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Clean-up crews have started to move through homeless encampments in Austin, TX to remove debris, and pack up the folks living there, primarily under highway overpasses.

Fox News reports, The project started on Monday morning as cleaning crews used leaf blowers and street sweepers to clear debris while they were guarded by state police.

Fox News sent a camera crew and reporter Aishah Hasine into Austin to investigate and ask questions to people on the ground.

“We saw… crews out and about escorted by state police cleaning up the trash out here, using leaf blowers and a street sweeper,” Hasine told the hosts of “Fox & Friends.” “The second part we believe will be to pack up the folks living here as the state steps in and frustration mounts, over how the city is handling this crisis.”

 

Homeless encampments began to increase in number earlier this year when Austin city officials repealed a “camping ban” that allowed people to sit, lie down and camp in most public places where they previously wouldn’t have legally been able to.

Doesn’t “camping” sound picturesque and eco-friendly?

 

Problem is, since then the camping ban was lifted, homelessness increased, and why wouldn’t it?

 

One man interviewed by Hasine claimed homeless people come from all around the country to live on the streets in Austin because the authorities are lax and there are many incentives, like free food and shelter.

“You don’t have to buy food,” he said. “Everybody feeds you. They give you money. You can party. It’s a blast, man.”

 

Riiight.

And then there’s the matter of drug paraphernalia, trash and poop, which opponents of the homeless camp and the lifting of restrictions said increased.

But activists worry the homeless people will truly have no place to go, as nearby shelters are already full.

Abbott’s spokesperson said the state would be directing the Texas Department of Transportation “to clear encampments from underpasses throughout the city, while providing those experiencing homelessness with access to resources for services and care. In addition to these short-term services, the Office of the Governor is working with a coalition consisting of private sector and faith-based organizations on longer-term solutions.”

 

Austin’s problems seem small compared to issues of homelessness in California.

Last week a fire erupted in Southern California in the Simi Valley, and for a time threatened the Reagan Library. The fire started near a homeless encampment. Hm.

Arson investigators were interviewing residents, but so far, no cause for the fire has been mentioned.

 

And of course, there’s San Francisco, which currently has a homeless population of over 8,000 souls.

But it’s not like the city isn’t trying to do anything.

The City Journal reports, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, no other American city has spent more on affordable housing. From 2004 to 2014, the city spent $2 billion on nearly 3,000 new units of permanent supportive housing, which comes with drug counseling and social workers. More have been constructed since then, and thousands more are in the works, along with more shelter beds.

The City Journal posits a disturbing reason why homelessness is on the rise:

For the last three decades, San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. The city has done so in the name of compassion toward the homeless. The results have been the opposite: street squalor and misery have increased, even as government expenditures have ballooned.

 

The City of Austin, TX seems to be backing out of that little experiment as well — at least if Governor Abbott has anything to do with it.

 

 

 

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