Hi, I’m Cory — telling the stories that make Texas wilder & wiser.

In a little over a decade, Houston housed over 28,000 people who were experiencing homelessness.

The U.S.’s 4th largest city and Texas’ largest has cut its total homelessness figures by more than 60% since committing to tackle this issue head-on in 2012.

Representatives from cities nationwide, including my very own, San Antonio, visit Houston to learn about how they’ve achieved such progress.

Houston adopted what’s called a Housing First strategy. 

Housing First, for those unfamiliar, is an approach to addressing the challenge of homelessness by first, before addressing anything else (addiction and sobriety, employment, etc.), housing the individual in question. Research has shown this is the most effective way to get and keep people out of homelessness. Various studies confirm that a rapid re-housing approach leads to 75%-91% of households remaining housed after one year.

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Austin, Texas. 

A city that’s near and dear to my wife and I’s love story. It’s where we met. And in a short time after, it’s where together, we left (and moved South to San Antonio).

I moved to Austin in the summer of 2016. It felt for the first time that I was doing something radically different with my life. Setting out on my own. I had traveled a good amount before, but moving to Texas was the first time I really “lived” somewhere else. 

I lived a 20-minute walk away from one of the most famed streets in the whole “town” (if it could still be called that), South Congress. 

Neither of my subjects for this story I’m telling here, existed in the short year or so span I lived in Austin. One, in the past, which arguably created the