Keep Austin Divided: A Foundation of Segregation
AUSTIN, TEXAS. — Vast masses of people on 6th Street, live music around every corner, 6am lines for Franklin BBQ. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Austin for events like ACL or SXSW. Many of them will return home with tales of amazing local bands, breakfast tacos, and hipster vibes. There is no really city like Austin in America. The Texas Capital shines like a liberal beacon in the midst of a deeply conservative state. Yet beneath all the glittering lights, hipster culture, and a rapidly expanding tech industry, Austin has one of America’s most segregated cities.
In 2015, the US Census Bureau named Austin, Texas as “one of the fastest growing cities in the United States.” This growth has largely to do with Austin’s immense focus on skilled labor from the University of Texas at Austin and its economic paradigm of not relying on heavy industry. This branding has painted Austin the eyes of the media as a modern, progressive city specializing in technology and service professions. This non-industrial standard has not only provided a massive economic growth to Austin but also helped maintain the natural landscapes and quality of life that is so characteristic of Austin in modern times. While this image of Austin shines like a bright guiding light, attracting more and more young working professionals to Austin, its foundation and development rests in a far more shadowy past.
The most overlooked fact when dealing with Austin is its blatant racial and social segregation. The gradual relocation and segregation of Austin has been in effect since the 1920's. The influx of poorer minorities into major cities and upper-middle class whites moving to the suburbs resulted in increasingly deteriorating city centers that were undesirable to local government leaders. In response, urban renewal programs became the standard policy in major American cities, displacing poorer minorities and, in Austin’s case, creating a geographic segregation of poorer minorities such as African Americans and Hispanics.
While it is easy to correlate Austin’s racial divide with historically ethnic neighborhoods, the real perpetrators are the discriminatory practices of urban renewal and redlining which devastated many minorities residing in the inner cities. Post-World War 2, many of the white veterans were compensated by “federal initiatives such as the GI Bill [and] FHA-guaranteed mortgages … [which] facilitated white flight to the suburbs” (Busch 2013). Meanwhile, African Americans flooded into the cities for the cheaper accommodations and industrial jobs resulting in predominately white suburbs and black and Hispanic inner cities.
This initial segregation was reinforced by the early practice of redlining, “the once federally sanctioned denial of services to residents in predominately non-White neighborhoods” (Huggins 2017). Followed by most private banks, this practice marked black and Latino residential areas as “high risk” or for industrial use, “creating environmental hazards, depreciating property values, and making improvements to property more difficult” (Busch 2015). Thus, these neighborhoods would receive little to no financial investment from urban developers, causing further deterioration and decline of the inner city. In addition, city planners used urban renewal to relocate minorities and then sold the areas to private investors at low prices to build “new roads, homes, and commercial buildings” (Trowbridge 2014). Even when these neighborhoods re-opened, African Americans could not return due to “higher rents and restrictive covenants” (Trowbridge 2014).’
In Austin’s case, more than 85% of Travis County residents lived within city limits as late as 1973 (Busch 2013). This lack of suburbs, which typically provided tax base, was a major cause of the segregation that developed in Austin for the years to come. In 1928, Austin laid out its first city planning initiative, which sought to “maintain the nonindustrial, nonurban qualities that characterized Austin in the city’s residential districts on the Westside” (Busch 2013).
Since then, city planners have always sought to preserve and enhance Austin’s image. The underside of this endeavor meant relocating the undesirable industries and minorities to the Eastside of Austin (Busch 2015). At the time, they simply relocated most African American amenities such as schools, parks, and hospitals to the Eastside, drawing the population away from the downtown and university areas. Pockets of African Americans living in Wheatsville and Clarksville were all relocated by closing schools in those areas. By 1932, almost all African Americans were relocated to the Eastside.
Most business elites saw the potential value of real estate near the downtown areas and displaced many of the minorities residing there through rezoning their land as commercial or central business districts. By doing this, they could invoke eminent domain, which, under the 5th Amendment, allows governments to demand private property for public use in return for “just” compensation.
Historical Rainey Street is one of many examples of such a practice. After World War 2, Rainey St. became home to a majority Hispanic population (Lavy 2016). The residents even successfully “pushed to have the neighborhood declared a historic district listed on the U.S National Register of Historic Places” (Lavy 2016). However, this federal designation did not protect from the zoning processes of local authorities and Rainey street was eventually rezoned as a central business district. Nowadays, we know Rainey street for its vibrant nightlife, food trucks and high density residential buildings. Former Hispanic residents that remained are often encouraged to sell their homes and land due to the massive increase in property value brought about by the entrepreneurial ventures.
Without a doubt, the most iconic symbol of Austin’s segregation is the construction of Interstate 35. This acts “as a physical and social barrier” between the Austin that city planners intended and the Austin that they deemed undesirable to present (Busch 2015). In a 2015 study by the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, Austin is one the country’s most economically segregated cities (Badger 2015). Much of the effects of this segregation is made apparent in the health demographics between East and West Austin.
