There has been a lot of excitement
in America for the last six years.
On March 29th, 1962,
several busses stopped on a road in
downtown Austin.
Out of them walked dozens of girls
from local high schools.
Some wore pleated plaid skirts.
Others wore dark jumpers over
collared shirts.
All of them wore white gloves.
These colorful, often festive
occasions didn't commemorate
holidays or historic
anniversaries.
Once off the bus, these girls formed
a line stretching across the road,
blocking it.
Men gave speeches.
A marching band played.
These occasions came complete
with all the trimmings.
The girls laughed as two guys in
dark suits pretended to cut the air
around them, as if the line they had
formed was a ceremonial ribbon.
Because, you see, this was a
celebration.
A grand opening of a road.
What is this big road?
Where is it going?
Well, not just any road.
A superhighway ...
to the future.
Are you rolling?
I am rolling, yes.
We are rolling.
All right.
We are turning onto the frontage
road of I-35.
I'm gonna try and merge
on, oh shoot.
Okay. Ope.
Nathan's trying,
trying to be a safe driver and I'm distracting him.
I'm not going to get any accidents
today.
Awhile back, I went for a drive with
my colleague Nathan Bernier.
He's going to join me for this
episode.
Nathan covers transportation for
KUT.
And on this day, we drove on I-35
through downtown Austin.
Um, And how does congestion look
today on I-35?
It's pretty busy on I-35,
surprisingly
enough, uh ...
It's about, what, almost 11 a.m.?
11 a.m..
And we're going, mmm,
10, 20, 15 miles an hour right
now.
Tens of thousands of people going to
work, delivering stuff, going
home, getting their kids,
many of them driving dozens or even
hundreds of miles in one day.
This is it, though, right?
I mean, we're going to pull up the
upper deck and a skyline
of Austin is going to grow out of
the horizon.
The thing of dreams,
sitting in, uh, sitting in traffic.
This particular highway is just one
way people in Austin get around.
But driving is the way everyone
and everything gets
around the city.
We're, you know, driving by Bank of
America, a Shell Station.
You can see some of the tallest
buildings of downtown, but you
can't- You're not, we're not
quite getting the full
view of downtown just yet.
It's coming up.
It wasn't that long ago that Austin
was a more rural place.
You didn't have to go far to find
yourself out in the country.
But as Austin got bigger, so did the
roads. And they filled up with more
and more people.
More roads. More people.
More people. More roads.
You get it.
Okay, so now we're getting
close to 15th Street.
And this is about the place where
those dozen or so women
in that photograph that I found
fanned out across this highway
as it opened for the first
time to Austinites in 1962.
And it's what, I mean, 1962.
So for more,
just over 60 years, people have been
driving on this stretch of I-35.
Oh, it's insane.
And think about all of the people
and things that have driven along
here. I mean, millions of people,
definitely, including
celebrities.
Probably.
Definitely.
[laughter]
Presidents of the
United States of America and other
countries, perhaps.
Presidents also have to go on
highways.
And then I think of, like, all the
materials. You know, you see
all the huge commercial
trucks that drive up and down I-35,
um, delivering
who knows what.
And what? This stretches from
Laredo to Duluth,
Minnesota.
Pretty much, I mean, almost
everything, if you're in
a house, it's very likely that
everything your house is made of
traveled on I-35 at some
point. That beer in your hand,
maybe that traveled, that likely
traveled along I-35.
I mean, everything travels
along I-35, it's insane.
To wax poetic, it's like this
artery pulsing through the body
of America.
It is.
All right. You should drop me off
now, cause that was terrible.
[laughter]
Pull over. I'm ejected from the car.
Alright, I'm exiting here.
So what does I-35 have to do
with housing in Austin?
Well, everything.
Without highways, Austin would look
a lot different than it does now.
For better or for worse,
I'm Audrey McGlinchey.
This is Growth Machine: How Austin
Engineered Its Housing Market.
Episode two: Roads
to Everywhere.
By the mid 1940s, Austin was
a city of 100,000 people,
a 10th of its population today.
And the city was geographically
smaller as well.
It just took up less land.
