I want to start this podcast about
housing in Austin by talking to
someone who came to the city like so
many: with dreams of making
it big.
My name is Adrian Quesada.
I am a musician, producer based
in Austin, Texas.
You've probably heard of Adrian, but
if you haven't, he's played in a
bunch of bands in Austin.
One of my favorites is Grupo
Fantasma.
Adrian's also played with Black
Pumas, Brownout.
He's been onstage with Prince and
Los Lobos.
Anyway, this kid from Laredo moves
to Austin in 1995 to go
to UT.
He lives in student housing for a
couple of years, then he moves off
campus and starts living with a
couple of bandmates.
We had an apartment on East
Riverside.
Really- It was really cheap.
I mean, like a couple hundred each.
About $300 a month each.
After a couple of years, him and his
buddies moved out.
We rented a house up in
North Austin, kind of off 51st
Street.
Adrian says this house had a
rotating cast of people.
But he was young and rent was cheap.
Probably around three, three or 400
each. Maybe at some point we were
paying 500 each for a full
house.
Adrian says he didn't really worry
about having money for rent.
We were never swimming in cash, but
we never felt like we
were going to get thrown out of the
house or anything. We all, we all
made rent. Always.
Eventually, Adrian decided he was
done living with a bunch of people.
He found a place on his own.
Avenue F in Hyde Park, and
my rent was $400 there.
For a one bedroom.
For a massive one bedroom.
In Hyde Park.
Yep, it was huge.
It was $400.
You can hear the disbelief in my
voice. Sure.
This was the early 2000s,
but a one bedroom in Hyde Park goes
for about 1600 a month
now, four times what Adrian
paid.
The only catch was the, um,
landlord, when th-
they wouldn't take care of anything.
I think the landlord had bought it
for his son when he was in college
and just forgot about it.
So he took advantage of this whole
absent landlord thing.
I started doing this thing where I
would, uh, be so late
with the rent.
Say I paid it three weeks in,
I would figure out a way to like
skip two months a year because I
would be like- act like that was
just the February rent versus the
January rent.
Eventually, an attorney called him
and shut down the whole scheme.
But the point is, Austin was cheap
and you could get away with making
it cheaper.
After four years in this Hyde Park
spot, Adrian met a woman
he would eventually marry, and
he crossed the river to live with
her.
She had a condo, a two story condo
on Congress and Oltorf.
Adrian can't remember what he paid
toward her mortgage or if he paid at
all. Sweet deal.
Anyway, the two got serious and
decided to buy a house.
They found one just south of St.
Edwards University in the St. Elmo
area. It was 2004.
What did you pay for your house back
when you bought it?
132.
$132,000.
Homes in that zip code now sell for
half a million.
But back then, and to a musician on
the brink of success, but not
quite there yet, that was a lot.
That felt like a huge number.
That was not manageable.
That was, by any means.
That was absolutely
insane to think of going into
that much debt.
20 years later, Adrian and his wife
have paid off the house and they own
a second one, in Lockhart.
Adrian says he definitely hustled
when he first started out as a
musician, but he was able to make
it, to move to Austin, play
gigs, cover his bills
and eventually build a life in a
city he loves.
He's not sure that exists any
longer, at least for musicians.
It's a struggle for a lot of people.
You know, I think multiple people
piling into, um,
houses and apartments and
just hustling all kinds of jobs is,
is very much a reality.
He's seen musicians move to small
towns outside the city, places
like Lockhart, Buda, places
cheaper than Austin.
The surreal thing is that the
creative class is what made Austin
appealing, and now
the creative class is being priced
out.
Adrian thinks about this business
near his house.
It's about a ten minute walk away,
and he used to spend a lot of time
there.
There used to be a music lab
rehearsal space that all, every
band, it was kind of rite of passage
to rehearse in this gross
place that was just beer soaked and
just was nasty in there.
I can't make this stuff up.
This band space is now ...
Thank you for calling, Tesla.
Please hold for the next available
agent.
That's right. It's a Tesla showroom.
The thing that makes me really
scratch my head is, you know, when
my wife and I bought a house
17 years ago and decided to start a
family, we were
scraping by, you know,
as creatives.
I don't know how a young
creative family
would plant their roots and start a
family in Austin without having a,
like, serious income.
