Texas Homeless Population Delcines

Recently the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development released a report on how Texas has had one of the major homeless decreasing rates in the country since the year 2007. Texas was ranked in the top five over the last couple years for having the highest percentage of homeless people among those in New York, California, And Massachusetts.

Theirs different categories we put people in when talking about homelessness there's sheltered homeless people who are people who stay in emergency shelters or group homes, there's unsheltered homeless people who stay in cars. buses, parks, abandoned buildings etc. and then there's chronically homeless which are people who have a disability or has someone in the family with a disability who has either been continuously homeless for at least a year or experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.

Nearly 30,000 Americans among those of 610,000 were in fact "homeless" this year in Texas that’s a 13% decrease from the year 2012 and a huge 27% from the year 2007. Nationally homeless people have declined over the years, sadly about a quarter of homeless people were children and about 12% of the homeless are adults and veterans. since the year 2007 Austin itself has went from having almost 6000 homeless people to 2090 homeless people this year and that’s good in my eyes that means the government is actually trying to make a difference for once.

To me its good to see this declining because that means people are in fact getting back on their feet and finding jibs that qualify for and are able to support themselves and/or family and actually have a place to stay and call home. The government should actually have a thing to where they in fact try to help homeless people directly especially when a majority amount seems to be children, to help get care and be able to support and take care of themselves because after all it's not like people just wake up one day and decide they want to be homeless.

Abortion Response!

In one of my classmates articles Texas In My Eyes she talked about abortions in Texas and the House Bill 2 that requires the doctors that are performing the abortion surgery have hospital admitting privilege within 30 miles of the facility, and that doctors follows the FDA regimen, rather than commonly used evidence-based protocol, for drug-induced abortions and she agreed with that bill and I also agree with her.

 I feel that a woman needs to have the best care especially when getting a serious procedure like that done and it still allows women to get abortions safely and legally in Texas. The House Bill 2 may has also did a good thing and managed closed some facilities down because they didn't meet some of the requirements and to me that's a good thing because so many women could have gotten a procedure done illegally and things also would've went wrong because they didn't have the proper equipment or doctors etc.

I agree to leave the Bill because it allows women to have that option available and it doesn't take that away from them because yes some people may believe that abortion is bad and should just be illegal but some people don't have time for children or may not be financially stable to have children right now and the House Bill 2 saves them!

Texas Water Conservation

Texas government has a lot of things that should and should not be done by them, meaning handling local and government problems to the best of their abilities and I decided to choose something that is a major problem in the Texas right now and I don't think the government is doing a good job at handling it and people aren't really getting it and that happens to be the conservation of our water!

As you may know Texas is now in a stage 2 drought which means the combined level of Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan which happen to be our region’s water supply reservoirs have only a combined storage level of only 900,000 acres of water and that is only 35% full of the 100% we're supposed to have. Because of the low storage levels the Austin council members adopted a revised water conservation code on August 16, 2012 with different water restrictions including watering days and times.

I agree that they had to change the restrictions and get more specific about water conservation because people really didn't see the problem with watering your grass every day or washing your car at home because you didn't want to spend money at a car wash or taking hour long showers and because no one seen those everyday task being a problem we started losing tons and tons of water every day!

Some of the restrictions are you can only water your yard one day a week, no washing your cars at home because a study showed that washing your cars use three times the amount of water than an automatic car wash, they also have a water waste rule which is failure to repair a controllable leak which includes a broken sprinkler, a leaking valve, or a broken pipe you must fix it immediately and if you don't you'll be sent a warning and if you still fail to comply then you will receive a citation until you fix the leak.

All customers who use water other than reclaimed water must follow the drought stage 2 water restriction code and the only way to avoid it is to check were your water is coming from and see what area you fall in or if you have variances which is an acceptance from adherence water use regulations.

What the government fails to realize is not everyone is familiar with these water laws and what the drought really is and how it’s getting worse and worse every year and if they made more of an attempt to enforce these restrictions and actually fine people and knowledge the minds of their Texas residents about conserving water then maybe we could actually make a change and help with water conservation. 

If people knew that we're running low on water and it can and will affect their lives in a negative way maybe they'll take action. The government should have weekly water conservation checks and make sure everyone is using the amount of water their supposed to and if not they'll get fined, they need to be more aware and actually be more involved in this too because if they showed the public that they too themselves follow these water restriction laws then maybe they'll get a better turn out!