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Austin Free Press, as part of its journalism partnership with Huston-Tillotson University, embarked on a community-centered environmental project with Earth Day Austin to illustrate the impact of Austin’s land-use ordinances and initiatives on the people most impacted by them – African Americans and Hispanics.
During the semester-long project, HT students wrote seven displacement profiles, marking significant time periods when Austin city officials approved housing, transportation and land-use policies that pushed People of Color out of their longtime neighborhoods.
The pain point of those policies is inescapable, happening in the same East Austin neighborhoods that the city’s racist “1928 Master Plan” designated as a “negro district.” Forced into that area in the previous century, People of Color now find themselves economically displaced to the city’s outer limits – and beyond. Student profiles will be displayed on April 12 as part of the Earth Day Austin event at HT.
The 1928 Austin City Plan creates the “Negro District”
The Jim Crow land use plan approved by the Austin City Council institutionalized housing segregation by creating the “negro district” in East Austin. Up to then, African Americans lived in neighborhoods across Austin, including Clarksville, Wheatville, Bouldin Creek and Barton Springs.
The land use plan was enforced by denying city services to Black residents outside the negro district, using land use regulations and locating segregated public facilities in the area.
Austin’s 1928 City Plan created the blueprint for the nearly 100 years of displacement of African Americans and Hispanics that followed.
Austin’s concrete color line
Written by Sky Turntine
I-35 was built along East Avenue, which Austin’s political leaders had designated as a racial boundary three decades earlier. Austin’s 1928 “Master Plan” deliberately placed schools, parks, and civic institutions in the city’s designated “Negro District.” Up to 1928, Black residents lived in Freedman communities across the city, including West Austin’s Clarksville, Barton Springs, and Wheatville.
Mexican American communities, similarly, marginalized by discriminatory housing policies, also suffered from the highway’s construction. When I-35 was completed in May 1962, it reinforced segregation and 1930s redlining practices of Black and Brown people. Banks and lenders marked with red lines areas east of I-35 to deny residents mortgages, loans, and insurance.
UT’s expansion pushes Blackland residents out
Written by Dasia Gordon
The University of Texas at Austin’s expansion into East Austin, particularly the Blackland neighborhood, is an embodiment of gentrification in action. For decades, East Austin has been home to African American families — many of whom had no choice but to settle there due to segregationist policies. Many of those same families and their descendants have been pushed out more recently, not by legal barriers, but by rising costs, shifting demographics, and the relentless expansion of UT-Austin.
UT-Austin opened its Disch-Falk Field baseball stadium in Blackland in 1975.
The irony is that African Americans were barred from UT-Austin until 1956. As UT continues to expand and reshape the city, the question remains: Will its growth ever consider the people who called East Austin home for generations?
TOD redevelopment for MLK and Plaza Saltillo
Written by Zya Fleming
The City of Austin developed Transit Oriented Districts in the Martin Luther King Boulevard and Plaza Saltillo corridors for the purpose of providing affordable, moderate, and market-rate housing and public transportation for Austin residents who were living in those communities and for newcomers or others who were moving to Austin or wanted housing near downtown and on public transportation routes.
A decade after building it, the city looked at the results and found that they had failed in their most important goals.
Moreover, they learned that the redevelopment that included more housing density to accommodate more people and public transit to decrease reliance on cars significantly displaced longtime African Americans and Hispanics living in those communities. Public transit ridership plummeted. Instead, it was upper income Whites generally without children who moved in. And because they mostly worked at home, they didn’t use public transportation.
Austin’s smart growth damages people of color
Written by Lyneisha Fowler
There has been significant growth and urban development over the past few decades in Austin, Texas, leading to economic prosperity for some while displacing others. As part of the city’s Smart Growth Program, the Austin City Council passed two initiatives in April 2000 to manage growth and protect environmentally sensitive areas in West Austin: The Desired Development Zone and the SMART Housing program.
While these programs concentrated development in specific areas East of Interstate 35 — and provided some affordable housing — ultimately those land use policies set in motion the massive displacement of African American and Hispanic residents from their life-long communities.
Rainy forecast for Mexican American historic neighborhood
Written by Bianca Joffre
Rainey Street, a community once bustling with Mexican American culture, and untouched from Austin’s downtown life, is yet another Austin community of Brown residents who suffered unjust acts of displacement caused by systemic gentrification.
Developers took an interest in the street in the 1960s after I-35 opened. The neighborhood’s proximity to the Austin Convention Center spurred city officials to take a deeper interest and rezone Rainey Street in 2005, leading to many homes to be demolished.
Rainey Street residents were forcefully pushed out of their longtime neighborhood, as they watched their houses being replaced with entertainment businesses. Today, Internet “Rainey Street” searches describe a thriving entertainment district with negligible mentions of Rainey Street’s rich legacy of Mexican American families and culture.
As Mueller rises, nearby Black and Brown residents fall
Written by Nefta Fonseca, Jr.
The Mueller redevelopment, a $1.5 billion transformation of Austin’s former municipal airport into a mixed-use hub, has been hailed by city officials as a triumph of sustainable urban design. But for many long-term East Austin residents —particularly African American families who lived in neighborhoods adjacent to Mueller —the project has underscored a painful divide between the city’s vision of progress and the reality of gentrification-driven displacement.
Between 2000 and 2010 East Austin neighborhoods saw a 66 percent decrease in Black population, 33 percent decrease in Latino population, and 442 percent increase in White population, according to “Those Who Stayed,” by Eric Tang and Bisola Falola of the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas-Austin.
Project Connect disconnect
Written by Briaa Clausell
Along the transit corridor of CapMetro’s Project Connect light rail plan, Austin officials are working to expand so-called Equity Transit-Oriented Development (ETOD). While this plan seeks to increase housing availability and enhance public transportation, it also poses problems. In lower-income neighborhoods targeted by Project Connect the plan raises the age-old red flags of gentrification and displacement.
The purpose of the ETOD overlay is to create more affordable living options and allow taller buildings and higher-density housing near rail and bus stations. It has done that. But it also has ushered in wealthier people who are displacing existing communities. Although the city introduced ETOD as an affordability solution, these changes are rapidly displacing Austin’s moderate- and lower-income Black and Brown families.