The southern boundary of Austin
didn't go far past Oltorf Street,
so in the early forties, St.
Edward's University was outside
the city limits.
To the west, Lake Austin was a
boundary, and to the north, 51st
Street was one of the boundaries.
Then East Austin stretched to around
Airport Boulevard.
Getting around was not great.
A lot of city roads were still
unpaved.
The city had not even paved Lamar
Boulevard, north of 24th Street, in
the mid-forties.
Which is wild to think about, like,
half of Lamar is just a gravel road.
Anyway, back in the forties, Austin
was a much smaller city.
Yeah, and harder to get around.
But that all changed when everyone
got a car.
By the end of the 1930s, America was
only a few decades away from the
horse and buggy.
But there were already 30 million
cars on the road.
Buick's beauty, smooth
safety surge acceleration
and its million dollar ride.
Look at those lines.
There's true streamlining for you
...
But the roads were not that
great. So there was a movement to
build a network of superhighways.
Can't you see that this highway
means a whole new way of life
for the children?
Congress was studying whether to
build an interstate highway system.
But then ... World War Two happened.
All America offers its pattern of
life and work to meet the demand
for protection.
World War Two slowed down efforts
to build the interstate highway
system, and the war also slowed the
production of cars.
GM became the largest
military contractor in the country,
making machine guns and
anti-aircraft cannon.
As General Motors makes victory
its business.
Ford stopped making cars for
civilians.
The Ford Motor Company has thrown
the full weight of its engineering
resources behind the nation's
defense efforts.
Most people couldn't even buy a car
because of rationing.
Supplies were short on everything
from shoes to gasoline was doled
out. No stamps, no
salt.
So imagine living through the most
destructive and deadliest war
in human history, with all
this deprivation in the United
States.
And then it all ended
in 1945.
Throughout the world, throngs of
people hailed the end of the war.
Car companies started making cars
again, and Americans were hungry
for them.
[music] I'm in love with you, baby.
Let me ride in your automobile.
Today, the automobile is part of
any American scene.
Clean and sleek and strong.
Like so many people these days, we
live in the suburbs.
And three weeks ago, we bought
another Ford.
It's a whole new way of life.
Gas was cheap.
In today's dollars, about two bucks
a gallon. Credit was easy
and cars were being pumped out like
hotcakes.
Chevrolet is the first in the
industry to achieve the riding
and driving thrill of a lifetime.
There's never been anything like it
before.
Now I'm free to go anywhere, do
anything, see anybody, any time
I want to.
If you never had that freedom
before, it must have felt amazing.
[music] Let me riding
your automobile.
And more people than ever could
afford it.
From 1945 to 1955,
the number of vehicles in the U.S.
doubled to more than 60
million.
In a single decade.
Through quality mass production.
New Chevrolets are made each year,
which millions of people can afford.
And now people wanted to do
everything in their cars.
Want to have dinner?
Drive in restaurants.
Want to go see a movie?
Drive in movie theater.
Want to make a deposit?
Drive in bank.
Where the cashier works behind a
bulletproof glass ...
Millions of people in their cars
would change American culture
forever.
[music] Oh, you've got a good little
car, baby.
Two minute drive ...
It don't run like no buggy.
And now, with the car at the center
of American life, there was enough
political support for the federal
government to put a lot of money on
the table for an interstate highway
system.
$25 billion.
That's what Congress approved in
1956.
The legislation was signed by
President Dwight Eisenhower.
The Federal Aid Highway
Act.
The most talked about phase of the
act is the Interstate Highway
System, a 41,000
mile network of our most important
roads.
Most of these roads will be four,
six, even eight lane expressways,
constructed for through traffic.
They will take the over-the-road
driver from city to city, coast to
coast, at highway speeds —
even through large population
centers.
The plan was to route highways very
close to town centers, to bring
people into the city where they
could do their business and spend
their money.
So that's why I say, speaking for
the Chamber of Commerce, if there's
any highway improvement to be done,
let's improve the roads that bring
more people into Connersville.
Whether it's Dallas, Detroit,
Denver. Everyone's getting a
highway.
Including Austin.
