Sara McTarnaghan
Abstract
This paper analyzes the scale and character of home demolitions in East Austin since 2007 from a built environment approach. A documentation and analysis of home demolitions, construction, and resale in East Austin contextualizes the narrative of gentrification and reveals how that process is complicated through the mechanics of speculative development, real estate messaging and aesthetics. In this moment of sociocultural displacement and loss, new norms are inscribed in the built environment. This new landscape is strongly embedded in the discourse and aesthetic of environmental sustainability, which threatens to overpower conversations about equity and urban development in a highly contested space of the city.
Keywords: Gentrification; real estate development; exclusion; Austin
After years of neglect, with little to no public or private investment or development activity, Central East Austin is in the midst of a real estate boom, characterized by a surge in single-family home demolitions and redevelopment. The neighborhoods near downtown Austin, directly to the east of Interstate 35 (see Figure 1), have a storied history of planning action and inaction that has caused concentrations of low-income minority groups—both African American and Latino—to establish communities there over time. The co-location of industrial or commercial land uses and segregated facilities for African Americans per Austin’s 1928 comprehensive plan, paired with exclusionary lending practices, created difficult living conditions for East Austin residents. Today, processes of gentrification have reversed historical demographic trends; East Austin has experienced a sharp increase in higher-income white residents. Once again, this demographic shift is tied to planning action, with a renewed focus on the areas near downtown through Smart Growth and environmental sustainability measures, and inaction, based on a market-driven model with few provisions for affordable housing. In this changing landscape, one-story bungalows from the early-mid 20th century are torn down and replaced by super-modern condos and new single-family homes.
Gentrification is often studied from an equity perspective in terms of the political economy of real estate without examining the changing form of the built environment and what it reveals about the gentrification process for individuals, families, and communities. Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in 1964 to refer to the class dimensions of neighborhood change, specifically the influx of middle-class people and displacement of working class residents in London. Since then, scholars from the fields of urban studies, geography and sociology have wrestled to understand and define the phenomenon, often placing the consumption preferences of arriving middle
class residents at the center of narratives and analysis. Ley, for example, who defines gentrification as “the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment” (2002, p. 2527), was interested in the role of artists in processes of neighborhood change in Toronto. More recently, however, some urban scholars have argued that gentrification scholarship must be re-connected to urban policy and critical perspectives on the displacement of the working classes. In the introduction to a special issue on gentrification in Urban Studies, Slater, Curran and Lees challenge the trajectory of gentrification studies:
Academic inquiry into neighbourhood change has looked at the role of urban policy in harnessing the aspirations of middle-class professionals at the expense of looking at the role of urban policy in causing immense hardship for people with nowhere else to go in booming property markets reshaped by neoliberal regulatory regimes (2004, p. 1142).
Similar to major urban centers such as New York or London, which have been at the center of gentrification scholarship to date, Austin’s rapid growth and population change fuel contentious debates about neighborhood change in a city that still grapples with its history of racial segregation.
From a built environment approach based in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis, photography and historical property data, this article explores the scale and character of home demolitions in the 78702 ZIP code from 2007 to 2014. A documentation and analysis of home demolitions, construction, and resale in East Austin contextualizes the narrative of gentrification and reveals how that process is complicated through the mechanics of speculative development, real estate messaging and aesthetics. In this moment of sociocultural displacement and loss, new social and cultural norms are inscribed in the built environment through building façades, fences, and streetscapes. This new landscape is strongly embedded in the discourse and aesthetic of environmental sustainability, which threatens to overpower conversations about equity and urban development in a highly contested space of the city. This article is organized in three sections: (1) an overview of the structural forces which created East Austin’s socio-spatial landscape; (2) spatial and visual analysis of home demolitions in 78702; and (3) discussion of the trends and implications of this pattern of redevelopment and displacement.
