Previously on Growth Machine.
So it's this huge grassroots
uprising. And mind you, this is a
zoning case, right?
But it's not like any other zoning
case.
Oh, it was wild.
Every cause has to have a villain.
And Jim Bob Moffet and Gary Bradley
were like poster child.
And as a geologist, I will promise
you, I know more about Barton Creek
than anybody in this room.
Bullshit!
Excuse me.
Basically, they created a petition
to take these stricter development
rules and enshrine them into
city code through a popular vote.
Force the city to put strict caps on
development in the southwest of
town.
My car windows were smashed, my
car tires were slashed.
I had a high powered rifle shot
through my house twice.
Good evening. The people of Austin
have spoken and a majority say they
want a stronger ordinance to protect
Barton Springs.
And even in these interviews, right
after the election is called,
you start hearing these fault lines
appear.
So the Save Our Springs people are
coming off of this big high.
Their petition was a success and
Austinites voted to limit
development in Southwest Austin
to protect Barton Springs.
But as these stories often go,
state lawmakers then got involved.
In 1993, then Senator Ken
Armbrister, a Democrat from
Victoria, Texas, filed a
bill that would let some developers
go ahead with projects in Southwest
Austin, and they wouldn't have to
follow the new S.O.S.
rules. This was what developers
wanted, and what they'd lobbied for.
Remember Gary Bradley?
He's a local developer we heard from
in the last episode.
I went to the legislature
to get justice because I couldn't
get it at City Council.
But Austin environmentalists also
had allies at the legislature.
Okay, Senator from Travis,
Senator Barrientos, lays out
amendment number six ...
Senator Gonzalo Barrientos
represented Austin for more than two
decades, and in 1993,
he was ready to do whatever it took
to stop this developer friendly
bill.
Mr. President, members,
this will have been the very first
time that
I will filibuster.
Filibustering is a way to stop or
delay a bill.
Basically, senators make these long,
winding speeches in an attempt
to block a vote, and you
have to follow a couple of rules.
You can't sit down.
You can't eat or drink.
You can't leave the Senate floor,
which means you can't use the
bathroom, and you have to talk
the whole time.
Where you see members,
I'm speaking against this law
because I don't believe that we have
to go to extremes
in most cases.
To pass the time.
Barrientos read a bunch of things.
He read the S.O.S.
petition in its entirety.
It reads, "Save our Springs
Initiative Petition,
an ordinance initiated by petition
by the citizens of Austin to prevent
pollution Barton Springs,
Barton Creek and the Barton
Springs Edwards Aquifer."
He listed off some of the tens of
thousands of people who signed
the petition.
Melody Evans.
Barbara Visser.
Barbara Frizzell.
Ray Garcia signed up.
Ray Garcia. You know, the one from
Chippewa Street.
He also just adlibbed a bunch of
stuff. Often, it seemed, hamming
it up for the more conservative,
Austin-bashing lawmakers.
You know, some people around the
state sometimes think that were
kind of nutty around here
because we talk all the time about
Barton Springs and Barton
Creek and the Barton Springs
Aquifer.
You say they think
that we're radical
tree huggers, that
we're nuts about the water
in the Barton Springs
swimming pool.
And yet
when people visit here, they say,
"Oh, it's so beautiful.
We want to keep it this way."
It wasn't entirely clear how
Barrientos actually felt about this
bill. At times it seemed like
the senator was not actually on the
side of the Barton Springs
environmentalists.
You're a little bitty old, sleepy
town of Austin, Texas.
Just a while back was 50,000,
80,000, 100,000
people.
Now we're going on to half a
million.
We can't tell people to leave,
even though some of my environmental
friends, environmentalists,
some would have us build a fence
around the city of Austin.
We cannot do that.
But the senator felt he had to stop
the bill.
He was elected to represent the
people of Austin who had voted
to limit development in the Barton
Creek area.
We had thousands and
thousands of people
vote on this issue.
And I could not go back in good
conscience and
try to cut deals for them
because they have already voted.
Barrientos filibustered for hours
and hours.
These waters that have been gushing
forth ...
He talked on and on and
on.
In order to prevent pollution,
impervious cover for ...
12, 13, 14
hours.