And if you just ask people to tell
their Austin housing story,
he's right.
I first came to Austin in the fall
of 1969 to attend UT,
and I think my room and board was
like $70 a month or
something.
In 2007, I found
an apartment on Craigslist,
on West 10th, for $500
a month.
Between 2008
and 2010,
I was not paying more than 650
at the most.
So I moved to Austin in 2011,
and I moved from North Carolina, and
I moved into a house.
Total was like 1100 for
a four bedroom house.
A few months later, when his lease
was up, and this was 2014,
it just doubled to 1600.
We moved down to San Marcos because
it was cheaper.
But even that started to get pricey.
We were looking around in Austin
and that was hard in 2014
and we ended up having to move out
to Pflugerville.
I grew up here.
I'm from here, was born here, and I
can't afford to really live here
anymore.
Here's my Austin housing story.
2015, a bedroom in a house
in Cherrywood for under $700
a month. Another house with
roommates down the street 1100
a month.
Moved in with a partner, 500
a month. That was a great deal.
Then tiny one bedroom, basically
a studio in Hyde Park.
1100 a month.
Last year, I bought a condo.
Mortgage and HOA fees come out
to about 1800 a month.
Ten years ago, you could rent a two
bedroom apartment for $1,000
a month.
Families earned about $70,000
a year.
Since then, rents have nearly
doubled.
Wages have not.
As Austin home prices continue to
surge ...
To pay the rent or the mortgage,
people forego other things:
gas, clothing, food.
For those who can't pay, the
consequences can be dire:
eviction, foreclosure.
For other people, it may mean
leaving Austin altogether.
Prices continue to soar ...
How did we get here?
On one hand, the story of housing in
Austin is the same in cities across
the country.
In the past couple of decades, lots
of people have moved here.
But we haven't built enough housing
for them, at least not in the places
where people really want to live.
The median price of a home just hit
a brand new record ...
So prices have gone up, pushing
out current residents, mostly people
of color, and making Austin a
place only the rich can afford.
A new all time high
last month, according to the Austin
Board of Realtors ...
I've been covering local government
and housing in Austin for nearly a
decade.
I've written the same story over
and over again.
In just a year, the median sales
price of a home in Austin rose by
more than $100,000 ...
The median sales price of a home in
Austin rose by 25% ...
The city set a record for the
highest annual increase in median
sales price of homes.
You know this story.
Even if you don't live in Austin,
you know this story of Austin.
But let me drill down for a minute.
What neighborhood do you live in?
Why?
Is it because it's the only
neighborhood you can afford or
because you bought your house
decades ago, and even if you sold
it, couldn't buy a new place?
Is it because it's the only
neighborhood where you look around
and see people who look like you?
If you work outside your house, how
far do you commute?
Do you bike, walk or drive to work?
Do you, like most people who live
here, spend an hour in your car
alone, each day, getting to
and from work?
Is all of this okay with you?
If Austin had one story, that story
would be growth.
People move here every day, and the
city gets bigger and bigger.
Not just population, but also
geography.
The way we as a city have handled
this growth, the direction that the
city has grown, that's the
bigger story.
And to start to unravel it, we have
to go back, back in time
to consider choices that have built
in Austin, that can no longer
keep its promises.
The promise that you like, Adrian
Quesada, can come here,
follow your dreams and make it
big.
Or at least afford to pay the rent.
I'm Andrew McGlinchey.
This is Growth Machine: How Austin
Engineered Its Housing Market.
Episode
one, We planned this.
For this episode, I'm going to be
joined by Marisa Charpentier.
She's also a reporter here at KUT.
Hi, Marisa.
Hi, Audrey.
Back in May, we got invited to this
one story house in East Austin.
Tan stone exterior, green
roof and lots and lots of
stories.
Hi, I'm Audrey.
How are you?
I'm good, good ...
We were invited by a man named
Donald Dallas.
That's my aunt. So it was, this
house belonged to her mom.
Donald is an activist and a teacher.
He's in his thirties and he grew up
in East Austin.
And this house has been in his
family since the 1960s.
Here's Donald's grandmother, Linda.
We all lived in this
house.
Every last one of us,
you know, was raised up right here,
in this home.
