money to help our most vulnerable.
Austin’s dollars are not going toward facilitating crimes and dangerous behavior, as some on X would have you believe.
A significant portion of funding supports:
Children and families who would otherwise be homeless
Women and children fleeing domestic violence
Rapid rehousing to prevent long-term homelessness
Prevention services that keep people housed in the first place — which are some of the highest-impact, lowest-cost interventions in the entire system.
Jail isn’t a solution for homelessness.
Some of the wealthiest in Austin argue that the only solution to persistent homelessness is jail. Not only is that cruel, it’s not a real solution.
Treating homelessness as a public safety issue rather than a housing issue is costly to taxpayers: it overburdens emergency, public health, and correctional resources.
People who are booked into jails when they are unhoused have longer jail stays than average: The length of stay for unhoused people in jails is 2.5 times longer than people who are unhoused. Those jail stays also pose health risks to people who are jailed.
Unhoused people booked into jails are disproportionately older (over age 55), therefore posing additional health challenges and costs.