Eastside Austinites criticize CodeNEXT, suggest solutions
East Austin residents fear the city’s plan to rewrite its land development code will displace more long-time residents of color to make room for young, white professionals and for the businesses that cater to them.
Community Not Commodity, an affiliate of Save Our City Austin (SOCA), hosted a panel on Saturday, September 9, inside IBEW Local Union 520, an Austin labor union building–to discuss CodeNEXT, the current rewrite of the Austin land development code, and to propose solutions to prevent the actions written out in the code.
“Urban renewal- people in east Austin have always referred to it as urban removal,” said Jane Rivera, chair of Austin Parks and Recreation Board.
Since the forces of development entered the east side of Austin, decades ago, gradually housing prices have risen, causing an exodus of low-income and minority families. These families have experienced issues with racism and loss of single-family homes.
“Communities don’t deserve to be displaced just because they finally receive the amenities they’ve been missing for decades,” said Carmen Llanes Pulido, Executive Director of GO Austin and VAMOS Austin. “My old neighborhood [in east Austin] was a very eclectic and diverse place when I was growing up. There are a lot of historic communities in this area that built culture in single-family homes.”
According to research by Eric Tang, an Associate Professor of Black Studies at UT Austin, displaced families say they would return to the east side if the housing was more affordable and if schools were not so segregated.
“Parents implicitly knew that the more segregated schools were, the worse off their children would be,” Tang said. “Schools that were more integrated would let their children have better chances of success.”
With ongoing development in east Austin, in addition to inadequate housing and schools, communities have faced inadequate access to healthy foods, lifestyles and physical activity.
Social support is so much bigger than our social lives, Pulido said. According to research by Pulido, when there aren’t systems of people to literally take care and check on each other, the community deteriorates, as is seen in the African American and Chicano communities of east Austin.
Proposed solutions to combat CodeNEXT and its effects include another rewrite of the development code that repairs the displacement of communities of color, a fund or reimbursement to help people who were displaced find new housing and intergenerational organizing that maintains culture and memory of the communities that have been in east Austin since it was first created.
“Once you give developers mores entitlements, more land rights and then you adopt anti-displacement practices, its like putting the cart before the horse,” Fred Lewis, President of SOCA, said.
Community Not Commodity has written a petition to appeal to Austin City Council to implement policies that prevent displacement and delay the current plans of CodeNEXT.
“If we don’t start caring, we will lose these communities,” Lewis said. “We will lose what it means to be from Austin.”
