Nope. I suppose we can't. This type of idiocy is why I left Austin 19 years ago, and why I don't miss it at all.
I moved out last month. Largest bond election for a city passed in 2018. Had to get out of those before the bill comes due. I voted for the city of Austin to be independently audited and that they would review some of their documents for grammatical and syntactical errors. Of course neither of those things passed. Only the 100s of millions of dollars in new taxes.
Every major city that allowed that is now facing major problems including disease, closed business and mass exodus of tax paying citizens. As someone who has worked closely with homelessness organizations, the experts will tell you this is a major mistake that only perpetuates the problems that cause homelessness. Mental illness and addiction grow worse when you promote it.
This will likely be the final straw for me in terms of giving up the remaining ties to the area...my house was in an unincorporated part of the County, fully ringed by West Lake Hills and, as such, likely just enough away from the lunacy. However, I have no desire to put up with the neighboring nonsense. I'll still continue to support the Longhorns, but unless this gets repealed, I cannot see wanting to move back, even to a weekend home. I'll take my chances with the earthquakes rocking the Vegas area... Oh, and that straw...yes, it IS plastic. Something else that the commiefornians want to take away from you. They were not content to take plastic bags away...
Austin, what once was the dream city of all Texans is now a nightmare. Yes I still enjoy the games but passing under the bridges downtown is downright frightening now - only to get worse. such a shame. This is yet another modern example where I can only say in exasperation “what are they thinking”.
Its fun to poke at others until someone $hits in your yard. Liberals always think it will be someone else's yard. Serious question....if you really live in Austin will you happily clean it up or will you be pissed off when it happens to you?
What they usually think is that these kinds of concerns are overblown fearmongering by the opposition and that neither they nor many others will have to deal with it. If the prediction ends up coming true (as it has in San Francisco and some other places), they come up with other reasons to explain it away. For example, they'll blame it on income inequality and lack of affordable and/or government housing.
San Antonio is next. We just reelected our leftist mayor and the city council has maybe two or three conservatives. The rest are raging liberals. Plus we're jealous Austin is getting ahead of us, so we do what they do. We're the city that wouldn't let Chik Fil A into the airport because of their owner's religious beliefs.
Take a look at the 4 mayoral candidates in Houston - no, take a long, deep dive into their history, THEN tell me you would vote for one of them. Houston's last GOOD mayor was Louie Welch, who convinced S&P that the B+ bond rating should be changed to AAA. That's been over 40 years ago. No hope on the horizon.
I disagree, but not by much. Houston's last good mayor was Bob Lanier, IMO. He killed the light-rail initiative of incumbent Kathy Whitmire (of course it came back once he was out of office). He rightly described light-rail as "urban jewelry" and ran on a platform of killing it - that shows how much Houston has changed in the past 30 years. He also hired the most awesome Police Chief I have ever seen anywhere, Sam Nuccia.
I wasn't a Bill White fan, but when he announced after Hurricane Rita that he had ordered police officers to shoot looters on site, that was a brief moment of greatness.
It's a dilemma for him. Can he remain a slave to a racist group of libs that want to kill minorities as long as they accuse everyone else of being racist?
No different than the original gun control laws that were cooked up by Dems to keep guns out of the hands of freed slaves.