Austin Mayor Seeks To Stem The Tide On Gentrification-Fueled Displacement

AUSTIN, TX — The issue of gentrification-fueled displacement of residents has long bedeviled city officials seeking to stem the tide on the exodus. On Monday, Austin Mayor Steve Adler issued a call to action to address the issue head-on to stem the tide on the more corrosive effects of gentrification.

The mayor seeks input on a municipal strategy culminating in the creation of a task force in addressing displacement. For some years now, the hot local market has increasingly appealed to industry, with commercial development occurring at a brisk pace.

Resulting spikes in property rates in the midst of new development has priced many residents out of their homes. Along the way, Austin has become the nation's most economically segregated metro area in the U.S., according to one exhaustive study done two years ago.

Perhaps nowhere is the economic chasm more felt than in East Austin, once a working-class enclave primarily populated by Hispanics and African Americans that has steadily become the trendy part of the city. To some, the upheaval created by this gentrification-fueled displacement on families—many of whom struggle to stay in neighborhoods their families have lived in for generations—is lost as some sort of an abstraction.

A case in point is a recent advertising supplement in the Austin American-Statesman painting gentrification as a force for good while inadvertently diminishing the impact such development has on East Austin families.

"Enjoy Hipster Paradise in East Downtown," the culturally tone-deaf piece began, misnaming the sector known in the local nomenclature as East Austin. The piece then extolled the virtues of commercial development, positing such construction as a force for good in ridding the city of pockets of town viewed as undesirable.

“A decade ago Austinites would rarely dare to venture to the east side of the I H 35 corridor," the author wrote. "Though the city has never been home to truly seedy or sinister areas, going east of the highway prior to the mass gentrification of downtown was not advised. However, now that the neighborhood has been purchased by California investors and trendy millennial home-owners, East Downtown is one of the city’s most desirable locales.”

The piece prompted local outrage, particularly among Latino and African American East Side denizens whose presence there was inferred. The Statesman has since apologized for the slight and removed the article from its website, claiming the copy editing process normally practiced in the newsroom wasn't done in the advertising department. Longtime editorial writer Alberta Phillips, who once lived in East Austin with her children and still attends church there, subsequently wrote an editorial explaining the reasons why the advertorial's approach was so hurtful to residents.

While the ramifications of displacement may have been lost on the advertorial's author, the effects on affected residents is all too real. A dramatic illustration of such displacement was seen in December 2015, when Oracle Corp.—the world's second-largest software developer—found a prime piece of lakefront land on which to build a new campus and luxury housing for employees.

Problem was, a low-income apartment complex stood in the way of such development, prompting the evictions of dozens of families—having to scramble alternative housing and new schools in which to enroll their children—in the days preceding Christmas.

Despite several requests for comment from Patch, officials at Oracle Corp.—a company that last month reported net income of $3.23 billion in fiscal fourth-quarter earnings—officials never responded to queries related to whether the company intended to offer funds as offset to relocation costs of affected residents.

While that incident was most prominent given its sheer scale, that sort of gentrification-sparked displacement occurs regularly in Austin—a city growing at a brisk pace with an estimated 150 people per day moving here in search of the good salaries offered in the high tech industry for which the city is becoming something of a Central Texas hub.

To counter those effects, the mayor released his plea for input from stakeholders in the hopes of stemming the tide. What follows is the mayor's letter of invitation to those who might offer insight and expertise:

"Colleagues:

"As we go on July break, I’d like to share a preliminary idea about how we can address and communicate with our residents about displacement, significantly related to other manifestations like gentrification, in an intentional and comprehensive way. This posting is to seek input and to see if others want to join Council Member [Pio] Renteria, Council Member [Delia] Garza and me in sponsoring a resolution to focus on this issue in a comprehensive way beginning with the creation of a task force to highlight anti-displacement policies, strategies, and tools.

"Displacement is not a new concern and this and past councils and members have identified many ways to address displacement. The goal of preventing displacement exists across many policy platforms and recent examples include:

• One of the community values in the Strategic Housing Blueprint is preventing households from being priced out of their neighborhoods.

• A discussion surfacing in the CodeNEXT process is the worry about whether increased unit density, increased size density, up-zoning, and changed will effect displacement.

• A focus of the Mayor’s Task Force on Institutional Racism and Systemic Inequities holds past city leaders to account for racially discriminatory policies responsible for segregation and gentrification-driven displacement and recommends several policies to remedy the resulting inequitable status quo.

• The Spirit of East Austin initiative has begun to publish and vet a menu of equity interventions.

• The Equity Office is developing an Equity Tool, which is intended to create a framework toevaluate city policies, departments and decisions to ensure equity.

"Undoubtedly, addressing and preventing displacement is a direct or indirect goal of many city programs. However, many initiatives, programs, and conversations on equity fail to provide a comprehensive, cross-discipline, cross-department analytical framework to focus on displacement. While the goals and policies associated with addressing displacement are generally aligned, they exist in several different policy areas so it is difficult to measure progress in a meaningful way.

"In effect, some suggest we are skipping the step in which we could begin with a data-based approach and leapfrogging straight to proposing policy and enacting programs. We all agree that displacement is a challenge, but we do not have a comprehensive understanding of what’s causing it and how to address it comprehensively. The community is entitled to see that their council and city staff are addressing the issue, how they are addressing the issue, and the breadth of the responses required.

"I think a task force on displacement would be well-taken and would reveal not only the depth of the issue but also the scope of a real response. The resolution would commit the city to a six-month-long process to gather information, understand contributing factors, set metrics and goals, and raise responses. The data and work would be broken down geographically by neighborhood whenever reasonably and constructively possible.

"The resolution could be adopted in August and could authorize the creation of an 15-member task force, 11 members appointed by the city council with additional appointments made to ensure diversity and expertise. Its membership or supporting participants could consist of those displaced, housing and tenant advocates, non-profit and for-profit housing developers,education administrators, health care professionals, workforce developers, economists, academics and the Equity Officer and our city staff.

"That task group could meet at least twice a month for six months and be charged with assessing the growing loss of low and middle income residents and housing units available to them, the property tax burden, education, health and economic considerations, quantifying the problem, and then reporting back to the council with a set of recommendations for consideration and possible adoption.The resolution will also commit a reasonable amount of time from staff to assist the task force in its mission.

"The resolution could authorize staff to compile data for the task force showing the factors responsible for displacement, including but not limited to the supply of housing, housing losses due to demolition, upgrade and condominium conversion, speculative sale, abandonment, increased home prices, rents and taxes, and provide other indicators or predictors of housing loss and/or displacement such as education, health and workforce considerations drawing from available data.

"As a community, we need more than just anecdotal information to address displacement, its cost to our city’s diversity and quality of life, and its relationship to our growth and managing growth policies. We need to evaluate existing conditions and future options with a data driven community discussion.If we are better to manage growth to make Austin more affordable for more of our residents and to preserve what we love about this city, we need more than good intentions and ad hoc reactions.

"We need to address displacement in a comprehensive, broad and systematic, intentional manner. We need a plan.This challenge is one that will require us all to work together to find the best way forward. Anyone else want to join in helping to bring forward a council proposal?"

>>> Official photo of Austin Mayor Steve Adler via City of Austin