This house is a meeting spot of
sorts.
On a Tuesday evening, about a dozen
of Donald's family members came
and went.
Aunts, nieces, nephews.
Our grandma do stuff for
us. She do anything.
She'll buy your stuff for and she
will buy a t-shirt for like,
for school and like that.
And then she'll buy a school
for [inaudible].
Not quite sure what the last part of
that was. But anyway, I sat
next to Linda on this deep leather
couch and I asked her to tell me a
story about growing up here.
She immediately got to the juicy
stuff.
My cousin lived across the street
from us, up here on Higgins,
my grandmother's house, and
she used to sneak me in to Charlie's
Playhouse.
Charlie's Playhouse was a club that
opened in the late fifties.
Ruthie Mae 'cause she sung there.
She was a singer. and she sing- And
she took me in there.
I was under age.
I think I was about, ooh,
I must have been about 16,
17 years old.
... the White Swan. You ever hear
about the White Swan?
This is Linda, sister Sue.
At 12th and Chicon, uh, the East
Room, then, uh,
you used to go down to Sea Rose and
... we used had
a lot of places to go to.
You know, we, we
used to have a lot of ...
Jam Burger, oh,
Jam Burger was ...
Tell me what you know about Jam
Burger!
As we're talking, you can hear the
screen door open and shut
as people come and go.
Beyond the door is Loreto Drive,
a small street, about two dozen
homes, most of them single story.
And there's a streetlight.
When Linda was raising her kids,
they would play outside with one
rule. Be home by the time the
street light came on.
A lot of times the mom would have to
call 'em in, "Y'all get in this
house, it's so late!"
They wouldn't pay her no mind.
They still be playing out there.
But
we had a lot of fun on this street
here. Mainly this street,
'cause we knew everybody,
you know. All the families
knew us too, you know?
It isn't that way anymore.
Linda says she doesn't know most of
the people on this street.
A lot of the old families sold their
houses and moved away.
Right now, about 30% of
the people in this neighborhood are
black.
40 years ago, that number was
90%.
Which meant that most of the
businesses here were owned by Black
people. So it was like a
self-sustaining community of Black
Austinites.
That was kind of like the way of
life, like,
economically here.
This is Donald.
It's a little hard to hear him.
He stood behind the couch.
So you really didn't have to go
outside in the neighborhood with
your daughter because you had
everything here, you know.
And it was owned by the people that
was from here.
We had doctor's offices
and pharmacy, black owned
pharmacies.
I don't know if we had a bank, but,
you know, it could have been.
This is Sion, Donald's aunt.
About a decade ago, a lot of new
people started moving to this
neighborhood, changing the
demographics, driving up the cost
of housing.
Sion says she remembers this one
encounter she had in 2010.
We were at the bank, Bank of America
down the street, and a guy told
us in the bank, um, I
don't know how we got on the subject
of, like, the housing market, but
he was like, "Don't ever sell
your house if you live in East
Austin, because East
Austin's housing
market is going to be crazy like
California.
And he said, give it about ten years
and you'll see.
So I always remembered that.
And so this is going to sound like a
dumb question, but when the guy at
the bank said that thing to you, was
he right?
He was absolutely right.
Donald, Sion, Linda,
Sue.
Four generations in this one
house and part of this
family can trace their history in
Austin back even further,
to a small community in South Austin
called Kincheonville.
And how this family moved from South
Austin to East Austin and eventually
away from Austin.
That's what this episode is about.
It's about why that guy at the bank
was right.
How one decision ended up dictating
where a whole group of Austinites
could and then couldn't live.
And it takes us back a century to
1928.
So can you just introduce yourself
to me? Tell me your name, good
title.
My name is Edmund Tayloe Gordon and
I'm an associate professor of
African, African Diaspora Studies at
the University of Texas at Austin.
Let's start in 1865.
The Civil War is over.
Formerly enslaved black people in
Texas have learned about their
emancipation and start leaving
plantations.
They're coming to whatever
town is the biggest looking for
wage labor, basically, and other
kinds of economic opportunities.
They're settling in and around
cities like Austin, in neighborhoods
called freedom colonies or freedmen
communities.
Relatively prosperous communities.
These folks are both
producing stuff on their own.
