BG Reads | News You Need to Know (January 22, 2021)
[AUSTIN METRO]
Adler: Austin's repeal of homeless camping ban 'is not working' (Austin American-Statesman)
Facing the possibility Austin voters could reinstate the city's homeless camping ban in May, Mayor Steve Adler said the city's existing plan of action has failed.
In a conversation with the American-Statesman, Adler acknowledged that the 2019 repeal of the city's camping ban "is not working." He suggested City Council members should get together with Austin residents to propose alternative solutions for addressing the city's growing homelessness crisis.
"Going back to where we were we know doesn't work – and what we're doing now we also know doesn't work," Adler told the Statesman.
His comments come after the group Save Austin Now said it has submitted 27,000 signed petitions to the city clerk to add language to the ballot for the May 1 election that would reinstate the camping ban. After failing last year to get the 20,000 valid signatures the city requires for a ballot referendum, Save Austin Now said this time it submitted 24,000 signatures that it had validated, plus 3,000 more that it did not attempt to validate. The clerk is expected to review the signatures in the coming weeks.Adler's comments also came shortly after Gov. Greg Abbott again weighed in on Austin's homelessness problem. Reacting to a news story on the possible reinstatement of the camping ban, Abbott posted a tweet Wednesday threatening intervention by the state if Austin did not vote in favor of bringing back the ban.
"If Austin doesn't reinstate the ban on homeless camping the state will do it for them," Abbott wrote. "Contrary to what Austin leaders think no one has a right to urinate & defecate wherever they want. Homelessness promoted by Austin has also endangered public safety."… (LINK TO STORY)
Austin buildings teaming up with Hi, How Are You Project to go green for mental health awareness (KVUE)
On Friday, the Hi, How Are You Project is kicking off its Happy Habit-A-Thon, a multi-day awareness and fundraising project encouraging people to share and support how they partake in happy habits.
Jan. 22 is a special date because it is the birthday of Daniel Johnston, the artist behind Austin's famous "Hi, How Are You," mural near the University of Texas campus. Johnston, who was an outspoken advocate regarding mental health, died in 2019.
This year, many Austin businesses will be "going green," the color representing mental health, with green lights starting on Friday and lasting through the week.
"In these challenging times, we encourage everyone to tend to their mental health just as we are taking precautions to maintain our physical health," the project says. "It doesn't require much effort to implement helpful strategies that promote your long-term well-being. Here are a few easy daily tasks you can do to elevate your mood, improve energy and keep yourself in good mental health. We call them 'Happy Habits.'"
Local buildings that have signed up to participate in the event include:
Austin City Hall
The Long Center for the Performing Arts
JW Marriot
W Austin… (LINK TO STORY)
Report: Austin’s home sales broke records in 2020 (Austin Business Journal)
Demand for housing in metro Austin reached unprecedented levels in 2020.
This was the takeaway of an end-of-year report published Jan. 21 by the Austin Board of Realtors. Despite the pandemic-induced downturn — and actually because of it — a record-breaking 40,165 homes were sold in the Austin area last year, totaling more than $17.5 billion in sales volume.
The Austin area has set an annual record for sales each year since 2011.
December 2020 was also a record-setting month, with 3,626 homes selling in the five-county Austin metro — a 16% year-over-year increase — during the final 31 days of the year. The median price of a home jumped 16% to $370,000, also an all-time monthly record for the region.
The median sales price for 2020 was up 9% to $344,000. Listings for the year were also up 0.4% to 43,816, while active listings decreased 34% to 4,556. Pending sales jumped 13% to 42,371 last year.
“This is a historical and unprecedented time for our housing market,” 2021 ABOR President Susan Horton said in a statement. “The pandemic only increased demand for all types of housing across the region, pushing inventory to near-zero levels and creating the strongest sellers’ market Realtors have ever seen.”
Corporate relocations and increased consumer buying power from employees of companies such as Tesla Inc. are contributing to Austin’s growing real estate market.
