Category Archives: Affordability

Towards creating a more diverse and sustainable Austin for all.

Remarks to Green & Healthy Homes Initiative Annual Executive Leadership Institute

GHHIThank you, and welcome, everyone, to Austin!

Austin is a creative, innovative city, which is a nice way of saying we don’t really care about doing things the way they’ve always been done. In fact, Austin is good ideas become real, even if this idea is so new, so radical, that it would get you kicked out of most cities.

This is what it means to Keep Austin Weird. Austin is where Willie Nelson came to reinvent country music. Austin gave the world a new way to shop for groceries with Whole Foods and a new way to catch dinner-and-a-movie with the Alamo Draft House. We are perhaps best known for our tech innovations. First with Dell, which was born in a dorm room up the road at UT, and now Google picked Austin as the first city outside of Mountain View to test their automated cars.

All of these things I’ve mentioned – Google cars, Alamo Draft House, and Whiskey River – aren’t just new, they’re improved. The point of innovation is to do things in a new way so they work better. And Austin is very comfortable with innovation. That’s why while I immediately took to the Green & Health Homes Initiative. This isn’t just a new way to do home repairs. It’s smarter. It works better. It saves people money. Continue reading →

Speech – Mayor’s Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness

Thank you, Congressman Doggett, for that introduction. And thank you, Secretary Castro, for being here today, and good morning to everyone here.

Not with us today is Senator Kirk Watson, whose staff showed up to help with this initiative and never left. He can’t be here today, but rest assured he’ll know that we’re thanking him now, so thank you, Kirk.

Normally, the way you do this is to start off by thanking people before you get to the meat of your speech. This is not going to be that kind of speech. It’s all going to be all thank you’s. There are going to be so many thank you’s that if this were an Oscars speech I’d never be allowed to finish.

We’re here today to celebrate that all of you have achieved what at one time was thought impossible — the functional end to chronic veteran homelessness in Austin. And I mean all of you. If success has a lot of fathers, we’re never going to be able to establish paternity here.

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