Most of them are growing food.
You got, you know, small chickens
and pigs and things like that.
The leaders of the families
would get together and they would
try to bring as much of
what you needed within
the confines of your colony.
Gary Bledsoe is a civil rights
lawyer and the head of the Texas
NAACP.
Because there was an understanding
of the hostility against
people of color outside
the colony.
But people still had to leave the
freedom colonies for work.
Most of the kind of labor
that these folks would have been
involved in was labor in which
they're, you know, supporting,
you know, white households: laundry,
cooking, things like that.
In Austin, there were more than a
dozen freedom colonies in and around
the city.
Many with names we still use today.
Wheatville, Clarksville,
to a lesser extent,
the communities of Gregory Town and
Mason Town.
This is Tara Dudley.
She's an architectural historian.
Learning the stories, especially
the sort of forgotten,
in some cases, unknown stories.
If anything, it helps me feel
more a part of that larger
narrative.
As freedom colonies grew in Austin,
so did the rest of the city.
It's the state capital, so people
moved here for government jobs.
And by 1871, there was a train
connecting Austin and Houston.
A decade later, the state opened the
University of Texas.
By 1920, there were about 35,000
people living in Austin, nearly
ten times as many as there were
just after the Civil War.
And the city was also growing
geographically.
The first suburb was built, Hyde
Park. Back then, it was
a whites only neighborhood.
More and more people are getting
around the city in cars.
And so there's a need for
infrastructure to keep up, to
take Austin into a modern era.
Everything from paving streets,
straightening out streets, crossing
the creeks that we were sandwiched
in between. In many places,
there still weren't bridges, um, or,
you know, sufficient bridges,
especially by the time we're moving
from the horse and buggy to the
automobile.
So elected officials in Austin
decide the city needs a plan.
They hire these two guys out of
Dallas, guys by the name of Coke and
Fowler, and they come up with a
document that's about 70 pages
long. It says Vision:
for a new Austin,
Where schools should be located,
where housing should be located,
where parks should be located,
the bridges and streets.
These are the unpaved streets.
This is where we should pave them,
and so on and so forth.
Planners also recommend that Austin
build parks and playgrounds.
They recommend a bunch of upgrades
to what was then called Barton
Springs Park.
Things like building a permanent dam
to create Barton Springs Pool.
But the planners and the elected
officials that hired them also
had something else in mind.
Really, one of the primary goals was
segregation and the separation
of people of color from
white Austin.
They wanted to get all the Blacks to
leave Clarksville
and to leave, which we all and
to populate in a certain
area, uh, for obvious
control.
A key point of segregation at this
time is the idea of separate
but equal.
Although to be clear, it was never
equal.
The city makes an economic argument.
If Black people are spread
throughout Austin, then it has to
provide separate but equal schools
and parks in all these different
neighborhoods.
To be able to produce equal
facilities, municipal facilities
in all of these areas is going to
cost a lot of money.
It's going to be expensive.
And Austin leaders can't just draw
maps and say, okay, only white
people can live here.
Only Black people can live here.
Even in the 1920s, this was
unconstitutional.
And so what they decide to do here
is the more humane thing, according
to them, which is to lure black
people out of these communities
rather than force 'em out.
The idea was they wouldn't
continue to provide you city
services if you
refused to move.
We're not going to have amenities,
so we're not going to have sewage.
We're not going to have paved roads,
we're not going to have electricity
in those areas.
But there would be city services,
schools, parks, maybe even
electricity for Black people
somewhere else.
In East Austin, several blocks
East of what is now I-35.
Out of the 70 pages in this master
plan, the part that will segregate
the city is just two paragraphs
long.
Here's what it says.
There has been considerable talk in
Austin, as well as other cities in
regard to the race segregation
problem.
This problem cannot be solved
legally under any zoning law known
to us at present.
Practically all attempts of such
have been proven unconstitutional.
They wanted to do something like
a zoning initiative,
but that their lawyers
had indicated to them that they
couldn't do it.
In our studies in Austin, we have
found that the Negroes are present
in small numbers, in practically
all sections of the city, excepting
the area just east of East Avenue
and south of the city cemetery.
This area seems to be all Negro
population.
