Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. It's Revolutionary celebrates Massachusetts' history of possibility. Stick around until the end of this podcast for the story of how basketball, born in a Springfield gym, grew into a global game. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty.
It's New Year's Eve in 1980 in Austin, Texas. A man wearing a hat decorated with an armadillo shell and deer antlers steps to the microphone at a music club. Live from deep in the heart of Texas! Live from the Armadillo World Headquarters! Concluded!
Everyone who loves the Armadillo, I want you to give me a cheer. The Armadillo is in fact called the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. Sadly, it was the music venue's last night. The club was closing after roughly a decade in Austin. The band Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen had the stage.
The Armadillo hosted hundreds of musical acts during its run. People like Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Frank Zappa, Waylon Jennings, and Charlie Daniels. Armadillo's a special place to play, there's no doubt about it. When they put that
A few inches of asphalt over the top of this place, they'll be burying something. It'll be a long time before anybody ever realizes what they're burying. You know, it was a place to kind of start happening. Everybody respected it. You know, it's the end of an era. There's no two ways about it. It's the end of an era. Charlie Daniels there. They put more than a couple of inches of asphalt over the armadillo. Shortly after it closed, it was demolished and replaced with a multi-story office building.
Now, for some in Austin, places like the Armadillo are a symbol of what they like to call Old Austin. Because for decades, the city has been known as a funky liberal haven in a deep red state, a place where venues like the Armadillo could thrive. But now tech money is pouring into the city and there's been huge growth. Elon Musk has moved both his Tesla and X headquarters to the Austin area.
Big names like Joe Rogan also live there now. Here's Rogan talking about why he loves Austin on his podcast with comedian Kevin James last year.
By the way, I love Austin. I'm coming here. I would be here every day. Move here. The club's always available. You'll have fun. Great place to work out. Come here to my gym. We can work out together. The way they treat freedom here is like a religion. Freedom is a different thing in Texas. They are not interested in controlling what you buy and where you go and what you do on your land. You can own a zebra. They don't give a ****.
Now listeners who hear On Point in Austin on station KUT, they too have noticed a shift in the city's culture.
I don't smell as much patchouli in Austin as I used to. When I first got to Austin, it would be everywhere. Nowadays, I'm much more likely to smell a designer perfume or something along those lines. There was a warehouse district that was pretty close to downtown in the 80s and 90s, and there were all these punk clubs there. And so we would go see really great bands and pay $5 and
Now it's like gourmet chocolate and an $18 salad place. And this is the new Austin. It really was about music and art and just this whole vibe of kind of anything goes and you can do and look kind of however you want. And New Austin is all about shiny things. Those are On Point listeners and Austinites, Ashley, Randy, and Janae.
Now, of course, cities change. This is a fact. Technology changes things, trends come and go, demographics shift, and gentrification happens. That's not what makes the old Austin, new Austin story so interesting, especially for those of us who don't live there.
What I find most fascinating is that Texas is the second most populous state in the union today. And that growth is attributed to the fact that Texas prides itself as being a low-tax, low-regulation, pro-growth state. But even that super-welcoming environment has not been able to cope with the speed Texas' own capital is booming.
So just to lovingly rile up both our Texas and California listeners for a second, I wonder, does that make Austin the San Francisco of Texas? Well, Joshua Long joins us to help answer that question. He's at KUT in Austin. He's a professor of environmental studies at Southwestern University and author of the book Weird City, Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas. Professor Long, welcome.
Hello, Meghna. Good to be here. Is Austin the San Francisco of Texas? Well, that was a great intro. I'm not really sure how to answer that question. Who do you want to offend the least? Let's just put it that way. Yeah, that's definitely been on my mind when preparing for today's discussion. Okay. I appreciate the elegance with which you sidestepped that question. So let me get to an easier one to answer. How long have you lived in Austin?
Oh, I currently don't live in Austin. I've lived in and around Austin for most of my life, but I'm currently in Georgetown because I teach at Southwestern and I'm very close to the university where I teach. But in some ways that sort of outside looking in is, I think, very true for a lot of Austinites who have been displaced from Austin for various reasons, but still call themselves Austinites and still have that connection to the city. Help me with my Texas geography. Georgetown being where relative to Austin?
Well, depending on traffic, anywhere between a half an hour to an hour and a half north of Austin. Okay, okay, got it. But you said you've been living in and around Austin for most, if not all of your life?
