Closing the temporary homeless shelter in Southeast Austin without alternative places for people to go would be a move backward, Mayor Kirk Watson said.
According to city officials, there are about 260 people currently staying at the property known as the Marshalling Yard. The shelter was initially supposed to close in August, but operations were extended eight months. The Austin City Council could vote this week on keeping it open even longer as part of a resolution led by the mayor.
“We are doing so well building out the continuum, including emergency shelter beds, and it has proved to be needed, if you look at the numbers,” Watson said. “So what we don’t want to do is prematurely stop taking people. We need to find another alternative before we start not taking folks.”
Other shelters have not been accepting people because they are saving space for the dozens of people expected to need beds when the Marshalling Yard closes. And finding a more permanent property to relocate people has proved challenging, said David Gray, the city's homeless strategy officer.
“When it comes to identifying a new site for a shelter, a timeline for doing that is really challenging due to a number of interconnected factors,” he said.
He said that includes the volatile real estate market, interest rates and high demand for the limited properties available in Austin. Once a property is identified, Gray said, it takes time to gather community input and engage with the neighbors, as well as time and money to build out and retrofit a place to properly serve people.
Gray reported earlier this year that the city was still several hundred shelter beds short to serve people experiencing homelessness.
More than 6,200 people are believed to be homeless in Austin, according to data from the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition. There are about 5,960 beds – permanent and temporary – in the system.
The Marshalling Yard has been helpful for people who need a place indoors to sleep and has played a critical transitional role for people waiting for more permanent housing to open, Watson said.
People who reside onsite have access to several services, including daily transportation, pet boarding, laundry and showers. Residents also get three meals a day, primarily provided through a partnership with the Central Texas Food Bank. People can also work with case managers to get on housing lists and for other services, Gray said.
“The Marshalling Yard does provide a vital service to the City of Austin and homelessness response system,” Gray said. “It’s a great tool for us to get people off the streets, and get people out of areas that are high wildfire risk. It also gets vulnerable people indoors when we have extreme heat days or extreme cold nights.”
Extending operation at the Marshaling Yard will not be possible without funding, though. Watson said how it'd be paid for is still up in the air, but the money would not come from existing homelessness dollars. City Manager T.C. Broadnax will be asked to identify money to support the extension.
That uncertainty gives Council Member Vanessa Fuentes pause. She said she is concerned about the indefinite timeline and the wide range of operational costs associated with keeping the Marshalling Yard open longer.
“I understand how important it is for us to have emergency shelter operations,” Fuentes said. “But what I don’t want is that we continue to fund the Marshalling Yard indefinitely and that comes at the expense of us continuing to fund permanent supportive housing solutions, our rapid rehousing program and other types of housing that we know is effective, that works and is also desperately needed.”
She said she wants the city to have a plan in place that includes not only identifying a permanent emergency shelter, but also allows the city to fund other long-term housing solutions.
“Without any policy direction or guidance in place we will find ourselves again in this same position,” Fuentes said. “We need a plan that highlights how exactly the city is working with partners to identify a permanent emergency shelter operation, and on top of that is the cost of it and where that money will come from.”
The city has been working to open more permanent supportive housing. It expects to have about 1,000 housing units available by the end of 2027.
In August, the city adopted a nearly $6 billion budget with more than $30 million dedicated to homelessness response. That includes money for emergency shelter, rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing, but it was a tight ledger, leaving little wiggle room for other projects.
In addition to finding funding to extend operations, Watson’s resolution tasks Broadnax with figuring out how to improve the rate of people leaving the Marshalling Yard to permanent housing. Of the more than 1,000 people who have used the shelter since it opened in August 2023, Gray said, only about 20% have found permanent housing after leaving.
The City Council is set to vote on the resolution Thursday.
