Collateral Damage: Texas anti-diversity and Austin HOME laws both harm Blacks and Latinos by Alberta Phillips, Austin Free Press

Alberta Phillips, a member of the Austin Planning Commission, writes cogently on how politics often makes for strange bedfellows. Good ol' liberal Austin leaders are, in effect, converging with the anti-diversity agenda in the making of its Austin HOME law that serves the interests of gentrification and in so doing, harming Blacks and Latinos.

This is exactly what Black and Brown folks need to come together as collectively, we have more power, as well as because our communities are the very target of policy. We must also engage in continuous education and advocacy on the value and importance of a diverse Austin, considering that some Black and Brown leaders and organizations lent their support to this agenda.

-Angela Valenzuela

#BlackBrownSolidarity

Collateral Damage: Texas anti-diversity and Austin HOME laws both harm Blacks and Latinos

by Alberta Phillips, Austin Free Press | June 18, 2024

Protesting the HOME zoning ordinance at Austin City Hall on May 14, 2024. Image credit: Iliana Medrano.

A former editor of the Austin American-Statesman years ago schooled me up on progressive versus conservative politics by drawing a line across a page. He then marked the center of the line, noting that everything left of that center was “progressive,” and everything right of center was “conservative.” As each side moved farther from the center toward the extreme ends of the line, he showed me something bizarre. The opposite points can bend so sharply that they intersect.

We’ve witnessed that phenomena in vaccine warfare as the far right and far left embrace conspiracy theories over science. We’ve also seen those interests merge in the movement to legalize marijuana. Now, conservatives in our State Capitol and progressives in our City Hall have implemented laws that many African Americans and Latinos say treat them as collateral damage. They have a point.

The Republican-dominated state government is implementing its 2023 anti-Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) law with the stated goal of neutralizing DEI’s preferential treatment of certain groups (read that as Blacks and Hispanics).  

That is twisted logic, given Texas’ history of discrimination and racial violence against African Americans and Latinos. UT-Austin crafted DEI programs to help reverse that damage and create a more welcoming environment on a campus that legally barred African Americans until 1950. DEI programs aim to promote academic excellence and success by providing Black, Hispanic and other students and faculty of color the social and scholarly infrastructure that were missing previously.

Instead, university and state leaders have been nailing the DEI coffin shut, laying off at least 60 UT-Austin employees and eliminating the Division of Campus and Community Engagement. It’s had a chilling effect on Black and Latino faculty and students, some of whom are headed for the exits. It’s hard to see how UT-Austin continues to recruit and retain top minority faculty and students in this climate. 

Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Austin City Council passed a new land-use plan without ever studying its impact on the people most at-risk of being displaced. The Home Options for Mobility and Equity (HOME) ordinance permits housing to be built on smaller lots in single-family-zoned neighborhoods to generate more homes overall. But this market-based approach does not create the more affordable homes that are needed to address the displacement crisis facing Austin’s BIPOC communities. Given Austin’s racial and ethnic wealth gap, it’s not difficult to predict who HOME’s winners and losers will be.

During public hearings and in work sessions this spring, my colleagues and I on the city’s Planning Commission heard from dozens of potentially impacted Black and Latino teachers, homeowners, and renters. They told us that their students, families, and neighbors will be forced out of their neighborhoods and out of Austin by increased market pressures of HOME’s upzoning. The split screen at the city and state levels are similar: Members of the Planning Commission and City Council have been called racists, as have those implementing the state’s anti-DEI laws.

HOME establishes a so-called Equitable Transit-Oriented Development zone that governs land–use regulations for non-single-family zoned properties near Project Connect’s Phase 1 transit stations. If past transit-oriented developments are any indication, then Blacks and Latinos are in for a bumpy ride – out of town. 

A 2022 City of Austin report found that building transit-oriented development in historically Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) neighborhoods near the Plaza Saltillo and Martin Luther King transit stations resulted in “a significant increase in white, high-income populations and an active decrease in BIPOC presence over the last 10 years.” 

It goes on to say that most of the census tracts encompassed by those transit-oriented developments can be attributed to growth of the white population and “that demographic shift illustrates the displacement of BIPOC residents, an ultimate indicator of continued racial disparity.”