Yeah, I mean, it was a circuitous route through graduate school and some jobs overseas. But honestly, I grew up in Bastrop, which might come up in the conversation later because we've seen Bastrop transform quite a bit over the last few years. But I went to school in Austin and worked at the Capitol, worked at Austin coffee shops. And over the years, I've seen the city transform quite a bit. Okay, so before we talk about that actual transformation, I still want to know a little bit more about your relationship with...
with Austin. Like, how do you feel about this place?
Oh, these are the questions I was hoping to avoid. I actually have a deep love for Austin and always will, but it is mixed feelings and I think that's true for a lot of Austinites. We still sort of miss some of the old landscapes and honestly the vibe that's sort of laid back, slower living and a greater sense of tolerance and friendliness that Austin was very much known for. A lot of that is disappearing.
But you still can find that in pockets throughout the city. And I enjoy it when I do stumble across that from time to time. Yeah. Well, the reason why I asked is because even though I've lived in New England for roughly half my life now, I still consider home the Pacific Northwest.
And for some of the same reasons, especially Seattle, that's not my home territory, Oregon is, but that sort of corridor there on the other side of the country, for some of the same reasons, has changed so rapidly. This idea of like what constitutes the soul of a city.
and especially ones that are so geographically unique, really is like it hits home for me. So to hear that you kind of have this internal tussle about it resonates quite deeply with me. But how long have people been sort of lamenting the loss of old Austin? Yeah.
Well, that's a great question because it really depends on who you ask. I mean, for many people, the decade of the Dillo was true old Austin. That was the golden age of Austin. And I think they have a pretty good case in some ways there. But it depends on, you know, if somebody moved here in the 80s or 90s and they lived through certain transformations of
the tech scene and the music scene. Then they identify with certain music venues or restaurants that closed then or when they started to have to pay to get into Barton Springs. So for everyone, it's a little bit different. But if you were to kind of look at this sort of taking a step back, I think there's been sort of three...
waves I would argue of an Austin narratives that has emerged in the 60s and 70s and the 80s and 90s and since 2000 and they're all sort of unique in their own way and we've seen this move away from old Austin to new Austin and somewhere in the middle that you could probably draw a dividing line
So, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. That's interesting. Could I interpret that as, in a sense, Austinites have always been lamenting, always been lamenting the loss of old Austin, just depends on when you moved there? Yeah, we speak about it in sort of nostalgic and sad tones. Like, you know, like, there's a joke that came out in a play a few years ago, like old Austinites talk about Austin like they're veterans of some war, like you'd have no idea what it was like. Yeah.
But, you know, there was something special about the Austin that emerged in the 1970s, this sort of hippie libertarianism that, you know, there's only a couple regions in the United States where that term gets applied. And Austin had its own flavor of that. This idea that, you know, individual libertarianism
liberty and minimal government and all of that of libertarianism, but also mixed with the sort of anti-establishment, peace-loving, social tolerance, creativity, and sort of whimsical weirdness, all kind of meshed together in Austin. And, you know, people tell the story of when Willie Nelson jumped on the stage at the old Armadillo World headquarters and
St. Blue-Eyes crying in the rain, he married the rednecks and the hippies and we realized we could all get along and there was this sort of kumbaya moment and again, even though it's overly romanticized, there's an element of truth to that that carried the city through.
Yeah. Right now, my heart is weeping along with my fellow Oregonians, particularly in Portland, a.k.a. weird Portland, people there who are lamenting the loss of the sort of rain-soaked, mossy version of what you just mentioned.
what you just described as Austin having been. So the thing is, though, that I find particularly interesting, and correct me if I'm wrong, as I said earlier, cities do change. But it seems as if in the past, like, maybe decade or at least couple of decades, the pace at which things have been transforming in Austin is much, much higher than perhaps we've seen elsewhere. And that is part of the issue.
oh no question um whether it's politically or culturally or socially or where we whether we've seen the displacement of certain populations and other populations moving in things have definitely changed and and it's something that's hard to put your finger on it's hard to really describe a sense of place but the vibe of austin has changed um when i was doing research for my book back in the early 2000s all the way up through uh 2008 2009 uh
It was very easy to do that kind of work because everybody I talked to had an opinion. I could just walk up to people on the street and they'd start saying something and want to talk about Austin. I don't know if I could do that research again today in Austin. Because they wouldn't have an opinion? Oh, they might have an opinion, but they're too busy to get to work. Oh, okay. Professor Long, hang on for just a minute. We'll be right back. This is On Point. On Point.
