Heyman<\/a> said the council should help increase affordable housing options for students, such as co-op housing, rather than expanding UNO or building more developments in West Campus.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cThis idea of expanding UNO into the northern part of the campus area is not going to necessarily do anything to create more affordable housing,\u201d Heyman said. \u201cIt\u2019s just going to expand the number of students who could live next to campus \u2026 which is a bonus, but it\u2019s not necessarily going to make things cheaper.\u201d<\/p>\n
Public safety<\/p>\n
Qadri said the city needs more trained professionals to deal with mental health emergencies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always been of the mind that we need to make sure our police officers are there to serve and protect, and not have police officers in situations that they\u2019re not trained to be in,\u201d Qadri said. \u201cIndividuals who are dealing with a mental health crisis \u2014 that\u2019s not a place for an officer to be in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heyman said that the Austin Police Department is overwhelmed with cases that could be outsourced to mental health and emergency services professionals. He also said he would prioritize working with APD to recruit new officers and ensure they are trained to de-escalate situations.<\/p>\n
Kam said she has seen multiple incidents where criminals arrested in West Campus by APD were released from custody shortly after by Travis County.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a big advocate for Travis County stepping up to make sure that we don\u2019t have these offenders released so soon without some having been diverted to a program \u2026 whether that be consequences in jail time or mental health diversion,\u201d Kam said. \u201cWhen I\u2019ve met with UT students, that does come up as an issue \u2026 that they do feel at times unsafe, and certainly I felt it when I\u2019ve been in West Campus.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"5 candidates are running for Austin City Council District 9, which includes UT and West Campus. As the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-453975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}