The City of Austin has begun closing homeless and vagrant encampments on its greenway trails after citizen journalism showed that they had been overwhelmed by trash.
The extent of the situation had been revealed by citizen journalist Jamie Hammonds, who runs an account on Twitter called Documenting Austin’s Streets and Homeless (DASH).
Shared on June 7, the video showed horrible conditions in the city’s green spaces, with trash, debris, and makeshift coverings littering the wooded area.
Violet Crown Trail
Gains Creek Greenbelt.
It's destroyed. It will never be the same.
Absolutely the worst encampment in Austin.
There are cars, trailers, mountains of garbage, needles, human waste and hundreds of homeless. pic.twitter.com/wA5RoOsIVG
— DASH (@DocumentingATX) June 7, 2023
In a post showing another video, Hammonds said of the Violet Crown Trail that “big portions of it are destroyed. It’s heartbreaking.”
“This is just heartbreaking, watching the wildlife dig through piles of garbage, instead of smelling nature you get human waste,” he continued.
“You can smell these places in the summertime,” Hammonds explained to Fox News. “These large homeless camps. The trash and stuff that’s going up.”
“There are probably 300 folks living up in the woods. Their trail has just been decimated and it’s completely destroyed with trash,” he continued. “The problem’s there, it’s just that people can’t see it. They don’t realize how many people are actually in the woods.”
Hammonds criticized most of the local Austin media for neglecting to cover the situation at the trail, suggesting, “The fact that not one local Austin media outlet has approached me about my story on the Violet Crown Trail says everything you need to know. They will not report it for whatever reason.”
Nevertheless, the videos drew Austinites’ attention and soon spread not only to national news outlets but to some international ones as well.
Local community activist Cleo Petricek called the situation a “human and environmental disaster” and blamed it on “City neglect and dereliction of duties.”
After the videos released by DASH received international coverage, the City of Austin deployed resources to remove the vagrant and homeless population at the Violet Crown Trail and send them to a designated shelter.
The City of Dallas has similarly struggled to address the homeless and vagrant encampments scattered throughout the city, with City Council Member Cara Mendelsohn alleging that the City is “not doing enforcement that’s necessary,” as reported by The Dallas Express.
Recent incidents linked to the crisis include the discovery of a rotting body in a Dallas creek and eyewitness reports of vagrants allegedly masturbating in front of City Hall.
While the distribution of homeless encampments across cities such as Austin and Dallas has contributed to such developments, San Antonio’s one-stop-shop model, overseen by the nonprofit Haven for Hope, has rendered much more promising results by concentrating homeless services and the homeless population in a single geographic area.
Neither Austin nor Dallas has yet indicated any intention to pursue this model, though polling suggests it is the solution most favored by Dallas residents.
