Thirty-Five People and Three Hundred Tons Are Not the Same Unit

I did the long division on the back of an H-E-B receipt for $11.42: tortillas, limes, one sad bag of ice. Seven hundred twenty thousand divided by thirty-five. I got a little over twenty thousand and assumed I'd dropped a zero, because nothing in my life has ever cost twenty thousand dollars a unit except a used truck and a root canal I'm still paying off.

I hadn't dropped a zero.

The number came out of a staff report last week on Austin's new homeless encampment management programs. Community Impact covered it on September 2. The first month cost about $720,000. Staff reported 35 people sheltered, more than 300 tons of debris removed, and people camping again at 28 percent of the sites the city had cleared.

Those are the four numbers. The city likes them in that order. I'd like to take them out of order and look at each one under a better lamp.

The denominator is doing a lot of work

The twenty-thousand-per-person figure is unfair, and I want to say so before somebody at City Hall forwards this to their cousin. The $720,000 didn't only pay for shelter. It also paid for crews, trucks, landfill fees, and whatever else goes into moving three hundred tons of anything. Dividing the whole bill by 35 people is the kind of math you do at a kitchen table at 11 p.m. with a receipt and a grudge.

Dividing it by tonnage is just as unfair. That gets you about $2,400 a ton, which would make it the most expensive trash pickup in Travis County history. It's fun to say, though.

The trouble is that the report hands you both numbers in the same breath, as if 35 and 300 belonged on the same scoreboard. They don't. One counts human beings who now have a roof. The other counts how heavy the stuff was. A report that puts them side by side is asking you to feel good about both totals at once, and they don't add up to anything. They're different units. Nobody has ever converted people into tons, and the agenda item should stop arranging its bullet points as though somebody might.

I used to work a truck scale

For two summers in my twenties I ran the scale house at a scrap yard off Ben White that I'll leave unnamed out of respect for its tetanus record. Trucks rolled on full, rolled off empty, and I wrote the difference on a pink carbon slip. The lesson of that job, which nobody had to teach me, was that tonnage is the easiest number in the world to make big.

Rain makes it big. Dirt makes it big. A soaked mattress weighs about as much as a decent opinion of yourself. Every load that came across my scale was heavier than the guy driving it wanted it to be, unless he was getting paid by weight, in which case it was never heavy enough.

So when a report leads with "over 300 tons," I don't picture progress. I picture the scale house, the pink slip, and a lot of August rain. I also picture what a ton is made of out there. Some of it is honestly garbage, the kind nobody wants living next to, the people living next to it included. Some of it, I would bet my scale-house paycheck, was a tent, a sleeping bag, a folding chair, and a backpack with somebody's birth certificate zipped in the front pocket. Weight doesn't sort itself into categories. It's all just pounds on the slip.

That isn't me assuming the worst about the crews. They're doing a hard, filthy job in heat that would cook a parking meter. It's me pointing out that the city chose to lead with the one metric that can't tell those things apart.

Thirty-five is a real number and I'm glad about it

Thirty-five people went somewhere with a door. I don't want to wave that away to land a joke about consultants. That's thirty-five people who got through Labor Day weekend somewhere other than under an overpass while I-35 got rebuilt over their heads. If one of them was the guy who used to sit by the bus stop at Cameron and 51st reading paperback westerns and nodding at everybody, good. I hope he got the bottom bunk.

The question isn't whether 35 is good. It is. The question is what the denominator ought to be, and the report doesn't say. Thirty-five out of how many? How many people were at the sites that got cleared? Where did the rest go? If they went to another site, that isn't really an outcome. It's a relocation with a work order attached.

That brings us to the number that ought to be printed in red.

Twenty-eight percent

At 28 percent of cleared sites, people were camping again.

Anyone who has lived in this city longer than a lease cycle could have told you that would happen, and so could anyone who has ever been told to leave somewhere with nowhere else to go. Clearing a site doesn't create a destination. It only removes one. If there's no bed at the end of the process, the process is a very expensive way of making someone walk four blocks.

Picture spending a month and the better part of three-quarters of a million dollars mopping a floor while the ceiling is still leaking. More than a quarter of the time, the puddle is right back where it was. The report counts the mop. It counts the gallons. It doesn't seem in any hurry to look up.

My guess, and it's a guess, the kind you form from forty years of watching this city announce things, is that the 28 percent is the most honest number in the whole item, because it's the only one that measures what happens after the city leaves.

What I'd like on the next agenda

The city is going to keep issuing these reports, and it should, because a program that spends this kind of money owes the public a look at the receipt. So here's my request from the cheap seats, written in pencil on the back of an H-E-B receipt:

• Lead with people. Put the sheltered count first and give it a denominator. Report how many people were contacted, how many were offered something, and how many took it. If people turned offers down, say why, because "why" is where the actual policy lives.
• Follow up at thirty and ninety days. Being sheltered on a Tuesday is not the same as still being housed in December. Tell us which one you're counting.
• Split the tonnage. Separate trash from belongings, and say what happened to the belongings. If there's a storage process, report how many people got their stuff back. If there isn't one, that's a finding too.
• Track the 28 percent like it matters. It's the number that tells you whether the money moved anyone forward or only moved them over.

None of that is radical. It's how you'd run a lemonade stand if the lemonade stand had a seven-figure annual budget and a public information office.

I folded the receipt back up and put it in the junk drawer with the takeout menus and a rubber band from 2009. Eleven forty-two for tortillas, limes, and ice. I know exactly what I got for that money, and I could tell you where every piece of it went.

The city should be able to say the same about its $720,000.