Austin’s Socio-Spatial Residential Landscape
City planners and private developers drove the consolidation of low-in-come African American and Latino residents into a segregated East Austin enclave through systemic mechanisms of exclusion. One of the earliest mechanisms for exclusion in Austin was the use of racially restrictive covenants on private property, severely limiting mobility and household choice for people of color. Covenants are restrictions on land or property that are written into property deeds and applicable in perpetuity. Racially based use of covenants started in the late 19th century and was common in Southern cities in order to “exclude and subjugate less powerful social groups deemed to be dangerous to property values” (Tretter, 2012, p. 24). In Austin, the use and spatial distribution of racially restrictive covenants effectively drafted the patterns of housing discrimination observed throughout the 20th century and, to a slightly lesser degree, today.
Developed in 1928 by Koch and Fowlers Engineers, Austin’s first comprehensive plan institutionalized many mechanisms of segregation already operating in the city. Although the US Supreme Court declared race-based zoning unconstitutional in the 1917 Buchanan v. Warley decision, the 1928 plan offered a method for segregating races that could be upheld under law. In the plan, the City created a “Negro district,” concentrating all facilities and services for black families in the area east of I-35, to incentivize African American families (who were residing all over the city at the time) to move there. Tretter argues that the 1928 plan and associated municipal zoning “largely locked in the exclusions that had already been laid down by private racial covenants beginning in 1893” (ibid., p. 30). In addition to consolidating residential segregation, the 1928 plan placed most of the city’s industrial and heavy commercial zones adjacent to residential areas reserved for people of color, making these neighborhoods inhospitable places to raise families and accumulate wealth through property ownership.
The legacy of institutionalized segregation from the 1928 plan continued to shape land-use planning and financing in Austin into the 1930s and 1940s. The postwar period was characterized by the increased participation of the federal government in housing and neighborhood affairs. The Housing and Loan Corporation (HOLC) set federal guidelines for lending and underwriting for home finance. Through the HOLC guidelines and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) lending, the federal government furthered the racial segregation in housing where “areas with African Americans, as well as those with older housing and poorer households, were consistently given a fourth grade, or ‘hazardous,’ rating and colored red” (ibid., p. 13). These limitations on federal home lending led to further disinvestment in areas deemed hazardous, all while loans for home purchasing or repair were made unavailable. Federal public housing policy was also influential in furthering segregation in the coming decades. In Austin, one-third of the city’s entire stock of public housing would be located in Central East Austin, specifically in the 78702 ZIP code. The construction of I-35 in the 1960s reinforced the pre-existing racial boundary, creating a physical barrier between East Austin and the rest of the city.
Each of these mechanisms of segregation and exclusion inform Austin’s landscape today; as community organizer Susana Almanza states, the “image of Austin as a progressive city is challenged by historical race relations and land use planning issues” (2007, p. 62). Tretter’s demographic analysis from the 2000 census clearly illustrates the results of a century of private and public actions that produced residential segregation; African American and Latino families split the East Side, while the rest of the city is predominantly Anglo. However, just ten years later, the 2010 census results clearly reflect the rapid change of the neighborhood as processes of gentrification have accelerated in Austin. The data show the major flight of African American households out of East Austin (Tretter, 2012). While some of this migration may reflect greater economic mobility and housing choice for these families, it has also been connected to rising property values, rents, cost of living and a higher incidence of foreclosure more suggestive of economic coercion than choice.
Growing development pressure in the creative city
Just as residential segregation and the formation of East Austin were historically tied to both planning and private development, today’s sustainability planning, population growth and economic boom are reshaping the historic residential and demographic patterns across the city. For the last two decades, Austin has experienced rapid population and economic growth. During this period, Austin emerged as part of a nationwide imaginary of successful cities, frequently ranking high on lists of green cities, as well as serving as a model of the much-lauded creative city. Within this paradigm there is a tendency to “connect specific ideals of urban ‘livability’ with urban economic development policies that cater to the whims of Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’” (McCann, 2008, p. 2). As creativity is coupled with livability, the narrative goes that the city must be “reshaped and repackaged as a consumption and lifestyle space that attracts the creative class” to be economically competitive (ibid., p. 4).