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Stick around until the end of this podcast for a field trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Now, we heard from a lot of Austinites who listened to On Point on KUT in Austin. For example, here's Christopher Hutchins. It was kind of a freak town, you know, where you could be whoever you wanted to be. And that was OK. There's plenty of things to do outdoors. Tons of music and art to consume. That is still here today.
It's just not as inclusive. All the freaks and the queers and the artists are still here. We're not going away. And here's Robert Cullick. He was a journalist on the growth beat for a local newspaper in the 1980s. In old Austin, it was a young person's culture. One came to Austin from a more conservative place in Texas and experienced the heady feeling of intellectual and certainly physical freedom.
So you stay to protect and nurture that feeling. One assumed one's waiter had a Ph.D. because there was a good chance he or she did. Well, in New Austin, people move here for good jobs and bigger homes than they can get in California and to experience some of the creative spirit and music and art that's been left behind. But it's just smoke and not much fire. Here's one more. This is Marty Butler. He says his parents moved to Austin in the late 1960s, and he's lived there for some 50 years.
There's been booms in the past, but nothing like what's happened over the last 20 years, where Austin really became a place that you could come to get rich. I'm now surrounded by homes with incomes probably above half a million dollars a year. It has not necessarily ruined the city. There's still a lot of Austin that's intact, but the change is marked. And this is what we have to recognize, that Austin is not what it used to be, but it's still pretty damn good.
Joshua Long joins us today. He's a professor at Southwestern University and author of Weird City, Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas. And Professor Long, look, I mean, I'm just going to be totally transparent about I am not a Texan, not an Austinite. So I really want to actually just spend a few more minutes digging into the texture and cultural history of the city to help us, you know, who aren't
of the soil there to understand why this issue of change in Austin matters so much to people. Because
As an outsider, I've always kind of actually wondered why Austin was able to retain this hippie libertarian feel, especially as the capital of the state of Texas, which, you know, especially in the past quarter century has, to an outsider's view, become a bastion of just like deep conservatism.
Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, it does make sense. And Austin, for a long time, I think it's important to remember that Austin for a very long time was a very affordable place to live and a place where you didn't, it was never a city of elites. It was never a city of influencers. And we sort of have become that most recently. But how Austin came to be this, you know, in the 70s and 80s is more of a,
relatively middle class and affordable place was that Austin was often in the shadow of cities like Dallas and Houston and San Antonio and it was the capital city and it was a place where people who were trying to get away from the conservatism of deep red Texas came to this blue oasis in search for something different.
Started in the 1960s for sure when the University of Texas population doubled in the decade. In the 1970s as the outlaw country and cosmic cowboy music scene started to take off, that added a certain element to it as well. And that started to transform a little bit as we got into the 1980s because Austin really started to tell a story about itself.
And actually, that's something that we should talk about is because rather than a traditional sort of timeline history of Austin, the city loves to tell stories about itself and who it is. And those often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Okay, one second, though, because before we get to what some of those stories are, just...
Just to not sound totally ignorant about how diverse Texas actually is. I mean, there are other like major blue spots in the state. I was just in Houston. So it's not like, you know, it's not like like Austin is this this single blueberry right in the tomato soup.
Oh, you're absolutely right that Houston and San Antonio especially are places that, especially now, do kind of embrace that kind of lifestyle. But if you're thinking about the 1960s and 70s in rural Texas, the University of Texas especially was a sort of beacon to a lot of young people who wanted to get away from that strict conservatism. And they didn't go towards the fancy philosophy.
Forgive me for saying that the highfalutin Dallas area or or the oil money in Houston. They went to Austin for the music scene, for the counterculture vibes. And that's what drew a lot of that. I got you. OK, so tell me what like what what's one of the stories that the city loved to tell about itself?
Well, um... You're setting yourself up for these questions. I know, I know, you're right. You know, so coming out of the 1970s where we were very much trying to portray ourselves as this laid back, you know, if you come here, try to be tolerant, be creative, be whimsical. We love our weirdos here. We don't care where you come from, just relax and enjoy the city.
