The Austin Common Radio Hour The Austin Common Radio Hour

On May 4th, voters in Travis County will get to vote for 3 seats on the Travis Central Appraisal District Board of Directors. It's a super confusing election, but as always, we're here to explain it all for ya!
This episode features interviews with nearly all of the candidates, including Don Zimmerman, Jett Hanna, Shenghao "Daniel" Wang, Jonathan Patschke, Matt Mackowiak, & Dick Lavine.

Our podcast mini-series on homelessness continues with a focus on emergency shelter, which is meant to provide people with a safe place to sleep (temporarily), while they work to get connected to more permanent housing. But in Austin, we don't have enough emergency shelter beds, which can mean long wait lists, just to find a place to sleep that isn't outside.

How do our shelters deal with this? And how does emergency shelter in Austin work anyway? To help answer these questions, host Amy Stansbury spoke with Max Moscoe and David Gomez of The Other Ones Foundation (which runs Esperanza Community) and Kirkpatrick Tyler of Urban Alchemy (which runs the ARCH).

This episode of the The Austin Common Radio Hour kicks off a mini-series on homelessness in Austin. In this first episode, we focus on some of the first steps a person experiencing homelessness might take on their path toward receiving services and eventually gaining access to housing.... visiting the Sunrise Hub (a homelessness services day center in south Austin) and taking a Coordinated Assessment (which is both a wait list and a prioritization tool for determining who gets access to subsidized or supportive housing services).

But what happens when that wait list is really long? To help answer that question, we spoke with Mark Hilbelink (executive director of the Sunrise Navigation Center) and Alesandra Dominguez (director of crisis response at ECHO).

On December 7th, Austin City Council will vote on the HOME Initiative, a proposal to allow up to three housing units to be built on single-family lots. The idea is to increase the city's supply of "missing middle" housing, but like so many debates related to housing and land use, the issue is complicated.

In this episode of The Austin Common Radio Hour, host Amy Stansbury interviews several people with an array of perspectives on the issue - Austin City Council Member Leslie Pool, Carmen Llanes (Executive Director of Go Austin/Vamos Austin and a former Austin Planning Commissioner), and Jake Wegmann (who sits on the faculty of the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin).

The are 14 proposed state constitutional amendments on the ballot this year. In this episode we take a deep into several of them, including Prop 4 (property taxes), Prop 6 (water), Prop 8 (broadband internet).

Our guests include state Rep. Vikki Goodwin, Jennifer Walker (National Wildlife Federation), and Kelty Garbee (Texas Rural Funders).

The are 14 proposed state constitutional amendments on the ballot this year. One of them, Prop 14, would create a $1 billion centennial parks conservation fund to grow our state parks system.

To tell us all about it, host Amy Stansbury sat down with Luke Metzger (Executive Director of Environment Texas).