Editor’s note: “Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City,” by longtime Observer contributor Alex Hannaford, will be published Oct. 1 by Dey Street Books. The following consists of the author’s original introduction, followed by excerpts, published with permission.
Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City, as the title suggests, is a story about the capital of Texas. But it’s not a travelogue. This is a book about gentrification, climate change, race, guns, and affordability. It’s a story about how various technology booms caused a construction boom and more people moved into the place I once called home than could actually accommodate it.
This is also about how my love affair with Austin faded. For the better part of two decades, I had a front-row seat to witness the profound changes taking place in what would become America’s fastest-growing city. And as the subtitle suggests, this book is not just about Austen. The themes I’ve tried to address, from homelessness and the environment to the city’s treatment of immigrants and its future, are translatable to many other American cities.
I first encountered Austin in 1999. I was on a coast to coast road trip with a friend from England. Apparently American road trips are something we Brits love to do. It was going to be a three-month drive from New York. (where we bought a 1988 V8 Pontiac Firebird from an undercover cop) to San Francisco, but with quite a detour. It goes all the way to Chicago, down to New Orleans, through Houston, and on to New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.
Austin wasn’t on our list of stops. To be honest, I had barely heard of the place. This was years before SXSW was internationally known. But someone I met on the East Coast insisted I go to SXSW. And one day that May, we pulled the Firebird into the driveway of a (now defunct) youth hostel in what was then Town Lake. It was an unplanned visit to Austin, but it ended up changing my life.
I immigrated to the United States in 2003 and moved into an apartment in Austin. It feels like a lifetime ago. The following year I married my Texan wife and bought our first home in 2010. It was on the east side and priced at $165,000. Three bedrooms on a 1/4 acre lot, just 4 miles from downtown and right on the Colorado River. Austin was a different place back then. Still, the prices were reasonable and the heat didn’t bother me. For a while.
I am acutely aware that not only did I participate in the gentrification of the East Side, which I will one day write about, but I also helped promote Austin as the greatest place in the world at every opportunity.
While researching Lost in Austin, I spent many hours at the Austin History Center in Guadalupe. Something I discovered there inspired me to tell the story of Rainey Street, a particular neighborhood in Austin and what happened there.
Back in 1979, a neighborhood group calling itself the Citizens of East Town Lake published a thin, hand-drawn black-and-white brochure in the form of a cartoon. On the cover, a group of Mexican-Americans were seated on the stoop of a house, their speech bubbles serving as headlines indicating the contents of the pamphlet. “What are you going to do when they run out of you?” one man asks. “Will you still have a home this time next year?” another asks. Two women sitting on the top row each ask, “Is the city’s plan for east Austin what you want?” “Can you pay the rent?” A little boy sitting next to them said, “Did you know that the Rainey Street area is being destroyed?”
The story of Rainey Street is a microcosm of Austin’s gentrification. Today, the neighborhood is synonymous with bachelorette parties and day drinking, with once-beautiful historic houses built in the 1800s converted into bars, now shaded by lights, awnings, and beer posters. It has become almost unrecognizable. Some of the original houses were destroyed in devastating floods in the 1930s, but they were replaced with bungalows, and the community that developed there was primarily Hispanic. Rainey Street’s prime location, just west of Interstate 35 and within walking distance to downtown, has quickly become the center of intense conflict between developers and preservationists seeking to bring housing, hotels and entertainment to the area. It became a place of battle. By the mid-1980s, preservationists had won, but it didn’t last long. These efforts to give Rainey Street historic district status meant nothing when the city rezoned it in the mid-2000s to allow continued development.
Brigid Shea and her husband purchased a home in Rainey in 1995. It was a small, one-bed, one-bathroom house that was falling apart at the seams. Brigid, who worked as a journalist at NPR, turned her attention to environmentalism after moving to Austin in the late 1980s, but soon after she found out she was pregnant, she and her husband spent whatever money they had. They were repairing their houses to make them livable. They knew they could only stay there for a few years – their son would need his own room – but as a toddler, their son saw baby snakes and other animals near the edge of a lake. I loved finding living things and my family loved to enjoy it too. Hike along the trails on the weekends. Although figurative, the little house quickly grew on Brigid and her husband. However, the city was intent on rezoning Rainey as a commercial site, and many of the neighbors similarly wanted to sell their properties at high prices. One of the neighborhood leaders, Bobby Velasquez, whose father founded the Austin minicab company Lloyd’s Taxi in 1931, has instead sat back and watched the neighborhood slowly gentrify, Brigid said. told. “We were the only ones who said let’s keep it as a residential area,” Brigid recalls. “And we ultimately felt we couldn’t argue with that. It made a lot of sense for those families.”
Brigid and her family moved from Rainey in 2001, but she quickly became homesick. Eight years later, entrepreneur Bridget Dunlap rented one of the older homes there and converted it into the area’s first bar, the Luster Pearl. This set in motion a chain of events that led to this old Latino neighborhood becoming the booming entertainment district it is today. Dunlap soon opened three more bars in the Rainey Street area. Her website calls her the “Queen of Rainey Street,” a visionary who transformed “a former residential street into one of Austin’s most popular entertainment and nightlife districts.” I’m here. Her website says she was a “trailblazer.”
The mindset of those who see themselves as “pioneers” changing the “urban fringe” is the language of gentrification. Geographer Neil Smith writes, “The urban pioneer, the urban homesteader, and the urban cowboy became the new folk heroes of the urban fringe.” “In the 1980s, real estate magazines scouted the sides of gentrifying neighborhoods, checked the landscape for profitable reinvestment, and at the same time reported home how friendly the homes were. He even talked about his job as an “urban scout.” The natives did. ” When a new apartment building opened in Manhattan’s Times Square in 1983, its owners took out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the “taming of the Wild West.”
Brigid Shea’s house was eventually purchased by a developer who built what she described as a “terrible exoskeleton” over it to expand its square footage. In 2014, somewhat ironically, while the original Luster Pearl itself was forced to close to make way for a condo development, Bridget Dunlap opened a new spot in Kitty Corner at Rainey’s old location. Saddened by the loss of the original building (“the one who started it all, the one who brought people to Rainey Street”), Dunlap purchased the 100-year-old building from its new owners and had it moved to East Tennessee. I did. I-35 freeway. Her brand has now expanded, and her Facebook page describes Luster Pearl East as “the daughter of Luster Pearl, the original darling of the Rainy Street revolution.”
In the summer of 2019, the last holdout on Rainey Street listed the family home his grandparents bought in the 1940s for $2.6 million. Today, the few remaining homes on Rainy Island are decorated with bunting and plastic beer posters, overshadowed in all directions by high-rise apartment and hotel developments. A huge group of towers. Van Zandt, the hotel that dominated Rainey’s skyline when it opened in 2015, is now dwarfed by its competitors.
I think everyone in Austin should know what happened on Rainey Street and how it happened. But that thin pamphlet with the little boy on the cover asking, “Did you know that the entire Rainey Street area is now being destroyed?” is tucked away somewhere on a dusty shelf in the back of the Austin History Center. It is placed.