This period of boom was accompanied by the adoption of a new planning paradigm, Smart Growth, which sought to connect land use issues to the environment and transportation. The main impetus for this change was the Save our Springs (SOS) Alliance, and the movement to reduce development on the sensitive Edwards Aquifer in West Austin. Spatially, the ordinance pushed development activity to areas outside of the aquifer such as East Austin. As Tretter notes, this moment in planning represents an odd point of collaboration between pro-growth and environmental (often characterized as being anti-growth) groups about the future planning trajectory of the city (2012). Despite this unusual consensus, some groups immediately questioned this new sustainable path forward. The proposed plans were particularly alarming for traditionally marginalized communities on the East Side whose relatively central land became ripe for redevelopment. On this contradiction, Almanza asserts:
In Texas, when they talked about ‘smart growth’ they said it would limit suburban sprawl but it was just gentrification. Sprawl hasn’t stopped. As they began to develop downtown, they pretended there were no people of color downtown. Those people who were supposed to be our allies are running us out of our communities (2007, p. 62).
Zoning and land use designations, the same planning instruments which limited residential opportunity for Blacks and Latinos to the east side in the 20th century, now threaten to displace them in the 21st. While some counter this argument by eagerly citing new affordable housing built in East Austin, even in cases where supposed affordable housing becomes part of the Smart Growth equation, this is part and parcel of the displacement process due to the relatively modest affordability targets (reaching households earning 60 to 80 percent of median family income) that would exclude many current residents living at 30 to 50 percent MFI (ibid., p. 64). Under these conditions, the ability for a long-standing East Austin family to stay in place becomes increasingly difficult and unlikely.
The new desirability or livability of East Austin is in part due to overall development pressure in Austin, further intensified spatially by Smart Growth in tandem with a focus on the urban core. That said, such desirability cannot be separated from the successes of the grassroots environmental justice movement led by PODER and other organizations in the 1990s to shut down industries that were polluting their neighborhoods. The environmental justice movement in Austin was primarily led by people of color who began to challenge the siting of hazardous industries in their neighborhoods—dating back to Austin’s 1928 plan. In her account
of the movement, Almanza notes the conflict between the environmental justice movement and larger planning trends in Austin:
As we rid our communities of industrial and certain types of commercial zoning, which had allowed hazardous facilities, pawnshops and liquor stores in our neighborhoods, the Smart Growth movement was inventing new zoning categories. Just to name a few, the new zoning included Commercial Mixed-use, Mixed-Use Urban Center, Vertical Mixed-Use, and Neighborhood Mixed-Use. None of these zonings secured housing for the poor or working poor (2007, p. 62).
With increasing development attention in East Austin it became more and more likely that the same communities that were striving to create healthier neighborhoods for their families would soon be pushed out. In the absence of inclusionary zoning and other, more progressive planning instruments, it is difficult for the City of Austin to secure affordable housing needs while encouraging growth and development. Though this tension exists across the entire city, it is most acute in East Austin due to the legacy of exclusion and segregation that shapes both the real estate dynamics and the cultural history of the neighborhood.
Such tensions exist across the country and world as urban development focuses once again on the center city—the response to both environmental concerns associated with sprawl and shifting consumption preferences of middle-to-high income individuals. Through her research on homelessness in Seattle and transportation planning in Austin, Sarah Dooling provides a useful theoretical frame: ecological gentrification. By acknowledging and understanding the visible tensions in urban development today, ecological gentrification delineates the “uneven distribution of benefits associated with a planning effort driven by ecological agendas or environmental ethics” (Dooling, 2012, p. 104). The term, she claims, is intentionally provocative:
It seeks to associate the displacement of people (a process typically associated with economic development and neighborhood change) with environmental changes stemming from formalized planning efforts, where the changes are assumed to be and referred to as universally beneficial (ibid.).
Dooling further establishes how urban vulnerabilities are produced (and reproduced in this case) through the “collisions of environmental and economic agendas that fail to address existing conditions of vulnerable people who are stigmatized and vilified in the popular media” (ibid., p. 103). The frame of ecological gentrification begs a more nuanced under- standing of the impacts of environmental agendas—relevant to Austin’s redevelopment under Smart Growth.