In the 1940s, the head of the State
Highway Department showed up in
Austin. His name was DeWitt
C. Greer, and he's a super important
guy when it comes to the development
of highways in Texas.
He would actually wind up running
the state highway department for
the next 30 years, almost.
He became known as king of
the highway builders.
Anyway, so this king of highways
comes to Austin leaders and says,
'Hey, your city is not big enough to
be our first priority.
We're going to build a highway in
Dallas and San Antonio,
but then we'll get to you.
So you guys better get ready and
start figuring out where we should
put this thing.'
So the city highway planners started
looking at some routes, two
or three of them, and they presented
them to the state officials.
And some of these routes were kind
of interesting.
One possible route for I-35
would have set it up San Jacinto
Boulevard, but that passed through
University of Texas property.
Can't really put a highway over UT.
Right. And then there was Red
River, that was considered as a
route. But at the time that
ran through what was the Austin
Country Club Golf course.
God forbid the golfers be
interrupted by a highway.
Can't have that.
Finally, in February 1945,
all the government officials agree,
'We're going to put the highway down
a street called East Avenue.'
And the planners had several reasons
for choosing East Avenue.
First, it was wide.
Much of it was already 200
feet wide.
And that was how wide they needed
the highway to be.
It was actually called la Calle
Ancha or the Wide
Street by Mexican-American residents
who lived nearby.
It wasn't always full of cars.
It was also this social place.
Large, grassy medians cut
through the road and people would
picnic in these medians.
They'd play baseball.
Even horses grazed there.
So East Avenue, planners argued, was
already the right dimensions for a
highway.
It was already a busy thoroughfare,
but there were some other factors as
well.
Highway planners across the country
were choosing routes that tore
through communities of color, even
sometimes literally rerouting the
highway to avoid white
neighborhoods.
In the last episode, we talked about
how I-35 eventually became
this dividing line between East and
West Austin, a dividing line
between communities of color and
white people.
But before that, East Avenue was
this dividing line.
Banks used East Avenue as a marker
to decide who they would lend money
to. You might have heard of the term
redlining.
Well, that's basically where
mortgage lenders took maps
of cities and they drew red lines
around neighborhoods where they
would refuse to give mortgages to
people.
Most of the time, those
neighborhoods were black
neighborhoods, east of East Avenue,
redlined. So essentially, these
communities were left out of home
ownership for decades,
and that would have ramifications
generations down the road.
I do remember when East Avenue
was the distinct
street.
And I remember seeing
the concrete,
some of the concrete laid and seeing
some of the huge pipes
going in for the
construction of Interstate
Highway 35.
That's Harrison Epight.
He was born in Austin in the
mid-fifties, and he grew up in East
Austin in what was a redlined
neighborhood.
Right now, the area has completely
changed.
There's a Whole Foods there.
So that's where I met him.
We sat out on the patio at Whole
Foods right next to I-35
and talked about the highway.
It worsened segregation
for those people who could not
move.
Or those who chose not to
move.
And then the land was devalued
over here.
That, I guess you could say
redlining was the worst thing of
all. But certainly
that along with I-35,
it became an unofficial,
an unofficial barrier.
But even before they could start
building this highway barrier,
officials realized they needed to
make more room for it.
Even though East Avenue was still
200 feet wide, it wasn't wide
enough.
So in 1948, the city started
seizing people's property.
Dozens of homes and businesses were
taken by the city.
One of those homes was on Claremont
Avenue.
This is a street.
It's one of the first streets after
you cross over Lady Bird Lake on the
north side of the lake.
It's basically a block long
right now because most of it
was taken for the highway.
On this street in the early 1950s,
there was this one story house.
There was a picket fence, a chicken
coop in the backyard.
And it belonged to this guy.
Ilus J. Hall. 32,
132
years old.
No, no.
102.
That's his son, Mark.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I'm not, I'm not
132, that'd make me a little
bit older. [laughter]
Ilis, who, to be clear, is
102, was born in Oklahoma
in 1921.
He came to Austin because he was
stationed at the Bergstrom Air Force
Base.
When he left the Army, he bought the
house at 1008 Clermont
Avenue.
