@abstractcode Happened to me today as well.

The Houston Chronicle: “You’re not allowing ads. Subscribe or turn off your adblocker to see this story.”

Me: “There is a third option… how about ‘no’?”

#HoustonChronicle #Adblock #Enshittification

@elbeejay Practically everything I've quoted and commented on here in this thread has been authored, in part or wholly, by R.A. Schuetz. She has an account on the fediverse, but doesn't appear active sadly: @[email protected] (and apparently my instance might not federate with them?)

I want to recommend this page on the Houston Chronicle's website:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/author/ra-schuetz/

But alas, no matter what I do, I cannot get past a scraper blocker. Apparently, it wants unrestricted canvas AND WebGL access to pass through. Fuck AI. She also has a website here:

https://raschuetz.com/

Matt Zdun, also at the Houston Chronicle, provided the data visualizations to these articles:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/author/matt-zdun/

https://www.mattzdun.com/

Alas, no fediverse presence from him.

#homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

And the second:

And this one, which is a rare case of using vertical scrolling through the "page" as a way to effectively produce a slide deck mechanism --- a common trope in data journalism that I normally find annoying as shit --- effectively.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2024/houston-arrow-homeless-encampments/

>A Houston Chronicle analysis found that, outside of downtown, Midtown and Memorial Park, Houston police officers are not writing the most tickets where the most homeless people live. They’re also not writing them solely in the areas that have been decommissioned. Instead, they’re writing them primarily in a swath of the city that radiates outward from downtown to the west – an area colloquially known as the “Houston arrow,” where the population tends to be wealthier, whiter and have better health outcomes.

I suspect the same pattern plays out in Austin, where wealthy Northwestern Austinites came out in force in favor of reinstating the camping ban there.

>Officials have focused on decommissioning encampments along major freeways.

Where the homeless are most visible.

>On a recent Tuesday, a list of people whom the church had given permission to stay on the porch was taped to the window of Lord of the Streets. But Brad Sullivan, vicar of Lord of the Streets, said that the church may not be able to shield people looking to sleep there for much longer. “I don’t want to be a bad neighbor to the folks in Midtown,” he said.

It's your neighbors who are bad, not you trying to help.

>Here is a map of median household income, with the highest earners represented by the deepest shades of purple. The high earners in neighborhoods west, northwest and southwest of downtown form an arrow shape: the "Houston Arrow." That is also where most of the encampment tickets were issued.
>
>The Houston Arrow also shows up when mapping race. Here the deeper shades of yellow are the areas with a higher concentration of white residents. Again, the encampment tickets match up with the arrow.

That map looks damn near identical to the map of Prop B election results in Austin in May 2021 (which reinstated, and *expanded*, the camping ban).

The map I included is by Eli Spencer Heyman, on Bluesky at @elium2.com‬@bsky.app. Alas, he is not on Mastodon. He has a website though:

https://elium2.com/

A similar map was replicated by Jayaram Hariharan, who *is* on the Fediverse :D (though, sadly, he appears inactive)

https://jayaramhariharan.com/misc/atx-map/

https://github.com/elbeejay/ATX_PropB_Map

@elbeejay

He also put his work up on Github, which is nice :)

#osm #OpenStreetMap #gis #homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #Austin #AustinTX #atx #HoustonChronicle

Finally, two excellent data-driven journalism pieces. The first one:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2024/houston-homeless-tickets-hpd/

>Houstonians who cannot afford basic housing currently owe more than $9.5 million in fines from 2020-2024, money the city is unlikely to see paid. And municipal court data shows those who received these tickets related to homelessness often just find new places to camp nearby. Many who’ve been chronically homeless said ticketing did little to deter future infractions — after all, they have nowhere to go — and did not come with interventions leading to permanent housing. Often, they were unaware they had even received a ticket.

That's a substantial fraction of the total budget Houston has for homelessness.

>Millions of dollars in fines are ultimately dismissed while the city continues to pour time and money into court operations and enforcement. Police officers who write the most tickets receive more in overtime than a typical officer in their position, according to a Chronicle analysis.
>
>...
>
>And yet, police officers who write the most tickets receive more overtime than the typical officer in their position. The senior officer who wrote the most tickets received nearly $53,000 in overtime between July 2022 and the end of June 2023, about 10 times what the typical senior officer earns in overtime pay.
>
>“Sometimes, the enforcement of illegal encampments is performed in an overtime capacity,” said Houston Police in a statement. Certain officers have specialized training and know-how “to prioritize the well-being of persons experiencing homelessness by engaging individuals with care, compassion, and accountability.”

