Urban Renewal in Austin in The Age of Neoliberalism
Project Connect is the city’s most expensive public works program in its history and poses social and racial equity concerns that would continue a legacy of segregation on the landscape.
More and more, politicians and power brokers’ rhetoric employs the virtues of “learning from our past’’ in regards to equity as public service policies are implemented. The past they are recognizing is the philosophy offered by “progressive” politicians during the structuring and disbursement of public goods programs dating back to the New Deal, manifesting in new and profound ways today. Business progressives in the early twentieth century through the early twenty-first century increasingly placed faith in a combination of market forces and decentralized social policy in order to engender prosperity, with community-based actors playing a major role in this process. We see this still in President Joe Biden — himself a “progressive” from the ‘70s — who’s pushing a $2 trillion infrastructure plan which outlines specific areas of improvement for cities: roads, bridges, and public transportation. U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg assured KVUE in Austin, Texas that their vision for this program’s rollout keeps the history of neighborhood and racial bifurcation caused by the disproportionately distributed New Deal-era federal funds in clear view. Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk says Project Connect is a “once-in-a-generation” investment and that “Project Connect will be better for our residents’ health, environment, safety, and prosperity.”
Austin’s $7.1 billion tax rate revenue was passed by public vote under Proposition A in November 2020; an initiative aiming to fund, in part, the construction and operational costs of two new light rail lines, another commuter rail line, an additional rapid bus service, a thru-tunnel (complete with a shopping center) underneath Republic Square, and more, to better connect and alleviate traffic and air pollution caused by commuting between Austin’s North, East, and Southside neighborhoods. With a combination of federal funds (the exact amount of which has not yet been agreed upon, yet will supposedly cover 45% of expenses), a portion of CapMetro’s Capital Expansion Fund, and the property tax revenue increase, the City of Austin hopes to cover the massive cost. Research from both the City of Austin and KVUE at the time Project Connect was up for vote shows that a property tax increase of around 25% of the City portion of their bill will be required to cover that segment of investment, amounting to an average additional $350 a year, or just under $30 a month, for the median household property value in Austin (around $350K.) Since then — a mere 5 months later — median property value within the city itself and the surrounding metro area increased 24.8% to $515,000, marking the first time the median home price in Austin surpassed the $500,000 threshold. $300 million is set to be included for anti-displacement housing strategies as well, distributed by the city-appointed “Catalyst group” — a group of 30 residents from Austin’s Eastern Crescent that mostly relies on public transportation and is 90% Black. They will be tasked with codifying equitable methods of distributing that capital. Although the city is already collecting taxes, the $300 million set aside for anti-displacement will be distributed over the anticipated 13-year period which Project Connect is expected to occupy, with the first $100 million ready within the first 3 years of construction.
Opponents to Project Connect, such as the PAC “Our Mobility, Our Future (OMOF),” offer alternative solutions that are market driven and don’t address bigger questions of equity. Rather, they champion corporate solutions that focus on capital instead of communities; push self-serving and more costly telecommuting solutions intended for much longer distances; and validate this with research that is ill-informed and outdated regarding public opinion of public transit. While OMOF’s plan includes some progressive ideas — such as “mobility hubs” where people can safely connect to multiple modes of transportation — stances such as these don’t address larger equity issues in communities such as food insecurity, gentrification, and access to health services, which ultimately makes their solutions fall short of what the City is already proposing. For many Austinites, public transit can be the only way to access fresh food and healthcare. Public transportation is failing them because it’s historically underfunded and underprepared, not because it isn’t “modern” or “new” enough. In fact, neither the official outlines of Project Connect nor the anti-Project Connect plans explicitly mention food insecurity, gentrification, or access to healthcare at all. However, Project Connect at least considers proximity to health services, grocery stores, and schools in the placement of stations.