First house ever.
Ilis lived at this house with his
wife for a few years.
Then the city came knocking.
At first they said they'd only take
part of his lot, and Ilis thought
he'd be able to stay.
And then they come back and
said, 'No, that's not
enough.
We gonna to take all of it.'
I tried to
get 'em to let me have
back half.
They wouldn't do it.
They said, 'Well, we're
going to take over.' [laughter]
The city of Austin offered Ilis
$3400 for his
home.
$3400?
3400? Does that sound right?
[laughter]
That's not very much by today's
standards.
You couldn't buy ... [laughter]
At that point, he made a little
gesture where he's holding up his
fingers to show a very small
amount, you know.
So I don't know what that home would
be worth now, Audrey, but I imagine
quite a lot.
Yeah. A home on that street is
actually for sale right now.
And according to Zillow, it's listed
for about one and a half million
dollars.
So the city takes his home
and Ilis moves out in the mid
fifties.
Here's his son, Mark, again, asking
him a question.
Were you wanting to move at that
time anyway, or was that something
that was kind of forced on you?
Well,
I don't know
that it was forced on me,
but
in a way it was too,
because I would've lived
there for some time,
I know, if
I hadn't sold it.
Once the city seized all this
property, including Ilis' house,
the state was able to finish the
last segment of I-35 through
Austin.
But before they even finished
building I-35 in the early sixties,
an engineer for the Texas Highway
Department, Ed Bluestein, whose name
you might recognize from a local
boulevard, he said four lanes
is not enough.
So the city, he said, needed
to start immediately getting more
land to build six lanes downtown.
And that's how wide I-35
was when it opened in 1962.
This is the American dream
of freedom on wheels.
An automotive age traveling
on time-saving superhighways.
You have to remember that highways
were still this really novel thing.
Around this time, the Dallas Morning
News actually ran a story explaining
to readers how to use the entrance
and exit ramps of this highway.
We have become the nation
on wheels, with
more motorized mobility
than ever dreamed of before.
It's hard to understand what this
was like now because we just take it
all for granted.
But the highway changed so
many things. Of course, we talk
about people's land getting taken,
dozens of homes.
I-35 cemented the
segregation of East Austin.
And it did this other big thing.
The highway opened up a bunch of new
land. You could suddenly drive so
much faster across the city and
beyond.
You could live farther away, ten,
20, 30 miles outside
Austin and get to work downtown
in still a reasonable amount of
time.
Suddenly, there was a new frontier.
More after the break.
So I-35 opened in Austin
in 1962 and
suddenly you could drive from
downtown to the outskirts of the
city in, I don't know, ten
minutes, and park your car
outside your lovely new home.
We in Austin can be proud of our
beautiful residential district, and
the Nash Phillips Corpus Company has
contributed many of the fine homes
in and around our area, finer homes
at lower cost.
What you're hearing is an ad for
this new development called Windsor
Park.
You might know it better as a
neighborhood in northeast Austin,
just north of the Mueller
development.
Back then, right on the edge of
town.
More home for the money, and quality
at no extra cost.
Some of the first homes were built
in Windsor Park in 1955,
around the same time as they broke
ground on the interstate.
Once the highway was finished,
developers built more and more
houses in this area.
This is it. This is the
future.
People have returned from World War
Two.
The government's putting all this
money into building homes.
And not just building homes, but
backing mortgages, making
it much easier for people, and
to be clear, almost exclusively
white people to buy a
house.
Funny thing about wanting a house,
how it hits some young couples.
All of a sudden.
The home they've always dreamed of,
the happiest investment they have
ever made.
Maybe I better add a few more rooms
back here.
For the hopes and dreams of
everyone, there's a home
they can call their own.
Oh, darling, it's going to be just
perfect.
That's right.
Highways poured gasoline on
the flames of homeownership.
These big roads gave us easy access
to more land, land that people
could build on.
By 1972, a decade
after I-35 opened in Austin,
the city had grown substantially,
annexing nearly 40 square
miles of land.
To put that in other terms, Austin
increased its geographic size
by nearly 60%.