Given those facts and Austin’s history of using land-use policies to discriminate against Blacks and Latinos, it’s understandable that BIPOC communities feel threatened.

The irony of this moment recalls the lesson that then-American-Statesman Managing Editor David Lowery illustrated by drawing that line on the paper.

At City Hall and the Texas Legislature, each side has bent to the point where conservatives and progressives – acting in their own interests – have staked positions in which African Americans and Latinos are collateral damage. 

Editor’s Note:

This is part of an occasional series on the land-use revisions that the Austin City Council passed on May 16, 2024. Alberta Phillips is a board member of the Austin Free Press and its associate content editor. She is a member of the Austin Planning Commission and a former Austin American-Statesman columnist and editorial writer.

Get Oracle out of City Planning: Why We All Should Vote Against Proposition B in Austin, Texas

Friends, 

I am happy to feature this piece by Olivia Tamzarian known and loved by so many of us who is registering a plea for help in the struggle against privatization and gentrification in East Austin. 

Please consider voting NO against Prop. B.

No, we should not allow the Oracle corporation to do our city planning

-Angela Valenzuela

“Get Oracle out of City Planning: Why We All Should Vote Against Proposition B”

by

Olivia Tamzarian

Oct. 27, 2021

As a Riverside resident, I’m  deeply concerned about Proposition B in Austin. 

My concern has been brewing ever since I joined the Friends of Riverside Neighborhood Association in 2019, to be more actively involved with my Riverside community. I thought Friends of Riverside was a true neighborhood association. After joining, I was surprised to learn that the group leader was a Presidium employee. 

Why was Oracle, the giant company that took over Lakeshore and is the main gentrifier in this area, running our Riverside neighborhood association? I left with a deep sense of anger in the pit of my stomach. The very group that was supposed to have the community’s best interest at heart was unduly and illegitimately influenced by those with a financial interest in Riverside.

I cut ties with Friends of Riverside to attend Austin City Council rezoning meetings, and I started doing more research on exactly what is going on under our noses. What I found is that while Austin sleeps, Oracle, a private company, keeps gobbling up more and more of our city’s land.

I don’t ever want to leave Austin. It’s my home. I have come to terms with the fact that I may never afford to own a home here. As long as I can afford to rent, I can stay. But I know what will finally push me out of my neighborhood is all of the development of the “Domain on Riverside” down the block from the apartment complex where I have lived for the past 15 years. 

Which brings me to my main question and concern about Proposition B: 

"Why do we let a mega-corporation like Oracle do our city planning?"

While long-time Austinites have watched their city get less and less affordable over the years, they have simultaneously witnessed exponential growth in giant, new companies moving into Austin and our communities, resulting in fast-paced gentrification for East Austin’s communities of color. Dallas, Texas-based real estate giant, Presidium, and the Oracle development and other megacompanies, have been making serious money-moves that are poised to not only dispossess East Austin residents, but are ruinous to diversity. 

East Riverside, Austin, is where so many start out. It’s a place where UT students live, where young people set about and settle in to adult life. It has been home for decades to service and industry workers, immigrants, and refugees that makeup the city’s “essential workers” to which the pandemic has brought notice as the very lifeblood of our city. I started here, like so many others, because it offered affordable housing. Plus, it was the closest I could get to my downtown job without a car. 

Developers of this area have realized that Riverside, is actually a great place to live in Austin, especially since other options of affordable housing have vanished into thin air. They seek to capitalize on the neighborhood that has gone under the radar for too long. How dare working people without lofty California incomes inhabit such a desirable track of land right near Ladybird lake? How can one conceive of this as anything other than a race and class issue and classic land grab by the uberwealthy? Oracle is offering its current and future employees a lifestyle that many Austinites cannot themselves afford and with such blatant disregard for East Austin residents that have resided there for generations.

The Domain on Riverside is a two-decade construction plan, spanning over 100 acres including parkland at Roy Guerrero park. The scale of this project is massive, razing over 1,300 affordable housing units to create a mega mall for the rich. If I can afford to stay to see it to completion, according to a story by Egan (2020), that means I will live next to a construction project for the next 10 to 20 years.