“The Austin-area real estate market is experiencing extraordinarily high demand fueled by years of high population growth and employment gains, lifestyle changes following the pandemic and record-low interest rates,” James Gaines, the former chief economist with Texas Real Estate Research Center, said in a statement. “The pandemic fostered an environment where many families increased personal savings helping some transition from renting to ownership while others needed to move up for more space while working from home. Despite a steep slowdown during shelter-in-place orders this spring, the market came roaring back in the summer with no drop-off at the end of the calendar year.”… (LINK TO STORY)
[TEXAS]
Texas House and Senate propose similar spending amounts in preliminary budgets (Texas Tribune)
Texas leaders in the state House and Senate have each proposed budgets that spend $119.7 billion in general revenue for the next two fiscal years, signifying notable agreement on the top lines as lawmakers try to draft a state spending plan while they confront the coronavirus pandemic.
The proposals from the two chambers, issued first on Thursday by the Senate and then by the House, are about $7 billion over the amount of general revenue Comptroller Glenn Hegar said lawmakers have to spend during the session.
State lawmakers are required to pass a balanced budget, meaning they will have to either cut down that spending later in the budgeting process, delay spending on certain items until a later budget cycle or tap into the state’s rainy day fund to pay for some of its expenses, among other accounting maneuvers budget writers could use… (LINK TO STORY)
Only one Texas county shows COVID-19 vaccine acceptance rate needed for return to normal (Dallas Morning News)
Hesitancy to take a COVID-19 vaccine varies greatly in Texas, and Dallas County residents are more likely than others to decline shots, according to survey data from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. As Dallas County struggles to provide enough doses of vaccine for its residents, it has to overcome an additional barrier in the pursuit of herd immunity and a return to normalcy — the fact that nearly 1 in 3 residents don’t want to be vaccinated. The survey results, which MIT Technology Review calls “extremely worrying,” come from Carnegie Mellon’s COVIDcast. The surveys are conducted by the university’s Delphi Group, which works in collaboration with Facebook and other universities. Delphi Group is regarded as one of the nation’s best flu-forecasting teams.
The level of detail in the data collected by the Delphi team, made up of 72 students, faculty members and volunteers around the world, has never before been available during a public health emergency, according to the group. During the ongoing pandemic, Delphi Group has regularly put questions to Facebook users, including on mask use and social distancing. The question it posed about vaccine acceptance was: “If a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 were offered to you today, would you definitely or probably choose to get vaccinated?” The survey participants are a sample of Facebook users rather than the overall U.S. population, allowing researchers to reach more people than through telephone or mail surveys, according to the organization. Delphi Group’s survey data is then given a statistical weight based on how representative of the U.S. population the surveyed people are, using data available to Facebook. Some of the country’s highest rates of vaccine acceptance can be seen in Northeastern states such as New York and New Hampshire.
In Texas, the survey results show the highest levels of acceptance are in counties with the largest populations. Residents of Travis County, home to the state capital, Austin, and the main campus of the University of Texas, were the most accepting of a vaccine, with 85% saying they would definitely or probably get the vaccine if it is offered. It’s the only Texas county that currently reaches the threshold scientists say the public needs to achieve herd immunity, according to the Delphi Group data… (LINK TO STORY)
Texas Republicans are angry at big tech’s reaction to U.S. Capitol siege. But few mention the GOP’s role in sowing election misinformation. (Texas Tribune)
After major technology and social media companies this month banned former President Donald Trump from their platforms and dumped conspiracy peddling accounts and the app Parler over their respective roles in inciting the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol, Texas Republicans portrayed the moves as discrimination against GOP voices.
But many lawmakers did so without acknowledging or decrying the role Republicans and social media played in stoking the baseless conspiracies that fueled the insurrectionists’ vicious anger at the outcome of a free and fair election.