It is our recommendation that the
nearest approach to the solution of
the race segregation problem will
be the recommendation of this
district as a Negro district.
The unstated word is,
we want to put 'em together,
and so we want to find the place
where they're located the most.
And so
it's, it's less costly that way.
And making that
into a black neighborhood.
And then all the facilities
inconveniences be provided the
Negroes in this district, as
an incentive to draw the Negro
population to this area.
It's not a draw.
It's a forced move.
Because we can't coerce these folks,
because it's unconstitutional,
we will bait them
into moving into
what we have created
as an area for them,
to contain them in.
This will eliminate the necessity of
duplication of white and black
schools, white and black parks
and other duplicate facilities for
this area.
We want to be separate from you
people, make no ifs, ands,
buts about it.
We don't have any kind of facility,
not just schools and parks.
We don't want to have any kind of
facility for Blacks and whites
go together. That's what that
sentence says.
We are recommending that sufficient
area be acquired adjoining the
Negro High School to provide
adequate space for a complete Negro
play field in connection with
the Negro High School.
We further recommend that the Negro
schools in this area be provided
with ample and adequate playground
space and facilities similar
to the white schools of the city.
An all white City Council adopts
the plan in March 1928.
Overall, we've seen it was very
successful. But
it wasn't, you know, one day
they're here and one day they're
gone kind of thing.
But ultimately, as we've seen,
the plan did work in
having most African-Americans
moved to East Austin.
By 1930, nearly 80%
of Austin's black population
was living in East Austin.
And in some cases, facilities were
actually picked up and moved across
town.
Four years after the 1928
plan passed, officials closed the
school in Wheatville, a freedom
colony west of what is now UT.
They also voted to have the school
building picked up, like literally
dismantled and moved to East Austin
and rebuilt there.
While the city of Austin didn't on
paper force people to move, they
were not given a choice.
You know, not having a paved street,
not having electricity, that's fine.
But for me, as a parent, I wouldn't
be willing to have my children
cross town going to and from school
every day in order to
achieve their education.
They did it in a way
to where it would appear, where
they could have plausible
deniability about what their
intentions were.
And so they didn't just come out
and force you,
but they made it to where you had to
go, where they could say, well, you
have a choice.
So they tried to make it
that that kind of hocus
pocus is
what they were perpetrating on the
public.
But I think that when it's all said
and done, it was really a force.
The 1928 plan, doesn't directly
mention Hispanic people, but
it ultimately affected them too.
Neighborhoods they lived in west of
what is now I-35 were
condemned for redevelopment,
and low income Hispanic residents
eventually moved east.
Meanwhile, some black families
remained in freedom colonies in West
Austin for decades, especially
in Clarksville.
We actually spoke to some people
whose families didn't leave
Clarksville until the 1970s.
Whenever they left, whether it was
1930 or 1970,
Bledsoe says getting pushed out
of these communities would have been
incredibly traumatic.
Your support network is gone.
Your family network
is destroyed.
You have to go to
different schools
and property that you may actually
love and cherish is
no longer going to be
yours, and there's nothing you can
do about it.
Not too many things that would be
more humiliating
than that. And you realize this is
not happening to other people,
but it's happening to you.
And this plan to segregate Austin
nearly a century ago, it's part of
a pattern.
It'll happen again and again.
These black folks, when they
first come to Austin, settle down
in the places that white folks
didn't want. And as soon as white
folks want them, then they get
shuffled off to other places
that, you know, where white
folks wanted to be.
And as soon as those got to be,
you know, desirable, then they're
shuffled off to someplace else.
But what happened once all these
people were forced to move to East
Austin?
Black people did what Black people
do, and they always figure out a
way.
More after the break.
Within years of the 1928
master plan passing, nearly
all of the city's black residents
lived in East Austin.
They were not welcome in the rest of
the city. They couldn't go to UT.
They couldn't swim at Barton
Springs.
They couldn't get mortgages from the
bank.
They couldn't even try on clothes at
Scarborough's, a department store
downtown.
So living east of what is now
I-35, Black Austinites
built their own world.
I thought the community
ended at IH35.
And 'cause we had everything
we needed right here.
This is Brenda Mims Malik.
She grew up in East Austin in the
fifties and sixties.
We had our schools, we had our
businesses.