How many of these gentrification projects are being approved under our noses, leaving us to shake our heads and mumble about how we used to afford to do this and that? It always seems like when projects like Prop B are proposed, the true agenda is hidden under thinly-veiled rhetoric, claiming that Austin will somehow gain from catering to the developers, ignoring the glaring truth that these massive developments negatively affect the people who are already living in the area to be “developed.” 

These are my actual friends and neighbors. In the 2021 freeze I met hard working people, families scooping pool water to flush their toilets and trading dry food and flashlights. We will all be directly impacted. Co-workers, teacher friends, artists, and young professionals who all contribute greatly to Austin while contributing to its diversity. We deserve to have a voice in these decisions. Every time a new luxury condo is built, “the market value of the neighborhood went up,” we are told, so they raise our rent. How much more? We never know until we get that fateful letter that states that we must reconcile ourselves to another one-year contract. It could also come as an eviction notice when a complex is bought and sold. Since Austin’s occupancy rate and rents are so high, if I can’t make rent, as I have been already callously told, the next person will.

At the re-zoning meetings in Fall, 2019, I listened to Developers claim that the affordable complexes in Riverside like mine, the last ones closest to downtown, are unsafe and in poor condition. It’s uncanny that this concern only applies to the exact units they want to tear down and build on top of. My complex, safe or unsafe, isn’t in the exact tract that Presidium accumulated, so it will stay in the exact same condition while it continuously becomes more expensive right in front of my eyes.

What people have to realize is that for so many of us, the Riverside neighborhood is not just a pass-through, not just a route from the airport to downtown. The developers and city planners conveniently paint it as “rundown,” simultaneously describing and rationalizing their land-grabbing plans for it to be re-worked as a “corridor” for arriving tourists. 

At three City Council meetings that I attended in 2019, a large number of Ausitinites spoke out against the re-zoning of a giant tract of land at Pleasant Valley and Riverside, which essentially “unhomes” thousands of the last affordable housing close to downtown. Perhaps not so ironically, the planned Domain on Riverside and the existing Oracle complex are just down the block from one of the larger camps of people experiencing homelessness. 

I didn’t actually believe the proposed re-zoning would pass since at first, most City Council members were against the Domain on Riverside, admitting that it would displace vulnerable populations including many Latino, student, and refugee communities. But something noticeably changed over the three hearings as the community got exceedingly vocal. The vote skewed more in favor of the developers who sensed the resistance and came back with a proposal to enter into an agreement with the Austin-based non-profit, Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, donating money to their organization to persuade Council to vote in favor of the developers. 

I wonder if any Austinites would say that the homelessness problem improved after 2019, particularly as no specific deliverables have been shared and the pandemic has swelled the ranks of the homeless (Fecher, 2021). 

I made it a point at the October, 2019, City Council hearing that when developers say they will put aside 10 percent of their units for affordable housing, what they are actually saying is that 90% of their units will be unaffordable (KVUE, 2019). By the third City Council vote for the rezoning to build the Domain on Riverside, over 50 community members spoke out, in tears, while protesters raged outside City Hall appalled by this outright blow to working communities and communities of color. 

And yet on that last vote, there was a weary helplessness to the room. Ms. Harper Madison went on record saying she did not support it, but she went to vote for it anyway. The vote was 6-3 with Council Members Greg Casar, Delia Garza and Leslie Pool against. Council Member Alison Alter abstained, and Council Member Kathie Tovo was off the dais (Jankowski, 2019). 

And despite so many Austin programs and funds that are intended to combat gentrification, so many non-profits and activists who I admire are doing work to get resources to help folks who have been displaced, I can't help but repeat the mantra, "If you don't take somebody's business or you don't drive them out of town, then you don't have to worry about putting them back years later, throwing more time and money at the situation (Adami, 2019)."

So when Proposition B is discussed as a project for John Treviño park, make no mistake it is actually an elaborate scheme that will privatize Riverside on the Lakeshore area to Oracle. If Prob B passes, voters would OK the City of Austin selling, leasing or exchanging its Lakeshore property, which happens to be next to Oracle’s headquarters.

Proposition B is another proposition that chips away and privatizes even more the most beautiful part of the Riverside neighborhood, making it just another amenity for the Oracle mega-complex to enjoy. The offer to exchange parkland for it as a way to sweeten the deal makes it even more obvious just how much we as city residents stand to lose. Taking shoreline parkland away from the Riverside community in order for the city to “acquire” parkland in far East Austin is the proverbial “robbing Peter to pay Paul” scenario best understood as “taking something away from one person to pay another, leaving the former at a disadvantage.”