Yeah and over the next two decades,
Austin, as a city became
less dense, meaning the city's
residents are spreading out,
living further away from each other.
It was a new age of growth, the
age of suburban living
on steroids, also
known as sprawl.
From a layperson's term, we probably
have a visible association
with sprawl.
This is Jean Claudia Scherer.
She's a professor of community and
regional planning at UT-Austin.
We kind of know it when we see it.
The streets become filled with
crowds of workers and shoppers.
Low rise commercial development,
strip malls.
Then in the evening, the workers
stream home again.
More driving involved.
And the business section becomes
a ghost city.
Sometimes it has a negative,
aesthetic connotation.
Onward and upward go the
subdivisions.
One development here,
another down the highway, competing
to lure more people to the open
spaces.
So what does all of this have to do
with housing prices?
Well, it's hard to build new housing
in Austin for a bunch of reasons,
but mainly because of building
regulations and opposition from
people already living in the city.
We'll talk a lot more about that in
a later episode.
But it's all good because people can
just build further out.
The outskirts of the city and the
suburbs become this release
valve, taking pressure off
central Austin to build more
and to make more room for people.
So instead, people who can no longer
afford the central city can just get
on the highway and drive
until they find a place they can
afford.
In real estate, this is called
drive until you qualify.
So imagine you're on I-35 driving
through Austin and you don't make
enough money to qualify for a
mortgage there.
So you keep on driving, maybe
to Pflugerville.
And maybe Pflugerville wasn't
affordable, so maybe you had to
drive to Maynor.
This is Joshua Long.
He teaches environmental studies at
Southwestern University in
Georgetown, a suburb north of
Austin.
Now Maynor's getting a little
expensive, so you keep driving,
on to Hutto.
Oh, gosh, Hutto's now gettin' a
little pricey.
Maybe I gotta, go to Elgin.
You drive until you find a place
that you can afford.
And as Joshua just said, highways,
they let us drive farther to
qualify, qualify for a home
outside the city.
Where nowadays, they're are a lot
cheaper.
But there are so many costs
associated with living farther away.
Your rent or your mortgage may be
lower than in Austin, but other
things start to add up.
You got to make choices about what
vehicle you're going to purchase.
Do you have a big family, so you
need an SUV?
Or maybe you're concerned about the
environment so you get a Prius.
Either way, it's a monthly
car payment.
Is gas, you know, $2.89
a gallon or is it $4.50
a gallon? You know, we've seen that
in the last few years as
fluctuations.
Yeah. This time last year, regular
gas in Austin was more
than 4.60 a gallon.
Now it's down to about three bucks.
Suddenly, your home
budget fluctuates so
much with these changes in
the market.
So there's the cost of gas.
The cost of buying a car.
Car payments.
And then car maintenance and
insurance. Stuff like that.
Driving everywhere in a car also has
environmental impacts.
It's one of the biggest contributors
to climate change, and the pollution
from engine emissions also makes air
quality worse, which is bad for
people who struggle with things like
asthma.
But there's another hidden cost of
living in the suburbs, and it can
fluctuate as wildly as the
price of gas.
And that is the time you
spend in traffic.
The time that's spent
in traffic is time that
is away from work, it's away from
family, it's away from some other
pursuit.
This is Rick Perry in 2006,
back when he was governor of Texas,
and he's announcing the opening of
another superhighway.
You're watching KXAN on the
news at ten.
Fastest highway in the country is
now open. Barricades were moved
off the entrance ramps to the new
S.H. 130 ...
This afternoon, after three years of
construction, the 85 mile
an hour speed limit will be the
highest in the country ...
This road's so clean, you could
probably eat your lunch off of it.
And right now they're taking the
barriers off the new state Highway
130 ...
Thanks to Highway 130, traffic
flowing north and south
along one of America's most
important trade corridors
are now going to have
another option.
And the building of this new highway
did just what I-35 did
40 years before it.
It opened up new land for
development.
Here's Joshua again.
Think about Hutto.
I mean, nobody was living in Hutto,
you know, 15 ...
I shouldn't say nobody, it was a
very small town just
15, 20 years ago.