From three in the afternoon until
nine in the morning.
20% in the contributing zone within
the Barton Creek watershed ...
And at that point Barrientos had
been standing up and talking
for nearly 18 hours straight.
Because they generally require less
fertilizer ...
Towards the end of it, the senator
started stumbling over his words.
The guy was tired.
Stormwater runoff should have a
[stuttering] velocity.
Just before 10 a.m., he gave up
and walked off the floor.
Runoff approaches the ...
Throughout those 18 hours of
reading, grandstanding and,
well, maybe holding his bladder,
Barrientos said multiple times he
had one wish.
One wish that would have helped him
avoid this fight.
I truly believe
that had environmentalist
developers,
City of Austin City
Council members
sat down at a table
and not gotten up,
we would have been able to
work out a compromise.
A
compromise.
Turns out the senator would
get just that.
I'm Andrew McGlinchey.
This is Growth Machine: How Austin
Engineered its Housing Market.
Episode four, Smart Growth
or Dumb Growth?
Mose Buchele, a reporter here at KUT,
is gonna join me again for this
episode. Hey, Mose.
Good to be back, Audrey.
So, while the battle for Barton
Springs was going on, at Austin City
Hall and then at the state
legislature, another environmental
struggle was taking place in the
city.
That's right. And it focused not
on Barton Springs and development
in the city's West Side.
It focused on East
Austin.
Like you heard in earlier episodes
of this podcast.
East Austin was historically where
black and Hispanic people lived.
It was more working class, lower
income.
And this was the legacy of
segregation.
The 1928 master plan
and eventually the construction of
I-35 in the sixties.
Susana Almanza is a local activist
and she grew up in East Austin.
What you saw in East Austin were
small businesses, mom and pop
businesses owned by the community.
When you went down the street, you
saw people who looked just like you.
The East Side also had more heavy
industry than other parts of the
city. Of course, it was no accident
polluting businesses ended up there.
The city had done industrial zoning
in our communities, which
allowed for hazardous
corporations or facilities to be
across the street from schools next
to residents.
And so we know that zoning
was a racism tool
that had been used against our
communities.
By the 1980s, people in the East
Side started organizing to fight
back.
They opposed plans to put a big tech
center in the Montopolis
neighborhood on the East Side.
They took aim at a gas fired power
plant that the city had put in East
Austin's Holly neighborhood.
They demanded the city move a
recycling center that they said
brought rats and pollution
to their neighborhood.
Yeah, Susana and her group, People
Organized in Defense of Earth
and her Resources, or PODER,
led efforts to move a big
gasoline storage facility, called a
tank farm, away from East Side
neighborhoods.
Move those tanks! Move those tanks! Move those tanks!
Six of the largest oil
corporations in the world.
Chevron, ExxonMobil, Texaco,
Citco, Gulf States.
They were all in East Austin in
a 52 acre tank farm,
which had benzene, toluene, xylene,
all of these terrible
emissions.
And, as we know, benzene was known
to cause cancer.
At first, Susana says her group
didn't have much to do with the West
Side Barton Springs activists.
But by the time the Save Our Springs ordinance
was up for a vote in 1992,
she had thrown her support behind
it. She says this was a tough
decision.
We felt PODER had to walk a real
delicate line in it because
we did have a lot of people that
were in the community that were
upset that how could we side with
the whole Save Our Springs.
So why were people on the East
Side suspicious of West
Austin environmentalism?
Well, for one thing, the
concerns of the West Side
activists always
seemed to take priority at City
Hall.
The environmentalists in West
Austin did have the ear
of the City Council, and they knew
them personally because, as we know,
most of the City Council
representatives were from West
Austin.
And so, of course, they were going
to want to protect, you know,
their environment.
East side environmentalist were
fighting, I mean, cancer-causing
pollution in their neighborhood.
West Side activists were fighting
for a swimming pool.
I mean, it sometimes felt like when
it came to East Austin, the city
didn't think there was any
environment to protect.
When a bird called the
Golden-cheeked Warbler might have
heard of, it was listed as
endangered and more
West Austin Hill Country land
was going to be protected, Susana
says a joke started going around.
Well, we're the "Brown-cheeked
Warblers," why can't we protect the
land over here?