Again I ask, "Why do we let Oracle do our city planning?"

References

Adami, L. (2019, Aug. 9). “Austin city council votes on Domain-like development on Riverside Drive: The item now advances to a third reading,” KVUE. Retrieved: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/domain-on-riverside-gets-preliminary-approval-from-austin-city-council/269-109f6ff5-7683-411d-b3e2-f6761cdb0216

Egan, J. (2020, Dec. 22). “East Austin's new Riverside development would be double the size of Domain,” Austin Culture Map. Retrieved: https://austin.culturemap.com/news/real-estate/12-22-20-domain-on-riverside-10-million-square-feet-river-park/

Fecher, J. (2021, Oct. 6). Austin’s homeless residents left with nowhere to go amid camping crackdown. Retrieved: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/06/austin-camping-ban-homeless/

Jankowski, P. (2019, Oct. 18). Austin City Council gives final approval to ‘Domain on Riverside.’ Retrieved: https://www.statesman.com/news/20191018/austin-city-council-gives-final-approval-to-domain-on-riverside

KVUE (2019, Oct. 8). “Austin City Council gives final approval on ‘Domain-like’ development on Riverside.’ Retrieved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJKcd-0ah3Q

Every American needs to take a history of Mexico class, by Dr. Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Excellent piece! Harvard University professor of the history of science and the study of Mexico, Dr. Gabriela Soto Laveaga, makes a compelling case for why every American should learn about the history of Mexico—presumably in K-12, as well as higher education. After all, our histories are intertwined. It would help us to have a broadened perspective in debates on immigration, race relations, the U.S.-Mexico border, and why so many of us advocate for bilingual education. 

It's pretty incredible that one can earn a college degree and still know precious little about Mexico or Mexican history. Even well-educated people know little more than knowing how to order tequila or Mexican food in a restaurant, as if symbolically consuming Mexicans in this way makes one culturally competent. 

These mindsets are transborder and hemispheric, too, with many Americans regarding Mexico and Latin America as little more than a playground for tourists designed to cater to mostly Anglo Americans, as well as Anglicized ones, who may be of any hue. This posture translates into the gobbling up choice property throughout Mexico, elevating gentrification to a global scale. 

In places throughout Mexico like San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato, one pays for property in U.S. dollars and at least half the city is Anglo. I have many friends from Guanajuato, including from San Miguel, and they can't afford to live there because Anglos have raised the cost of housing as a result of what they call, "colonización," the Spanish term for gentrification (and colonization) that makes it difficult for them to live there, impelling them to migrate to the U.S. 

Once here, they're targeted by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Then they become the targets anew of gentrification as their apartments get bulldozed in East Austin, forcing them to vacate and move to the outer rings of the city and county, resulting in long-distance commutes to largely either construction, domestic, or service-sector jobs working in restaurants and hotels throughout our city. Many of these persons have advanced degrees in Mexico that unfortunately count for little here. We work precisely with families like these at our Saturday academy, Academia Cuauhtli.

Instead of being entitled and self-serving and teaching future generations to be so oriented, let's do take up Dr. Soto Laveaga's plea for greater understanding based on a long-overdue, clear reading of the history of Mexico and the Southwest. 

As the Mexican American experience itself suggests, we shall acquire an enhanced understanding of social relations, policies, politics, culture, and how to be better neighbors with a community whose future is caught up with our own in ways big and small. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Every American needs to 

take a history of Mexico class

Learning the history of Mexico can help Americans better understand themselves.

Members of the Sons of the Republic of Texas gather in front of the Alamo Cenotaph monument in San Antonio to commemorate the 184th anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo on March 6, 2020. (Tamir Kalifa for The Washington Post)

By Gabriela Laveaga | Washington Post | July 22, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The recent backlash over a new book on the history of The Alamo is not about partisanship nor misapplied critical race theory. It is, however, about denying who we are as a nation. More than an erasure of historical fact it is another example of the ongoing and dangerous practice of cherry-picking parts of our past to fit prepackaged national myths. This is not a new practice nor is our society the only one to rewrite history to suit current political winds. Yet denying a serious, factual analysis of our past sabotages the ability to achieve a more just and equal society. If we start our national origins story with historical falsehoods, we will continue to repeat and expand these fictions to make the initial lie make sense.

