By: Avi Beskrowni
East Austin, 2019. A woman stands outside her old house, opening her mailbox. It’s empty, except for one letter: “Move on.” She has just started getting these letters about moving out. The house prices have also risen in this previously low-income neighborhood. Earlier this year, higher-income people have moved into the neighborhood, demolishing houses, and building mansions. This was why the house prices rose. “I’ll hang on,” said the woman. Then the phone calls started coming. As if moving from the house she’d lived in for over fifty years would be easy. And she didn’t want the house prices to go up again after someone demolished her house and built a mansion. She didn’t want other people displaced like she might be if richer people kept moving into her neighborhood. She didn’t want her neighborhood to be gentrified.
Driving through gentrifying neighborhoods, you can clearly see the changes that the neighborhood has been undergoing. Old dusty brick houses with litter strewn across the miniscule front yards with broken windows, at the very worst. These old houses are going to be demolished soon, and new houses with clean paint over metal, wood or steel with huge windows and clean big front yards will replace them. And the people who are hanging on despite the property taxes with small, poorly-built houses, garages filled with boxes, but habitable houses nonetheless. Driving by is like driving by a huge collage of clean items, dirty items, clean items, dirty items. This particular neighborhood, Johnston Terrace, is near a neighborhood that’s becoming increasingly “trendy”: Airport Boulevard. With crafting places like the Austin Tinkering school to exotic coffee shops to big modern warehouses dedicated to developing code, it’s the definition of gentrification. You can also see musty billboards printed in Comic Sans, dusty car dealerships minus the cars, and shops that have long since closed down, but the plywood over the windows and the doors lying on the empty concrete parking lot still remain. You can see the plants edging through the skeleton of the old shops. People living in the smaller houses tell me that “these houses are more expensive than my previous houses, and smaller too.” People who have lived there for a longer time have been forced to move out of the previously low-income neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are mostly on the east side as an echo of Jim Crow Austin -- black and hispanic people were segregated to the east part of Austin. Due to the discriminating laws at the time, that meant that the east-side neighborhoods were poorer. And most notably, the hundreds of “For Sale” signs.
Gentrification is a leading factor in Austin’s development. Johnston Terrace, an Austin neighborhood near 183, has been ranked as the fourth-fastest gentrifying neighborhood in America! In Austin, from 2011 to 2014, the average house price tripled from 125,000 to 375,000. Out of 200 Austin neighborhoods, 58 were marked as “Gentrifying” by the Uprooted Project. While the large meat of that number (23) were marked as “Susceptible”, 6 were marked as “Continued Loss”. This is a lot of people being displaced or in danger of being displaced. The population of Austin is nearing 1 million, and people getting gentrified total to about a quarter that number, which totals to 250 thousand people, maybe a little less. The Texas Tribune mentions that Austin is one of the most economically segregated cities in America, which means that people who are college-educated people who make a lot of money will move to more low-income areas where housing prices are lower, which raises the housing prices and kicks people out of the neighborhood they have known for sometimes multiple generations. “We are losing people and we are losing communities,” Mayor of Austin Steve Adler remarked.
But that isn’t the end of the story. Racism is also often a factor. Johnston Terrace was a neighborhood with a population which was mostly African American. The rich people who “invaded” the neighborhood were often white people who dismissed the opinions of the people who had lived in the neighborhood before and only thought about themselves. The University of Texas Uprooted Project is dedicated to preventing displacement, and their study shows an alarming amount of lopsidedness related to race. They mark “people of color” as some of the most likely people to be displaced. One person whose neighborhood was being gentrified remarked that “it’s not shocking how fast it’s happening in my neighborhood, it’s just shocking that the group of people moving in are very similar. At least it could be a diverse group of people. But we’re just getting white developer building a big fancy house.” The aforementioned Jim Crow laws are also part of this. “This is one reason why gentrification is so damaging.”
