Being homeless is a full-time job.
Imagine having to struggle daily without the amenities most of us take for granted: a toilet and shower, a stove and fridge, a car and air conditioning, much less a roof to keep out the sun and rain.
Everything the unsheltered do is public, and police can ticket or arrest them almost at will. Or as one San Antonio panhandler at a gas station discovered four years ago, they can be fatally shot with impunity. Meanwhile, the cop fired from SAPD for offering a homeless man a sandwich filled with dog feces has since been hired by another South Texas police department.
Too few of those fed shit-sandwiches in this life are afforded such second chances.
Yet to hear mayoral candidate and District 9 Councilman John Courage tell it, being homeless is “very easy.” During a March 26 council session, Courage floated an ordinance to outlaw shopping carts more than 1,000 feet away from grocery stores, arguing that failing to do so would “allow it to continue to be easy for people to be homeless.”
“What’s easy about homelessness?” another member of council interjected.
“No, it’s very easy. You don’t have to do anything, you just sleep out on the streets,” Courage fired back, adding, “Giving people the opportunity to collect trash from wherever they can find it — and bring it to live with it — is just allowing them to continue to live as easily as they choose to live.”
I’d pay good money to watch a reality show where those who bloviate from the air-conditioned comfort of City Hall are forced to survive on the streets for a month.
Lest anyone think Courage is alone in punishing the unhoused, Councilman Manny Pelaez — also a mayoral candidate — put up banners in his District 8 telling people, “It’s okay to say no to panhandling.”
In a fit of scaremongering, Manny the Compassionate also warned downtowns could become “war zones” if cities don’t dismantle encampments. Authorities undertook 1,200 such sweeps in Bexar County last year, costing taxpayers $3.6 million.
With election day on May 3, Courage tried to clarify his bad take on Texas Public Radio’s The Source.
“I’m not trying to say being homeless is an easy life,” Courage backpedaled, “but they can sustain themselves, and part of the discussion was, should we … make it more challenging for people to live on their own and hopefully accept the services that we have available to help them lift themselves up.”
First, he did explicitly state that being homeless isn’t just an easy life but a “very easy” one. There’s nothing courageous about refusing to correct such a boneheaded statement.
But, secondly, and more substantively, do we actually have enough services available to the city’s unsheltered population? The answer’s no. And Courage knows it.
During the same council session where Courage fired off his gaffe, he asked Department of Human Services Director Melody Woosley whether the city needs more mental health professionals, drug and alcohol treatment beds, psychiatric treatment beds and financial resources to combat homelessness. The city needs all of them, she affirmed.
After hearing her response, how can Courage claim this preventable tragedy has less to do with a lack of mental health resources and affordable housing than it does his caricature of unhoused people as freewheeling forest hermits?
As Councilwoman Teri Castillo’s questioning revealed during that same session, San Antonio has zero low-barrier homeless shelters — or those that provide 24/7 easy access with minimal hurdles to entry.
When Castillo asked Woosley if such shelters exist here, the staffer responded that SAMMinistries is the closest, “but not completely.” To enter that shelter requires both a current eviction notice and proof of a stable income, according to its website.
For many sleeping on the streets, those are impossibly high bars.
San Antonio’s first-ever Homeless Response Annual Performance and Spending Report noted that homelessness per 1,000 Bexar County residents was 14.5 in 2022, 15.1 in 2023 and 16 in 2024. That last figure is the highest since official point-in-time counts began.
Hard to believe we can reverse that trend if our leaders still treat poverty like a character flaw instead of a predictable outcome of systemic wealth hoarding.
The stereotypes unravel when you consider what any fan of movies about bourgeois decadence should know: alcohol consumption and substance abuse tends to be higher among the upper class. It just goes on behind closed doors, so we’re not forced to witness it firsthand. And when the incomes of those in the bottom bracket improve, lo and behold, so does their anxiety and depression and mental health.
Studies of direct cash transfers also demonstrate a subsequent decrease in spending on temptation goods, like tobacco and illicit drugs. Poverty is not a lack of virtue, it’s purely and simply a lack of money.
Courage’s remark ranks up there with former Mayor Ivy Taylor’s 2017 diagnosis that generational poverty in San Antonio is mainly the result of “people not being in relationship with their Creator.” Memories of my Christian past may be fading, but I seem to recall the Godhead himself was a bit of a homeless drifter. Who’s prepared to say Yeshua Ben Joseph had it easy?
The mayoral race need not be an excuse to shun understanding and decency. District 6 Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda, who’s also seeking the city’s highest elected office, told the Express-News that homelessness is her top issue.
Further, during an interview with the Big City Small Town podcast, she pointed to the East Side’s Towne Twin Village to show that humane solutions are possible.
Developed by the Housing First Community Coalition, Towne Twin Village focuses on senior citizens and received just $9.9 million of the $150 million affordable housing bond, approved in 2022. Of that total, a mere $25 million has gone to permanent supportive housing.
Havrda supports expediting another larger bond by the end of this year, Manny the Compassionate doesn’t.
“We have to duplicate [Towne Twin Village] as much as we can all over the city, because it’s low-to-no barrier,” Havrda said. “And yes, people have substance abuse issues, they have mental health impairments, sometimes they have dogs, and so some places won’t take them. And we don’t want to separate them from their companions. I’m sorry that it took so long to get there, but that’s rapid re-housing. That’s literally getting them in a place where they’re safe, where they’re going to have sustenance, and they’re going to have access to care.”
San Antonio needs leaders who act out of a heartfelt sense of communitarian principle, not unapologetic corporate stooges like Pelaez. Voting him or Courage into higher office would only further enable politicians to run their mouths and clog sorely needed policy conversations with trash.
To that, it’s “okay to say no.”
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This article appears in Apr 30 – May 13, 2025.