One way to right this tendency is by studying the role of Mexico and Mexicans in the making of an American identity. It will not solve a concerted effort to refuse historical truths, but it may help us develop critical skills to identify the problems with teaching a single story of American history. Why Mexico? Among other reasons, Mexico lost more than 50 percent of its territory to the United States. Put starkly, much of our country was once Mexico. Analyzing the origins of this territorial gain places current debates about immigration, the border and even what languages can be taught in schools in a broader perspective.

Essayist and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz understood the value of this decades ago when he wrote, “by coming to know Mexico, North Americans can learn to understand an unacknowledged part of themselves.” That unacknowledged part is complicated. Let’s use just one example, the Mexican American War or the U.S. Invasion, as it is known in Mexico, to illustrate how this pivotal event could be taught in American classrooms to expand how we study the actions of our then still-fledgling nation.

While the history of The Alamo is not as consequential for Mexico, Mexican schoolchildren learn that when their country granted Anglo-Americans permission to settle in the sparsely populated territory of Tejas these settlers agreed to abide by the laws of Mexico and were encouraged to learn Spanish, convert to Catholicism, intermarry with Mexicans and, eventually, renounce slavery.

Instead, Anglo-Americans defied all of these expectations. They started by blowing past the cap on the number of Anglo-Americans who could settle in Mexico. That enabled them to outnumber Mexicans in its northern territory. The Americans then refused to follow the laws of the land; in response, Mexico sent troops to patrol its borders, understanding that a faction of Texans were intent on fostering secession from Mexico.

That is the backdrop for the 1836 siege of The Alamo: a country intent on quelling a rebellion of lawless foreigners who had overstayed their welcome in Mexico.

Yet the fate of Texas would not be decided on the battlefield but in Washington, D.C. In 1837 the U.S. recognized Texas as an independent state, fueling the anger of its southern neighbor. A few years later in 1844, James K. Polk ran his presidential campaign on the annexation of Texas, which many in Mexico still considered a rebel territory that was part of their nation.

Part of the dispute was where Texas claimed to draw its border, at the Nueces or the Rio Grande, which would give it an additional 150 miles of territory.

This geographic detail is important. Polk, determined to push for war, claimed that a border skirmish involving Mexican and American troops spilled “American blood on America’s soil.” But this claim was false; the battle happened in this disputed territory. A young congressman from Illinois, future president Abraham Lincoln, objecting to Polk’s lie, introduced the Spot Resolution of 1847, which laid out the evidence that the fight did not happen on American soil.

What if schoolchildren learned to examine Lincoln’s resolution and protests against what he thought was an unjust war? This broader context would show students that national stories are not tidy, they are messy and sometimes brimming with illegal, or at least problematic, acts. It would also teach students to interrogate presidential actions and claims, not simply accept them as fact.

In the past few months, diverse battles over what will be taught in our classrooms have a common denominator: pushback against a triumphalist narrative, which glorifies the actions of one group over another. Studying the Mexican American War can also teach us about the changing roles of race in our country. Specifically, how some ethnic groups that enjoy broad acceptance today were once reviled, such as, for example, the Irish.

One of the most symbolically powerful events of the war is mostly forgotten in the U.S. today. But Mexicans see the U.S. execution of a predominantly Irish regiment — the Saint Patrick’s Battalion — for treason, as a key event in the war.

In the 1840s, the Irish, fleeing famine, arrived destitute, hungry and, as political cartoons of the era show, in droves to the United States. Relegated to low-class jobs and living in crowded ethnic ghettos, the Irish were portrayed as undesirable immigrants with less-than-average intelligence, who were prone to criminality.

Yet when the call went out for an additional 50,000 troops to invade Mexico, immigrants — many of them Irish — answered the call with the hopes of achieving acceptance in the U.S. It did not take long, however, for many Irish to realize that they were fighting an unjust war started on false pretenses. As Catholics, they also sympathized with Mexicans who were appalled at the desecration of churches by the invading American army. Switching allegiances, a battalion of Irish deserted and fought on the Mexican side. While most were captured and hung for treason, today in Mexico you can find memorials to the Irish, considered heroes of the war. Not every Mexican schoolchild will know about The Alamo but they will all know about the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, when a group of unwanted immigrants rose up against a falsehood. In other words, the questions we ask of the past matter.

