By: Cosmo Valdemar Knight Courtois
It was a seemingly great day for Ali Ronder until she got her tax bill and saw that her property tax had gone up substantially since she had first bought her house. She had no other choice but to put the house on the market. She got an offer of over 400,000 dollars on the house within 12 hours. She was shocked, she didn’t want to give up a house in central Austin, but that was so much money, she could get a house further out and be able to pay off her property taxes. She wanted this money, but this was a big risk to take. This is gentrification.
But what really is gentrification? An article by The Uprooted Project describes it best. “This process includes three dimensions: 1) the displacement of lower-income residents; 2) the physical transformation of the neighborhood—mostly through the upgrading of its housing stock and commercial spaces; and 3) the changing cultural character of the neighborhood.” What The Uprooted Project is saying is that gentrification has benefits as well as disadvantages. There are some parts of it that can benefit certain people, and some that don’t. For example, upgrading certain housing can benefit the people moving in and sometimes the people living around them. Displacement is something different. There are a few types of displacement. One type is when someone is priced out, and the other is when they need to move out to make way for new development. Ali’s neighborhood had been a less wealthy neighborhood with a large minority population when she had bought her house. After she had bought her house, more housing was torn down or renovated into more expensive duplexes and multi-family housing, this changed the culture of her neighborhood and also upped the rent and property taxes of almost every house in that area.
Ryan Leach works at a hot rod shop in Austin where the owner rents out a unit in which they work on and keep cars. The area of Austin where these units were located used to be an area with little care surrounding it, the owners of the units would let the businesses park their cars wherever, etc. Until one day they started painting the units, and then they started putting up fences and making very strict rules. Ryan stated: “They started subtly harassing us,” and he proceeds to say, “they started ticketing our cars and they said, ‘Hey, you can only have two cars out in front of your business, and they have to be running.’ Well if it's an auto body shop, you’re going to have more than two cars, and they are not going to be running.” He also said that he is worried that developers might bulldoze the industrial bays and put up townhouses or condos so they could get more money for them.
But why is this happening? What made this occur? KQED News says that gentrification started as a term in London to describe displacement of the poor as wealthier people take their place. They also explained that gentrification is a part of every growing city. Gentrification is happening in all the big cities, and because Austin is growing so big at such a high rate, gentrification is a very big problem. Gentrification has been in Austin for many years, but it has only been skyrocketing recently. Gentrification, also known as displacement, began as a plan to keep minority groups away from white people. The City Council created new districts such as Austin’s City Council District One, which used to be known as the “negro district” This plan changed the areas in Austin forever. Conor Kenney, an advocate for density in Austin stated that in some areas, they are building new sidewalks and really fixing up things, while other areas keep their broken sidewalks or roads. This means that these areas are cheaper than other areas, and they are usually populated with minority groups because they were originally meant to keep those minority groups away from more wealthy people. The land use regulations were also different in those areas, and they still are. This really adds to the problems of gentrification. Even though it seems like this is not happening as much today, there are certain subtleties that are shaping the way gentrification works.
What does this have to do with gentrification? Well, this segregation has been changing lately, and as there is more and more demand for housing, there are more people renovating and building houses to make more money on them, and as more people renovate and make new housing, the more it encourages others to do the same. This would reduce the amount of affordable housing and add to the unnecessary amount of overpriced housing. This is a problem for many people, like Ali, who grew up in minority neighborhoods that did not have the same amenities as a wealthier, white, neighborhood. These neighborhoods would soon become more popular, and with more popularity comes a higher demand for people of every class wanting to move in. Even though more people want to move in, the people selling the houses want the most money they can get, making it so only people of higher classes are able to buy in that area. This would change the fabric of the neighborhood as well, making the closely knitted community tear apart. For Ali, the newly built housing for mostly wealthier, white people would unstitch the thread work of her neighborhoods safe, trusting bond. For example, she said that most housing would originally not have fences and not too much privacy because the people in the community trusted each other. After new housing for wealthier people came, they felt offended because the new housing had big fences that blocked out everyone else, making it seem as if the new people didn’t want to be involved with anyone around them.
We need change. This problem has impacted enough people. Kicking them out of their own homes and separating the communities. Ryan said; “I think we need to look at housing as a social right and not something solely to profit from.” If Austin did this, we would not have a supply and demand problem. Other countries have done this, and they have been able to give almost everyone a house. Another way to fix gentrification is to change the way we pay taxes. We could make it so people pay only income tax, not property tax. This would make it so everyone could pay their taxes, no matter where their house is. An infographic from the City Of Austin shows that the median price for single family homes went up by 8% and the amount of active listings went down by 29% in the past year. This shows how much Austin is changing in such a short amount of time because the amount of time it will take for houses to sell has gone down substantially. Amity, a real estate broker with Give Realty, is worried about how this might affect her job. She says that in Austin, we have .9 months of housing inventory, while in a balanced market, there should be 6.5. The amount of housing inventory displayed in these numbers means that if no new housing came on the market, all the houses would sell out in 0.9 months. Almost seven times less than we should have. In Houston, they have 3.4 months of housing inventory, about three and a half times more than us, showing that they are more stable because of the amount of housing they can provide for people wanting to move in.
We need to change for the people suffering from this. We need to help the people whose neighborhoods have changed and those that have been priced out. We need to help people with the same story as Ali. The people that are never able to find and keep a home for more than a few years because of such rapid growth. We need to help the people with the same problems as Ryan. The people having their businesses suffer because of lack of space and money. And we need to help the culture of Austin. We could protest and bring awareness to this topic. A topic that so many don’t even think about. We could think of new ways to solve it and bring up those ways to the City Council to try to make this city better. We need people to stop destroying what so many love. We need to change Austin for the better.
Bibliography
“Tools for Texas Communities.” The Uprooted Project. Accessed February 23, 2020. https://sites.utexas.edu/ge ntrificationproject/gentrification-and-displacement-in-austin/.
Green, Matthew. “What You Need to Know about Gentrification (with Lesson Plan).” KQED, March 21, 2017. https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/26269/what-you-need-to-know-about-gentrification.
“Austin’s ‘1928 Master Plan’ Unleashed Forces Which Still Shape Austin Today,” n.d. https://austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/City-Council/Houston/CM_OH_1928_Op-Ed.pdf.
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