That's not to say the defenders of
Barton Springs were having an easy
time of it.
We opened this episode talking about
how state lawmakers tried to water
down the S.O.S.
ordinance almost as soon as it went
into effect.
Despite the filibuster from State
Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, the bill
to do that passed
in 1993.
The only thing stopping it that year
was Governor Ann Richards.
She ended up vetoing this bill
By 1995, there
was a new governor in town with his
own ideas about
the environment.
I know the human being and
fish can co-exist peacefully.
That's right.
By this point, George W.
Bush is governor
of Texas.
So in 1995, opponents
of S.O.S. headed back to the
Capitol, this time with a governor
who was more sympathetic to
them.
Suddenly, Gary Bradley and other
Austin developers had the advantage.
Well, people at the legislature care
about truth, care about justice,
care about property rights.
To me, it looked like straight up
corruption.
Robin Rather is a local
environmentalist. She joined S.O.S.
in '93 and was eventually
named chair.
And she was in charge of lobbying
at the Capitol with the group's
lawyer, Bill Bunch.
There were billions of dollars
to the development community at
stake.
They spared no expense on those
lobbying efforts.
They were very, very skilled.
They had the best lobbyists in the
world doing it.
You know, you had me and
Bill Bunch up there, we were not
professional lobbyists, we're just
trying to lay out the environmental
facts of the situation, and getting
exactly nowhere.
In 1995, there was no filibuster.
There was no veto.
Governor Bush signed a bill to
weaken the S.O.S.
protection.
Except.
Except it was a lot messier than
that.
Right.
[music] Austin is a summer city, and
Barton Springs eternal ...
Like I said, in 1995, Bush
signed the developer friendly
legislation into law.
But two years later, in the 1997
legislative session, those rules
were mysteriously removed.
Yeah, mysterious.
That forced developers to again
comply with S.O.S.
for all their projects.
But they were also challenging
S.O.S. in court.
So in 1998, the state Supreme
Court upholds the S.O.S.
protections.
With Greg Abbott on the Supreme
Court at the time, yeah.
Meanwhile, the Federal Government
has determined that the Barton
Springs Salamander, which we haven't
even talked about yet, is an
endangered species.
Here's Bill Bunch with S.O.S..
Okay, there's this federal dictate
now that we protect the water.
That could further complicate
building projects.
But in 1999,
the legislature comes back and
passes developer friendly laws
again.
And somewhere in all of this, Gary
Bradley challenges Bill Bunch
to a fistfight.
I don't need Bill Bunch from
Berkeley to tell me what to do in
Texas.
I really don't.
It just seemed like this
was a war that was never
going to end.
[music] Barton Springs Eternal. Barton Springs Eternal. Barton Springs
Eternal. Barton Springs Eternal ...
But as it kept going, Robin Rather,
with S.O.S., says
she started to get the feeling ...
We were losing badly.
[music]
Enter Kirk Watson.
Can you introduce yourself to me?
Tell me your name.
Where's a bumper sticker?
I usually have a bumper sticker
around where I can do that.
No, my name's Kirk Watson.
I'm the newly elected
mayor of Austin, Texas.
That's right.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson.
Yes. He's currently the city's
mayor, but he was also elected
mayor in 1997.
And Watson says when he decided
to run the first time, he knew
he'd have to deal with something he
calls aquifer
politics.
Aquifer politics
dominated a great
deal of the politics of this
community for a long
time. And I can even make an
argument in some instances, it
still
is part of it.
We mentioned in the last episode
that after several wins, the Save
Our Springs organization had amassed
a ton of political support in
Austin, even if that wasn't true
at the state level.
And on the other side, you had
well-funded business and real estate
interests.
Watson says it was like Austin had
its very own two party
system.
It was as nasty as any
two party system you can think of,
even right now.
It was environmentalist versus
developers.
It was the Chamber
of Commerce versus the Sierra Club.
It was the Save our Springs Alliance
versus the Real Estate Council.
Watson saw all this bad blood as
holding the city back.
S.O.S. had consumed Austin
politics and nothing else could
really get any oxygen.
But what was it holding the city
back from?
In the nineties, across the country,
cities were in trouble.