At the war’s end the U.S. gained the future states of California, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and portions of Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana from Mexico. To carry through with the belief that it was a God-given right to expand from “sea-to-shining sea” Mexicans were transformed into strangers on their own land. The new courts and laws helped take away the rights of Mexicans, setting a legal precedent for making them second class citizens, penalized for speaking Spanish or simply gathering in groups.

To be sure, mandating a history of Mexico class for a fuller understanding of our current society implies that we will have teachers trained and willing to teach a factual past. So far, we have mixed results in that area.

Despite these challenges, expanding our curriculum will enrich the understanding of the next generations of Americans. Borderlands scholar Gloria Anzaldua described the U.S.-Mexico border, a product of the Mexican American War, as an open wound, the marker of a collective and traumatic history that continues to have an impact on the present lives of communities and individuals. Problems, whether these be workers’ rights, migration, declining ground water at the border, economic development or drug trafficking affect both countries and cannot be solved with unilateral decisions. Unilateral histories also do not work.

The past few years have shown us that to remain purposefully ignorant of history is dangerous for democracy. If we move to erase uncomfortable pasts then we remain tethered to fictions.

Gabriela Soto Laveaga is professor of the history of science and the Antonio Madero Professor for the study of Mexico at Harvard University. She is working on a book on agricultural research and water in Sonora and the Punjab.  Twitter

Important piece on the topic of gentrification and how this particularly impacts Latina women. Check out this statement by UT Professor Dr. Alberto Martinez who is quoted within:

Martinez said the data also show that for every $1 a white man makes, Latinas make about 58 cents, which he said is also less than what Black women make (66 cents), white women make (80 cents) or Asian women make (97 cents).

A deeper issue, as referenced by Bertha Rendon Delgado whose family is from East Austin, the cultural erasure that accompanies gentrification is unconscionable, tearing into the soul of the community. This is very sad and tragic. Not only are the wealthy well positioned for this land grab, but as Dr. Martinez indicates, this dynamic is tied to the 58 cents to every dollar earned by Latina women relative to white men. 

We desperately need more education, better jobs, and salary equity in society.

-Angela Valenzuela

Hispanic flight from Austin tied to affordability, gentrification, experts say

Bertha Rendon Delgado said the East Austin neighborhood she grew up in isn’t what it used to be. The neighbors she once knew and houses that made up the area have slowly started to disappear.

Rising property taxes and the redevelopment of the neighborhood has pushed many families out, completely changing the face of the once thriving Chicano community, she said.

“Our culture has been struggling for centuries,” Delgado said, “And people don’t understand what has happened to my community.”

The East Town Lake neighborhood, which makes up part of Austin’s District 3, has faced an increase in property taxes and the cost of living — what many residents are seeing as gentrification — pushing many Hispanic families out.

The trend is happening all over the city, as more and more Hispanic families seek affordability outside of the Austin city limits.

Carlos A. Martinez, a spokesperson for the League of United Latin American Citizens, said Austin is a desirable city for people to live and work, and the more people move in, the higher the demand becomes for jobs and real estate.

But that is not good news for everyone.

“Austin is one of the most expensive places to live in Texas,” Martinez said. “And as more and more people move in, it becomes less and less attainable for working-class people.”

Hispanic families, which he said make up a good portion of the working class, move to places they can afford, but because they still work in Austin, their destinations tend to be neighboring Travis County communities such as Del Valle or Manor, or places adjacent to the county, such as Buda in Hays County or areas near the Williamson County line.

Priced out

According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau information, while Austin’s overall population has grown about 23% over the last decade, its Hispanic population growth has become sluggish, growing only 10% since 2010. That is outpaced by both its Black and Asian populations, which grew 20% and 70%, respectively.

But what has become even more alarming, some say, is that Austin’s Hispanic population not only grew at a slower pace in the last decade, but since 2016 that population has started to shrink, dropping from 329,484 in 2016 to 318,016 in 2019, which is about 32.5% of the total Austin population. In 2010, Hispanics were about 36% of the city’s population.

