Tag: Southside Community Center

Bonus! 3 pm workshop, 4/21/26

by The San Marxist, posted in 3 pm Workshops

Workshop #1: The Homeless PIT count

“PIT” stands for “Point in Time”. The PIT Count is a fixed day in January, where cities nationwide try to actually figure how many people are homeless in their communities.   Each city assembles a team of people who go out into the community and try to actually count and talk to as many homeless people as they can find on that day. (PIT count 2024, PIT count 2025)

The rules are set by the Housing and Urban Development agency, (HUD). If you complete a PIT count, it helps you apply for federal funding.

For unsheltered, think people in cars, and people outside.

For sheltered, think Hays County Women’s Shelter, Southside, Marla’s Place, but not people in hotels or motels.

The PIT count is not perfect. But it gives us useful information.

The blue column is people that they saw, but didn’t get to talk to. The blue is included in the orange group.

The gray column – Sheltered – is much smaller in 2026 than in 2025. This is because in 2025, the PIT count day ended up being a “cold weather night”, where Southside was open to everyone.

(I’m not sure why the chart has those weird gaps.)

Ages of people they were able to talk to:

and gender:

and race:

Generally homeless people have significant obstacles in their lives:

Almost all the homeless people in Hays County are in San Marcos:

They drove out to Wimberley and Dripping Springs, but did not see any people there. In Wimberly, they saw evidence of encampments, but didn’t actually see any homeless people.

Here’s where we’ve landed over the past six years:

Again, PIT counts aren’t perfect. You have to be careful when you’re looking at data like this. You can’t conclude that we’re solving homelessness – it could be that people are hiding, because they’re worried about ICE.

One presenter says that whenever ICE rumors pop up on social media, the line at the Food Bank gets cut in half. (That is so deeply depressing on so many levels.)

…

We also have a second source for homeless data: the public schools.

All the school districts collect this data at the beginning of the school year:

This year’s data:

So SMCISD has an estimated 105 K-12 students who are housing insecure. This doesn’t include their parents or any baby siblings who aren’t yet in school.

One offhand comment by the presenter: Statistically, apparently babies are the age group most likely to be evicted, and children aged 2-5 are the next most likely to be evicted.

Pretty grim commentary on our society!

…

At last year’s presentation, they said there was an urgent need to include homeless people in emergency action plans. For example, if we have a winter storm, how do we keep homeless people safe? How do we prevent families from freezing in their cars?

This year: progress! Relevant groups have come together and are working on this.

This year’s ask: the Homeless Management Information System. (HMIS)

It’s extremely difficult for case managers to keep track of details of homeless people. Which doctors has this person seen? What medications are they on? Do we need to locate their birth certificate or social security card? Etc.

HMIS is the system run by the Texas Homeless Network, so that everyone can pool their data and coordinate care. It costs $450 per user.

Can San Marcos help pay for this?

Answer: You bet! We’re planning on putting $9000 towards this at the May Homeless Coalition meeting.

…

Workshop #2: Homeless Action Plan

In 2024, we gave Southside $50K to come up with a Homeless Action Plan, and then another $800K to carry it out. This came out of federal Covid money, so it all has to be spent by December 31st, 2026.

This is their report on how it went!

Here’s the overview:

They focused on families primarily. Like we saw a moment ago, there are at least 105 kids in SMCISD who are housing-insecure.

(But not exclusively – they did also help individuals.)

There are three main tentpoles to their plan:

The presentation walked through each of the tentpoles individually.

So first, Emergency Assistance:

Think: car repair so someone can get to their job, or covering a two-week gap in pay when they get a new job, or covering part of a high electric bill, etc. You don’t want a small emergency to snowball into a big emergency.

Next: Eviction Prevention

Both of those categories are where you see the most bang for the buck.

Being evicted is expensive, destabilizing, and sends families down a cascade of trauma. But preventing eviction can be quick, cheap, and help get someone through an isolated hard time. Win-win.

….

This last category morphed over time. This is for families who have lost their housing.

They started with Rapid Rehousing:

What they said was that San Marcos doesn’t yet have the infrastructure to carry out this kind of program. Also, HUD used to fund this kind of program under Biden, but of course now everything is a dumpster fire.

It was leading to staff burnout and having to turn away lots of families, and generally awful for everyone involved.

So for Phase II, they switched to Transitional Housing:

Basically, they’d have 20 families stay for 60 days at Southside, all together as a cohort. They’d work with these families really closely, bring in a ton of community partners, and try to transition them to permanent housing.