While millions of Americans have long faced barriers to food security, the Coronavirus pandemic has made it worse — in large part because public transit services have been restricted and, in some places, discontinued indefinitely. Public health researchers have found that many transportation insecure communities are also food insecure, experiencing a higher incidence of cancer and other chronic diseases, such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. When residents find themselves on one end of a 2-to-4-hour commute to buy groceries, they’re more likely to spend their food dollars at the places closest to them: liquor stores, corner stores, convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants, all of which specialize in highly processed foods full of sugar, salt, and fat.
A Bifurcated City
Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy, having been the former president of the inequality-focused think tank Demos. In her new book The Sum Of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together, she describes the “zero-sum paradigm” of economics:
“When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of ‘the public’ becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perceptions of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.”
For this ideology, Austin’s approach to urban renewal and industrial decentralization would be the perfect archetype.
In Austin, the largest contributing factors to food insecurity are poverty, unemployment, and accessibility. Socioeconomic and infrastructural barriers such as these are often results of economic disinvestment and structural racism. There is a traceable, direct line connecting these structural indicators to the 80-plus years of urban renewal that largely benefited Austin’s white, upper-class, knowledge industry residents. From the 1930s to the 1960s, being progressive in Austin usually meant supporting New Deal policies, encouraging strong ties to the federal government as a source of funding, and promoting responsible, nonindustrial growth. Fighting racial inequality or supporting federal legislation aimed at ending discrimination took a decidedly back seat. Federal rules regarding eminent domain and urban renewal served to enhance segregation and widened the chasm between races in the city. The city’s physical transformation in the postwar decades also illuminates the racial limits of liberalism and the myriad ways that whiteness conferred economic, health, and social benefits. Owing in part to strong support for New Deal policies among politicians and a tolerant, open-minded university atmosphere, the area gained a reputation as a center for progressive politics in the South by the 1930s. In 1938, at the behest of Lyndon Johnson and Mayor Tom Miller, both ardent New Dealers, Austin was one of the first cities to erect federally sponsored public housing. The city itself received over $1.5 million in New Deal funding, an extremely high figure for a city of its size.
Federal policy and subsidies made reorganizing the city and reinscribing segregation much easier. In 1967 entire neighborhoods were claimed by the University of Texas and the City of Austin using eminent domain legislation and, over the coming years, were evacuated, demolished, and replaced with different structures meant for different people. The same highways that drew people and resources away from the center created a barrier that separated races. Unlike minorities, displaced whites were more able to acquire loans to move to peripheral residential neighborhoods. The geography of open space in Austin reinforced racial barriers, and environmental improvements benefited whites far more than minorities. Federal urban renewal money was allocated locally and eminent domain was administered locally, which allowed for elites to drive spatial transformation in ways that reflected white interests. The outcome was a policy where even residents who owned up-to-standard property in areas targeted for renewal were often dispossessed. Texas urban renewal legislation made it illegal to build public housing with urban renewal funding. Whites fought to maintain racially segregated schools, which limited minorities’ ability to compete in the city’s increasingly white-collar labor market. As a result, progressive legislation increased segregation and concentration via accumulation and urban renewal while dispossessing Ausin’s African American and Hispanic communities — who now face the highest percentage of poverty and unemployment and, thus, food insecurity, gentrification, and healthcare inequities.
The Landscape as Transformative Justice
According to Andrew M. Busch in his book City In A Garden — a thoroughly-researched profile of environmental transformations and racial injustices in 20th century Austin — one major infrastructural project that urban renewal ideology facilitated in Austin was the completion of IH-35, which further institutionalized the symbolic and actual barrier between East and West Austin when it was built directly over East Avenue, for decades the line of racial demarcation between Anglo West Austin and minority East Austin. In many larger cities, federally funded expressways eviscerated existing working- and middle- class neighborhoods and worked in consort with other urban renewal projects to segregate poor minority residents. In Austin, the expressway, completed in 1962, reinscribed a physical and mental landscape of segregation in central Austin in a much more brutal and impassable form. East Avenue was a wide parkway with a naturally landscaped center and multiple cross streets connecting east and west. Residents on either side could enjoy the parkway and also easily view the other side. In its place rose the mammoth structure, twenty feet high in some areas, which created an actual wall between the already disparate communities. IH-35 and other roadway construction — such as what is now Research Blvd — expedited traffic flow around the city’s northern and eastern perimeter and through the city itself. This literally paved the way for a significant increase in development around the urban periphery and along the nodes created north and south of town while also inscribing a more rigid form of segregation on the landscape as race and class barriers.