Gentrification and the Built Environment: Single Family Home Demolitions
In this context, questions of displacement, neighborhood change, and speculative development are important, as current economic growth and planning trajectories cannot be divorced from the local context and history of urban development. Focusing on Central East Austin, this article explores how the history of residential segregation in the 20th century and the experience of rapid economic growth and demographic change in the first years of the 21st century express themselves in the local built environment. Specifically, the analysis that follows will consider how the remaking of neighborhoods through demolition and redevelopment influences displacement.
This project takes a mixed-methods approach grounded in study of the built environment, including: mapping, site visits and photography, historical data, press coverage in the Austin American-Statesman, and online real estate resources such as Zillow. The City of Austin Growth-Watch dataset aggregates building permits, which facilitated analysis of single-family home demolition permitting between 2007 and 2014, both spatially and temporally. Google Maps Street View includes recent historical data that provides rich documentation of neighborhood change. Within 78702, the majority of streets have high-quality parcel-by-parcel imagery from at least five occasions during the study period, providing snapshots of properties at telling stages, including: pre-demolition, vacancy, construction, finished homes, and early occupation. Mobilizing these unique data sources, the findings presented provide finegrain evidence of the material changes occurring in East Austin today, but further qualitative research is required to better understand the explicit role of different private and public actors involved in these processes, as well as the lived experience of residents (old and new) in this changing landscape.
The historic socio-spatial construction of East Austin through planning and private development makes it particularly important to study today. As such, the 78702 ZIP code is perhaps most representative of both the historic neighborhood fabric and contemporary development pressures.
The 78702 ZIP code is immediately adjacent to downtown Austin, delineated by Martin Luther King Boulevard to the north, I-35 to the west, Lady Bird Lake to the south, and Airport Boulevard to the east. It contains important civic, religious, and cultural sites, representative of the large African American and Hispanic populations, as well as two of the East Side’s historic core business districts—East 12th Street and East Cesar Chavez Boulevard.
Demographic data from 2009 to 2013 American Community Survey (ACS) five-year estimates provide an important and up-to-date depiction of the area. In regards to income, 78702 remains majority low-income; the income per capita is $19,715, roughly 60 percent of the city-wide average. Nearly one-third (31.2 percent) of individuals are living below the poverty line, significantly higher than the citywide poverty rate of 19.1 percent. While poverty rates have not changed drastically from 2000 to 2013 in the 78702 ZIP code, the per capita income nearly doubled since the 2000 Census. The persistence of higher-than-average poverty amidst rapid redevelopment and neighborhood change may be partially attributed to the large stock of public housing units within the ZIP code. In regards to the housing stock, there are 8,895 units, a slight majority of which are renter occupied (54%). Data on the occupancy of homes within the district reveal intense neighborhood change and redevelopment: an estimated 70.9% of households had moved in between 2000 and 2013. Despite significantly below-average incomes, the median value of owner-occupied housing units is $188,00, about $40,000 less than the City’s average (US Census Bureau, 2013).
Development trends in East Austin have not gone unnoticed by the larger Austin community or media. There have been numerous articles in the Austin American-Statesman about growth, demographic change, and real estate in Central East Austin over the past decade. For example, in February 2012 the Statesman published an article entitled “Rosewood area a hidden gem near downtown,” in which the authors quote Lonny Stern, a newcomer to the neighborhood: “the influx of new restaurants and shops is improving quality of life here, he [Stern] said: ‘every time something new comes around, it keeps getting better and better. This area is ripe for dense development. We feel like it’s an undiscovered gem” (Austin American-Statesman, 2/26/2012). While terms like “untapped potential” or “hidden gem” are still the rhetoric driving real estate investment and gentrification in East Austin today, property speculation within the district began appearing in local press as early as the 1990s. In a 1998 Statesman article, Darrell Piece, president of Snap Management Group, called East Austin the “key gateway to Austin”, claiming, “the people who take advantage of that now will truly be the pioneers and the settlers, and they will be pleased by their choice” (Austin American-Statesman, 6/2/1998). Sixteen years later, it appears Piece’s estimate of the return on investment was as accurate as the development booms.
