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    Joshua Angell, also known as Josh Angell (born June 3, 1979), is an outspoken Liberal activist who has run a news blog since 2004, entitled "Voice Of The Majority" Angell, a frequent caller to radio shows such as Lynn Samuels, is often outspoken on what he calls "the lies of the Bush Crime Family". Known locally in Austin, Texas to appear at rallies and anti-war demonstrations, Angell is self described as "The most famous gay activist in Austin that everybody knows OF but nobody KNOWS".


    Sunday, September 26, 2004


     
    For Austin to really understand how the Eastside works, and how it could work better, and how it can help the rest of town work better, it's the people of East Austin, not the properties, that need to increase in value.
    So, it's official: East Austin is either being "revitalized" (if you approve of it) or "gentrified" (if you don't). The Statesman says so. As you may remember, the daily informed us last month that East Austin property values have gone up at "twice the countywide average." You don't say. The Statesman based this front-page news on Travis Central Appraisal District (TCAD) data, which is, to say the least, an imperfect indicator of what's happening on the ground. Home sales on the Eastside, while unquestionably more common than they were five years ago, are still quite rare compared to other parts of town. But each of those few sales can affect the appraised value of every home in its neighborhood, which generally spawns a spate of protests to TCAD by current homeowners. When those protests are resolved, the East Austin appreciation rate may be more "in line" with the countywide average.
    Of course, properties on the Eastside have been so consistently redlined and undervalued that an appreciation rate of four or five times the countywide average would be required to bring them near the value of the mythical "average Austin home." (My own house, when I bought it, was appraised for one-fourth of the seller's asking price, which was still well below the median home value back in 1993.) The average single-family home appraisal in the 78702 ZIP code - less than $40,000, according to the daily's own report - is still the lowest in the county. (This ZIP is second-to-last, trailed only by neighboring 78721, in the more germane, to real estate folks, figure of appraised value per square foot.)
    An altogether more interesting fact was buried in the jump of that front-page story: "In some areas, such as the Stonegate neighborhood and... the homes near the East 11th and 12th Streets redevelopment, values did not change from 1997 to 1998." Presumably, these examples were not picked at random; Stonegate was at the center of the Tannehill Apartments imbroglio last fall, and the "East 11th and 12th Streets redevelopment" is better known to y'all as the always-interesting Austin Revitalization Authority. Apparently, TCAD does not see the same rapid, wholesale "gentrification" of the inner Eastside that has been identified, and laid at the Central East Austin neighborhoods' feet, by many supposed Eastside "leaders."
    What's happened instead, one thinks, is that the Statesman and other local opinion-makers have finally noticed that East Austin is actually a pretty nice place to live. And the thought that a low-income neighborhood is not, by definition, a blighted slum causes them too much cognitive dissonance. So, to resolve this discord, we're being "informed" of an economic trend that really doesn't exist, and in turn being denied the true story.
    Eastside Discovery?
    There is apparently a policy at the Statesman against referring to these inner Eastside neighborhoods by name - such as Guadalupe, Blackshear, Chestnut, or Swede Hill, the last being my own neighborhood. (The May 28 piece does, however, refer to "Tarrytown.") Ten days later, Rich Oppel added his two cents to the daily's East Austin yahoo-fest with an editorial in which he also refers specifically to Guadalupe and Swede Hill, but mentions neither by name. We are, instead, a "site" where ARA director Byron Marshall speculates the authority could direct the first phase of its $9 million publicly funded renewal project, along I-35 toward MLK.
    Oppel quotes one developer as saying "the people who take advantage of [Eastside renewal] now will truly be the pioneers and the settlers, and they will be pleased by their choice." No word on what the people who've already made that choice - and who've for their trouble been castigated as racists, gentrifiers, interlopers, obstructionists, and in my neighborhood's case (a personal favorite) "white devils" - are supposed to do to welcome these new "pioneers." Get out of the way, one supposes.
    This should gall you as much as it galls me, since in my years living in, and fighting for, exactly what Oppel now touts as the Eastside's bright future - a centrally located, affordable, historic, and culturally diverse mixed-use inner-city neighborhood - among our most formidable foes has been the Austin American-Statesman. Apparently, the vitality that Oppel has so recently discovered on the Eastside is now mentionable because the daily can pretend that people like Marshall are responsible for creating it. News flash, Rich: Had you hopped in a cab the very first day you arrived in Austin and hopped out on the inner Eastside, you would have seen exactly the same signs of "renewal."
    Because the people who are renewing the Eastside are, of course, the people who live there, and the people who work and attend school and (significantly) go to church there, not the ARA or any developer-come-lately. They are not all Anglo, as is often advanced by those who decry "gentrification" or even those who applaud it. In his piece, Oppel quotes local star architect Juan Cotera as lauding "Anglos who've come in and fixed up houses" in the Guadalupe neighborhood. Said houses, according to Guadalupe neighborhood leaders, are actually owned by Hispanics. (To his credit, though, Oppel does describe the inner Eastside as "ethnically mixed," a truth that has long evaded many ARA supporters.)
    Whoever we are, black, brown, and white, we are the same people who have been slapped around repeatedly by the daily, and by the Eric Mitchell Mafia, for holding the silly notion that, since we are responsible for the current (and not insignificant) vitality of East Austin, we deserve some sort of authority in affairs affecting our neighborhoods, and most specifically within the ARA. We now have that voice, of course, much to the chagrin of most of the original ARA board members, who seem to have responded by not showing up at board and community meetings. (This as reported by several new ARA board members.) As a consequence, the vision of the ARA has changed profoundly in a few short months. Gone (for now) is the talk about a regional shopping mall, or a strip of chain stores and downtown-spillover office space.
