New book details how Austin, Texas, lost its ‘magic’ — and the larger threat its trajectory may represent

Austin’s “magic” has slipped away thanks to poorly planned development run amok, a new book argues.

In “Lost in Austin,” out Tuesday, journalist Alex Hannaford details how spiking rents have sent development sprawling into the Texas city’s ecologically sensitive hinterlands — increasing traffic, sucking up the source of its water and potentially spelling a warning for its doom.

This trajectory from laid-back, compact college town to global city has hollowed out much of what made Austin grow, Hannaford contends — and illustrates a broader issue of spiraling real estate costs threatening to undermine the social foundations of cities across the country.

When Hannaford moved to Austin in 2003, it was still “an affordable city that artists and musicians and people of all backgrounds and economic statuses could live in: line cook, cleaning lady, artist, full-time musicians,” he told The Hill.

From about 2015, however, prices began to spike, driven by the city’s embrace of a tech industry diaspora whose expansion in the area was driven in part by rising costs in Northern California — a trend the COVID-19 pandemic only further fueled.

During the same period, the city’s supposed position as a music mecca has slowly eroded, Hannaford writes.

The number of official music venues counted by Visit Austin — the city’s marketing and tourist promotion arm — has reached a record high in recent years.

But based on city statistics, Hannaford found, most of those locations are not true full-time venues but side stages at restaurants and bars that host occasional cover bands.

These, he conceded, have a place — but the old full-time venues that hosted the up-and-coming artists who gave Austin its reputation as a creative mecca have been lost.

“Visit Austin still likes to extol the virtue of ‘Live Music Capital of the World’ — but working musicians can’t afford to park downtown, let alone live there,” Hannaford said.

One musician he interviewed — his daughter’s former music teacher — can afford to keep gigging only because she paid off her mortgage decades ago, something Hannaford noted present-day up-and-comers can only dream of.

In large part, the spike in prices in the city is a result of a gold rush of finance capital, he argued.

But he contended that Austin’s past politics have also played a role, saying it’s not inevitable that “companies can just move into a neighborhood and do what they want to,” or that those needs will take precedence over the ability of existing gentrification into those areas.

Inside Austin, the recent spike in rents has overlaid the artifacts of historic racism, in particular the 1920s plan of “urban revitalization” that forced Black families out of historic enclaves such as Wheatsville and Clarksville in Central Austin and into new, government-planned neighborhoods in the city’s East Side — across what would become I-35 — that were densely populated with largely Black and Latino residents.

That history, Hannaford writes in “Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City,” set the stage for massive displacement as rents and home prices began to spike in the modern day, funneling new development and gentrification into those areas.

The neighborhoods were particularly vulnerable because of their lack of representation. Until a hard-fought revolution in 2012 , Austin operated under a governmental system in which the city council was dominated by floating “at-large” positions traditionally held by representatives of its richest, and whitest, ZIP codes.

“It was literally, at one point, a formal agreement between factions in this town that the African Americans would have a seat and the Hispanics would have a seat,” Peck Young, director of the Austin Community College Center for Public Policy and Political Studies and a leader of the reform effort, told KVUE.

Young was referring to the notorious “gentleman’s agreement,” which KUT Austin called “an unwritten, unenforceable agreement among Austin’s political players [that] stipulated that two seats on the City Council be reserved for one Black member and one Hispanic member.”

“The only problem was that minorities didn’t get to elect who they wanted. It was who the white people wanted to have in those seats,” Young added.

The city’s minority-majority neighborhoods had more lax zoning, which made them targets for polluting industry — and, as city incentives for new development piled on top of historic injustice, ground zero for an urban transformation, Hannaford wrote.

That historic zoning, he told The Hill, is why “for the longest time Austin was [the] only fast growing city with declining Black population,” as longtime East Side families were offered “money they couldn’t refuse” to give up their properties.

On the buyer side, the city’s rising prices, in turn, have driven an exodus out onto the plains that surround Austin by those who can’t afford to pay half a million dollars — at absolute minimum — for a single-family home in decent condition.

In one personal example, Hannaford writes that his family’s former housecleaner  — an immigrant from Guatemala who entered the U.S. illegally, has lived in Austin since the early 2000s and makes roughly $15 an hour — has had to move an hour out of the city.

“She has to commute in, because she can’t afford to live there anymore,” Hannaford said.

That has made her one more car on the region’s choked-up expressways, which draw in more than a quarter-million people per day from outside the five counties that make up metro Austin — helping to put the city in the top 6 percent of U.S. municipalities with the worst traffic.

And as prices and traffic have swelled, so have heat and drought.

When he first moved to Austin, Hannaford said, not only was food cheap, entertainment easy to find and housing affordable, but “there were places I could swim March through December — lakes, rivers and watering holes.”

By 2012, however, a small piece of property his family owned on Lake Travis, a manmade reservoir west of town, had gone dry, yielding “apocalyptic” images of “expensive houses on the bank with their docks high and dry, and water nowhere to be seen,” he recalled.

The iconic Jacob’s Well spring an hour west of the city was largely running dry by a decade later, making it part of the broader trajectory of Texas’s declining groundwater resources .

These crises — cultural withering, falling groundwater levels, declining aquifers and worsening traffic — are all, Hannaford argued, at root a problem of affordability.

That, he said, is what pushes people out of the dense city, where development can scale more sustainably, and into the well-fed and largely unregulated newer municipalities sprawling in its hinterlands.

But even this transformation, he argued, would be less of a problem if people in Austin’s outlying communities like Round Rock or Kyle could live more densely and with greater connection to their in-city jobs through the sort of fast, reliable mass transit that has kept his hometown of London a hub of immigrants and the working class even as its rents and property values have gone up.

In Austin, by contrast, there is just one metro line, which serves the city’s wealthy northwestern suburbs and little else.

Facing the changes in the city, Hannaford’s family made a spreadsheet of pros and cons of staying in a place where they had planned to spend the rest of their lives. They found, to his surprise, that “the column of reasons to leave was just bigger.” Ultimately, they sold and moved to a small city in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Hannaford recounted his time in Austin with an air of heartbreak. The city’s planners, he emphasized, hadn’t tried to create “a wealthy city with no culture.”

Even as they have encouraged high-income jobs and new industries that pay them, they have pushed for transit, for affordable housing and water conservation, he noted.

But he argues that during the crucial window when it would have most helped, they were not sufficiently focused on taking steps — like, for example, holding the real estate industry’s feet to the fire on affordable housing — to save what had made Austin a draw in the first place.

“People make a city, and you can do something about enabling people from all walks of life to live in,” he said.

“If you work for a city, then part of your job — because of policies you make and zoning you allow, incentives you give — is to ask, what do you want to achieve?”

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