We had our movie, you know, our
entertainment.
There was the Harlem Theater, known
for its chili burgers and for
playing movies you couldn't see
anywhere else in the city.
Imitation of Life.
I'd like to hold you in my arms once
more, like you were still
my baby.
All right.
Oh.
[inaudible] Oh, my baby ...
That played, I believe,
twice a year.
An Imitation. An imitation of Life.
The Harlem Theater was on East 12th
Street. You could get there by
riding the trolley that went up and
down the neighborhood.
And my brother and I used to,
you know, just get on it for the
fun of it. I think it was like a
nickel or something like that.
And we'd go to the end of it, turn
around and come back.
Ada Harden is another lifelong
resident of East Austin.
My dad owned a
service station, body and paint shop
and service station, about three
blocks down.
And it was all on the same street.
A couple of blocks south.
And you hit East 11th Street, the
entertainment district.
That's where, if you wanted to hear
blues or whatever, that's where you
went.
Charles Ernie is a former city
council member.
He remembers a place called
Charlie's Playhouse.
They had loud music and
dancing.
I met my first wife in Charlie's
Playhouse.
There was also the Victory Grill,
the Deluxe Hotel.
Maybe other people met their wives
or husbands at these places.
Those were the good times.
But in the early seventies, things
started to change.
For one, the Harlem Theater shut
down.
I remember it closed.
And then, I also remember that
it burned down.
So, um,
those were some tumultuous times
for us because that was also
around the time that the high
school closed.
Anderson High School shut down in
1971 because of
a desegregation order from a federal
judge.
Many people who grew up in the
neighborhood back then talk about
how the push to desegregate the city
was the eventual downfall of East
Austin.
What had happened now was that you
could go to these
other clubs across town
that now played the music that only
Charlie's Playhouse used to play.
People started spending money
outside of the neighborhood.
And black owned businesses started
to close.
The buildings stayed vacant.
And a lot of the places were just
havens for drug dealers and
prostitutes.
So now it's not an entertainment
center for the community like
it was when Charlie's Playhouse was
there.
I know a lot of folks don't want to
talk about this, but I remember
gangs in old East
Austin.
This is Natasha Harper Madison.
She's a city council member who grew
up in East Austin in the eighties.
I remember, you know,
drive bys. I remember our house
got shot up. I remember when
crack hit communities
across this country, it hit
historic East Austin too.
Families started
moving out of East Austin, and
in big numbers.
Between 1970 and 1990,
about half of the neighborhood's
Black residents left.
Then in the 1990s, the city started
a campaign to bring more development
to East Austin.
Land was cheap.
It had been undervalued for decades,
and as downtown got built out, it
made sense to start building in East
Austin.
As soon as you start
eliminating some of those barriers
to development. You
can look at downtown.
You're sitting almost a hop, skip
and a jump from downtown. It
is going to change.
The value of that, that
neighborhood, because of its
proximity to downtown, is just too
great.
I mean, I distinctly remember the
first time I saw, you know, a
white lady jogging down the street,
distinctly remember, I thought
she was in trouble.
My mom just said, "I think she's
jogging." You know, I remember
starting to see more Anglo
neighbors. I mean, I distinctly
remember sort of very slowly
watching the change.
When the money decided to come
into the neighborhood, then
the money brought with it the
attention.
Which brings us back to 2010
and the man in the bank.
He said, give it about ten years
and you'll see.
So I always remembered that.
Part of what that man in the bank
was probably getting out was that
starting in 2000,
Austin became one of the fastest
growing cities in the country.
It had over half a million people,
obviously, and it grew at 20.4%.
This is Eric Ting.
He's a professor at the University
of Texas.
He's talking about Austin's growth
in the decade between 2000 and
2010.
As a general rule, if
a city is in double digit growth
like that, it shouldn't see a
decline in any major
racial group.
What Tang saying is that as the city
grows, so does the number of
white, Black, Latino and
Asian-American residents.
The city is getting bigger, and so
is the number of people living here
across racial groups.
But by 2010, this was not
happening in Austin.
It turned out that
African-Americans were the
only group during this
period of remarkable growth to
see losses.
And again, I'm not talking just
about the share of its
population. I'm talking about an
absolute numerical loss.