And since the implementation of the
toll road, bringing access
to all this land
that was easily developed
and easily subdivided
into neighborhoods, Hutto has
boomed.
You build a road, things will grow
up around the road.
S.H. 130 goes through Hutto.
Since S.H.
130 opened in 2006,
the population of Hutto quadrupled
to about 40,000 people.
Four times what it was before
the highway was built.
That's wild.
Yeah. From 2006 to now,
four times.
It is insane.
And this idea that
highways dictate growth, where
people can live.
For Joshua, it's not just an
academic theory.
He lives in Georgetown, America's
fastest growing city.
Georgetown went from a sleepy,
extremely conservative small town,
where 20 years ago you
had to have a membership to drink
in a bar in Georgetown.
Yeah, you had to buy like a bar
membership to drink.
And now downtown is
a party every weekend.
And for a few years there,
we'd walk around, be like, 'Gosh,
this is perfect.' And
we talk about how we're in the sweet
spot that this is going to change
because the secret's out.
Everybody's moving to Georgetown,
it's the cool place.
And that's certainly happened.
It's a pain.
I mean, to get, literally
to drive about two and a half, three
miles in Georgetown right now can
take you 15 to 20 minutes on a bad
day.
And that's traffic that's
actually worse than some parts of
Austin.
As much as Joshua has seen
Georgetown change and some of that
not for good, in his mind, it makes
sense that there's all these people
moving there.
Homes in Austin on average sell for
more than half a million dollars.
But just outside the city, homes are
cheaper. In Georgetown, you'll pay
about $100,000 less
for a home.
If you have children
and you want a backyard, or maybe
you just have a dog and you want a
backyard or you need space for a
home office.
Sometimes suburbs are your
only option.
And we made it easy for people to
move out here.
We built highways like I-35.
There's large swaths of open
land ready to be built on.
And we've made it increasingly
difficult to live in
Austin for all the opposite reasons.
There's not a lot of land to build
on, and there's a lot more
restrictions on what you can build.
I guess what we're trying to say is
the suburbs make sense.
[dog barking] Except for this one
dog, it's a quiet morning in
Georgetown. It's 8:00, and
Hunter Holder is heading out to his
tech job in Austin.
I wasn't planning on buying a Tesla,
but even with, like, Texas, like,
you know, artificially keeping gas
like, pretty cheap, it's still
expensive to own a gas vehicle just
in general.
Hunter moved to Georgetown last year
from the Dallas area.
At first, he and his husband lived
in an apartment in downtown Austin
while they looked for a home to buy.
And that was really nice.
That was like a wonderful
experience, being able to, like,
walk or like bike anywhere I wanted.
I was seriously considering, just
like living in Austin.
But once I saw the home prices, I
was pretty dismayed that we couldn't
find a place that we could afford.
Yeah. So right now we're on
S.H. 29.
Keep in mind, this is someone who
works at a big tech company.
And, you know, paid pretty darn well
and I can't afford to, like, buy
in Austin. I imagine most of the
people here who actually
own places in Austin already owned
them before because, you
know, three, four, five
years ago, it was affordable.
And that's changed very drastically.
So Hunters Husband, who's a realtor,
spent weeks looking for homes
they could afford.
You know, scoping out the good
areas and the right houses and
everything like that.
If I didn't have him, then
I'd probably not be, uh,
owning the house. I'd probably be
renting just like a lot of other
people.
They found a house last summer
in Georgetown.
The checklist was enough space for
two of us and our dog.
Having like a yard for the dog
to, like, play in and poop
and, [laughter] as well, as like
being reasonably close to amenities
like grocery stores, and, I
love it. It's totally great.
But yeah, the
commute to work is
pretty monstrous.
Uh, we're getting onto I-35 and
it's a huge number of cars
going about 20 miles per
hour. Some of them just totally
stopped.
This is fairly normal on a workday.
Hunter spends a lot of time
commuting and that gives him
a lot of time to think about
how much time he spends commuting.
I lose about 2 hours a day, like
on average, about 2 hours a day,
driving to and from work and,
you know, maybe doing errands
along the way. So,
you know, time is money as well.