While most media attention has celebrated the potential of real estate development in 78702, recent coverage has begun to address the gentrification and displacement that is occurring across East Austin. In November 2014, the Statesman published an article entitled “Houses go, and so does city past,” addressing noticeable patterns of neighborhood change through home demolition and redevelopment. In the article, Thomas Brown, owner of Paradisa Homes, challenged accusations of speculative development levied at his and other firms: “a lot of people think we are coming in trying to make a quick dollar, but some of these houses are in severe disrepair, with deferred maintenance. We feel we are improving the neighborhood” (Austin American-Statesman, 11/2/2014). The claims of Brown and other developers about improving the neighborhood are, understandably, not always well received by long-standing residents. Of the teardowns and neighborhood redevelopment, 30-year East Austin resident Mark Rogers claimed, “it’s kind of like losing memory through the loss of structures” (ibid.). For other residents it’s the demographic change that is most alarming: “there is a sense that people are gutting the neighborhood, not blending with it or becoming part of it. You want people to move here because they want to join in your neighborhood, not because they want to reinvent it” (ibid.). This article and similar media coverage only begin to address the tensions of neighborhood change oc- curring in 78702.
Turning the analysis to evidence of change and displacement in the built environment, Figure 2 (see opposing page) illustrates the scale and dis- tribution of home demolitions in 78702 over the past seven years. Trends for Austin show a decrease in demolition permits during the recession in 2008 as well as a steady annual rise from 2009 to today. While 78702 has only 2.55 percent of Austin’s roughly 350,000 housing units, the area has received 16.1 percent of all single-family home demolition permits since 2007. Home demolitions were up 25 percent for the city in the first three quarters of 2014 compared to the whole year of 2007—even more acute in 78702, where permits are up 36 percent. During the seven-year period of analysis there was a total of 408 home demolition permits issued in 78702, excluding demolition permits for garages, decks and other small- er projects.
To further explore the mechanics of demolition and redevelopment at the block scale, I conducted two case studies of sub-districts within the 78702 ZIP code, focusing on the areas with the highest concentration of
development activity: the Holly Street and East 13th Street Corridors. Using Google imagery and site visits, I conducted a housing inventory for all homes that received a demolition permit between 2007 and 2014 in the case study areas. The results of this inventory reveal interesting trends in redevelopment, specifically the unique aesthetics, scale of community change, and the integral role of private development actors. Additionally, the photography survey suggests a growing tension between old and new residents, expressed through built environment features such as fortified fences and “No trespassing” or private security signage.
The Holly Street Corridor is in the southernmost edge of the 78702 ZIP code, located between East Cesar Chavez Boulevard and the Colorado River. It is a predominantly single-family residential area with a few schools, churches, and other civic facilities. Throughout the second half of the 20th century this area was consolidated as a predominately Mexican-American district, and remains majority Latino today. Holly Street has a particularly strong sense of place given that the Holly Power Plant was the center of PODER’s battle for environmental justice. The closure of the Holly Power Plant in 2007 represented a major victory for the local community, which had long suffered health complications due to toxic emissions from the plant. Today, Holly Street and the surrounding blocks are one of the most visible areas of neighborhood change within 78702. There is a high density of demolition permits and a striking difference between the one-story bungalows from the 1940s and the multi-story new condos and single-family homes built today. Development pressure could be greater in this area due to the amenities of the neighborhood, such as proximity to Lady Bird Lake and downtown. The City approved twenty-five demolition permits in the roughly four-by-four block area since 2007. To date, roughly half of the properties (12) have been fully redeveloped, an additional three units are currently under construction, seven are currently vacant lots, and three have not been demolished, though they appear to have been remodeled.