The other side of the argument is not to be ignored. People who move into the neighborhood just after entering college who earn a good amount of money will move into low-income areas with many houses uninhabited or lots of open lots. They will, with their money, buy a lot there. They build a bigger house, which causes the property sellers to make their prices large. The people who moved in will just remark that they liked the neighborhood because it was nice and the houses were inexpensive. And it seems, in a city like Austin with it’s booming population growth which causes economic growth and it’s amount of economic segregation, it’s just inevitable that by-products like gentrification will happen. “Changes are bound to happen,” says one person in Johnston Terrace, the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in Austin. It’s near the more well-known neighborhood of Govalle. Another person remarked that “gentrification is inevitable, it’s just happening way too fast. My whole street has changed in just over five years. I don’t have the same neighbors anymore.” And there are also those who think that gentrification is beautifying run-down or “dirty” neighborhoods. An article in the Harvard Gazette says that “these neighborhoods are dirty and possibly dangerous. What some people will call gentrification can be called revitalization.” A quote from the same newspaper says that “these neighborhoods were already fine to start with.” And they may be right. But the argument still goes on on whether gentrification can be prevented.
But many activists say that gentrification is not a by-product of growth and can be prevented. Gentrification kicks people out of the neighborhood. It rips social fabric. It’s extremely dangerous, but some of our laws need to be changed because they make Austin expensive. It extends past kicking people out of neighborhoods. One man said, “just because you are part of the same neighborhood does not mean you are part of the same community.” He has lived there for seventeen years. He remarked that “if so many new people are moving into the neighborhood with big houses compared to your tiny one, it’s hard to fit in with the community.” For some people who are just hanging on it’s very hard socially, because they are constantly thinking about moving and arranging plans to save money to be able to stay in the neighborhood. A lot of houses are now rented, which means that it’s easier to come and go. But it’s still hard to leave your home.
Gentrification has had a history in Austin. President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote an article on it titled “The Tarnish on the Violet Crown”. An Austin citizen remarks that “when people move out of Austin, they just end up moving to somewhere like Buda or other places near Austin, and soon enough, the same things are going to happen to that place.” Gentrification has also taken over in other Texas cities, like Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio. But back to Austin. Stephanie Lang remarks that “the gentrification, the displacement -- all of these things are legacies that were orchestrated from the 1928 plan.” Lang is a community curator looking to preserve African-American history and communities in Austin. The “1928 plan” she’s referring to is the City Plan of 1928, which asked black people at the time to move to East Austin, where the land was “less valuable”. This incredibly racist act didn’t really come true when it was first published. They were just asking people to move from their homes. The city resorted to all sorts of persuasion: closing city schools, restricting city services, and even harassment. In the early 2000s, a lot of people started flocking to Austin, because it had some obvious perks: it was inexpensive (then), it had great communities, it had nice green areas, and it had great events (Austin City Limits, which was one of the reasons it claimed to be the Live Music capital of the world.) And lots of people moved into East Austin, because it was especially inexpensive. We know what happens next, aka gentrification: house prices rise up, and people move out. The aforementioned ripping of the social fabric commences. And destruction ensues.
So, what can be done? Reparations for the city plan of 1928 have been discussed by the City, although it has not happened yet, and it is still not talked about very much in Austin. In her “Texas Anti-Displacement Toolkit”, Heather K. Way suggests to put community voices at the center. “Community voices should be incorporated throughout the development and implementation of displacement mitigation plans and strategies to ensure they are aligned with community needs.” This is the first sentence in the first part of the Toolkit. Often in neighborhoods the amount of displaced people raises even higher because the “leaders” of the neighborhood do not consider public opinions or strategies agreed upon by people who are not “leaders”. Sometimes there’s not a community page which makes it even harder for people to get their voices heard. Way also mentions that funding from the city is very important. In her case study of Columbia Heights in Washington, D.C., Way writes that “Preservation at a scale large enough to be meaningful requires large amounts of dedicated funding.” In sum, gentrification is a knife in Austin’s body and in order to take the knife out and clean the blood, we need to improve our development system and affordability.
HuffPost: Austin is Stepping Up In It's Fight Against Gentrification
Three Interviews With Citizens of Johnston Terrace
KVUE: Austin's Unaffordability
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