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Originally Posted by ahealy
Damn, Genral... That all feels spot on. I'm really REALLY hoping the homelessness/lake levels part is way off though.
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Its already trending upward. I can speak to the northern end. First, the bats. We all know about the huge colonies under the Congress Bridge and the half huge colony under the I35 overpass at McNeil in Round Rock. I'm seeing more and more bats in the overpasses at I35 and Wells Branch and I35 / Howard Lane. Which brings me to the homeless. I pass them almost every day under the overpasses at I35 / Parmer, Howard, Wells Branch and Grand Avenue. There is a rather large camp under the overpass at Howard and a smaller at Grand Ave. I see the regulars, but there always seem to be new faces almost daily. They pan handle in shifts. Not long ago there were monthly clean sweeps where trucks would come in and clean up the mess and the police would clear them out. Not anymore. I talk to a few of them and met a newbie to the Howard overpass camp. Her name is Tammy. She frequents our recycle dumpster daily. Her camp is near a Home Depot and a Walmart. On any given day you can count almost 20 shopping carts from both those stores. There are a growing number of tents and cardboard shanties all butted up against each other. Tammy said she left the tough competition of Downtown to the "greener pastures in the burbs and beyond".
As these homeless camps continue to grow, in plain sight, its obvious that the larger they get, the safer they feel and the less any city officials know what to do with them, so they are basically left alone, and then because the population and traffic continues to grow away from downtown, the success of pan handling seems to be sustainable with less competition than downtown.
But as the Howard overpass camp fills up, the other overpasses up the road will take on the overflows. I think the word is out that nobody messes with them up here, so hear they come and will continue to come. There are literally homeless pan handlers on every intersection on 183 to Cedar Park and from Parmer, to even Georgetown. During the 2020s, the scale of this will become a crisis and they may need to open up a shelter and soup kitchen somewhere between Pflugerville and Round Rock. Yet no one seems to be talking about this...yet. They will.