Here’s a bunch of partners they collaborate with:

So that’s an outline of the main programs they implemented.

….

But wait! There’s more! With the $800K, they also spruced up Southside:

which is good.

Some budget details:

This shows how expensive the Rapid Rehousing was in Phase 1, and how many more families they were able to serve with the second model.

And here’s some general financial breakdown:

and some general takeaways:

…

What does Council say?

The million dollar question is: what happens when the Covid money runs out? Can we keep all this going?

They are working on it! They have enough money to keep it going through January 2027, and they are pursuing grants and stuff to keep these programs going.

…

Listen, let me be a moral scold for a sec:

We know how to solve homelessness. There is no mystery. We just aren’t willing to pay for it.

Nationally, it would cost under $10 billion to end homelessness. But homeless people cost over $11 billion each year, as is! Think ER visits, untreated mental illness and addictions, and jails.

It’s more expensive to be cruel to people! Isn’t that wild?

Again, there’s no mystery here. Republicans slash funding for homelessness programs, over and over again, and here we are.

Hour 1-2, 6/7/22

by The San Marxist, posted in Hour summaries

Citizen Comment:

  • The big topic of the night is the film studio to be built out in La Cima, and what kind of tax breaks they should get, and what kind of expectations should come along with it.  Someone from SMRF spoke about holding them to high environmental standards. Another speaker spoke in favor of it.
  • Rodrigo Amaya talked about one specific police officer who is known to racially profile and harass Hispanic community members at Rio Vista.
  • Remember the dangerous intersection in front of the Methodist Church? That was on April 19th. There is now a stop sign, and the head of WalkSMTX came to profusively thank the city for their quick action. That is some responsive governance right there.

(Some financial reports, an annexation into La Cima which is just more houses and not the film studio.)

Item 29: ’22-’23 CBDG Grant Allocations

There is about $850K in Community Block Development Grant (CBDG) money to be allocated this August. Tuesday’s presentation gave preliminary recommendations about how to divvy it up. Applicants are the Hays-County Women’s Shelter, Habitat for Humanity, CASA, Salvation Army, about four different city programs, and Southside Community Center. 

One of the city programs – the homebuyer assistance program – has been a flop, because there aren’t any affordable houses.  So that is discussed, but not axed. 

Max Baker tackles Southside Community Center.  Basically, there are a lot of reasons to feel warmly towards Southside Community Center – they’ve been serving the homeless for a very long time, and doing so when no one else was. As Jude Prather put it, “their heart is in the right place.”  There are also a lot of reasons to be critical of Southside – in recent years, it sounds like the director had his hands full with medical issues, and the management has fallen apart.  

Southside asked for $115K of CBDG money, and staff is recommending $55K.  However, Southside is apparently sitting on $392K, unspent, from prior years.  Max Baker wants to know why we’re even considering giving them an additional 55K.

He starts by reading this bit that city staff posted to the message board, after Max asked about the $400k:

Staff: As a subrecipient, Southside is essentially a “staff extension” – they must handle a program exactly like staff would handle it. Staff is responsible for setting them up for success, ensuring they are trained. In 2019, all City staff responsible for development and oversight of the program left. In 2020, the HUD monitoring had an extensive 15 findings that included every part of the program – such as documenting whether contractors were procured competitively, whether homeowners received information appropriately, and what each expenditure included. HUD required that City staff completely rewrite the policies and procedures and retrain Southside. Staff also chose to take on some of the actions such as procuring contractors, in order to ensure it was done correctly. Southside has been on hold since, waiting for 1) policy and procedure rewrite 2) retraining 3) contractor procurement. In addition, Southside was responsible for the application intake and income verification process and that did not go well; staff has taken this over as well and is working to receive the correct income documentation from applicants.

Max goes on to say “…This is the first time I remember hearing that  there is this large pot of money that is being unused because of Southside’s – I’m going to put it bluntly – incompetence in managing a program, or having the staff necessary, to deal with this. … If staff is doing so much of this work, why are we still working with Southside? My assumption is that it’s because they have the building.”

(The answer to this is supposed to be posted to the message boards, but it’s not up yet.)

As usual, Max is right, but kind of hostile and undiplomatic about it. Southside isn’t run by bad people. Staff is not bad people.  Maybe we shouldn’t be awarding Southside more money at this moment, but maybe we can say it more nicely? 

…

On a different note, Max Baker has an excellent suggestion that the CBDG money could be used to provide 24 hour restrooms available for homeless people and the general public. This is really important. We can ameliorate some of the worst difficulties of living on the streets, while simultaneously working to get people off the streets.