We recently noted uber-liberal Austin — Joe Biden carried Travis County, where Austin is located, 435,860 (71.62%) to 161,337 (26.51%) — and how it cut the city’s police department budget by a third. Of course, the city has seen a 73.68% increase in homicides from January through May over the same period in 2020, but the lovely Amanda Marcotte, a former Austinite, claims that’s because guns are so easy to get, not that they were any harder to obtain in 2020.

But, with few exceptions, it’s just the riff-raff killing other riff-raff, so the liberal elites in the city government and around the University of Texas don’t really care. It seems that they only care when problems encroach on their neighborhoods. From The Wall Street Journal:

As Austin Booms, Homelessness Faces Crackdown

Bans on public camping in Texas are breaking up encampments downtown

By Elizabeth Findell | June 24, 2021 | 8:15 AM EDT

AUSTIN, Texas—A freeway overpass shaded Elizabeth Contreras’s tent from the hot Texas sun, five years into a stretch of on-and-off homelessness that began when her husband left her, she said. Austin Police Officer Rosie Perez stopped by the tent last week with a written warning for Ms. Contreras: Within weeks, she would need to be gone.

Police officers are beginning to enforce new city and statewide bans on public camping, after a two-year battle over Austin homeless policies. Amid a growth boom that accelerated the city’s affordability crisis, homelessness has increased and local shelters are mostly full.

“You guys are asking ‘Where do I go?’ and I don’t have an answer for you,” Ms. Perez told Ms. Contreras. “But I know the process is going to continue.”

Cities nationwide are grappling with how to respond to homelessness after the coronavirus pandemic. This rapidly growing city of nearly 1 million has an estimated 3,160 people experiencing homelessness, according to an estimate by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, a nonprofit that serves as the lead agency for homeless services in the Austin area. While that is a small number compared with many West Coast cities, the issue gained visibility after a change to city policies led homeless encampments to spread across downtown Austin and popular walking and biking paths.

Austin City Council members voted in 2019 to rescind a longtime city ban on sitting or sleeping in public, following testimony, mostly from homeless people and advocates, on its impact. One man spoke of a friend who had been killed when, sleeping in a tunnel to keep from being cited, she was swept away in a flood. Others said citations made it more difficult to work out of homelessness.

The majority of city council members agreed, saying camping rules criminalized homelessness and were inhumane and ineffective.

Backlash against the move was swift from Republican state officials, who often tangle with Austin’s liberal leaders. Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to override the decision days after the vote. Matt Mackowiak, head of the local GOP, spearheaded a petition effort to force the camping ban onto an election ballot. That effort gained steam, drawing support from police and some Democrats frustrated by the city’s limited action.

After initially saying they would carve out specific areas for camping, city leaders made no further adjustments to their policies. Efforts to purchase and operate hotels as transitional housing stalled. The Covid-19 pandemic complicated anti-homelessness efforts and reduced shelter capacity.

In May, critics of City Hall notched two victories. Austin voters approved Mr. Mackowiak’s ballot proposition, 57%-43%, forcing the city to reinstate the ban. State lawmakers also approved a ban on camping, with some recreation exceptions, on all public land in Texas. Neither ban made provisions for where to send people evicted from public spaces.

“Their social experiment on the camping ordinance failed so spectacularly that it can never be attempted in the state of Texas anywhere,” Mr. Mackowiak said.

There’s more at the original.

Remember: the voters who forced the reinstatement of the camping ban are the same ones who elected all of those Democrats and socialists to the city council, and the same ones who gave Joe Biden such an overwhelming victory in Travis County.

The Mayor stated that it’s easy to find political support to create more housing for the homeless, but a major political battle to figure out where to locate it. Translation: NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard.

This is what happens when liberal policies are enacted and start to actually affect mostly white, well-to-do liberal voters. They wouldn’t mind all of those tents if they were in the lower-class areas, but when they encroach on downtown high-rise condos or posh office buildings, that’s a different story altogether.