That actually started to change in the late 70s and 1980s when the growth machine in Austin started to come together and say, you know, we need to attract some businesses here. Now there's alternatives to this. There are many people who were very anti-growth at the time. That was a very strong sentiment. But the University of Texas, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, which was incredibly influential, and many of the other developers and business interests in Austin started to actively recruit
industries to Austin, specifically the tech scene, software development, advanced manufacturing. We started to get IBM and Motorola and Samsung and 3M and Texas Instruments. And that actually meshed well in some ways with the hippie libertarianism. Because if you think about it, another place in the United States where the term hippie libertarianism gets applied is Silicon Valley. And here we were sort of telling everybody that we were the new Silicon Hills.
It's just cheaper, more affordable, and a great place to hang out and spend the time in between your software development job. So how did – it seems to me though that like you call it the growth machine. But the growth machine – a growth machine works well in an environment that is also kind of laissez-faire, right? Like that libertarian streak. Come as you are, so grow as you want, right? Yeah.
Sure, and Austin still sort of embodies that and has for a long time. In many ways it's actually been to our detriment to a certain extent. Because again, if I'm telling these stories and I'm reproducing this narrative, they're dominant political narratives. They're inherently exclusionary. And by me telling these stories, I'm not telling the stories of the people who end up being displaced.
by that growth machine. Because we started to embark, especially, you know, if we're going to fast forward towards the 1990s when we started to bring in environmentalism as part of our ethos and we monetized environmentalism. And we started to say, okay, let's, you know, this, historians talk about the Green Council of the late 1990s that came together and initiated a lot of smart growth. Smart growth in theory is really great, but you have to put in protections for your existing communities because as you densify,
you are going to, in a free market real estate economy, you're going to drive up real estate prices, rents, and in a place like Texas, you're going to increase property taxes as well.
Well, I promise you in just like one minute, we're going to talk with someone who you're sitting right next to actually about the real big negative challenges of rapid neighborhood change. But there's one more thing about this libertarian streak because, again, externally from outside of Austin, it's like people are like, wow, Joe Rogan lives there. Elon Musk is moving there. Like this must be something crazy new. But –
You know, that sort of part of the city has always been there as well. Yes.
Yes, it has and it's always been there. We talk about hippie Austin, but you don't always talk about Bubba South Austin. That is another term that comes up. Or Alex Jones Austin. I have to say we do have this history of conspiracy theorists living in Austin. We are the home of InfoWars, unfortunately. But actually conspiracy theories on the left and the right because there's always been this kind of distrust of the establishment and government.
in Austin. So in some ways you can see how these sort of evolve over time to include different people, including people like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk.
And if we want to talk about that later, we have to think about when they moved here. Joe Rogan moved here in 2020, and he was outspokenly critical of COVID policies in California and talking about how in Austin they let you do what you want. And it was this budding comedy scene that he was going to incubate. And at first, we saw him moving in and we were like, another Californian, spent $14.5 million on a Lake Austin home, telling all his buddies from California to move here.
But, you know, it's sort of evolved over time, pros and cons there. Okay. Well, Professor Long, hang on for just a second because I'm long overdue in bringing Susana Almanza into the conversation. She also joins us from KUT in Austin, and she's director of the advocacy group Poder and a longtime East Austin resident. Susana, welcome to On Point. Hello, Meghna. Thank you. Tell me a little bit about East Austin, what it was like, what it's like now.
Right. And East Austin, for people who don't know, the City of Austin did its master plan in 1928. And in that master plan, it decided that people of color would live east of the highway. So Highway 35 became our border wall.
And we build our homes from anywhere from $2,000 to $18,000 in East Austin. And we made it the beautiful part of the city for people of color. So we had our own small businesses, mom and pops. We had our own transportation, taxi service, Latino, African American. We had our own beauty shops. And we had, of course, our segregated schools in East Austin.
Growing up in East Austin, I'm a native of East Austin, of course we didn't have paved streets and there was very little lighting. Their drainage system wasn't the best.
It was a happy place because it was a social network there where we had cousins, aunts, grandmas, everybody living in the area. And so, it was extended families and it was all about families at that time. It's sort of like I think the average family size was like eight to ten people. I grew up in a family of ten.
So it was a lot of families in the areas. There was a lot of celebrations, a lot of different parks in the community that we did. Transportation was not as heavy because in that era up until before, up to the 70s, there wasn't a lot of people who owned vehicles. So there wasn't heavy traffic until, you know, your job is your credit came in and people were able to get vehicles.