People had moved out to the suburbs,
which was easier because we had
built highways, blue collar
jobs, manufacturing jobs.
These were also moving out of cities
and out of the country entirely.
Cities that had relied on this kind
of economy were losing jobs
and losing people.
Other cities were trying to avoid
this by becoming the capitals
of the new tech economy.
You know, this is the dot com
boom at this time.
Like nobody's really making
things anymore.
I mean, I guess people are making
websites like, I don't know,
Pets.com or something,
but the idea was that your city
could grow by becoming a new
capital of this service-oriented
tech economy.
Basically, the idea was you were
either going to be an abandoned
factory town or Silicon
Valley.
So Kirk Watson and the
City of Austin started actively
recruiting industries to come here.
But when companies would show up to
check out Austin, they'd
have to contend with S.O.S..
S.O.S. would meet them at the
airport. Metaphorically,
it's a, "love to have you and your
jobs. Do not move over the
aquifer."
And if they did.
We fought like dogs.
So Watson's challenge, as he saw
it, was to grow Austin's
economy without pissing off S.O.S..
On one side, developers wanted
to build. All these people are
moving here and they need houses.
But environmentalists don't want
them to build, at least in this
part of town where Barton Springs
is. So how do you square
that circle?
What he did was introduce a concept
called Smart Growth.
Smart Growth.
Smart Growth
Smart Growth.
It was the everybody wins strategy.
That's what Smart Growth was
supposed to be.
So, Audrey, what is
Smart Growth?
Well, Smart Growth is really
just a marketing term, but
it means building cities in a way
that, well, some people say
is smart.
That means no longer building
outward, but instead building
inward and upward.
So putting businesses and houses
closer together.
Maybe you live on top of a grocery
store. You can you can walk or bike
to work. You can take a bus
or a subway, wherever
you want to go.
I mean, let's just cut to the chase.
We're talking about cities like New
York, Philadelphia,
Boston.
London, Paris, Madrid.
Mexico City, Bogota.
Anyway, supporters say this
is, quote, smart for several
reasons.
One, building new housing in a
city cuts down on having to have a
car and drive everywhere, which
is better for the environment.
There's this great news story from
Austin in the late nineties where
the reporter explains this thinking.
She's standing on the side
of a highway holding a donut
in her hand.
It's got pink frosting, just
so you have the full image.
The idea is to stop what's already
happened in some cities, it's called
the donut effect, where the center
city literally hollows out and
all the growth goes to the outer rim
of the city ...
Building this way also uses
up fewer city resources.
Cities don't have to keep building,
I don't know, pipes for water
or roads to get to new development
on the edges of town.
And it also encourages building
smaller homes, townhomes,
apartments. These are typically
cheaper than a house with a lawn.
What I was saying at the time
and what we were saying at
City Hall was, "We're
growing folks."
Again, this is then-mayor
and now-mayor, Kirk Watson.
How do we grow in a way that's smart
so that we don't do something
dumb to this place
we love?
And Watson's plan was to begin
with downtown Austin.
Think of it as the center of that
donut.
If you walk around downtown Austin
today, there's a lot going on,
right? There are restaurants,
offices, a couple of music venues.
Back in the 1990s, it wasn't
like that.
Yeah, people have described it to me
as like a ghost town.
Downtown rolled up about five, 5:30.
And the economy in downtown
was the old traditional economy of
lawyers, real estate
and banking.
Some people liked it that way.
You could roll up there, you could
park all day for free, you
could walk around.
But there weren't big, huge
buildings. It didn't even feel like
a downtown. It felt like a small
town, like, Main Street.
Anyway, once he got into office,
Watson decided he needed to bring
people back downtown.
He would get companies to open
offices there and get developers
to build housing downtown and
nearby.
But to do this, he needed
buy-in from environmentalists
and developers.
He needed to broker peace.
What he did was put dollars
on the table.
More after the break.
We're stuck because City Hall just
reacts.
It doesn't plan ahead ...
Kirk Watson ran for mayor the first
time in 1997.
This is a TV ad for his campaign.
And he ran on the idea that we had
to get control of how the city
was growing.
... And create a Greenbelt plan to
protect the lakes and hills around
Austin.
Instead of just building on the
outer rings of Austin, we needed
to put new housing and offices
in the center of the city.
