Greg Casar Enters the National Spotlight, and Brings His Grassroots Coalition With Him

Photo by John Anderson

Greg Casar’s final Austin City Council meeting on February 3 was a subdued affair. Icy weather forced 10 of the Council members to attend the meeting remotely, while Mayor Steve Adler presided in person, alone in the council chambers.

Casar also sat alone, in his home, and listened as supporters, allies, and friends called in to share their gratitude over the phone. Then, each of Casar's Council colleagues acknowledged that he helped transform City Hall into a place that was accessible to Austinites who would never have considered testifying from the podium before.

Adler, one of Casar's closest and most important allies on Council, ticked off a litany of Casar's policy accomplishments that touched on housing, criminal justice, labor, and a host of other issues. But it was Casar's success in expanding the idea of who City Hall worked for, Adler said, that would be his most enduring legacy.

Voters approved the new 10-1 Council (made up of 10 single-member districts and one at-large mayor) in 2012 and held its first 10-1 elections (all 11 seats open, more than 80 candidates) two years later; Adler and Casar became foundational members when they took office in 2015. This new form of local government was "imagined as the Council of change, equity, and of access to new voices at the table," Adler said. "You helped fulfill that potential and that promise.

"What I will remember most of your time on Council is the faces of the new people that came to us and spoke on issues," the mayor continued. "You've created a whole generation of people who now believe that they can come into this place with the belief that they can affect change. That is such an incredible gift, not only to those people and those communities, but to our city, generally."

As he heads into his new role as U.S. Rep. Casar, D-Texas, the new congressman says he's taking the grassroots approach that was fundamental to his Council strategy and scaling it up to the federal level. That will involve a field office in Austin responsible for the same kind of constituent services work that his District 4 Council office specialized in; it'll be led by some of the same people, plus new hires to meet the needs of a much larger constituency.

Casar will enter Congress with more responsibility than the typical freshman member. He was elected whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Dec. 8, making him the third-highest ranking member in the 103-member body. That means he'll be working behind the scenes to make sure the House's most liberal members are on the same page when it comes to resisting Republican extremism. "If the right wing makes a serious play to cut Social Security and Medicare, then the CPC will play a key role in stopping that from happening," Casar said. "We don't want to let the Joe Manchins of the world negotiate a deal where the GOP gets to balance the budget on the backs of the sick and the elderly."

U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was an early supporter, endorsing Casar just two months after he announced his run for Congress late in 2019. Jayapal, who co-chaired the Con­gressional Progressive Caucus from 2019 to 2021 and who now serves as its sole chair, told us she is constantly on the lookout for congressional candidates who have three of the qualities Casar possesses: experience with grassroots organizing, a progressive political outlook, and legislative experience.

It can be difficult to find people with all three qualifications, because progressive activists perceive entering electoral politics as "selling out," Jayapal said. "As a legislator, you have to be able to push, but you also have to govern. You rarely get perfection in legislation." But Congress needs more organizers in elected office, Jayapal added, because they understand that to develop effective legislation, affected communities must be part of the process. "We need to build coalitions to better support legislation with inside and outside organizing."

There's good reason to think the Casar model that worked at the local level will successfully scale up. Whatever you think of his politics, he was a policymaker who got things done. He pushed Council to support a historic affordable housing bond in 2018, which cleared the path for an even larger housing bond in 2022. He championed criminal justice reforms, like a "fair chance hiring" ordinance that helps formerly incarcerated people successfully reenter society by making it harder for employers to reject job applicants based on criminal history. He supported working-class tenants across the city, beginning in mobile home parks, as they stood up to bad landlords and demanded better living conditions. That effort culminated in new citywide renter protections.

But Casar himself, and those who worked alongside him, are clear: He didn't achieve any of those things alone. He did it through the work of a smart and dedicated staff, with the support of grassroots community organizations, and through collaboration with his Council colleagues who were willing to take risks and push for progressive change. It's his background as a community organizer, as policy director at Workers Defense Project in Austin, that his past, current, and newest allies point to as the key ingredient to his success on Council. His experience working directly with the people most impacted by policy made clear how crucial their firsthand knowledge is to crafting and adopting it.

Building a Movement

Last month, sitting outside a coffee shop in the congressional district he had just been elected to represent, Casar reflected on his time at City Hall – and how it will inform his work in the U.S. House of Representatives. "My first year in office, our mission statement was that we wanted to shift who City Hall was working for."

