New report looks at progress City of Austin has made on homelessness audit findings

Tuesday, city staff and some Austin City Council members reviewed a special report that looked at progress made on previous homelessness response audits.

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Tuesday, city staff and some Austin City Council members reviewed a special report that looked at progress made on previous homelessness response audits.

According to the report, the city has done four audits of the city's "homelessness assistance efforts" between 2017 and 2019. In those audits, the city looked at homelessness policy, coordination of efforts, allocation of resources and longer-term outcomes for people engaging with the homelessness response system.

Those audits produced 10 recommendations for ways the city could better address homelessness. In 2021, the Office of the City Auditor checked back in on those recommendations and found the city had achieved three of them and one was no longer applicable.

Now, the city is looking at the remaining six recommendations. Those are:

• Work with the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO) and other groups to improve data collected about how many people are actually homeless in Austin
• Find ways to sufficiently house people transitioning out of homelessness
• Look at how the city measures long-term success of homelessness efforts
• Look at homelessness contracts with vendors and ensure they track and report data including long-term outcomes, client feedback and performance goals
• Expand the capacity of homelessness prevention programs and create new ones
• Make the case management system smoother and more coordinated

"The City has implemented one recommendation to improve the quality and accuracy of data collected about the homeless population. However, while the City has made significant progress, there is still work to be done to fully implement the remaining five recommendations," the report said.

City staff walked council through where the city is at with those remaining five recommendations Tuesday.

There have also been several changes to how the city operates its homelessness response since those audits took place, including the creation of the city's Homeless Strategy Officer position and the splitting of the Homeless Strategy Office out from Austin Public Health.

"One of our priorities as a new office was to do an audit of our contracting and so having the independent city auditor's office come in and do this refresh audit was really helpful for me and my staff to learn about the work that's been done before and chart out some ways for us to continue," said Homeless Strategy Officer David Gray.

Gray told council members he agreed with all of the remaining recommendations and would work to implement them.

You can read the full special report here.