But it was a very walkable community, very walkable community. And it was a community where we were allowed to have, you know, we had our own chickens and rabbits. We ate everything pretty fresh, had our gardens. And so it was a time where I looked at where I had to walk across Highway 35 every day just to go to elementary school. And I could tell you Highway 35 was
It's nothing like it is today. I wouldn't be able to walk it, you know, with the traffic, or especially as a child trying to cross 35. So the atmosphere is very different, you know, and people of color living together.
but also working class, working class community. Okay. So tell me more about that because it sounds like what you're headed towards is that sense of community, which I do want to just emphasize that was created in part by like deliberate planned segregation, as you said. That sense of community affordability sounds like that's changing even in East Austin. Yeah.
Absolutely. East Austin is going under, well, it's being gentrified, but we say that gentrification is a new name for colonization. Because what has happened is, as Austin continues to grow,
Where does it grow? To the west, it has a lot of restrictions and they have a lot of people in power that they want to make sure that they keep their single family homes and that they control the type of growth. In East Austin, it's always been different because East Austin has been trying to treat it like the stepchild or the orphan child.
So zoning has come in. We went through industrial zoning, which meant that you could have a factory that was emitting chemicals next door to a school or to your home. So you were allowed to live with industrial emissions, industrial traffic in the area. So that's very different from West Austin. It was very much protected.
And that was one of the reasons that Bode came about because when we look at all the hazardous facilities in our community, and we actually got the city to do a study, and it turned out that 90% of all the industrial zoning was in East Austin.
90%?
and zoning has played on Austin and how now that Austin is growing, it came in with new kind of zoning policies
that never existed before in our communities, commercial service, mixed use, vertical mixed use. All of these different things have been used to take over our community. In the 1997, the city came out with a plan where it would say we're going to go through a neighborhood process and we're going to divide the city into 54 neighborhood planning areas.
So they started with the neighborhood plan in East Austin. One that became the East Echa Chavez neighborhood plan and the other one was a Chestnut neighborhood plan. And the Chestnut was African Americans and ours was basically Latinos. Well, when they came in and changed the zoning,
We were involved in that process. We fought it because it introduced the zoning that never existed before, commercial service mixed use, which they said, okay, these houses are going to now home, single family homes are going to be zoned commercial service mixed use. And we said, if you do that, then people who don't own their homes are going to get displaced because people are going to get more money rented at commercial services.
And they're not going to qualify for equity loans because equity loans have just come in because they're not zoned residential. They're not going to qualify for federal money for rehabilitation or anything else because they're zoned commercial. Susanna, can I just jump in here for a quick second? We have to take a break in just 30 seconds. But why did they want to change the zoning to begin with?
Oh, that was a way to take over and displace the community. You change the zoning and you displace people. That is, how do you take over the land? They wanted the land for someone else. They wanted the land. It was a land grab. So Susanna Almanza and Joshua Long, hang on for just a second. We'll talk more. It seems like everything when we talk about growth and rapid change comes back to the issue of housing. So we'll hit that directly when we come back. This is On Point.
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Professor Long, can you just pick up on what Susanna was describing as this rapid change for the Latino and Black lifelong residents of Austin? Because I think...
You know, obviously what she's describing is very familiar to people in other cities, right? I mean, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, you name it, Chicago. I mean, it's gentrification with a capital G. But I understand that you said, you told our producer Claire that Austinites themselves had a hard time calling it that.
I don't know about that. I think it was late for us to be having that conversation. Because initially it was all about sort of, it was driven largely by economic growth and an environmental ethos that said we need to protect our watershed, which we did to the West.
And we needed to zone a little bit better for more dense use, which we did. And we needed more public transportation. But in not putting in protections for the existing population, we created a real problem. Because alongside this, Austin was trying to portray itself as the new creative centrist.
center of the United States. Like it was an emerging major international city and saying, we want your, we want musicians, artists, and, and create young creatives to come to this city. When they come to the city, it's, you know, it's still,
hard for some people to find a place to live. Where were the affordable places? It was East Austin, Central East Austin especially. And I think the city looked at that and was like, "That is a place where we can extract value." And the reason that's a story that's common to many other cities.
is because we live in a very neoliberalized capitalist world where everything, you can put a price on the value of a person, on the value of their labor, on the value of their property. And East Austin, house prices were so low. And it was such a place where, you know, as you start to direct growth in that way, you see property values go up.