In 1956, the U.S. Congress passed the $25 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act that launched the Interstate Highway System. The law proposed to pay for 90% of the construction costs to encourage its implementation, yet low-income areas and communities of color were displaced, saw none of the benefits from the downtowns and waterways razed by these roadways, and were reimbursed with less money than what the housing-market could afford them. These policies and more portended economic, social, and racial disparities that these communities have yet to fully recover from, if at all. However, there are ways to achieve transformative change in the face of neoliberal policies from the White House and state and local governments. If governments wish to attain real equity and “learn from the past,” they need to directly, not passively, engage and include these underrepresented communities in the political decision-making process.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently unveiled legislation that would reverse this decades-old infrastructural formula, offering billions in federal dollars for cities willing to demolish or dramatically reimagine those urban highways. The Economic Justice Act, a spending package worth just over $435 billion, includes a $10 billion pilot program that would provide federal funds for communities to examine transit infrastructure that has divided them along racial and economic lines and potentially alter or remove them. It also includes plans to redevelop the reclaimed land from the altered highways. Furthermore, the language in the act specifically mentions prioritizing equity and avoiding displacement, while including grants meant to facilitate community engagement and participation as well as construction.
Prioritizing communities and the outcomes such legislation holds over their lives is the right way forward with Project Connect. Pete Buttigieg has been outspoken about the damage that transportation projects have done in the past (including in his interview with Austin’s KVUE), and the Biden administration has identified racial equity and climate change as two of four “overlapping and compounding crises” it wants to fight. As such, to make a federal highway-conversion program effective, a variety of “safety net supports” would be necessary, which don’t actually exist in Project Connect or rebuttal plans. This would include the involvement of social workers, mental health experts, food banks and pantries, and housing advocates to aid in actively healing ongoing trauma that has festered distrust for centuries while also ensuring the safety and security of the communities most at risk to these policies.
Input from and collaboration with grassroots campaigns like Reconnect Austin is vital, since they already represent and stand in solidarity with the voices of those most affected by the IH-35 expansion. The City of Austin should use its allocated $300 million for anti-displacement and put it in the hands of an organization already doing the work (and thus already trusted by the community) instead of a new, city-appointed group. This will provide transparency for the people most affected by Project Connect and accountability will remain at the community level. The proposed plans to expand IH-35 will only cause induced demand; more lanes equates to more drivers and more congestion. The Katy Freeway expansion in 2008, for example, resulted in a 30% increase in travel time. For IH-35 — a highway that was responsible for 22% of traffic fatalities in 2018 — more congestion is an awful idea.
Neoliberal Solutions: Capital vs. Community
If Austin wishes to stay aligned with the climate goals outlined in the Community Climate Plan and Imagine Austin (the City’s most recent Master Plan), then continuing to encourage automobile transportation and concomitant pollution via newly expanded lanes simply is not the answer. Proponents of Project Connect say the new transit systems will circumvent pollution because less people will use cars, however residents of transportation insecure neighborhoods already don’t have a personal vehicle to use. TexPRG, a bipartisan clean-energy advocacy group, estimates Project Connect “will avert 109 million vehicle miles, keeping an estimated 30 tons of nitrogen oxide and 43,000 tons of carbon dioxide out of Austin’s air every year.” However, these numbers are purely hypothetical, as they rely on projected numbers from CapMetro and not empirical evidence of carbon emissions and climate change in Austin. To meet Austin Climate Equity goals, transportation emissions need to be reduced by 34% within the next decade. Project Connect, as it stands, would not have any positive impact on climate change, and its minuscule contribution would be impossible to measure.
