Most mornings, the sidewalk outside Sunrise Community Church becomes a kind of waiting room. Before 8 a.m., a few dozen men and women, some pushing grocery carts or dragging luggage, some barefoot with dazed expressions, converge along a bull-wire fence that lines the South Austin property and take seats, inches from a busy stretch of Menchaca Road at the height of rush hour.

Around the corner, kids carrying backpacks exit their parents’ cars and dash behind a tall black fence onto the campus of the public elementary school that serves the surrounding neighborhoods of tidy mid-century ranch houses. And just a block away from Sunrise, a patchwork of tarps, mattresses, and broken office chairs forms a loose encampment under an elevated stretch of U.S. 290.

It’s hard to be indifferent to th

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