Meanwhile, Austin’s neighboring cities and counties are seeing large increases in their Hispanic population. Cedar Park, Manor and Buda have seen more than 150% growth, far outpacing Hispanic population growth in Austin.

Statewide, the Hispanic population grew about 21%.

Alberto Martinez, a University of Texas history professor, said gentrification, property prices and the fact that Hispanics are lower wage earners contribute to this demographic shift.

He said Hispanics nationwide are making far less money annually than most other groups.

Data from the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey show a widening gap in median annual incomes. For white households, the median income sat at about $90,000 a year, and for Asian households it averaged about $95,000 a year, but the median income for Hispanic households was about $55,000 in 2020.

Martinez said the data also show that for every $1 a white man makes, Latinas make about 58 cents, which he said is also less than what Black women make (66 cents), white women make (80 cents) or Asian women make (97 cents).

As rising property prices and taxes strain the finances of working-class families, Austin-area home sales continue to soar even amid the coronavirus pandemic.

October data from the Austin Board of Realtors show the median price of a home in the five-county metro area was $365,000, and within Austin’s city limits, the median sales price was $441,250. That is more than a 13% increase compared with the same time last year.

“So this affects Latinas nationwide,” Martinez said. “Because when they receive their paychecks, on the whole, Latinas are making almost half as much. So for a single Latina mother, this means she can’t live in Austin. She’ll live in (Buda or Cedar Park) and then drive in to work every day.”

Finding a resolution

Enacting local policy changes could help solve this issue, Martinez said.

“It is not an accident that Latinos are being squeezed out of Austin” because they are in the low-income categories, he said. “But I think this can be solved if the City Council pays attention to working wages, property taxes and rental prices. Many Hispanics work in Austin but don’t live here, and that is because the city is pricing them out by not enacting policies that look after low-income workers.”

Council Member Sabino “Pio” Renteria, who represents Austin’s east and south central neighborhoods, said the council has been crafting a new process leading to new development rules for the city.

“Part of the problem is the way we appraise our land value here in Austin,” Renteria said. “What happens is that people have been paying huge amounts of money for land. So developers will come in and buy a house and tear down and build two houses on it and sell them for half a million dollars each.”

He said that then drives up property values, and therefore property taxes. For families who are already struggling to keep up with raising taxes, and people older than 65 and on a fixed income, affording their homes becomes more challenging. He said many longtime families of the area are renters, so when their landlord sells out, they get displaced.

That is why, he said, he has shifted his focus to high-density affordable housing, which he hopes to make available for not only low-income and working-class families, but for older residents as well. The goal is to recreate a Mueller-style area where 25% of homes are low-income housing.

“It breaks my heart to see people sell their homes; it’s very sad,” Renteria said. “And it’s been really hard to get the code changed, because we have gotten a lot of pushback from the community. But a new code could allow us to build more units on a (single) lot to support working-class and low-income families.”

After watching the community she loves slowly disappear, Delgado is now on a mission to preserve the original culture of thriving Hispanic families and businesses.Preserving Chicano culture

Delgado, who has lived on Haskell Street for nearly her entire life, said the only traces of the Latino culture that defined the neighborhood are the few murals on the walls of the defunct Holly Street Power Plant that tell stories about the strength of the Chicano people.

She has joined other local artists in spearheading community art projects through Arte Texas, a group dedicated to restoring and preserving street art and graffiti murals.

But even that effort has been a challenge, she said, as more people move into the area, pushing out and erasing the original families who made up the neighborhood.

“Our neighborhood is being gentrified more every day, and it has become increasingly more difficult to keep and restore our art,” Delgado said. “When new people move in, they want to see what they want to see, so they start to erase our murals and us.”

But nothing will stop her from finding ways and resources to preserve the area’s original culture, she said. Delgado continues to work with the city and local artists to preserve the art.

She also is working on obtaining a real estate license, so she can help families invest in their homes while trying to unite the community and bridge the divide between the new and legacy families.

“The character of our neighborhood has slowly vanished, and the division here has never been more real,” Delgado said. “But we don’t want to be erased and our history to be lost. I want the music, food and residents to still remain, and I want tranquility and peace for us all, so that we can all enjoy what we all worked so hard for.”

