living through the last 28ish years in this town, i think i might can add some perspective to this post. i also worked for the us census in 2010, so i'm hoping to add some further insight.
when i came to town, we had drag worms. some drag worms were homeless, and some were westlake goth kids. i'm not lying. looking back, i'm not a fan of the nomenclature, but that's what it was. i remember in the late 90s, here in school, there was a bunch of folks selling roses in the south of the river area. i dated a girl down there, and we always went to the movies down off stassney. we always joked that there had to be a "rose king or queen" because they were on every corner selling roses. now i feel like the equivalency is the jesus people selling fuck if i know at every south austin intersection, but it all feels similar.
anyways, austin has always been friendly to homeless folks, mostly because the ethos of this town used to be "i'm about to be homeless unless i achieve this dream." this used to be a homeless person couch-surfing town. i remember being told that when i graduated in 2000, if i didn't leave for houston or dallas or somehwere else, i would be chronically underemployed here in austin. problem is, i met a girl in austin, and i had a ton of mostly younger friends in austin, and i had a liberal arts degree in 2000 when the job market was...eh....i stuck around. then i met a girl from here, and she had deep hispanic roots here, so that's sort of that, so i stayed. as a result of that, and of a real love for the undercity in a city, i've always kept an eye on counter-culture, graffiti, homeless, and other sorts of lovely austin weirdness.
so, aside from a year in japan that was once well-documented, i've pretty much lived here since the mid-90s. i love this town, and what i love most is the goddamn friendliness. even most of the homeless, compared to other cities all over the globe, are pretty goddamn friendly. so i've never really understood the animosity, aside from it being a pretty white-bread provincial town (west of 35 and north of ben white at least) toward the homeless, as compared to what i've experienced globally.
a lot of that to say, i was unemployed in 2010. the federal government was hiring for the census, which looked interesting, and paid fucking well. our first assignments were to locate, confirm, and prepare to count the homeless in austin. this would determine federal funding for services on a per person basis. this meant engagement, understanding of the local homeless community, where they actually lived, because homeless people aren't usually actually homeless, and a plan to count the local population.
since i don't know how this happened, i cannot assign any sense of blame, but the dictate to count the homeless came down to this:
one night, starting midnight, after engagement with local advocates, police, city leadership, etc, the census did this:
1) count occupied homeless shelter beds. give those people free census t-shirts.
2) send us out, starting from 10pm, to known camps. our jobs, with flouro vests, was to walk into known occupied homeless areas and try to count them by audio (you know, asking them questions, which they are so fucking keen to answer from someone from the government) or by visual after dark. the census requires a certain number of criteria to count a person. as i recall it was 3. i could be any 3 of 7 or something, to include, name, gender, race, blahblah, but if as an enumerator, you got 3, you win. but it all had to be volunteered.
until we got to the homeless where i got real fucking practical and weird. if i went door to door and asked questions, i needed 3 things, and that's a W. with the homeless, we needed like 2 real things. 1 - is that a person? and 2) can you determine gender, race, or something about this person?
yup. why? because the fucking plan was to count them from 12am to 6am while they were passed out. not in the homeless shelters. that was the easy work. i got the assignment of travelling around known homeless encampments and asking questions, or trying to count comatose people in parks, or asking people to control their dogs, or finding entire communitites of people in the city of austin (and i mean 50+) in areas where you'd never. anyways, there was a big local controversy about the idea of government employees shining flashlights into homeless folks eyes in the most vulnerable part of the night; people got fired, fucking apd ran everyone they knew in camps through local jails, and the homeless didn't get properly counted that night.
tl;dr: sorry, but they are going to be here, whether or not you like it. where you want them?