I'd call those incentives perverse, but that would imply that something is going wrong. This is expected behaviour under capitalism.

>When Houston City Council made encamping illegal in 2017, the ACLU of Texas and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty argued that Houston’s law was unconstitutional because penalizing someone for living in public spaces when there are no alternatives available is cruel and unusual punishment. (The Supreme Court heard a case originating in Oregon based on the same argument in April, and their decision is still pending.)

It's not pending anymore. #SCOTUS decided that it actually was fine and dandy and not a cruel and unusual punishment.

>When Burton died in the early hours of Jan. 21 [,2024], he died under the Heights underpass he could not seem to escape.

That was a few short days after the coldest low of the winter season (January 16, 2024, at 20 degrees Fahrenheit). Probably not completely coincidental.

#homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/kelly-court-village-reunion-20775445.php

>As Houston phases out public housing, former Kelly Court families share memories of how it shaped them
>
>...
>
>Ron “Bubba” Pearson, 72, said on a bench in the shade, chatting with Larry “Maney Boy” White, 71. “It’s a good thing to come back and see people who haven’t left — and to meet the young people and let them know the history,” Pearson said. He wanted them to be able to see the type of professional success former residents had achieved.

So... public housing provided them the stability necessary to achieve professional success? You don't say!

>They and others reminisced about the Kelly Court football team and Peppermint Park. Since then, the field where the football team practiced and the park where the children had played have been cleared for I-10 and US 59.
>
>“Everything we had, they’d always come and take it,” Pearson said.
>
>After the I-45 expansion removes another swath of the public housing community, which has since been renamed Kelly Village, the Houston Housing Authority plans to tear down and redevelop the remaining buildings. The replacement units will be made affordable through vouchers.

First as tragedy, then as farce.

>It also provided early lessons in civics — for example, in the '60s, the building manager advised Pearson and his friends to go to the city and request upgrades to the public housing’s recreational facilities. After the city replaced the asphalt basketball court with concrete and provided the community’s baseball team with new uniforms, they also helped Clayton and Cuney Homes lobby for improvements. The friends also collected so many newspapers from residents that a recycling facility on Jensen paid them enough to buy the football team uniforms.

It's almost as if a system didn't want people realizing that they could organize for their own interests. And win them.

>“I didn’t realize it at the time, but this community formed a net around me to support me, protect me and get me where I needed to go,” he said. People who saw that he was smart and athletic and wanted to go to college shepherded him away from dice and toward the paths that eventually led to a scholarship at the University of Oklahoma and then to becoming a doctor.

How many more doctors might we have if we decommodified housing? How many more engineers? Technicians? Nurses? Musicians?

>“It was a village,” Jackson said. “It was properly named.”
>
>Former tenants, spearheaded by a man who went by "Short Dog," hoped to recreate some of that by organizing their own reunion.
>
>“We’re having not just a reunion of our memories,” said Kelvin “Rock” Washington, 63. “The older men communicate with the younger people, bridge them over to education, jobs, prison reform — make them feel important in the world.”
>
>Kitty Dorsey, 41, nodded at Washington and asked if he’d shared his story. When her son was in elementary school, Kelvin had spotted him with three of his friends and decided to offer an impromptu economics lesson. If they wanted to sell snow cones, he’d buy the equipment and materials and split the sales 50-50. On the first day, they earned $40, and he gave them their share. But they’d soon make enough money to cover the costs of the equipment — and if they owned the entire business, they’d be able to earn twice as much for every snow cone sold. The next day, they bought him out, and sold snow cones for the rest of the summer.

This is what the ruling class fears. This is what they are taking from us. This is what abandoning housing first, and abandoning the struggle to decommodify housing, will cost us.

#homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/homeless-encampment-decommissioning-change-shelter-19965092.php

>It is no longer the standard for authorities who clean up camps to directly offer permanent housing or a spot in the navigation center, officials say. The decommissioning playbook has expanded to include shelter beds, such as those at the Houston Recovery Center.

"Expanded" is a euphemism here for "unraveled." You know, the word they used to describe housing-first in their puff piece editorial for the new mayor in the previous node in this thread.

