Watson, Council members refine direction in push to keep Marshalling Yard shelter open

Tuesday, September 24, 2024 by Chad Swiatecki

Mayor Kirk Watson and other members of City Council want to give city staff specific directions and benchmarks in their work to keep the Marshalling Yard Emergency Shelter open indefinitely and keep other city shelters from becoming overwhelmed with the number of experiencing homelessness.

In a recent posting on the City Council Message Board, Watson responded to District 2 Council Member Vanessa Fuentes' concerns about the cost and open-ended future for the facility, which was slated to close in March and which sits in District 3 just outside her district. Staff will need to find $9 million to operate the Marshalling Yard for another year.

An amended version of the relevant item for Thursday's agenda includes the direction that the $9 million can't come from elsewhere in the homelessness services system. It also calls for a plan to achieve a better rate of positive exits into stable housing for the 300 occupants at the Marshalling Yard, which staff has reported at between 10 percent and 20 percent in recent months.

Since passage of a six-month extension of the Marshalling Yard earlier this year, staff has looked unsuccessfully for city properties or any available for purchase in the private real estate market that could serve as a suitable replacement. Watson said the reduced intake underway at the Marshalling Yard and four other emergency shelters – which would need to absorb any residents still living there – is already putting a strain on the city's homelessness services.

"I understand the concerns regarding the indefinite time frame of keeping the Marshalling Yard open. I considered setting a date in the draft resolution that I put out, but I worry about setting an arbitrary date and then not being able to find an alternative in the set frame. We did that. The original resolution to close the Marshalling Yard was passed in April and here we are without an alternative site. We simply can't start going backward," he wrote in part.

Council Member Ryan Alter, who helped to add the new directives to the resolution, stressed the importance of not taking money from other homeless services programs. He said the Marshalling Yard was not included in the city's recent budget negotiations because it was expected an alternative site would have been identified with work underway to prepare it as a high-capacity emergency shelter.

"We all thought there was going to be some alternative location identified and ultimately available for the replacement of the Marshalling Yard. That has just proved to be more challenging than we thought. I think when the budget was being put together and when we were discussing potential changes, I guess there was just not the level of understanding that the replacement was not going to come as fast as we had all thought," he said. "I know the Homeless Strategy Office is trying to get creative, but finding space suitable for shelter that's ready for shelter is really difficult."

Alter said the acute need for hundreds of additional shelter beds has reached a point that Council and staff should consider employing the two sites in Northeast Austin and South Austin that were identified as possible locations for camping or tiny home shelters.

"That is something that we are having to consider. Originally, the hope was that we were going to find a facility that is already built and mostly ready to go, whereas if we're looking at property and then trying to build something, even something that's as quick to physically build as (Camp) Esperanza is, the problem is all the permitting or the other entitlements, getting the utilities set up."

David Gray, the city's homeless strategy officer, said the Marshalling Yard will be difficult to replace because in its construction as a storage facility it was also designed to provide large-scale shelter for emergency situations.

"What's allowed us to open and operate the Marshalling Yard at relatively low margins is the fact that when this building was constructed, it was also constructed to serve as a temporary emergency shelter during times of need, whether that's folks evacuating from a hurricane or something else. A lot of the infrastructure that you need to run a shelter, things like bathroom space or hookups, where you could hook up additional showers, trailers and bathrooms, and stuff like that, those things are already available," he said. "When we look at the cost per client to operate at the Marshalling Yard, it is less than our cost per client to operate any one of the other shelters that we run. If we wanted to stand up a new shelter, there's just a number of new steps that you have to go through."