And so, no, it's really
not worth all the time that I lose.
So we wanted to know, would he by
the home in Georgetown again if
he had to make the choice all over,
knowing what he knows now.
Uh, man.
I'd probably ...
I'd probably think about renting for
a little while longer and then, you
know, trying to scope out a
place in Austin, um,
that, that ...
I don't know how well it would work
out, you know, because rental prices
are also pretty high.
But that's what I would try to do,
I think.
On this morning, Hunter made it to
work in less than 40 minutes.
Actually, today was not too bad.
Usually it can be like up
to an hour. You just never know.
Hunter is not alone.
Each morning, the waves of traffic
coming into the city are filled with
people who can't afford to buy or
rent in Austin.
Granted, commuters spend more time
in their cars in cities like Dallas
and Houston, but on average,
people living in the Austin area
spend almost an hour each
day getting to and from work.
And despite building more and more
highways over the past decades,
commute times have gotten
longer.
Thanks, Nathan.
Thank you, Audrey.
I like talking about all this stuff.
Wait, but, how are you getting home
today?
*sigh* I'm going to drive down
I-35.
Happy driving.
The way we've built roads in Austin
determines in part where people
can and cannot live.
And now that we've gotten on this
highway, it's really hard to get
off.
On March 29th, 2023,
dozens of people gathered on a
grassy strip just off the frontage
road of I-35.
They stood in front of a dirt mound.
Some wore suits and ties.
Others dressed more for the occasion
in neon yellow safety vests.
Good morning, everybody.
We will get started.
Thank you for joining us today.
Exactly 61 years to the day I-35
opened in Austin, people were
celebrating another opening of the
highway; this time the beginning
of construction to expand I-35
in north Austin.
You know, breaking ground on the
I-35 Capital Express North project
is a major step forward for us.
If you've ever driven on I-35,
you know it's bad.
Traffic is terrible most
times of the day.
In an attempt to make this better,
the Texas Department of
Transportation is widening the
highway.
At the ceremony earlier this year,
there were no girls holding hands
and forming a ribbon like back in
1962.
This time, officials gripped golden
shovels and flung dirt as confetti
flew into the air.
There was no marching band.
Instead, they played recorded music
of a marching band.
But just like in 1962,
men made speeches.
It's going to be a $7.5 billion
project, the largest
tech stock project in
certainly in the history of the city
of Austin, to alleviate
all this congestion.
Just like when they first built this
highway, about 100 more homes
and businesses will be bulldozed
to make way for the expansion.
Unlike that celebration back in
1962, this
time there were protesters.
No more highways.
No more highways ...
Building highways in Austin is not
so politically popular anymore.
No city council members came to this
ceremony in March.
The mayor wasn't there.
No one from Congress.
Mostly just state employees and
bureaucrats from other agencies.
So you just have one
formally elected
official.
And this guy, former Travis
County Commissioner Gerald Doherty.
I love this project because
it moves traffic
more freely.
I mean, let's face it,
95% of us
are going to get in our cars because
that's what we have to do to live
our lives.
As Austin keeps expanding, growing
outward in what feels like endless
waves, Doherty has
a point.
The expansion of I-35 could make
it easier to live farther out,
encouraging more and more people to
drive in search of those lower
housing costs until the highway
fills up with all these extra
commuters and the congestion
returns and costs
go up gas,
car maintenance, time.
And before you know it, the cries
get even louder: just
one more lane to help
me get home.
Growth
Machine is a production of KUT
and KUTX studios in Austin.
It's produced by me, Nathan Bruner,
Marissa Charpentier, Mose Bushnell,
Jimmy Moss and Matt Largey.
Production help from Heather
Stewart. Technical help from Jake
Perlman and Rene Chavez.
Stephanie Federico is our digital
editor. Special thanks to Sinclair
Black, Elizabeth Mueller,
João Paulo Connolly, Ann Cook, the
Texas Archive for the Moving Image,
the Austin History Center and the
Prelinger Archives.
There's more at
kut.org/growthmachine.
I'm Audrey McGlinchey.
Thanks for listening.