>“It’s 2025,” said Mike Nichols, director of the city’s Housing and Community Development Department, pointing out that the body camera video capturing the encampment being cleared with a backhoe was over a year old.

This is the same Nichols that traded in his credibility and authority as a non-profit CEO to join the new mayor in their "expanded" approach.

>First of all, it expanded the focus from permanent housing to include shelters. Shelters are more expensive than permanent housing because they require staff and meals, among other services. But only chronically homeless individuals can be offered permanent housing. Without government funding for shelter beds, these people typically live outside or in other places not meant for habitation until they qualify for housing.

So... why don't we investigate why only chronically homeless individuals get PSH?

>Secondly, it called for sustainable funding mechanisms to replace the reliance on disaster recovery funds. Even now, Nichols is still working to assemble the funding needed for that plan.

You could decommodify housing. You could do public housing. Oh wait! Houston is phasing out its last remnants of public housing (more on that later).

>“We have enough housing,” he said. “We need to have enough funding for rent subsidy and wraparound services.”

Do these people not hear themselves? How can you say two mutually exclusive things one after the other like this? "We have enough housing" followed by "we can't pay for it" means YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH HOUSING.

>The city also pointed to three large encampments that have been closed since November 2024 through coordinated efforts by the city, law enforcement, Coalition and other service providers. At Allen’s Landing Park near University of Houston Downtown, Bayou Place near City Hall and Chartres Street near Minute Maid, the workers engaged with 107 people living on the street; 77 either moved into shelter beds, the navigation center or permanent housing or were connected with another housing solution such as transportation to reunite with family.

"transportation to reunite with family" is a euphemism for "give them a ticket out of the city."

>Permanent supportive housing also relies on housing vouchers and has been reserved for people with disabilities who have been chronically homeless, Young noted. She says that if they expand the response strategy beyond permanent supportive housing, they can pursue early, and less expensive, interventions.

How about you just EXPAND THE PERMANENT SUPPORTIVE HOUSING?

>While shelters could provide a similar experience to that of the navigation center, the ones he’d tried during his stint without a home never led to housing. He said one shelter felt like a prison.
>
>“They locked you in there,” he said. “Navigation center, I could walk out anytime night or day, go to the store, whatever … In fact, they started on the search for my housing.”

Well, at least one person with lived experience was quoted.

#homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/houston-homeless-whitmire-19516140.php

>Houston’s national model for reducing homelessness is unraveling | Editorial

Housing first isn't what's unraveling here. It's capitalism. Housing first is not compatible with housing as a commodity. And, under capitalism, commodities reign supreme.

>Whitmire took it all in, straining to hear at times amid the ear-splitting throttles of street racers and the clip-clop of horses pulling sight-seeing carriages. Later, as he walked away, he turned to his companions on this tour: two members of the Chronicle editorial board.
>
>“Sure looks to me like we’ve fixed it, didn’t we?” he said with a wry smile.

What a fucking jackass. And fuck the Houston Chronicle for going along with it.

>Was the hype just hype? For over a year, editorial board writers and a video journalist have studied the system, toured facilities, interviewed officials and former officials, followed the journeys of unhoused people, reviewed data and traveled from San Antonio to Colorado to get answers.
>
>Finally, we have a clear picture — albeit one that’s nuanced and constantly shifting.

I'm betting they don't talk about capitalism or commodities...

>“Housing first” isn’t unique to Houston. Other cities follow the philosophy but Houston had two advantages: a relatively affordable rental market and natural disasters. Yes, natural disasters, which opened a fount of federal relief money after Hurricane Harvey and other events that Turner and Harris County leaders funneled into housing for the homeless.

The irony of needing disasters to address the disasters that capitalism creates.

>Beyond funding woes, another gaping hole became obvious: Houston’s model serves only a fraction of the unhoused. When we started asking questions about the folks sleeping on benches and under bridges, we realized that for those who don’t fit in the Way Home’s prioritization of ending “chronic homelessness” — typically those on the street for a year or more — there were few options.
>
>True believers in the housing first model say a dollar spent on a shelter is a dollar that could have gone to housing someone in a real apartment. But this purist view seems blind to the thousands of people left to languish on Houston streets.

What the fuck are y'all talking about? It's not "purist" to say that housing is what works. The "impurities" here are in the program that wants to tackle "chronic homelessness" without tackling other forms.

>And lately, we’ve heard numerous anecdotal accounts from experts and seen for ourselves that the numbers of people on the street because of a temporary crisis such as an eviction, have been increasing.

