Growth Machine
Audrey McGlinchy
November 18, 2024
Introducing: 24 Hours in Austin
The new podcast 24 Hours in Austin tries to answer the question: What does a day in the life of Austin, Texas sound like? A team of audio producers from KUT spent the last several months documenting a handful of days in the life of Austin. They spent 24 hours straight in one location, talking to anyone who’d talk to them. They found that as big as Austin has gotten, standing still, it gets a little smaller.
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August 18, 2023
(Episode 7) Now that the machine has done its job, what now? We explore some of the existential questions that Austin’s housing market has wrought.
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August 10, 2023
(BONUS — Deleted scene!) We go back 100 years to tell the origin story of modern zoning.
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August 4, 2023
(Episode 6) Austin last re-wrote its land development code in 1984. Sounds boring, right? Well, that rewrite made it harder to build denser forms of housing. We explore the history of zoning in Austin and the opposition to changing the rules today, which could make the biggest difference in fixing Austin’s affordability crisis.
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July 27, 2023
(Episode 5) Not that long ago, Austin’s economy was sleepy, to put it mildly. People came here for UT, to work for the state or for the military. A little more than 50 years ago, a bedsheet changed everything — including the housing market.
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July 20, 2023
(BONUS) We talked in episode 2 about cars and roads — and how they affect where we live. We didn’t talk about one other way that cars affect housing: making places to put all the cars.
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July 13, 2023
(Episode 4) When a new mayor came to power, he found what he thought would be a compromise — a way to bring new businesses and build housing for all the people coming to Austin without threatening the city’s ecological gems. It turned out to be more complicated than that.
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July 6, 2023
Listen to This Podcast or We’ll Poison Barton Springs
(Episode 3) In the 1990s, Austin voters passed landmark protections for parts of southwest Austin that sit on top of the aquifer that feeds Barton Springs. That set off a chain of events that had a profound effect on how the city would grow in the coming decades.
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About
Housing prices in Austin have exploded in the past decade, leading to a city that’s not just unaffordable — but also highly segregated. None of this happened by accident. It’s the result of decades of decisions about what — if anything — gets built in Austin and where. From a master plan to move Black and brown residents to one part of town, to fights over how to protect the environment, to an outdated land development code — all of these are pieces in a machine that’s engineered Austin’s housing market.
Audrey McGlinchy
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