You see rents go up. That's displacing populations. But a story that's not often told about Texas cities is how quickly our property taxes can go up. And I know Susana will have something to say about that. Okay, we'll talk about that in a second. But there's one more thing. Because this is like a number that very – it brings this, the rapidity of the change into stark relief because Austin has had –
Obviously, population growth and a lot of it between censuses, right, between the 2010 and 2020 census. But in that same time, what, Professor, has been, for example, the decline in the African-American population in Austin?
Oh yeah, there's a statistic that's pretty alarming across the decades, but between 2000 and 2010, Austin saw a 20% population growth rate, while it witnessed between a 5% and 6% decrease in its African American population.
That's a statistical outlier from the rest of the United States. So while we were growing, we were simultaneously hemorrhaging largely our black population, but also our Latino population. Okay. So Professor Long and Susana Almanza, hang on for just a second, because we did actually speak with a member of the Austin City Council, Ryan Alter. He's a councilman for the 5th District in Austin. And he told us that the council is working hard.
to build more affordable housing. But he says the city's median family income, median family income, this is important, has skyrocketed. So it's tough to keep prices accessible. You used to have a whole lot of individuals or families who an 80% median family income unit, that was very accessible for them. And now they can only afford something that's restricted to 50% or even 30%.
Those units are much more costly to build. And so you just don't have as many of them. That imbalance has been a huge challenge that we've been trying to rectify and put back into balance. But RMFI shot up so fast that playing catch up
has been really difficult. By the way, the median family income in Austin, Texas right now is approximately $126,000 in comparison to the roughly 80,000 national median family income. So Ryan Alter says it's hard to get developers to agree to build housing that would meet the needs or the capabilities of people making 30 to 50% of Austin's, again, Austin's median family income.
And he says sometimes creating some slightly more affordable units at that 80% is better than nothing at all.
We calibrate these density bonus programs so that you can have a higher percentage of units that are less affordable or a lower percentage of units that are more affordable. So incentivizing that even if we don't get quite as many of the raw number of affordable units, if they're more affordable, then we're serving a segment of the population that is just underserved.
We're not allowed to condition zoning on affordability. That's something that in Texas is prohibited by law. This council has made it very clear that affordability is a top priority. And so when developers come to ask for zoning, they are free to say, "Look, I'm going to set aside 5%, 10% because I know that's going to be attractive when they're reviewing this case."
Even if they solved this issue of what is affordable in Austin, Ryan Alter says the bottom line is the city needs to build more housing, period. I think the proof's in the pudding. When you supply the units, prices go down. And we have seen that. People will say, well, you guys rose so fast that...
even some kind of decline, you're still way above everybody else. And there is some element of truth to that. I'm not going to pretend that we didn't see meteoric rise for four years. We have what is called the strategic housing blueprint. It is our guide to exactly that question. How many units do we need? That 10-year plan when we adopted it five years ago, I think it was 135,000 new housing units. That's a lot.
We have built a lot of those, but we are behind. That's Ryan Alter. He represents Austin's fifth district on the city council. Susana Almanza, would you like to respond to what the councilman was saying there? Yeah, I think that councilman and the whole city council is not being truthful about
The city of Austin owns thousands of properties that is acquired through liens or through purchase. That was a study done by Professor Elliot Tretter and his class. And so we know that the city has all this land that is just land banking. So when you look at it, and we've given this recommendation to the city for decades, is that if we own the land, because that's city land, that means we the taxpayers own that land.
then what really drives up the price of homes is the land. But if you own the land, you can build housing from zero, 30, 40, or 50% median family income. The ability is there. What the community says is they don't have the ganas. That means they don't have the will. They don't have the will to do it. So they try to say that they're doing all this by all their different housing policies.
of doing 10%, you know, affordability and so forth, when in reality, they don't tell the truth that they can actually build thousands of homes
for all ranges of income if they really wanted to. The truth is that Austin doesn't want low income and people of color in the urban core. That's the truth. If you look at their stats, they've built, and this is their own, it came out from 2018 to 2022, they built 35,000 units from 61 to 121% median family income.
And they only built 6,847 units from 30 to 60% income. So that's the real telling. That's the truth there. Who are they building for? Susanna, can I just jump in here and ask? Sure. I definitely hear what you're saying. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, I'm...
I'm based here in Boston, and it's like you're saying the exact same version of what's happening here. I actually reported for years on East Boston, happens to also be on the east side of the city, longtime home of especially Latino immigrants, but many, many immigrants, and the exact same story.