But like we said, to do
that, he had to make peace
between the West Side
environmentalists and the builders.
The city was split
very badly.
And I actually ran saying,
"I'm going to try to bring this city
together. We've got to stop this."
So the two camps started getting
together, like real estate people,
people from the Chamber of Commerce
and the Barton Springs Defenders.
And they had meetings.
They got together for drinks.
When you think about it, they
finally did exactly what
Senator Barrientos dreamed
of during that filibuster that
we heard about at the beginning of
this episode.
... Environmentalists, developers,
council members sat down at a
table and not gotten up ...
But it wasn't so easy.
It was ridiculously awkward.
I mean, in some cases, these people
had spent like more than ten
years hating each
other.
Here we are trying to, you know,
play nice, would be the way I would
say it. So we go have beverages.
People are trying to make small
talk. People are trying
to get past the fact that they've
been fighting.
These were sworn enemies.
And it made some of them physically
ill to start rubbing shoulders
with the other side.
My good friend and colleague, Bill
Bunch, when we were sitting
down with those guys, he would
literally puke.
I'm not talking about just
metaphorically. He would literally
be throwing up.
Bill did not confirm or deny
this when we emailed him.
Meeting over drinks was one thing,
but the next step was to get these
groups to join forces to support
a new city policy.
Basically, Watson decided
to dangle money in front
of both these two groups for things
that they each wanted.
For the business people, I mean,
they wanted to make money, right?
And they wanted to keep developing.
So why not a bigger
convention center, bringing
thousands of visitors to town and
millions, millions of dollars
to the city.
And the West Side environmentalists wanted
land to be protected, to
ensure that very little would be
built over the aquifer.
People had said for years, "If
you're going to regulate
the land that strictly,
you oughtta buy it," they would say.
And my response was,
you know, that makes some sense.
So Watson hatched
a plan.
They put bonds on a ballot
and asked the public to pay for
these things.
But in order to get both, the
environmentalists and the business
interests would have to come
together.
And as Robin remembers it, Watson
engineered this in a pretty sneaky
way.
He told the local paper that
basically it was a done deal, right?
The environmentalists and the real
estate guys had already agreed
they were coming together over this
bond issue.
And I remember Gary Valdez was the
chair of the Austin Chamber, and
he called me
[dial tone] This is Gary.
He was like, "Did you read today's
paper?" I was like, "Yeah, I'm
sitting right here." He's like, "Did
you know this?" I was like, "I
knew nothing." [phone dial] And we
conference called the head of RECA.
That's the Real Estate Council of
Austin.
Jerry Weintraub, "Weintraub, did you
know about this? What are we going
to do? It's in the paper.
He's announced it.
He said we're gonna work together."
I asked Watson about this.
I thought they'd agreed.
[laughter]
Either way, by late March
1998, Robin and Gary,
S.O.S. and the Chamber of Commerce
were at a press conference together,
announcing their support for these
bonds.
Old political enemies come together
on common ground today over one of
the most controversial issues in
Austin ...
We had a press conference at the
gazebo, right there on the water,
and Gary and Robin
were there, and I talked to them
both many times.
But I must admit,
while I felt like we
had made great progress and had
gotten to the point where there
was agreement conceptually
such that I felt
comfortable having a press
conference with them, I must
admit that I was worried about what
they might say.
I was like, "$60 million,
guys. Open space." And they were
like, "Convention center!"
And, you know, it worked.
And you could see it as a genius
political move.
Two months later, voters went to the
polls and passed the bonds,
the S.O.S. bond, the one to buy all
that land in the Barton Springs
watershed actually got the
least support.
It passed, but barely,
with 53% of the vote.
Convention Center did a little
better, with 58%
of people voting in favor.
But what it shows is that each side
needed the other one.
If they hadn't told their people
to support their opponents
projects, neither would have passed.
But the bonds were just the
beginning. These were being pitched
as the start of that thing we talked
about earlier, Smart Growth.
a vision for how Austin was going
to grow.
And by 1999, a year after
the Bonds passed, S.O.S.
was saying, "We're friends now
and we're all in on
this Smart Growth thing." Here's
developer Gary Bradley again.
This is how he put it.