Similar to Holly Street, the neighborhood around East 13th Street has experienced intense redevelopment pressure over the last several years. Located just a mile and a half north of Holly Street, this area was historically the core of the African American community in East Austin. Recognizing the trends of displacement of African-American households, businesses, and cultural spaces from Central East Austin, the African American Cultural Heritage District was created by activists and com
munity members in 2009 to “formally preserve areas where there is a concentration of existing African American landmarks” (aachd.org). The Protect our Assets Program is working towards preservation of the area’s cultural assets in the built environment. The work of the AACHD is happening simultaneously with the City of Austin’s renewed interest in E 11th Street and E 12th Street and the City’s strategic planning efforts to redevelop these blighted areas since 2011 (Economic & Planning Systems, Inc., et al, 2012). Here, trends of demolition and redevelopment are quite similar to Holly Street, though the clustering of redevelopment is even more pronounced. For example, on East 13th Street, between Poquito and Alamo, five out of ten properties on the block were demolished during this short seven-year period. The City issued 27 single-family home demolition permits in between 2007 and 2014, with a huge peak in 2011. Of these 27 properties, fourteen have been fully rebuilt, three are currently under construction, eight are vacant (many of them for three or more years) and two have not yet been demolished.
Discussion
The spatial analysis and housing inventory reveal several interesting details about the scope and nature of residential redevelopment and gentrification in 78702. Block-by-block across Central East Austin home demolitions and new construction are drastically changing the aesthetics and scale of the residential neighborhood. Material evidence of the changing residential landscape reveals the character of this displacement, and provides important context for any attempts to preserve affordability for long-term residents as the neighborhoods that constitute 78702 continue to experience redevelopment pressure.
The role of private developers in driving these processes of neighborhood change cannot be underestimated. Locally, a few niche firms appear to hold a large share of the residential redevelopment market. Unlike some of the coordinated City-led commercial revitalization efforts, the changing residential landscape in 78702 is unplanned, uncoordinated, and led by private developers. One company active in residential real estate in 78702 describes their process as bridging “the gap between high design and affordability, to marry style conscious and budget conscious, to make modern accessible. The goal is simple: attainable modern living” (habitatmodern.com). In this process, modest homes are torn down in favor of super-sized houses with promises of so-called modern living. These changes do not reflect a planned effort or community vision, but rather an opportunity to cash in on the rising property values and greater desirability (i.e. marketability) of the areas near downtown.
In this process, developers buy cheap properties, foreclosed homes, or even approach existing residents with offers, then demolish properties to rebuild. New construction varies from a highly customized design-build approach to quite similar cookie-cutter modern designs.
The sight of old, vacant, and new properties with developer signage out front is a common feature of the East Austin landscape today, reflecting the pervasive scale of development. Further research is required to fully detail the mechanics of flipping1 to understand the interactions between the range of actors involved in this process, including: real estate agents, demolition companies, design firms, private homeowners, and city government.
One developer, Austin Newcastle Homes, appeared frequently in both the Holly Street and 13th Street areas. Figure 3 (see page 58) maps all properties that have been redeveloped by Newcastle Homes in 78702, based on their online portfolio. Austin Newcastle’s property holdings, from the data available from the Travis County Appraisal District (TCAD), show an increase in the annual holdings since 2009, with a current portfolio of about 10 properties. Their descriptions of the redeveloped properties often highlight sustainable construction techniques, proximity to downtown, and the investment potential to lure new buyers. For example, one Newcastle property was listed as: Coveted GREEN, MODERN, URBAN LIFESTYLE
from NEWCASTLE HOMES, East Austin’s premier design-build team. Often copied, never equaled: superior design from top local architectural talent, unparalleled quality from truly local family biz, EnergyStar-certified sustainable green performance, unmatched investment value, & the unique ATX urban lifestyle, all moments to downtown, UT, Manor Rd, East 11th, East 6th & 7th (Zillow.com).
