In 1983, an Austin news crew turned its cameras on an overcrowded Salvation Army shelter. Two years later, a reporter spent weeks living on the streets and in the shelters of our city to show viewers what life there was like. The word Austin used for the people in those stories was "transients," as if they were only passing through. They were not passing through. They were our neighbors. Their stories were the first lines of a blueprint our community has been working from ever since.
Austin was not alone. Across the country, the 1980s were the decade when homelessness as we know it today took shape, and HomeAid itself was founded in 1989 by builders who looked at that crisis and chose to respond by doing what they do best: building homes. In Austin, 1985 brought the city's first task force on homelessness, charged with finding medical care, food, and a safe place to sleep for people who had none. More than 40 years ago, this community had already decided that looking away was not an option.
The decades that followed were full of effort and full of heart. A new community plan in 1997 led to the 2004 opening of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, a front door to meals, shelter, and health care. For 30 years, Austin has also debated, often intensely, how best to respond to neighbors living unsheltered. Those conversations run deep because Austinites care. Through all of them, one thing has held. Where someone sleeps tonight matters, and so does where they will live tomorrow.
Then Austin boomed. From 2010 to 2019, ours was the fastest-growing large metro area in the United States, adding nearly 30 percent to its population and welcoming more than half a million new neighbors. The cranes went up and the world moved in, and housing that working families could afford did not keep pace. On one night in January 2025, volunteers counted 3,238 people experiencing homelessness in Austin and Travis County, up 36 percent from the count two years earlier, and nearly half of them were sleeping without shelter. Those who do this work will tell you the real number is higher. The blueprint of our crisis is, at its core, a housing blueprint. And a housing problem is one that builders know how to solve.
The need is still growing, even as our community builds more ways to respond. In 2015, Mobile Loaves & Fishes opened Community First! Village, creating permanent homes and a community of belonging for people coming out of chronic homelessness. Today, the Village is expanding toward roughly 1,900 homes. Across Austin and Travis County, the homelessness response system has more than doubled its number of beds and units since 2019, and more than 3,000 people moved into housing in 2024. Those are meaningful accomplishments. But they are not evidence that the crisis is over or even that need is declining.
The 3,238 people identified during the 2025 Point-in-Time Count represented a 36 percent increase in just two years, and even that number is only a one-night snapshot. ECHO has long acknowledged the limitations of the PIT Count, particularly in finding people who are hidden, displaced or otherwise difficult to reach. Its own State of the System report estimated that nearly 5,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single day in June 2025, while City homelessness-response data has placed the estimated nightly population even higher, at approximately 6,300. Meanwhile, providers encounter people every day who never appear in a single-night count or may never enter the formal homelessness response system. The truth is more complicated than either progress or failure: Austin is helping more people than ever before, while the need continues to outpace the system built to meet it.
Collaborate. Care. Connect.
HomeAid Austin joined this story in 2017, and our role in it is simple. We bring the homebuilding community together with the nonprofits and faith partners who serve our neighbors every day. A builder captain rallies trade partners, labor and materials are donated, and dignified housing rises at an average cost savings of 50 percent. Then we hand the keys to a local service provider who walks alongside residents on their path to independence. Through that model, we have completed 50 projects, and our work has reached nearly 100,000 individuals. In June of 2026, we broke ground on Peace Family Housing, where a church, two builders, and a service provider came together for families experiencing homelessness, with the City of Austin standing beside us. That same morning, the City proclaimed June 9th, 2026, HomeAid Austin Day. That is what building together looks like.
A blueprint is only a plan, and plans can be redrawn. Each generation of Austinites has seen this issue through its own window. In the 1980s, our city saw people passing through. Today, we see neighbors priced out of the place they call home, families sleeping in cars, and people pushed farther from view even as the systems designed to help them grow. The generation that first said "transients" also formed the first task force. The generation that watched Austin boom now has the responsibility to build a response equal to the crisis that grew alongside it. We know housing works. We know shelter matters. We know that more than 3,000 people moving into housing in a single year represents thousands of lives changed. But we also know that thousands more are still waiting. Progress should give us confidence that solutions work, not permission to underestimate the size of the problem.
Every home we raise is a new line on a better drawing, one where all of Central Texas has a safe and dignified place to call home. Homelessness is closer than we think, but so is hope. Come build with us.
Volunteer, donate, or get involved at homeaidaustin.org, and follow along @HomeAidAustin.