But let me challenge you a little bit with this. I hear what you're saying in terms of like they, quote unquote, they don't want people of color in the urban core of Austin. But isn't it even sort of, is it like less...
less pointed than that and just this is the general outcome of what happens with capitalism and when a city becomes extremely attractive to people with a lot of money. I mean, like, I don't think I've seen any city solve this problem yet. Well, I think what makes that city attractive is
What makes it attractive if it's when you have the council you have the Austin real estate Council the Board of Realtors Chamber of Commerce when you have all these people working together and planning a city and recruiting whatever employment agencies and so forth without taking into regard that there are poor people people of color of
living in an area. When they pass a desired development zone, that desired development zone was east of the highway. Yeah. So yes, it's part of capitalism, but it's also part of racism. And we cannot live out the R word, okay? It's part of racism. It's who do you target? Who is the most vulnerable population? And who has...
Who has experienced racism from the very beginning of the establishment of the United States, right? It's the indigenous people of this continent. So when you have to look at it, you have to see how land use and zoning has a history that's rooted in racism.
And so, yes, you have racism and then you have capitalism. And we ourselves, the people, have come up with the people's plan. When the city was continuing to the height of its growth, they say, well, we don't just want to hear you all. Come up with some plans.
We come up with plans and we come up with recommendations. We even wrote the resolution so that they wouldn't have to start from zero scratch. And some we borrowed from other states and cities that we thought were progressive and were doing the right thing. And when we presented those people plans,
Again, they start to water them down and before you know it, they fall in this hole. So it's not like people are not trying to bring on the changes and that they're not aware of what is happening in a city that's growing so fast as Austin, right? Yeah.
is that you pretend that one section of the city is empty and you plan as if that city is, that portion of the city is empty without taking into regard, you know, who built this city? And looking at diversity, you know, looking at how do we retain these people? And I think that those are the things that we really need to look at.
when we look, you know, throughout the United States and not just the United States, the world, because gentrification is happening throughout the world. So you can see what's happening in the world and then see what's happening in Austin, Texas. So, Professor Long, pick up on what Susanna is saying, because...
You know, I think part of the reason why it's very, very hard for city councils to politically make the kinds of decisions that Susanna and Poder are calling for is because there's always this fear, even amongst the quote unquote most progressive city councils, that doing these kinds of changes will, you know, developers will come back and say, well, this reduces our ROI. So we're just not going to build there at all.
Well, I think that is actually an important part of the conversation is because we are so reliant on public-private partnerships and bringing in certain developers, they are very concerned with profit. And, you know, City of Austin often throws its hands up and say, like, well, we can't do this because we can't be attractive to developers. We could subsidize that.
It would take an effort and it would take it would actually take a community effort wide from the city to do it But we could subsidize those those efforts There's something else that that Susana hasn't brought up yet and because she's awful humble when it comes to this is it is it when it comes to East Austin One of the reasons it became an attractive place is because poder and other groups fought to clean it up I mean we're talking about a place that has
had quite a bit of pollution in various different ways, had a massive power plant that was having fires on a weekly basis and causing all kinds of noise and other forms of pollution in the area. And there were other facilities as well that they fought quite hard to be removed. And as soon as the power plant was decommissioned, as soon as the fuel storage areas started to get removed,
suddenly it was a cleaner, greener place and you had more open space. And the city looked at that and like, that's a desired development zone. That's where we're going to go in. And for a long time, they had a lot of not only legal, but community support to remove those things. But you can get environmental justice, but that economic justice is still late in coming. If there isn't what you called for earlier, which is as this growth is happening, the protections that are put in
for existing residents. And Susana, you were talking about how Poder has a plan for that. We only have like a minute left, Susana, but like when you presented this plan to city leaders, what was their response? Well, one of the things is that they're going to look at it and then they're going to, which council would support what resolution. And then again, there's a study.