That work began by responding to complaints coming from people living in mobile home parks located within Casar's North­east Austin district. Casar and his staff fielded calls from tenants who were dealing with landlords who refused to resolve basic quality-of-life issues, like clearing clogged drainage pipes, fixing gas leaks, and trimming back trees.

Building trust started here, when he and his staff showed up to help. These organizing efforts eventually led to the formation in 2016 of Building and Strengthening Ten­ant Action (BASTA), a tenants rights group that has helped thousands of Austin renters improve their living conditions.

BASTA's most notable success came in 2020, when residents of the North Lamar Mobile Home Park pulled off a remarkable coup – they purchased their park from owners who, in 2015, had threatened mass evictions if the existing tenants did not agree to exorbitant rent increases. The victory remains unique, and one that Casar is especially proud to have helped achieve. "A lot of folks who I respected asked me why we were working so hard to organize people in mobile home parks," he told us. "But we helped stop people from getting evicted. That made a universe of difference for those constituents, but it also helped spur a broader tenants rights movement within the city."

Shoshana Krieger, BASTA project director, agrees. "Greg saw blind spots in our housing ecosystem and a lack of infrastructure in place to serve some of the most vulnerable people in our community," she told us. "The D4 office was great at providing short-term fixes to problems – but then pressing on to build out longer-term solutions that created resilience in communities."

He kept up that effort through his last Council meeting. Amid the fond farewells, he also brought forward resolutions that directed staff to explore turning temporary COVID-19 protections for renters into permanent law. In November, with Casar gone from the dais, Council finally codified those protections.

Then-congressional candidate Greg Casar speaks in support of Starbucks workers’ efforts to unionize during a press conference outside a West Campus Starbucks on March 24, 2022 (Photo by John Anderson)

A similar through-line can be found in Casar's focus on social justice. In 2016, he helped pass a fair chance hiring ordinance, which prohibits private employers from inquiring about an applicant's criminal history until after a conditional job offer has been extended. Passing the ordinance was a major civil rights victory, making Austin the first city in Texas to pass what is known as a "ban the box" ordinance (since then, Harris County has adopted a similar measure and Dallas considered one earlier this year).

Casar worked alongside advocacy groups and formerly incarcerated individuals to write that ordinance. They knew it would be an uphill battle, both in clearing opposition from business interests and in defending it from hostile Republicans at the Capitol. The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce opposed the ordinance and asked for a number of changes – including removal of the "ban the box" provision.

"We knew if we accepted more of GACC's changes, the ordinance would have a better chance of surviving the statehouse," Casar recalled. "But I didn't decide which [changes] to agree to on my own." The coalition told Casar where to compromise; that empowered the council member to continue negotiating amendments, knowing his coalition would support him. "We were both politically smart enough to accept some changes, but principled enough to stand resolute against others."

About a year after the ordinance passed, when the 85th Texas Legislature's session was underway, Republicans tried to create state law to trump the local ordinance, but they were defeated by Casar and his allies. The same people who helped craft the ordinance showed up at the Capitol to testify against bills threatening to overturn it. The two years of organizing that preceded the Legislature's preemption attempts paid off.

The fair-chance campaign helped inspire new leaders and organizations in Austin's criminal justice advocacy space. Chris Harris participated in the campaign but was not a leader of it. Six years later, Harris is one of Austin's most accomplished justice advocates. "The fair-chance campaign was early in my advocacy work," Harris told us. "It was inspiring to see people come together at the local level and in a way that really challenged an ingrained status quo." And most importantly, Harris adds, "we won."

Following fair chance, groups like Grass­roots Leadership and the Austin Justice Coalition (Harris used to work at the former and now works at the latter) would achieve other notable justice reforms. In 2018, Austin became the first "Freedom City" in Texas – a movement that sprang up as a way to resist the immigration crackdown carried out by President Donald Trump. Then, in 2019, justice groups helped increase funding to improve Austin's mental health crisis response.

Reflective, Not Regretful

The movement's most high-profile victory occurred in 2020, when Austin became one of the only cities in the nation to answer the calls of Black Lives Matter demonstrators and actually reduce police spending. City Council approved a fiscal year 2020-21 budget that cut about $20 million in Austin Police Department spending compared to the previous budget. It was a relatively small figure given that APD's budget exceeded $400 million in both of those years, but the cut represented a willingness among Council to stand up to entrenched police power.

Minor as the cut may have been in reality, Casar's early messaging around the vote helped propel attacks from right-wing groups that framed the vote as "defunding the police." And in some cases, the conservative backlash directed at Casar has had statewide consequences.