The deal was simple, you know,
Watson's smart.
"Okay, S.O.S., you can have
everything southwest, but you can't
shut down the whole damn town, okay?
So leave me downtown and leave me
North Austin.
That's the deal."
So city leaders divided Austin into
two basic zones, and they gave
them names.
One was called the Drinking Water
Protection Zone.
This was land basically just west
of Mopac.
Land where you couldn't really
build, or it was really hard
to build.
And then you had what they called
the "desired development
zone," which is like pretty much
anywhere east of Mopac,
right? This is land not only
where you could build, but where
you were encouraged to build, where
you'd literally be rewarded for
building.
And if you look at this map of these
zones, the blueprint for
Smart Growth, it's like looking into
the future of Austin, prophecy
of what would happen in the city in
the coming years.
Yeah. West Austin is is
pretty much preserved in amber,
right? And all the growth that's
happening happens on the
East Side.
But there was a big problem.
One that would have huge
consequences for the people already
living in East Austin.
At the time, no one understood
about gentrification.
I don't think people fully realize
the economic burden that this
development would have on the people
of Central and East Austin.
Joshua Long is a professor of
environmental studies at
Southwestern University in
Georgetown.
We heard from him in the second
episode of this podcast,
and he studied the impacts of
Smart Growth in Austin.
Joshua says the city campaigned
to get people to move downtown, fill
in that donut hole or,
you know, the "desired development
zone." And it worked.
But these people also started
moving to East Austin.
And remember, many of them
were working for, like, '90s tech
companies, and so they had more
money.
You get that influx of money.
You get changes in demographics.
You get changes in political
perspective.
Between 2000 and 2010,
the median household income in one
East Austin zip code more than
doubled, incomes doubled.
This was new people moving in with
big paychecks.
This was not existing residents
getting huge raises.
And it was development, not for
them, it was development for
future growth, which led
almost immediately to
gentrification.
Gentrification is when wealthier,
often whiter people move into
a neighborhood. And this same
decade, East Austin, south
of E. 11th Street, became
significantly whiter, about 20%
whiter.
Joshua says the ideas around
Smart Growth are good on paper.
Many U.S. cities are trying to do
these things today, build more
and smaller housing closer together,
make it so you don't have to drive
everywhere.
But ...
If you don't have affordable housing
built into your plan and you don't
have a significant public
transportation plan
put into place for Smart Growth,
what you're going to get is
Smart Growth for the wealthy.
Smart Growth for those who can
afford it.
And that's going to displace
everybody else.
And as more people moved to this
neighborhood, often with more money,
home prices went up.
By the year 2000, home values
rose across the city.
But they were up the most in East
Austin.
That meant taxes were way up, too.
And long time black and Hispanic
residents started leaving.
So, you know, Robin Rather says she
and others didn't really
understand this is going to be a
consequence. But there was
someone who did.
We saw the tsunami coming.
We saw it. We could see, like,
"Oh my God, you know,
they're coming to take the land."
You remember Susana Almanza.
She was the East Side activist we
heard from earlier in this episode.
And she says during this time that
we're talking about, she and her
group, PODER, were fighting their
own battles, and in a lot of cases,
they were winning.
Yeah, they got the tank farm moved.
They got the city to commit to
shutting down the gas power plant in
the Holly neighborhood.
But one thing she says they were not
at the table for was the planning
for Smart Growth.
If you looked at, when the people
were working on Smart Growth, they
were looking as if East Austin
was void, as if no one lived on
that land.
So Smart Growth was already saying,
"This can be over there, that can be
over there. You can do this," as
if people didn't live there.
She says this was something her
group, PODER, even talked about at
board meetings. They just decided
they could not take on both fights
at the same time.
I said, "But the next fight is going
to be gentrification.
So what do y'all want to do?"
And they said, "Well,
we got to clean up the neighborhood
first. We got to, and then we'll
take on gentrification."
But by the time they did, it was
too late.
And so that's the process that
we're now undertaking.
Is the whole the biggest issue
is gentrification.
And the problem is, is that
it's not just one corporation, two
corporations or six.
But again, the biggest culprit is
still the city.
The City of Austin is still
the biggest culprit in gentrifying
our communities and displacing
communities of color.
