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WASHINGTON — In 2019, Austin repealed a ban on camping in the city. It was a priority championed by the city council’s most progressive members who said the measure would help homeless people access housing by keeping their criminal records clean.
Soon, encampments sprung up across the city. Residents complained about littering and noise. Pandemic social distancing rules pushed more people out of homeless shelters, making the issue even more visible. Conservative opponents of the city council said the city’s lax laws were drawing more people from outside Austin to pitch their tents. Gov. Greg Abbott protested. Conservatives mobilized, and by May 2021, the city’s residents said they had enough. A 57% majority of voters voted to reinstate a ban on camping in the city.
At the center of the initiative was a young city councilmember, whom conservatives delighted in caricaturing as the face of the most progressive policies in one of the most liberal cities in Texas. Greg Casar, who was elected to the Austin City Council in 2014 at the age of 25, had a leading hand in many of the city’s most progressive initiatives.
Casar is now a freshman congressman elected unanimously this month to lead the Congressional Progressive Caucus, one of the largest and most influential groups in Congress. The group of nearly 100 members drives much of the Democratic Party’s ideological compass and includes a wide range of members — from the ultra-visible Squad who became famous for bucking then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2018 to more muted members who also belong to the moderate New Democrat Coalition.
He has a lot of lessons he’s learned from his time on city council, particularly the camping fight that colored his political career for years after. Though he stands by the move to lift the camping ban, he says the city council didn’t do enough to communicate to voters how the measure helping homeless people aligned with the priorities of a majority of voters.
He is taking those lessons to Congress as Democrats reel from mass losses in this year’s elections. He would rather build coalitions than pass ideological purity tests that have pushed voters away from the left. He espouses a more working class message, steering away from the culture wars and back to economic concerns that dominated voters’ minds this year.
Greg Casar, Austin City Council member at the time, comments on recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Austin outside the Little Walnut Creek Branch Library in February 2017.
Credit:
Laura Skelding for The Texas Tribune
That doesn’t mean abandoning the vulnerable people that make up much of the progressive coalition, including immigrants, people of color and LGBTQ communities. But it means returning m