Winning progressive policy victories is only half the battle – sustaining them is a separate challenge altogether. It's notable that three of Casar's most high-profile policy victories – the paid sick days ordinance, the decriminalization of homelessness, and the 2020 police budget cuts – were all struck down by various right-wing forces.

Austin's paid sick days ordinance, approved by Council in 2018, would have required private businesses to provide one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, capped at 64 hours per year (San Antonio and Dallas would later pass similar ordinances). But right-wing lobbyists at the Texas Public Policy Foundation sued on behalf of business interests across the state. In November 2018, the 3rd Court of Appeals – which, at the time, was dominated by Republicans – ruled that the ordinance was unconstitutional. Two years later, the Texas Supreme Court – also dominated by Republicans – declined to hear an appeal made by the city of Austin, which effectively killed the ordinance.

This loss drove home for Casar how powerful, and conservative, the nation's court system had become – a trend that only accelerated after Trump lost the U.S. House in 2018. Casar recalled working for months to build the coalition that helped pass the sick days ordinance, while studying similar laws that survived Republican-controlled courts so that the Austin version would have a better chance of withstanding an inevitable lawsuit. The ordinance was still defeated.

"There has been a movement on the right to turn our court system into a feature of right-wing government," Casar said. "We have to respond by placing as many progressive judges on the bench as we can. We can't show up with fists to a knife fight."

Eighteen months after Council approved the paid sick days ordinance, they voted to decriminalize homelessness. But in May 2021, Austin voters approved a ballot measure effectively overturning Council's changes to Austin's 25-year-old public camping and no sit/lie ordinances. Then, the Texas Legislature passed a law banning public camping statewide. It was a humbling moment for Casar, who up to that point had not suffered such a resounding defeat.

When asked about how Council's post-decriminalization strategy could have been handled more effectively, Casar takes a long pause. "There were places the strategy could have been better. If there's potential for unintended consequences, we need to do everything we can to bring the public along," he said. How could the city have better managed issues that arose in the public spaces where unhoused people did camp, for example? "It was very challenging," Casar recalled. "We were in a challenging political event. When we make big moves like that in the future, we need to do a better job of thinking through these challenging aspects and make sure we maintain the public's support."

But Casar remains proud of the decriminalization effort. He argues that the issue was rooted in civil rights and humanitarian concern, and he believes helping people living outside, even if temporarily, was worth the backlash. Casar also argues that decriminalization made the typically ignored homeless population highly visible, which sparked communitywide conversation, which in turn spurred an urgency to act on the issue that had not existed before. "Now we're working on housing thousands of people," he said, referring to the city's newly established (and nearly fully funded) plan to house 3,000 people living without shelter. "There may have been some political pain, but if we ended up relieving human suffering, then it will have been worth it."

Casar has a similar feeling about the Texas Legislature's response to the APD budget cut – the Lege passed a law making it illegal for cities to reduce police spending without permission from the governor. He feels the broader goals of the movement remain intact, despite the state's preemption on police funding. Mental health crisis response has improved, even if more needs to be done. APD's beleaguered crime lab is on the path to becoming an independent city department. More investment has been made in community resources that can serve as alternatives to policing.

The votes Council took on June 11, 2020, to pass a series of resolutions aimed at reforming APD offer a clear illustration of the way Casar helped change how City Coun­cil functions. Casar recalled that emotional meeting, at which dozens of people testified about the violence they experienced at the hands of APD officers. "When I think of that period, and all of those young people marching in the streets and then calling into our meeting to urge us to act … I'm just proud. I'm proud we had a Council that was willing to listen, and then do something about the harm that was caused.

"Was it perfect? No. Were we beat up over it? Abso­lutely. But it was a human, compassionate, and special moment for us. We listened to folks who were really upset and we acted. And we did so at a time when so much of the Democratic Party was running away from the movement. But we embraced it."

Casar's experience as an unapologetic progressive – one who worked to upend the status quo in a city that all too often protects its most privileged residents at the expense of the vulnerable – is something he'll carry to Congress. "So many people in Texas want to see a more progressive federal government, and if there's a role I can play in bringing elected officials closer to where our people are, I will be grateful for the opportunity."

Mayor Steve Adler spoke to that opportunity at Casar's final Council meeting. There are certain moments in history when elected officials have the "chance to make real changes in equity and injustice," Adler said. "But that requires disruptive action. Incre­mental change favors the preservation of the status quo and, all too often, we're just able to nibble around the edges of progress. But in your time on the Council, we did not nibble."