    Instead, we now hear talk of 11th and 12th Streets being a bona fide mixed-use "urban village" designed to meet the needs of people who actually live in East Austin, now and in the future. Which is what the neighborhoods have been advocating for years - not just in word but in deed - and which is what the Eastside used to be in its glory days, the memory of which is supposedly the touchstone of the whole ARA effort. In fact, it's what much of the inner Eastside is now, which is easier to see if you don't focus your attention entirely on the more derelict reaches of 11th Street.
    We have corner stores, places to eat, parks and libraries, small businesses, civic institutions and churches by the score, all intermixed with residential neighborhoods that, if they could be better, could also be a whole lot worse. (Interestingly, the African-American "community leaders" who orate about their Eastside ventures being altruistic, about wanting to "give back to the community," have little evident interest in "revitalizing" some of Austin's real slums and slums-in-waiting, like Colony Park or St. John's.) If "vitality" is to be our benchmark for neighborhood worthiness, then much of East Austin is a whole lot better off than many nice, white subdivisions north of Hwy290, where public life is nonexistent and the streets empty out during the workday.
    What's in a Word?
    Yeah, yeah, you know. Many will read these words as the excuses of "gentrifiers" who want the Eastside to remain "charming" and derelict so that their money will go farther and longer, so they can buy up more homes. The notion that there is much on the Eastside that is good, and worth saving, and that can serve as a model to other neighborhoods and future "renewal" efforts - that is, the notion that poor or working-class people can create and enjoy quality lives - is curiously hard to sell to many Austinites. For whatever political or social reasons, they prefer that the Eastside remain a problem that can only be solved by the local political equivalent of martial law.
    Which brings us to the nubbin of Eastside dialogue, the reason anybody cares about our relative appraised home values. Nobody (except some of the people who live in these places) seems to give a rip about the wholesale "gentrification" of West Campus, or Hyde Park, or much of South Austin, or even (at this late date) of Clarksville, since the history of the original black settlement by that name is generally misunderstood if not completely forgotten. And what about places like Oak Hill, which used to be kinda working-class until swamped by luxury suburban sprawl? The real "gentrification" - if we understand the term in its economic sense, the destruction of class diversity and affordability - is happening in Hays and Williamson Counties, not in East Austin.
    But the whole city seems to have an opinion about the "gentrification" of East Austin, an opinion that's usually premised on one, or both, of two intentional misreadings of the term. The first is that "gentrification" is something that only white people do. This is a tired old canard, but the Mitchell Mafia, and its ideological soulmates in Latino neighborhoods south of 11th Street, seem to believe it in earnest. (Although they violently reject the corollary, as well they should, that upper-class persons of color, solely by dint of their ethnicity, are "ghettoizing" Cat Mountain and Oak Hill.)
    Just for the record, while Anglos do form a minority of residents in the 78702 ZIP code, they do not - according to 1990 census data - constitute a generally wealthier segment of the area's population. The notion that African-American or Hispanic developers building, or aiming to build, properties that cost far more than those already standing nearby, owned, or occupied by working-class Anglos, are "gentrifiying" those neighborhoods - often while enjoying one or another subsidy for "affordable" housing - is too weird to have been acknowledged in most of Austin's public discourse in the 1990s.
    The other fallacy is that only residential property contributes to, or is subject to, "gentrification." If a family, of any race, buys a home, fixes it up (if necessary), and lives in it, they're "gentrifying" the neighborhood. If a law firm comes in, buys the same home, fixes it up, and offices in it, the effect goes unnoticed. This is what happened to the inner west side, the downtown blocks around Austin Community College, where homes identical to those east of I-35, in the same condition, and at the same distance from the Capitol and Congress Avenue, have become completely unaffordable for residential or even neighborhood-retail uses.
    This dynamic, of course, gets sped along when big new commercial projects, such as what was formerly envisioned by the ARA, get plunked down next to existing homes. (Or even at some distance from them, a concern of many Eastsiders as they follow the proposed redevelopment of Mueller Airport.) If the ARA, or other developers before and since, had succeeded in turning 11th and 12th Streets into a large-scale, completely commercial district - Mitchell's vision from the get-go - it's likely that, within a generation, the surrounding neighborhoods would become predominantly commercial (or multi-family), and homeowners could not afford to buy there. And future city leaders would scratch their heads and wonder what happened to all the downtown housing.
    The Future Is Now
    Which is yet another cause for concern when reading Rich Oppel's vision of East Austin - which, in fairness, is not just his vision, but a good distillation of macro Austin opinion. Perhaps it's good that mainstream public opinion has abandoned the pretense that the Eastside is a slum (and, particularly, a slum of color) in need of redevelopment. What has replaced it, though, is a call to the marketplace to buy up East Austin while it's still cheap. Oppel closes his column with a fake ad for luxury condos occupied by "young professionals" - his illustration of the thesis that "East Austin will become desirable."
    Well, Rich, for thousands of people who live here, East Austin is already desirable. And it's because of us that you can see the signs of vitality that so impressed you - vitality that exists even though it's a working-class neighborhood, your paper's spurious reading of the tax rolls notwithstanding. For Austin to really understand how the Eastside works, and how it could work better, and how it can help the rest of town work better, it's the people of East Austin, not the properties, that need to increase in value.
    (by Mike Clark-Madison, of the Austin Chronicle)



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