Is Austin City Leadership Killing Our Golden Goose?

News flash :The things that made Austin desirable were not built by supply-side housing policy. It was the people who built this city, especially in historical East Austin.

There is a version of Austin that our own marketing department describes reasonably well:

Live Music Capital of the World!

Keep Austin Weird!

Barton Springs!

South by Southwest! ACL!

Breakfast tacos (sorry San Antonio)

None of these happened by narrowly-defined economic development strategy. They were started and produced by the communities - artists, immigrants, working-class families, musicians, chefs, craftspeople - who chose Austin when it was affordable and strange and nobody important was paying attention. People flocked here for it.

That history is longer and more specific than the tech boom narrative acknowledges.

East Austin, in particular, did not become a culturally rich neighborhood by accident. It became one under duress. The 1928 Master Plan, adopted unanimously by an all-white, all-male City Council, used Interstate 35 (then known as East Avenue) as a hard racial boundary. Prior to 1928, Austin's Black population lived throughout the city, in freedman communities built during Reconstruction.

The city's planners couldn't legally mandate racial segregation through zoning, so they used a crueler mechanism…. they cut off utilities to Black families in their existing neighborhoods. No water. No electricity. Move east or go without. Mexican American families followed, displaced there by the same combination of rising land values and discriminatory deed restrictions that closed off every other option.

The plan's own language was explicit. It described East Austin as a "negro district", and it became the "nearest approach to the solution of the race segregation problem". It was a deliberate choice that "all facilities and conveniences" were placed in East Austin as an incentive to concentrate the city's Black and Brown populations in one controllable location.

Forced into East Austin, these folks transformed the neighborhood - they built the churches, the schools, the restaurants, the music venues, the mutual aid networks, the cultural institutions.They made something genuinely irreplaceable in a space the city had designated for neglect. A 2022 study commissioned by the city itself found that the 1928 plan's dispossession cost Black homeowners in just five neighborhoods more than $290 million in lost land value. That figure covers only a fraction of the total harm.

Imagine learning that soul of Austin - the thing that put our city on the map, and that draws so many to the unique cultural history of this city…and truly the experiences I eventually fell in love with when I moved to Austin…. was built by marginalized, displaced communities who were given the worst real estate in the city. They made it extraordinary.

Then the city discovered East Austin was desirable, and pushed out the very folks who made it unique

In the late 1990s, Austin's "Smart Growth" policies quietly designated East Austin as a "Desired Development Zone" . Investment was now directing to these areas, and density pressure was brought into the exact neighborhoods that the city had spent decades neglecting and containing. The communities that built East Austin began to be priced out of it.

In a single decade, the white population of East Austin increased by 442%, the Black population decreased by 66%, and the Latino population decreased by 33%.

Then came the pandemic tech wave. Between 2019 and 2023, Austin's tech workforce grew faster than any other major metro in the country, from roughly 155,000 to 203,000 workers. Domestic migrants into the city peaked at 48,000 in 2020. The housing market went berserk. Neighborhoods that still had affordable character were the first to get redeveloped, because they were the ones with the lowest land costs and the most "upside."

Later arrived the HOME legislation. It was the city's 2023 zoning reform allowing up to three units on single-family lots. It was framed as an affordability solution, landing hardest on the neighborhoods least able to absorb another round of displacement. Community organizations like Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin were outside City Hall protesting on the day of the vote. Their concern was not abstract. It was the lived pattern of a century.

Black and Hispanic shares of Austin's population continue to decline. The city formally apologized in 2021 for its role in enslavement, segregation, and "multiple urban renewal programs that decimated Black communities." Within two years, it passed zoning reforms that community advocates said would accelerate the very displacement the apology acknowledged — without a single binding anti-displacement protection in the ordinance. Still, there are fewer Black and Latino children in Austin neighborhoods today than there were before the “boom”. The communities that built the culture this city markets to the world are leaving — and have been leaving, in waves, for thirty years.

What the tech wave actually revealed

I am one of the people who came during the tech boom of the late 2010s. I did not fully know the extent of this history of Austin. Yet I did notice that even during my first four years in the city and my East Austin neighborhood, families that had lived there for years were quietly selling their homes and moving out. Property taxes were high, yes. But for them, it just was not the same neighborhood they had grown up in anymore, as one of my elderly abuela neighbors explained to me. She’d expressed both heartbreak but also relief to leave before the change became worse. Other neighbors soon followed. My neighborhood is a hollow version of the lively community I had moved into. On my own street, instead of the laughter of children and neighbors, I get to see Waymo’s glide by renovated vacation rental properties (always conspicuous because of the array of Lime scooters parked by the entrance).

Many of us, myself included, have spent years genuinely trying to become part of this place rather than just occupying it. The people who moved here from wherever in the world are not the problem. The problem was what the city assumed about transplants like me.

Austin's leadership looked at the wave of people arriving from San Francisco and Seattle and New York and saw confirmation of a strategy: attract big tech corporations and companies, build a lot of dense housing. Let the market sort it out, watch the city grow?

I fear that what they didn't do was ask what these groups of migrant arrivals to Austn were actually looking for. Why they were leaving their previous cities, and what would need to be true for them to stay beyond a two-year remote-work adventure…. and to build roots and create a life. The answer, I can tell you from experience, was not a $750,000 townhouse on a lot that used to hold a single-family home (please, I couldn’t afford that myself!). Or to see a local neighborhood restaurant run by a local entrepreneur become another overpriced restaurant identical to one designed by private equity money in Brooklyn or Dallas. Did they not understand that people who came during the tech boom were chasing that sense of inspiration that comes from a city that promised to be “weird”? If we wanted to live in big cities…we would have just stayed there. That we were chasing the very things that some of Austin's own growth policies were and have been in the process of destroying.

It has been noted that were it not for international migration, Austin could have experienced overall population decline. It seems as though domestic migration engine that our city’s growth strategy was built around has stalled. The tech layoffs took over 10,300 jobs in 2024 alone. The numbers are still rolling in for 2026. The companies that accepted tax incentives from the City and County are restructuring, relocating, retrenching.

I want to understand what led our city government to choose to restructured our neighborhoods, rethink affordability definitions, undermine our school districts, and our cultural landscape around a migration wave that was doomed to be temporary.

The questions we all need to be asking (without being jaded)

Just look at this amazing city where we get to live in!!

Anyone who lives here will say the #1 thing they love about the city is our natural gifts of the springs, the greenbelt. Then, they will mention the artist and small business community (our incredible local food scene). It’s our historical neighborhoods and the communities who have lived on this land - and have given us institutions and culture that are so uniquely Austin. These are folks who are working so hard to keep creating and stay here…but they are getting priced out…and it’s not due to a “lack of housing”. It’s due to lack of affordable housing, accessible services such as schools, transit, healthcare…all that build a quality of life them and their families may actually sustain. Celebrating, preserving, and boosting these unique aspects of the Austin experience will guarantee our future as a community and a city.

The city government's recent track record shows a misalignment in appreciating this. Something needs to change about how Austin measures success, whom leadership plans for, and whose history it treats as the foundation of its future rather than an obstacle to development.

The question is not whether Austin can grow. It is growing, and will continue to grow.

The question is whether Austin's leadership can clarify: growth for whom, and toward what?