Report Presentation-Dogs Outnumber Children in East Austin: Wed., May 30, 12:00pm at UT

Do dogs outnumber children in gentrified East Austin?

On Wednesday, May 30, UT faculty and student researchers will release new data on the impact on gentrification on longstanding residents of East Austin. As a follow-up to a previous study, this new report answers a question posed by the longstanding residents themselves: Do dogs outnumber children in gentrified East Austin? 

The answer is a resounding yes. Dogs outnumber children in the neighborhood nearly two to one.  A profound absence of children, not an abundance of dogs, explains the disparity. The seventeen-and-under population in the neighborhood has fallen well below city and regional averages. The majority of these losses were likely among children of color. Between 2000 and 2010 the neighborhood’s Black population decreased by 60 percent, its Latino population decreased by 33 percent and its white population increased by 442 percent. 

The loss of children is perhaps the clearest indicator that a neighborhood has been thoroughly gentrified, and it could also serve as a bellwether for economic and racial disparities in other communities throughout Austin.

Join us for a presentation of the report’s findings:

Weds., May 30, 12:00pm – 1:00pm.

Gordon-White Building (GWB) Multipurpose Room 2.206

The University of Texas at Austin

(Copies of the report will be made available)

Hosted by the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis * The African and African and African Diaspora Studies Department * The Warfield Center for African and African American Studies

______

Eric Tang

Associate Professor,  African and African Diaspora Studies

Faculty Director,  Community Engagement Center 

The University of Texas at Austin 

512.471.4380 (O) 

Unsettled | EastAvenue |@UnsettledCity

Our testimonies at the December 18, 2017 AISD Board of Trustees Meeting [VIMEO]

Our testimony at the December 18, 2017 Austin Independent School District Board of Trustees Meeting [VIMEO]

Nuestro Grupo's post-testimony group photo, Dec. 18, 2017

It went well for us in this past Monday evening at the school board level. You can hear our testimonies from the AISD-Vimeo website as follows:

Cori Salmeron—1:12:30
Angela Valenzuela—1:15:00
Emilio Zamora—1:17:49

We in Nuestro Grupo, the community-based organization that organizes the activities of  Academia Cuauhtli —recoiled recently when we got word recently of school closures and consolidations of Eastside schools, including Sanchez, Metz, and Zavala. You can read about these terrible news here.

Me testifying.  You can get the publication I'm holding HERE.

These are all incredibly historic schools with embedded memories that track back to segregation. And now, gentrification.

To cut them back, to repurpose, to eliminate them is to erase historical memory beginning with the changing of the names like Spike Lee has recently commented on NPR regarding gentrification‘s impact on the soul of a community. It’s so sad—and for so many of us that have spent years working in and with these schools—enraging.

These are the ones that we as Nuestro Grupo work closely with through Academia Cuauhtli.  We also draw children and families from Houston and Pérez elementary schools in Southeast Austin.

To add insult to injury, this was done right after the successful bond election where Trustee Dr. Ted Gordon’s conciliatory plea to the struggling and the dispossessed, to support a bond that even in its outlay was going to be inequitable.  The sincerity of his plea and his expressed commitment to work toward equity actually encouraged me and many others to support the bond.  Regardless of where things stood pre-bond election, he promised that everything was still going to be negotiable— which was the reason that he put forward to support the bond. Our deep respects, Dr. Gordon.

So I expressed some dismay with that and shared my research-based literature review on Grow Your Own Educators.  N.B. Thanks to IDRA for giving me this opportunity to research, write, and publish this.

I also asked them to begin to take some notice of all of the amazing things that we are accomplishing. I guess we have been invisible.

Thankfully, the AISD Board and Superintendent Paul Cruz and Associate Superintendent Edmund Oropez have redoubled their commitment to work with us as a community.  

We are invisible no longer, my friends. We are coming together!  All of us. Everything on the table. There’s so many wonderful people in the district and in our community that we look forward to working with in the coming weeks and months.
 
All of it also sounds simultaneously fun, creative, and community-uplifting. We certainly have our hopes up!  Sí se puede!  Yes we can!   

-Angela Valenzuela

READ CORI'S AND EMILIO'S EXCELLENT TESTIMONY BELOW