Class Enemy of the Week: Matt Mackowiak
By Tandera L.
This is part four of Austin DSA’s “Class Enemy of the Week” series. You can find part three, on Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, here.
Homelessness has been an issue in Austin for decades, and the chosen solution has always been contempt and criminalization. In the 90s, homeless youth who hung out on Guadalupe by University of Texas, nicknamed “the Drag”, were referred to as “drag rats.” While claiming progressive values, Austin has always stuck with policies that put profit over people and ensure the continued suffering of the people who have been cast into poverty and homelessness.
In 2019, Austin DSA joined a coalition under the name “Homes Not Handcuffs” to pressure city council members to vote in favor of repealing three ordinances that violently targeted the homeless community. From 1997 to 2019, it was illegal to “aggressively” panhandle, “sit or sleep in public,” or “camp in public,” including sleeping in your car. Whether someone is ticketed or arrested for breaking these laws was up to the discretion of police officers. As socialists, we know the discretion of police officers can never be trusted because their discretion is a tool of capitalists and white supremacy. Their job is to oppress the poor, especially Black people and other people of color, while protecting wealthy people and their private property. Tasking police officers with “solving” our housing crisis would be like attempting to put out a fire with gasoline.
Austin DSA and other local activist groups campaigned extensively to get these ordinances repealed, making calls to on-the-fence city council members and knocking thousands of doors around town. In the end, city council voted unanimously in favor of getting rid of all three ordinances. Soon after the decriminalization of homelessness, Republican-backed groups sprung up and began to ramp up fear-mongering in Austin. Two groups, Safehorns and SaveAustinNow (SAN), have led the charge against humane solutions to homelessness. Their easily misleading names implying that they just want to do good for the community have muddled the conversation surrounding homelessness.
In Texas there are plenty of class enemies when it comes to housing and criminalizing poverty. Matt Mackowiak has happily decided to be our local enemy in Austin. As the chairman of the Travis County GOP, Mackowiak formed SAN originally as a political action committee to raise money for the Republican Party. He paints himself as a moderate and a man of the people who hates seeing encampments under highways because they are unsafe and inhumane. In reality, he acts not out of virtue, but out of utter contempt for the poor and downtrodden of our city. His solution to our housing crisis is to reinstate no sitting or lying in public and no camping in prohibited public spaces. Previous to the city council 2019 vote, homeless people in Austin lived in surrounding wooded areas, hiding from law enforcement. Police officers would show up to the camps and give residents a small amount of time to gather their most important belongings and clear out.
It is hard to understand how hard it is to get back on your feet, once you’ve gotten this low. During police raids, residents lose important paperwork that is necessary to have in order to receive state services and to obtain jobs. Living in poverty means panhandling for bus fare so you can get to the social security office, then panhandling for more bus fare to get to the birth certificate office, then panhandling for more bus fare to get a new ID. It takes significant time and money to prove you exist in our society.
But to people like Matt Mackowiak and the Travis County GOP, poverty is a choice. Poverty is an individual failing to take personal responsibility for their homelessness. Save Austin Now’s only objective is to recriminalize poverty in Austin and continue to cycle people through our criminal justice system and send others to hide in the woods.
The extent of Mackowiak’s alleged compassion for Austinites is expressed in his belief that people should be thrown in jail for not having a home. The coronavirus crisis has removed any mask of decency from capitalism, casting millions into destitution and misery and anti-homeless policies only serve to exacerbate suffering. We don’t need a deep analysis to understand Mackowiak or SAN — it’s simply people with wealth and positions of power not wanting to be bothered with poverty.
In order to get the proposition to recriminalize homelessness in Austin on the ballot in May, SAN needed to gather signatures. Mackowiak hired canvassers from across the country to be the face of his campaign. His petitioners, realizing the inhumanity of their cause, resorted to base deception to gather signatures. Many Austinites believed this would provide housing but in actuality it will give police the power to give warrants and arrest people on the basis of existing outside. Mackowiak’s outright lies infuriated so many people that the clerk’s office, which is responsible for approving any potential ballots and candidates, received hundreds of phone calls from people asking to be removed from the petitions. To date Save Austin Now has spent $300,000 on their campaign and plans on spending another $500,000. That’s almost $1 million dollars spent to bully, harass, and humiliate homeless people.
Mackowiak is a caricature of a dishonest politician. He regularly goes on the local Fox syndicate to defend the evil escapades of the Republicans both locally and nationally. He has attempted to claim that Save Austin Now is a bipartisan organization while using Travis County GOP as their mailing address. During the winter storm, Mackowiak attempted to raise funds for a private jet to Miami while the Austinites he claims to care about were freezing and starving in their homes. This is the true face of SAN and their Republican cronies.
The sight of the encampments enrage Mackowiak because he believes that Austin is a playground for the rich, hardly a home for their servants and certainly no place for those who have been totally cast out by our society.
Democratic socialists recognize that the solution to homelessness is providing people with homes, not throwing them in jail. Housing is a human right, and we won’t rest until that right is recognized. We must defeat the efforts of SAN on May 1st and from there continue our fight for housing for all. Join our campaign to defeat Prop B today.
