There’s some breaking news on a facet of the City’s homelessness issue that has not received much attention lately. That is the pending purchase of the Candlewood Suites Hotel in Northwest Austin. This is part of Austin that is in Williamson County, in the Anderson...
The proposed zoning for the former East Austin gasoline tank farm comes up again tomorrow (June 3) at Council. We went over some of the history two weeks ago when the item first hit the Council agenda. Council agreed to a postponement at the urging of Council Member...
The protest encampment surrounding City Hall is a virtually perfect metaphor for the homeless issue in Austin — if not for the whole state of City governance. The encampment got started the Monday after the May 1 election in which Prop B was approved. Prop B...
In any other election season a proposal to change Austin’s form of City government would likely gather the most attention. Not so this year as the tents of homeless people line Austin roadways, sidewalks and parks. This situation results from a City Council decision...
A series of interlocking issues will dominate local governance and politics this Spring. At least two of those are petition induced referendums on the May 1 municipal ballot: homelessness, in the form of whether to overturn the City Council’s June 2019 repeal of the...
As noted a few weeks ago, the Austin Independent had a few stories in the works when the power outages resulting from the Deep Freeze hit. At that point we held off on completing those stories and instead switched to covering the collapse of the state grid, and in...
Last week featured an official City of Austin apology from the City Council for the City’s “participation in the enslavement of Black people, for its active involvement in segregation and systemic discrimination, for exacerbating racial divides through both active and...
The City Council solved its Mayor Pro Tem dilemma last week, but otherwise 2021 is off to something of a rocky start. The early going has been largely dominated by the Council’s number one declared priority, “ending homelessness.” The view here is that the Council...