Austin's Black population shrank
by nearly 4000 people.
That made Austin different than
other big growing cities in the
U.S..
Cities grow that fast.
What does that suggest? And suggests
that the city is still
a place of opportunity for a
number of different people, of
different class backgrounds, not
just the high income earners.
We shouldn't see these losses,
and yet we did.
Tang argues the movement of Black
people out of the city can be traced
back to the 1928 plan,
back to when the city forced black
residents to move to East Austin.
You see, East Austin was a majority
black neighborhood into the late
nineties. But around the same time,
Austin began experiencing a real
economic boom.
More businesses opened downtown
and more workers needed places
to live.
East Austin was close to downtown
and property was cheap.
Whiter, wealthier people started
moving in.
Without protections for current
residents, property values and taxes
rose.
And those who lived there for
decades got priced out.
What we're talking about here is
gentrification.
You have to ask yourself, if there
were black communities in different
parts of Austin,
as there are, say, in
Houston or Dallas, that it's
not just concentrated in one area,
would you have
seen, then, the Black population
so singularly
impacted by gentrification?
Probably not.
When Black residents started leaving
East Austin, they left the city
entirely.
Austin was at the same time becoming
less affordable across the
board in all areas.
And at the same time they're looking
at their housing options and they're
saying, I can get, you know, more
square footage and
more equity in that home than to
try to buy something here in Austin.
Plus, there's not a cultural
kind of political draw to being
here, in a city
where historically I've felt
like a second class citizen.
Why not try another area?
Like Pflugerville or Manor.
Many people moved to these suburbs
north and east of the city.
20 years ago, you could buy a house
in East Austin for $60,000.
Now, homes there sell for
ten times that.
Austin's growth, its population
boom,
it's real estate boom.
This is all not just
recent.
It is brand new.
And, you know, I think we're
living, you know,
the history of the present.
This is the moment in which
things turn
with rapid speed.
Right. But, but they're
staged through
decades of
inequality, promulgated
by things like the 1928 master plan.
I'm, uh, I guess I would say a
good representation of
of what you would call Black Austin.
I'm very known in the community.
Um, so yeah.
Remember Donald Dallas?
We met his family at the beginning
of this episode.
Donald's one of many black
Austinites who've left the city in
recent years.
He now lives in Round Rock, a suburb
north of Austin, where he works as a
teacher.
Donald says he wishes he could have
stayed on the Eastside.
But ...
It wasn't no means of affordability
for me to stay on the Eastside.
So I haven't had a place on
the Eastside by myself.
Leaving Austin wasn't easy.
Donald comes from a long line of
Austinites.
He can trace his family back to one
of the city's original Freedmen's
colonies.
On his father's side, his great
great great grandfather, Thomas
Kincheon, founded Kincheonville in
the 1860s.
It was a farming community in
Southwest Austin.
Donald's family eventually moved to
East Austin, which he says was
a direct result of the 1928
plan.
So what my dad and my uncle had told
me was they turned off all
city resources.
They would never come and
pave our roads.
They would never come and, you know,
like, upgrade that area.
Um, which caused,
caused us and our family
and the community in it and in
hole to move.
It's only recently that Donald
learned about this part of his
family's history.
A few years ago, he got involved
with an organization called the
Black Austin Coalition.
They've been pushing the city to
address what the 1928 plan
did.
And doing this kind of work, Donald
says, made him curious about where
he came from.
I have a sense of fight, like,
to fight for this town, like, and I
didn't know where that urge was
coming from, like, it's so powerful.
And my dad was like, yeah, like you
deeply rooted here.
And when Donald talks about his
childhood in the nineties and the
East Austin, he knew as a kid,
he gets this big grin on his face.
Everything was flourishing.
Everybody knew each other.
It was, like I say, like it was
one big family.
His family members owned several
small businesses and they worked for
the city. They were bus drivers and
nurses.
He says everyone had each other's
backs.
Like we could start youth
organizations and that'd be
supported. We can start
small businesses and that'd be
supported, like with no problem.
We didn't, like I said, we were so
stuck in one confined area,
we didn't need no business from
anywhere else.
Like all the businesses was driving,
um,
the gatherings, the get-togethers,
like, they was amazing.