Much of the Texas GOP’s post-siege rhetoric depicts the technology and social media companies’ moves as the “censorship of conservatives,” even though the actions were in response to credible evidence that communications were inciting violence. And legal experts agree that these tech companies are exercising their full legal rights to moderate anything on their platforms. That means some GOP politicians’ vows to take legal, congressional and legislative action now put them in the rare position of advocating for something they typically oppose: more regulation of companies operating in a free market… (LINK TO STORY)
[NATION]
Judge says Amazon won’t have to restore Parler web service (Associated Press)
Amazon won’t be forced to immediately restore web service to Parler after a federal judge ruled Thursday against a plea to reinstate the fast-growing social media app, which is favored by followers of former President Donald Trump. U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle said she wasn’t dismissing Parler’s “substantive underlying claims” against Amazon, but said it had fallen short in demonstrating the need for an injunction forcing it back online. Amazon kicked Parler off its web-hosting service on Jan. 11. In court filings, it said the suspension was a “last resort” to block Parler from harboring violent plans to disrupt the presidential transition.
The Seattle tech giant said Parler had shown an “unwillingness and inability” to remove a slew of dangerous posts that called for the rape, torture and assassination of politicians, tech executives and many others. The social media app, a magnet for the far right, sued to get back online, arguing that Amazon had breached its contract and abused its market power. It said Trump was likely on the brink of joining the platform, following a wave of his followers who flocked to the app after Twitter and Facebook expelled Trump after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Parler CEO John Matze asserted in a court filing that Parler’s abrupt shutdown was motivated at least partly by “a desire to deny President Trump a platform on any large social-media service.”
Matze said Trump had contemplated joining the network as early as October under a pseudonym. The Trump administration last week declined to comment on whether he had planned to join. Amazon denied its move to pull the plug on Parler had anything to do with political animus. It claimed that Parler had breached its business agreement “by hosting content advocating violence and failing to timely take that content down.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Fauci says it's 'liberating' working under Biden (The Hill)
Anthony Fauci on Thursday said it has been “liberating” to work as the nation's top infectious diseases doctor under President Biden after his experience working for former President Trump.
Speaking at the White House press briefing, Fauci was asked if he feels "less constrained" in the new administration after clashing with Trump and eventually being sidelined last year.
“I can tell you I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the president, so it was really something that you didn’t feel you could actually say something and there wouldn’t be any repercussions about it,” he said. “The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence and science is, and know that’s it — let the science speak — it is somewhat of a liberating feeling.”… (LINK TO STORY)
Google Escalates Dispute With Australia by Threatening Search Shutdown (Wall Street Journal)
Google threatened to shut down its search engine in Australia if a proposed law requiring tech giants to pay publishers for news isn’t changed.
The warning escalates the long-running battle pitting the Alphabet Inc. unit and Facebook Inc. against the Australian government, whose efforts to compel tech companies to pay publishers is being widely watched globally and could offer a model for other countries. Last year, Facebook said it would restrict Australian users from sharing news articles on its platforms if the proposal became law.
The Australian code would require binding arbitration if publishers and the tech companies can’t reach a deal on compensation. Media companies in Australia, including the local subsidiary of News Corp, owner of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., have supported that provision, arguing that it would prevent the tech giants from walking away from negotiations.
Mel Silva, Google Australia’s managing director, told a parliamentary committee Friday that under the so-called news-media bargaining code, Google would have to pay publishers for links to news articles that appear in search results. That would set an untenable precedent, she said, noting that unrestricted linking between websites is fundamental to how its search engine operates.
“If this version of the code were to become law it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” she said. “That would be a bad outcome not just for us, but for the Australian people, media diversity and small businesses who use Google Search.”
Google and Facebook collect ad revenue based on visits to their sites and can increase their traffic by including links to news articles. But they argue that publishers also benefit because the links send readers directly to publishers’ websites.
After long resisting paying for content, tech companies have recently made deals with some publishers globally. This week, Google reached an agreement with a French publisher association that provides a framework for determining compensation when negotiating with individual publishers… (LINK TO STORY)