"such as an eviction" an EVICTION. As in, they *had* housing, and then were *removed from it*, because housing is a *commodity* and not a *human right*. The problem is not "housing first." The problem is EVICTION, you dimwits!

>For starters, Houston needs a well-rounded, pragmatic solution that fills glaring gaps and does the most good for the most people. Keep what’s working: collaboration among nonprofits and humane law enforcement. Get rid of tickets and fines for homeless people who have nowhere to go. Address what’s lacking: more diversion programs that keep people off the streets in the first place, more shelter space for people who aren’t ready or don’t qualify for housing, and stable sources of funding that aren’t dependent on the whims of weather or politics.

So... keep housing first? Get rid of the things that are not housing first? What's the problem here, editorial board? Why are you focusing on shelters, and not the reason for their existence in the first place? The problem is "don't qualify for housing." Such a thing should not be possible. There should be no qualifications. Period.

More broadly though, it's the "aren't dependent on... politics" part. Housing is inherently political. And Houston is learning that the ruling class will not allow the threat of homelessness to disappear from their arsenal.

>We’re hopeful that his focus on shelters now seems tempered with an appreciation for the long-term benefits of the housing-first model.

You've spent this entire puff piece fellating the new mayor. Your "hopes" mean jack shit.

>He confirmed to us in an interview last week the basics of a plan he hopes to discuss publicly soon: He’s close to securing $75 million to maintain and expand Houston’s model, a third each from the city, county and the private sector. The plan would involve greater police enforcement of camping bans while increasing the number of low-barrier shelter beds by maximizing the use of existing facilities such as the Sobering Center and the Harris Center, and by negotiating an agreement with the Salvation Army. The focus would initially be on getting people out of public space downtown and then progressing through the four quadrants of the city, potentially building shelters in each. The mayor also hinted at a plan to utilize the downtown St. Joseph hospital, currently in bankruptcy, for homeless people with serious mental health issues, including involuntary commitments for people with severe disorders.

There it is. The "plan" is to give up on housing first and move to institutionalization and incarceration, putting money into police and shelters rather than housing. The "initial" focus on making the homeless invisible will be the *only* focus.

>It’s fine that the motives for addressing homelessness in Houston are vast and varied. While some residents and businesses understandably prioritize the removal of homeless encampments near their homes and businesses, others are motivated by their spiritual beliefs that all people are made in God’s image and deserve a life of basic dignity. We believe even the conflicting motivations can coexist to accomplish a common goal.

Then y'all are absolute fools with no business running a newspaper.

>If we want to address homelessness in a way that’s truly a model for the nation, we’ll have to do it the Houston way: come together and get it done. This time, we don’t just mean social workers at dozens of nonprofits, city employees, faith leaders and a tenacious mayor. And even our biggest philanthropists and foundations can’t pull this off on their own. It will also take us, the taxpaying public, to invest in a solution.
>
>Houston has shown it’s possible to get chronically homeless people, many struggling with drug addiction and mental illness, off the streets, into homes, and some into jobs on their way to becoming productive members of society. Now we have to show we can do it for all open to receiving help.
>
>In a series of editorials, we’ll chart Houston’s journey with homelessness and agitate for solutions that’ll take us the final mile on the Way Home.

As expected: not a peep about capitalism or commodification.

#homelessness #Houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/hha-voucher-freeze-end-19811608.php

>It blamed the failure of federal disbursements for the program to keep up with rents, which sharply rose in the aftermath of the pandemic. After an unexpected tweak in how federal disbursements were calculated went into effect in January, about 400 housing authorities across the country are facing similar voucher freezes. The Houston Housing Authority called on those concerned to contact their representatives in Congress asking for the program to be fully funded for 2025.

They won't be funded. This is Trump's, and the conservatives' --- and yes, the liberals' --- plan: institutionalization and incarceration. Those are profitable. Decommodifying housing is not.

>But at the end of 2023, HUD changed the way it projected need to rely more on the consumer price index — which was flattening out — than on annual changes to the rent of a two-bedroom apartment. The Boston Housing Authority, which would have received a 5% budget increase under the old formula, saw its budget flatline, even though fair market rents for a two-bedroom unit in the area had increased 7%, according to a letter sent to HUD.

2023 y'all. Biden's administration.

#homelessness #houston #HoustonTX #htx #HoustonChronicle