A lot of the people that supported
Smart Growth don't fully agree.
Well, that's an overly simplistic
point of view.
Kirk Watson blames market forces.
I mean, basically capitalism, right?
As more and more people want to live
in a neighborhood, and if not enough
housing is available, the price
of existing housing goes up.
Watson says, in some ways, the East
Side environmentalists were almost
victims of their own success.
They cleaned up their communities,
kicked out those polluting
companies, and suddenly their
neighborhoods close to downtown
became incredibly valuable
to everyone else.
One of the things that occurred
is it made that land now
more desirable.
And so the market would say,
"That land is now more desirable,"
and it changes the whole character
of where people want to live.
But did anyone anticipate, I mean,
someone must have anticipated that
this would affect lower income
folks currently living there.
Was that a conversation?
Not in the way that
you see today,
because we were working
very closely with the people,
with the advocates for those
neighborhoods.
They were saying to us, "We
must change the zoning." And of
course, on its face it
needed to be changed.
But it had an impact.
And one of the things that's always
been a trouble with that is
that the people that fought
so hard to
make life better
under those circumstances, they
don't all get, they haven't all had
the opportunity to enjoy the benefit
of it.
And to a point, Susana
kind of agrees.
East Austinites did make their
communities cleaner, more desirable
to outsiders.
But she says the problem is they
were not involved in planning what
came next.
There were no protections or
considerations for the people
already living there.
You know, I walk now down my
community and I don't
see my Latino friends.
I don't see our Latino businesses
anymore.
You know, I see a lot of
young, white, more
upper class, you know, wealthy
people walking up and
down the street. And you can just
talk to any of the elders and
they'll go like, "I don't know what
happened. I don't know what
happened," but we all know what
happened.
While Watson disagrees with this
characterization, some of the
original supporters of Smart Growth
say it's right.
That Smart Growth policy set
in motion an unprecedented
degree of expensive
density.
And it started a vicious wave
of displacement.
A few years ago, at an event marking
the 90th anniversary of the 1928
master plan that segregated
East Austin, Robin Rather
even issued kind of a formal
apology.
I've apologized for my role,
but apologies are not nearly enough.
It's our responsibility right now
to put people first, not real estate
first.
If I made a mistake by supporting
a Smart Growth policy, I'll
say it. In fact, I have apologized.
I wish I'd never heard of
Smart Growth. I think it's been a
disaster for Austin, and I've
publicly apologized for my own
personal role in it.
And, you know, in a lot of ways,
this is a conversation we're still
having to this very day.
And we'll hear about that in a later
episode.
Thanks so much, Mose.
Thanks, Audrey.
I want to go back to where this
story started, last episode.
A development
over the aquifer.
That is what started this whole
fight, an environmental fight to
make sure that this beloved place,
Barton Springs, stays clean
for decades.
But along the way, it became a
debate about something else,
about how the entire city should
grow, where new housing should
be built, and whose neighborhoods
would change.
And that's a fight that's still
happening now.
Smart Growth, density, whatever you
want to call it.
These ideas are not objectively
bad. Apartment buildings
are not bad.
Duplexes are not bad.
Being able to walk somewhere instead
of drive is not bad.
The problem is, in Austin, these
things became a luxury that
only certain people could afford.
A decade after Smart Growth, this
concept came back
with a different name and different
maps.
Now we were talking about building
more places for people to live
all over the city.
And this time, the conversation,
well, it got really contentious, so
I'll call it a fight, happened
right out in the open on the public
stage.
But before we even get to that, we
have to talk about tech, about how
Austin became Silicon
Hills.
That's next time on Growth Machine.
Growth Machine is a production of
KUT and KUTX studios
in Austin.
It's produced by me, Mos Buchele,
Nathan Bernier, Marissa Charpentier,
Jimmy Moss and Matt Largey.
Production Help from Heather
Stewart.
Technical help from Jake Perlman and
Renee Chavez.
Stephanie Federico is our digital
editor.
Special thanks to Elliott Shredder,
Andrew Busch, the Austin History
Center and KVUE for archival
tape.
There's more at
KUT.org/GrowthMachine.
I'm Audrey McGlinchey.
Thanks for listening.