Housing construction in East Austin today is targeting an entirely new market and income bracket than those who have historically resided there, and this new housing stock is facilitating dramatic demographic changes. The first round of flipped properties from the early 2000s are slightly more modest and simpler in design than the luxurious remodels
1 Flipping is a real estate practice defined as: “buying a home and then turning around and reselling it for a profit” (Redfin). Property flipping emerged as a common practice during the real estate boom of the early 2000s, often involving only small cosmetic changes to a property to prime it for immediate resale. The practice of demolition and rebuilding by private developers in East Austin documented in this paper fits within the definition of flipping, although the scope of the work represents a larger investment and profit potential.
happening today, likely reflecting the degree to which property values have continued to rise. New homes, such as the one featured in Photo 1, are modern luxury properties that stand out from the existing housing stock.
The language used to describe these new properties is deeply connected to discourses of sustainability and green building that (when linking back to the Smart Growth movement) were some of the initial drivers of development in East Austin. However, the degree to which this new housing stock is truly representative of a sustainable path forward is worth questioning. One of the key tools for sustainability planning in Austin was to increase density in centrally located areas and thus reduce trip lengths and emissions. However, analysis of the redeveloped properties reveals more square footage per housing unit rather than a drastic increase in number of housing units, suggesting a material rather than demographic densification. On some redeveloped lots, two units replaced one home, but the majority of cases are simply bigger single-family homes, undermining the rhetoric of Smart Growth, densification, and environmentally sustainable development.
The absence of a demographic densification through this process of redevelopment is supported by decennial census data. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of 78702 dropped slightly from 22,534 to 21,334 people, despite an increase in housing units from 7,725 to 9,032 units (US Census Bureau 2000 & 2010). More recent estimates from the American Community Survey support this trend; the 2013 population of 78702
calculated 21,655 residents (US Census Bureau, 2013). The degree to which green infrastructure and building techniques used in these new units can mitigate the impacts of larger homes with greater impervious cover requires further research.
Another interesting phenomenon that is occurring in the residential redevelopment of Central East Austin
is the clustering of flipped households. Analysis of permitting dates and the imagery available from Google reveals multiple cases in which a neighboring home (or two or three) redevelop within a year or two of the first demolition on any given block (Photos 2 & 3, see previous page). It is perhaps relevant to
think of this process as a form of reverse block-busting, where as one property flips the vulnerability of displacement for neighboring families’ increases. Historically, blockbusting was a real-estate practice that supported white flight to racially homogenous suburbs as urban areas such as New York and Chicago became more racially mixed during the Great Migration, purportedly jeopardizing high home values. Ironically, 60 years later, the reverse can be observed, where the arrival of one or two wealthier, often Anglo, homeowners can trigger an increase in property values while reversing historical demographics, reverberates across blocks and neighborhoods.
Signs of the clash between long-standing residents and new arrivals are quite visible in the built environment, as predominantly one-story bungalows are being doubled or tripled in both square footage and property value. Despite the often open, airy architectural designs and large street-facing windows featured in new homes, physical markers of separation have fortified over time. Photographs of redeveloped properties reveal an increased use in fences and of other demarcations, such as “no trespassing” signs, to separate the private and neighborhood spheres in the years following initial occupation of the home (Photo 4, see opposing page).
This process of gentrification and redevelopment, of course, has not gone uncontested by long-standing residents. PODER and other groups who were active in the environmental and urban justice movements have begun to organize their communities, collecting information and making proposals such as a community land trusts to City Council on the crisis facing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Evidence in the built environment of this resistance is less obvious, although graffiti such as “Coming Never” spray-painted on the banner for a new development on Chicon is indicative of this tension (Photo 5, see opposing page). This housing development is one of very few affordable housing projects slated for the area, and yet construction has been stalled for several years.
Despite increasing awareness of the housing affordability crisis there is no consensus on how to improve the neighborhood and preserve its residents. In other words, the question of how to pursue sustainability planning, remove industrial hazards, or increase densities without triggering displacements remains unanswered. This tension is especially acute in a restricted planning environment such as Austin, where tools such as inclusionary zoning are illegal. The material changes documented in East Austin today reveal that the sustainability rhetoric has masked standard exclusionary real estate development projects under the marketable guise of ecological sustainability.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Dr. Sarah Lopez for introducing me to cultural landscapes and research methodologies rooted in study of the built environment and for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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