Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Follow us:
Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Subscribe to this news feed 

News

Austin

Homeless memorial planned for Auditorium Shores

  • Text size: + -
TWC News: Homeless memorial planned for Auditorium Shores
Play now

Time Warner Cable video customers:
Sign in with your TWC ID to access our video clips.

out of 10

Free Video Views Remaining

To get you to the stories you care about, we are offering everyone 10 video views per month.

Access to our video is always free for Time Warner Cable video customers who login with their TWC ID.

  To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.


A life-sized bronze statue of a homeless veteran holding his daughter is in the works for Austin’s Auditorium Shores.

One of Austin’s leading advocates for the homeless, Richard Troxell, say’s the statue captures an accurate image of homelessness in the city.

"We thought we needed to really humanize it, so we need to put a face on homelessness," he said.

The bronze memorial called "The Homecoming" will feature the soldier and his daughter, and an elderly woman with her bags.

Council Member Mike Martinez says the statue highlights the need to find permanent homes for the estimated 4,000 homeless Austinites.

"Until this issue is solved, we have a problem with homelessness in this community," Martinez said.

Martinez supports putting the statue in the heart of the city, but knows some Austinites won't be pleased with the prominent placement.

"It's not going to sit well with some people, but for me, it is a very important issue,” he said. “It's important to have a memorial to those homeless folks who have given their lives on the streets of Austin."

The statue is planned to compliment the city's existing homeless memorial—a plaque, bench and tree along Lady Bird Lake.

Austinite Jason Thompson supports the more prominent fixture as a means of fundraising.

"Obviously, the money would be helpful to the homeless people,” Thompson said. “If you get more people aware of the situation, maybe they are more likely to donate and raise more funds."

Making this statue, the latest call to action in the city's war to end homelessness.

The statue is expected to cost $175,000 which would be entirely funding through private donations.

If approved by the City Council on Thursday, House the Homeless will ramp up fundraising in October and donate it to the city.

10.11.12.245 ClientIP: 192.99.32.115, 23.15.4.5 UserAgent: ArchiveTeam ArchiveBot/20141229.01 (wpull 0.1005a1) and not Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36 Profile: TWCSAMLSP