In 2021, the Houston Police Department wrote citations for more than 9,000 violations associated with homelessness, up from 4,700 in 2019.
“That’s when downtown was becoming popular,” Stafford said. They had season tickets to the opera, the ballet, the Alley Theatre, the Rockets and the Astros — “and we thought: Let’s move downtown.”
From the very beginning, Stafford and Keyser said, people began sleeping outside the building. But at first, they did not arrive until the evening, Keyser said. It wasn’t until recent years, she said, that people started staying outside the Beacon during the days as well. When her husband’s tires were slashed, she said people at the Beacon recognized the man who did it, captured in the security footage. “I called HPD; they didn’t do anything about it. And the reality? That’s a class C misdemeanor, so that’s a ticket.” The only impact she could imagine would be making people mad.
Kiki Aguero leads her friends on the journey to the storage facility where they can retrieve their belongings, on Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022, in Houston. Godofredo A. Vásquez, Houston ChronicleThe day after her things were taken, Aguero corralled the two others who had lost their things. Others asked what they were doing.A bus ride took the group, which had grown over half a dozen, to the warehouse.
But after the rest were satisfied that they had found their things, Aguero still couldn’t find the clear backpack she said housed her tablet, birth certificate and social security card. She ripped apart the bags where she had seen her belongings to see if it had been hidden by blankets and coats. “It doesn’t make sense,” she protested.
According to the Downtown Management District, which does an informal count of the people outside of the Beacon roughly four times a day, the crowd has shrunk by about 15 percent since new steps were adopted.
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