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.