Due to the large proportion of industrial zoned areas in East Austin, generations of people have lived “so close to human-made environmental hazards such as chemical effluent or industrial plant emissions” (Tretter 2013). High rates of asthma have been reported throughout East Austin as well as increased cases of tuberculosis due to dilapidated houses and lack of running water (Huggins 2017). Despite efforts from the city council to incentivize minorities to move to the Eastside by building parks, libraries and schools, “the Eastside was consistently poorer, more dangerous living conditions, had less access to job and education, and was generally not considered part of the mainstream economic, political, or social discourse in Austin” (Busch 2013). The economic repercussions of redlining have irreversibly damaged East Austin resident’s ability to accumulate wealth through increasing the value of their property, “[denying] them the compound interest that future generations could derive from such affluence (Zehr 2015).
Personally, I have seen the incredibly disparity of wealth between the East and West side of Austin. Having several friends with families in Westlake, I have experienced the million dollar homes west of the Colorado River. The master planned neighborhoods of West Austin stood in stark contrast to the humble, organic spread in East Austin. Yet when I speak to friends and colleagues on this matter, I see their reluctance to elaborate on the subject. Most UT students were oblivious to the fact that Austin is one of America’s most segregated cities, although they are “not surprised” at this divide. In fact, they have come to accept this as a normal part of life in Austin.
In her 2014 article in the Texas Monthly, Cecilia Balli recounts her initial shock at the blatant racial divide as she first came to Austin to teach at UT (Balli 2014). At first, she was charmed by the “cultural liberalism and sophistication”, but was further dismayed by “why she rarely saw any Latinos or blacks”. She attributes much of the segregationist policies to the electoral processes that have resulted in the majority of Austin’s city council and mayors in the last forty years to be elected from “four zip codes west of I-35, an area that is home to just a tenth of the city’s populations” (Balli 2014).
While this is not a particularly pressing issue to most Austinites, more awareness needs to be raised to prevent further segregation. The future of Austin should not be based on a foundation of racial discrimination. During my interview with Dr. Andrew M. Busch, whose dissertation was on the history of segregation in Austin, he replied:
“Austin is the only major US [city] I know of that contains a higher percentage of African Americans in the suburbs than in the city proper. If present trends in housing cost and cost of life persist it is likely that Austin’s African American population will continue to shrink. Left unchecked, gentrification will continue. In my opinion the city need to adopt stronger policies — potentially a property tax freeze or a tax on Eastside businesses that provides for a land bank or other forms of subsidized housing for long term residents — to curb displacement and out migration. A failure to do so will likely mean that Austin will become less diverse.”
Busch also commented on the current gentrification of East Austin, stating the many upper class whites are seeking to buy property in East Austin due to the raising property tax. While this brings much needed investment to the impoverished Eastside, it continues the trend of displacing poorer minorities for the sake of urban development.
Open racial discrimination may have been defeated by the efforts of civil rights leaders in the 1960's, systemic segregation is still practiced in many parts of the U.S. to this day. Perhaps the saddest part is the apathy of the community to recognize the problem and bring awareness to it. It seems that most people are content with turning a blind eye to this issue. I hope in future years we can cross the gap of inequality and segregation just as Martin Luther King Blvd crosses the IH-35.
Badger, Emily. “Study: Austin Is Most Economically Segregated Metro Area.” The Texas Tribune, Texas Tribune, 23 Feb. 2015, www.texastribune.org/2015/02/23/austin-most-economically-segregated-metro-area/.
Balli, Cecilia. “What Nobody Says About Austin.” Texas Monthly, February 2013, https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/what-nobody-says-about-austin/
Busch, Andrew M. “The Perils of Participatory Planning.” Journal of Planning History, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 87–107., http://journals.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/doi/full/10.1177/1538513215590500
Busch, Andrew. “Building A City of Upper-Middle-Class Citizens.” Journal of Urban History, vol. 39, no. 5, 2013, pp. 975–996., http://journals.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/doi/full/10.1177/0096144213479324
Huggins, John C. “A Cartographic Perspective on the Correlation Between Redlining and Public Health in Austin, Texas — 1951” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research, vol. 19, no. 2, 2017, pp. 267–280 https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol19num2/ch19.pdf
Lavy, Brendan L. “Media Portrayal of gentrification and redevelopement on Rainey Street in Austin, Texas (USA), 2000–2014” City, Culture and Society, vol. 7, no. 4, 2016, pp. 197–207, https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/science/article/pii/S1877916616300352?via%3Dihub
Tretter, Eliot M. “Contesting Sustainability: ‘SMART Growth’ and the Redevelopement of Austin’s Eastside” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 37, no. 1, 2013, pp. 297–310, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01166.x/full
Trowbridge, David J. “How Austin Became Segregated: The City Plan of 1928.” Clio, 15 June 2014, www.theclio.com/web/entry?id=5517.
Winkie, Luke. “Austin Was Built to Be Segregated.” Vice, 16 June 2014, www.vice.com/en_us/article/nnqdk7/austin-was-built-to-be-segregated.
Zehr, Dan. “History of Austin’s Racial Divide in Maps.” Austin-American Statesman, 2015, projects.statesman.com/news/economic-mobility/index.html.