The I-35 corridor redesign proposed by Reconnect Austin seeks to take TxDOT’s implementation of depressed freeway lanes in Austin one step further. They endorse a four-step plan to restore the city’s urban grid and reunify East and West Austin: (1) remove the elevated highway between Caesar Chavez Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard; (2) remove existing highway frontage roads to reclaim 30 acres of downtown land; (3) bury this section of I-35 below ground; and (4) cover these depressed lanes with a new, narrower, pedestrian-and-bicycle-friendly boulevard. This would encourage active transportation (walking, biking) and provide a new transit corridor, taking cars off the road and reducing carbon emissions. Capturing the pollution from underground lanes and filtering it on-site would further reduce direct carbon emissions and be a major step towards accomplishing Austin’s climate goals, while also dramatically increasing the air and life quality of the surrounding residents. By capping I-35, the 30-acres of land currently under its frontage roads could be opened up for mixed-use development as part of a tax increment financing (TIF) district. Some of the reclaimed space could be used for community gardens and tree groves that implement carbon-sequestering, regenerative agricultural practices. Not only would this alleviate food insecurity, but it would restore vital microorganisms in the soil that catalyze its ability to act as a carbon sink. The potential valuation from this land is an estimated $10 billion, which would increase the tax base for local jurisdictions by millions of dollars.
If handled with care, this could lead to the creation of up to 4,500 market-rate and affordable housing units in a walkable location, ideal for people seeking or currently holding low- and moderate-income jobs downtown, such as those in the food and beverage industry. Money saved from utilizing the federal funds offered in the Economic Justice Act could go towards more public housing, community gardens, and more stations closer to healthcare centers and grocery stores along the railways of Project Connect. Even better, the money could be invested in the surrounding communities by incentivizing co-ops, such as grocery stores, clinics, and opportunities for education. The propositions put forward by Reconnect Austin fall in line with Austin’s Great Streets Master Plan, Senator Schumer’s Economic Justice Act, President Biden’s Infrastructure Spending Bill, and the Public Infrastructure Opportunities provision of the Economic Recovery and Resiliency Framework put forward by SpeakUp! Austin (the community engagement website for the City of Austin).
A Community Like This
The cost of such a measure will likely not vary significantly from those already proposed by CapMetro for Project Connect and the expansion of I-35. With the imminent creation of the Austin Transit Partnership board — the local government corporation that will be in charge of ensuring Project Connect is completed on time and on budget — these ideas need to be circulated. At Crescendo Cuisine, we believe a more equitable future can be built, but the City of Austin needs to actively listen to the input of its most marginalized residents for it to happen. One shining example of what’s possible is the reimagining of the Claiborne Corridor in New Orleans’ historic Seventh Ward neighborhood. An elevated section of federal highway that sliced through a thriving Black-owned business district and a massive grove of oak trees has been reclaimed as a public art and community space. Informed by a series of 11 design charettes held with residents and architects, The Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District Master Plan beautified the corridor with murals, increased jobs and economic stability, and built a marketplace with green infrastructure that runs the length of the 25 mile corridor. Made possible by federal and NGO grants and fiscal sponsors, the reimagined space has amplified community spirit and reinvigorated community-organizing work. Most importantly, thanks to the strong community organizing that led the City of New Orleans to conduct surveys, focus groups, and public discussions, the Claiborne Corridor along I-10 now boasts stable housing, improved community outcomes, and a preserved culture.
Austin’s marginalized communities have already said what they want, now it’s time for Austin’s leadership to listen and act accordingly if they really wish to not repeat the mistakes of the past. Conversely, implementing a “you-come-to-us” strategy of community engagement — as the Austin Transit Partnership is currently doing — exacerbates the inequities these communities already face, and in this case, the very public commodity that’s the subject of reform: accessibility. We feel it is imperative to speak up for the communities at risk of being displaced. The greatest gaslighting in modern Austin history would be to ignore their voices and then turn around and ask, after the fact, why they didn’t speak up. If the measures outlined in this paper aren’t implemented, the City of Austin would simultaneously be continuing a legacy of non-sustainable federally funded urban renewal while watching, foot in mouth, as its most expensive public works project ever fails to create positive impacts on equity and climate change.
