May 19, 2021
This has been a long and difficult year. On top of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting business closures and job losses, we faced power and water crises during Winter Storm Uri. And Austinites joined others nationwide in impassioned protests for racial justice. We want to recognize the downtown community for everything you’ve done to follow public health regulations to keep people safe this year, while also helping to advance important issues. Thank you for your flexibility and perseverance, even through your own emotional and economic struggles.
We also want to thank the Downtown Austin Alliance Board and team for your tireless service to the downtown community. Our work depends on partnerships with hundreds of property owners, community organizations and government leaders, and you’ve kept these connections strong in our new virtual world. You have continually processed large amounts of rapidly changing information, and helped our community navigate unknown territory and make data-driven decisions. And you have balanced this crisis response with creating a strategic, comprehensive plan for downtown’s recovery and resilience.
Cultivating inclusion downtown will be central to all of our recovery efforts. In fact, we have added "inclusive" to the Downtown Alliance’s core values as a continual reminder of this priority. We must make downtown safe, accessible, welcoming and appealing for everyone, no matter their age, gender, race or background. This is important to continuing downtown’s tradition as a gathering place for everything from live music to the social justice movements we saw this year. It is also important to strengthening our economy. This year has shown how dependent downtown businesses are on office workers and tourists, and as we welcome those groups back we also want to invite other Austinites downtown as well.
As the stewards of the Downtown Austin Vision, the Downtown Austin Alliance and its Foundation have continued working diligently toward transformative initiatives that will cultivate inclusion while enhancing downtown’s value and vitality for generations to come. These include Capital Metro’s Project Connect, which will connect downtown to North Austin, South Austin and the airport via two new light rail lines and other transit. We have been heavily involved in advocacy and public education around this effort and were encouraged that voters passed this $7.1 billion investment to keep our urban core accessible.
We were also encouraged by the Texas Transportation Commission’s official funding of the $4.9 billion Capital Express Project, which will lower and cap I-35 through downtown Austin. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reconnect East Austin and downtown and to improve the effectiveness of this key transit corridor. This year we began implementing a roadmap from the international experts from Urban Land Institute, capturing the community’s vision for the I-35 corridor and sharing it with TxDOT through our leadership in the Our Future 35 group.
Last but not least, we are urgently rallying our partners toward solving Austin’s homelessness crisis, which has escalated sharply prior to and during the pandemic. We need solutions that balance the needs for public health and safety with the needs for housing, social services and behavioral health care for those experiencing homelessness. We spearheaded a community homelessness summit to create a detailed implementation plan, and we continued to invest in research-based solutions, including Community First! Village’s expansion and a new Healthcare for the Homeless program with our partners at Integral Care, Downtown Austin Community Court and the Homeless Outreach Street Team.
And we are proud to “walk the talk” in helping our unhoused neighbors: Many of our Downtown Ambassadors who kept downtown clean and safe this year were formerly homeless. We are extremely grateful for their essential work and their example that we can all persevere through tough times and come out ahead.