And then it kind of just sits there on the shelf. That's usually the way it is. Yeah. They'll say they're endlessly in committee, right, where good ideas go to die. But I just I'm a little jaded about state politics. But Professor Long, again, in this last minute, help me find a way to wrap this up again and bring the relevance of what's happening in Austin to the rest of America, because
What do you think the lessons are that Austin has to teach the rest of us about how to cope or what not to do in coping with rapid growth? I think be careful about how much you wish growth to happen and whether or not you're –
economic sustainability as a city is really dependent on growth and expansion because that is a story that is not going away. And maybe the next time you'll have us on, we're talking about development east of the city and in the surrounding counties, because one of the areas that has not been developed is east of Austin. And whether it's data centers or advanced manufacturing or semiconductor plants, all of those communities east of Austin, which by the way,
were places that a lot of people who were displaced from East Austin moved to those communities because they were the only place they could afford. Now they're getting priced out again and they're seeing growth come up all around them.
Well, Joshua Long, professor of environmental studies at Southwestern University and author of Weird City, Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And Susana Almanza, director of Poder and a lifelong resident of East Austin. Susana, it was a great pleasure to have you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And by the way, thanks again to everyone at KUT for hosting both Joshua and Susanna. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is On Point. Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. Listen on for the story of the revolution that is basketball. Thank you.
You're listening to It's Revolutionary, a podcast celebrating 250 years since the shot heard around the world was fired right here in Massachusetts. I'm Jay Feinstein. From revolution to revolution, we're exploring the people and places in Massachusetts that shape America. Today, we're in the birthplace of basketball, Springfield. Nice shot!
The game was founded at a YMCA in 1891 as a way of keeping kids busy during Massachusetts winters. Man, the game just took off right from there. I think within three, four years, the game was already being taught in different countries, like India. It was awesome. Alex Pedro is the curatorial assistant and historian at the Basketball Hall of Fame, which is just a few miles down the road from the original site that started it all.
He showed me around and he says he does that because he can't play for himself. I am terrible at basketball.
As I like to say, those who cannot do, teach. But he is pretty much the biggest basketball enthusiast I've ever met. You know, it's just so exciting because there's always constant action. There's excitement. You can see the emotion on the player's face. I feel like there's more of a personality. James Naismith was the physical education instructor who invented the sport. The original game had no dribbling, and players would shoot into peach baskets with enclosed bottoms.
Janitors had to fetch the ball every time a player made a basket. It was a slower game, but it was an exciting game from the start. When Naismith designed the game, I don't think he even knew. I mean, he knew it was going to be popular, but I don't think he knew it was going to be this popular, right? Like, he made a game...
so great for television. You know, you can see the players' face, you can see their emotion, you can see them getting hurt or seeing their agonizing pain or just at any given moment, anything can happen in a basketball game. It's just so exciting. You know, it's just no matter what, if there's a second on the clock, there's still a chance to win. ♪
But is excitement enough to make basketball revolutionary? At the very least, it inspired revolutionaries, like Lenny Wilkins, the first black player on his team. They wanted to use the game of basketball and say, hey, I belong here. It doesn't matter the color of my skin or my sexuality. It doesn't matter. Basketball is basketball. Or Georgian Wells, the first woman to dunk in a game. We see dunks and we still get excited because it's just...
Such a raw athleticism, right? We're seeing somebody just jump in the air and do something so creative with their hand just to dunk the ball. It is really fun. But for the women's game, I feel like it's just showing that, hey, we're the same. We can do what you guys do. Or any of the number of Celtics hoop stars who have played right here in Massachusetts, featured in a new exhibit at the Hall of Fame called The Vault.
So when you first walk in, you give you that feel of a bank vault, right? This is like a bank vault door. It's all secure. This is all items that have never been together in one place. So it's pretty remarkable. There we were looking at Bob Cousy's All-Star jersey.
John Havlicek's 25,000 point ball, Cedric Maxwell's MVP finals trophy, and more. The history is so rich with the Celtics. I mean, there's so much lore. There's so many stories, so many iconic moments. And personally, to see all these championship rings and to see the evolution of them over the years and to have them in one place...
Man, that's just special. But basketball isn't just a professional sport. I met up with James Gee, a coach at Springfield Central High School, who says he sees the tangible difference basketball makes in the lives of kids.
And perhaps there's nothing more revolutionary than that.
But for Alex, it's really the game's history that makes the sport special. From a game that started in Springfield, Massachusetts at a YMCA with just 18 kids in a class to now this global game where people want to come from Europe and Asia to play in the NBA or to play for their national team and to see it, it's just, that in itself is revolutionary.
It's Revolutionary is a podcast from MA250. For more stories, check out Massachusetts250.org or WBUR.org slash MA250. Oh, God, it's been a while. Told you. Those who can't do, teach.