From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow.

This is the Daily.

In Austin, Texas, a local businessman has undertaken one of the nation's biggest and boldest efforts to confront the crisis of chronic homelessness.

Today, Lucy Tompkins takes us inside the multi-million dollar experiment to understand both its promise and its peril.

Music understand both its promise and its peril. It's Friday, December 6th.

Lucy, thank you for coming to the studio.

Thanks for having me, Michael. So I want to start by asking you, how did you coming to the studio. Thanks for having me, Michael.

So I want to start by asking you, how did you come to the story of this social experiment

that's been happening in Texas?

Yeah, so I write about homelessness, and I think it's fair to say in this topic and in journalism

in general, a lot of the stories are very focused on

what's going wrong, how intractable this problem is, how it's growing. But part of my job is

also to look for examples of where we're making progress. And I moved to Austin a few years ago. And as I started talking to

people about homelessness there, I kept hearing about this community on the outskirts of town

that people said was a really creative and successful and impressive way of housing some of the most difficult to house people who live

on the streets, the chronically homeless.

And just describe that population, what that word really means?

That's a federal definition, and it refers to people who have a disability like mental illness, addiction, or a physical disability,

and who've lived on the streets for more than a year or repeatedly.

And it would seem like a population that a lot of major American cities are really having a

hard time grappling with.

Yeah, these are the people who, when you think about encampments in

...