Donald says this all started to
change for him in the early 2000s.
That's when families he'd grown up
with started selling their houses.
So when you started to see your
family members, like, disperse,
it started to get real.
It started to get real, and they was
tearing down the houses and
rebuilding the with these
modern homes.
Homes that we have never even
imagined seeing.
So it started to look, yeah, it
started to look wild.
All right, if we can get everybody
to start gathering up over here, if
you have on a T-shirt,
we want y'all back here if you got a
T-shirt on.
In November 2020, Donald
and the rest of the Black Austin
Coalition held a press conference.
They urged city leaders to recognize
Austin's history of racism
and promise to invest in the Black
community.
They brought up the 1928 plan.
As we look at historical programs
and policy that the city
implemented, you will see the
underlying mistreatment and why
Black districts no longer exist
in this city.
Systematic racism in
official plans like the Negro
District of 1928
or I-35 racial barrier
has played a role in the removal of
black success.
A few months later, the Austin City
Council promised to study the issue.
They would hire researchers to put a
number on how much money Black
Austinites had lost because of
racist policies, like the
1928 plan.
Last year, researchers at UT
released their first report.
They found that when Black
landowners living throughout the
city were forced to sell and move
to East Austin, their descendants
lost out on $290
million.
This is a lot of money.
And to be clear, this is in today's
dollars.
290 million.
The city isn't planning to pay back
descendants of people impacted by
the 1928 plan, but
they are looking to invest in the
city's current Black residents.
They want to help build something
called a Black embassy
in East Austin.
It would be like a resource center
that supports Black led businesses
and organizations.
But it's been more than two years
since this plan was announced and
there's still no black embassy.
When we asked the city what was
going on, a city official blamed
the COVID pandemic and leadership
changes at City hall.
But for Donald, the city not keeping
its promises is nothing new.
He says he's prepared to play the
long game.
As far as, like, the building and
the structure and the promises that
was kept. We still fighting for it.
That $290 million just
scratches the surface.
What researchers have yet to
quantify is the social impact
of displacement, the loss
of traditions and landmarks,
the breaking apart of communities.
Donald misses the East Austin
he grew up in.
He still visits family who live
there, but it's different.
And he longs for a place he can't
return to.
So, like, when that old feel is
gone, you know, it
feels kind of funny. You know,
this is just like when you miss your
boyfriend or your girlfriend
or, you know, you miss
one of your loved ones.
That aspect of your life is gone
and you can't get back to it.
But that doesn't stop him from
trying.
Donald often drives a half hour
from Round Rock to his great
grandma's house to, at least
for a while, get some of that
old feeling back.
That was KUT's Marisa Charpentier.
In five years.
It'll be the 100th anniversary of
the 1928 plan.
I talked to people like Eric Ting,
Donald Dallas, many of the people
we spoke to for this episode.
And it's clear that the effects of
this city plan to forcibly segregate
Austin's residents are still very
much felt today.
When data from the 2020 census came
out, This became even more clear,
according to these numbers, Austin's
Black residents, along with the
city's Hispanic population, have
continued to move east, so
far east that people are moving out
of the city entirely.
And Austin's racial segregation
has continued.
In other words, you are unlikely to
see people of different races in
your own neighborhood.
That's especially true if you're
white.
The 1928 plan is one example
of how people have great power to
decide where Austinites, present
and future, can and cannot
live in this city.
In Austin's history, there have been
many more decisions like this
one. Maybe not with quite such
insidious and racist intentions,
but in many cases it's the
unintended consequences that have
had the same effect.
We'll look at some of those
decisions throughout this podcast.
Growth Machine is a production of
KUT and KUTX Studios
in Austin.
It's produced by me, Marisa
Charpentier, Mose Buchele,
Nathan Bernier, Jimmy Maas, and
Matt Largey.
Production help from Heather
Stewart. Technical help from Jake
Perlman. Stephanie Federico
is our digital editor.
Special thanks to Rich Heyman,
Amanda Jasso, Stephanie Lang,
Andrew Weber and the Austin History
Center.
Special, special thanks to Donald
Dallas and his family for welcoming
us into their home.
There's more at
kut.org/growthmachine.
I'm Audrey McGlinchy.
Thanks for listening.