With Gentrification, East Austin Goes To The Dogs: UT Study

EAST AUSTIN, TX — The effects of gentrification can be seen across the East Austin landscape: Luxury apartments where single-family homes once stood; trendy restaurants in spots where mom-and-pop shops once long catered to residents; youth-oriented bars catering to a new demographic, supplanting erstwhile storefronts that were once fixtures in the community.

But for all the new development, there's one element conspicuously missing. Children are an increasingly rare sight in East Austin these days, replaced by the ubiquitous sight of leashed dogs being walked by upwardly mobile new residents now calling the part of the city home. As property values rise due to gentrification-fueled new development, many families with children have been displaced — forced to leave to the city's outskirts where the cost of living is lower.

As a result, the peals of laughter from children playing along once-familiar neighborhood paths are quickly being replaced by the barking of frolicking dogs in East Austin.

That's the scenario laid out by Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis researchers at the University of Texas at Austin who presented more focused findings in an addendum to their previous, highly publicized March 2018 report titled "Those Who Stayed." On Wednesday, researchers expounded on the dearth of children in East Austin in gentrification's wake — arguably the most talked-about finding from the March report — as a key bellwether of subsequent residential displacement.

From 2000 to 2016, the number of children in the neighborhood between East Seventh and East 11th streets declined 14 percent, according to the findings. Stated another way, dogs now outnumber children 2-to-1 in the focused neighborhood between East 7th and East 11th streets by researchers' reckoning.

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“This was the perception among longstanding residents,” said Eric Tang. an associate professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and faculty member in the Center for Asian American Studies at UT=Austin. “We never measured that in our original survey, but we thought it was worth it to go back to the neighborhood after the first report was published to answer the question more definitively.”

Eric Tang, PhD (left), Olivia Sullings and Javonte Starling discuss findings from their study. Photo by Tony Cantú

And so to East Austin they returned in April, interviewing residents at 171 single-family homes specifically related to children and dogs living in the houses. Given the likelihood of restrictions on pets at apartments — which would've artificially skewered the results — rental units were excluded from the canvassing.

The upshot: Researchers counted 116 canine residents of East Austin compared to just 66 children. Thus, the perceptions of longtime residents visited for a previous study were confirmed through hard data. Tang noted another telling finding emerged from the East Austin follow-up visits: Only six children enrolled at Austin ISD schools are living in the 1,930 new apartment units examined in the study area.

Tang acknowledged the curiosity of the canine finding from the March study, with reactions ranging from amusement to bemusement for those learning of the research. But it's more than a mere curios dynamic, instead serving as an index for a higher-income demographic, economic and social homogeneity present with the urban core and heightened economic segregation across the entire metropolitan area, Tang said.

Interestingly, the original "Those Who Stayed" survey did not ask about pets or children, researchers noted in the addendum. Instead, the question related to the dearth of kids was prompted by longtime residents themselves commenting how dogs seemed to outnumber children in their community.

"A lot of people who move here have no kids," one 55-year-old African-American male resident living in East Austin well before the wave of gentrification swept over, was quoted as saying to researchers. "When I was growing up, there used to be a lot of kids. Now, a lot more dogs and cats around."

He wasn't alone in making the observation. "Most people are white," an 87-year-old black woman told researchers about the new influx of residents. "They spend the whole day walking the dogs. They don't have kids. They have dogs."

Another resident, a 61-year-old black female resident added plaintively: "They need to put children back in the neighborhood."

Real estate prospecting by commercial developers capitalizing on now-trendy East Austin — once a working-class enclave inhabited largely by Hispanics and African-Americans — has driven everybody's property values up. As a result, many longtime residents have been displaced, no longer able to afford bolstered property tax bills.

If the dog data yields metaphor for what's occurred in East Austin over the past decade or so of brisk growth, other data buttress the demographic and attendant economic changes afoot. Among other key findings researchers found:

• Between 2000 and 2010, the neighborhood’s black population dropped by 60 percent, while its Latino population decreased by 33 percent.
• In that same time period, the white population has jumped exponentially by 442 percent.
• From 2000 to 2016, the area’s median family income grew from $28,929 to $69,570.
• Seventy-six percent of the surveyed households (130 out of 171) do not have children living in them.
• Forty-six percent of the surveyed households (79 out of 171) have one or more dogs.
• "As we canvassed the neighborhood," researchers wrote, "our survey team noted that one or more dogs were present at approximately one-third at the homes where nobody answered."
• Between 2000 and 2016, the 17-and-under population remained consistently between 24 percent and 30 percent of the Austin MSA (metropolitan statistical area) population. During this same time period, the share of children in East Austin dropped dramatically."

In regard to the last point, researchers wrote: "The dearth of children in the neighborhood is highly localized, and a sign of gentrification that cannot be attributed to broader social factors such [as] shifting maternity rates."

Other than the hard data, there is a less measurable sense of irony suffusing the study. The studied neighborhood was once the heart of Austin's anachronistically called "Negro District," a racially segregated part of downtown created by city officials in 1928 to confine black people to the sector of the urban core. Before that master plan forcing their migration, black people lived in neighborhoods across the city, researchers noted. Fast forward to the 21st century, and these legacy home owners are now being displaced by the invisible hand of commerce.

Another bit of irony is that the neighborhoods of East Austin were planned with children in mind, as evidenced by zoning regulations calling for single-family homes, the abundance of parks and the high concentration of public schools.

But the beneficiaries of such development are scarcer and scarcer with an ever-changing landscape bereft of their presence: "During our eight canvassing sessions — all of them took place between 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. — our team encountered children playing in the streets only once," researchers wrote in their report. "One one other occasion, we noted two children riding bicycles with an adult. We did not spot children in public spaces outside of these two instances."

Tang was joined by Olivia Sullings, 22, and Javonte Starling, 23, in presenting the findings at a meeting room inside the Gordon-White Building at the University of Texas-Austin campus. Sullings and Starlng, both recent UT-Austin graduates, personally canvassed the studied East Austin neighborhood. The other study's authors are Amahree Archie, Katherine Daffin, Naveed Pejman and Aderius Ross.

>>> Photo of East Austin residents displayed at exhibit "Seen and Unseen: A Sunday Afternoon in Clarksville" by Hakeem Adewumi, 2017, mounted next door to the room where the "Those Who Stayed" report was discussed. The exhibit focuses on the West Austin neighborhood known as Clarksville, established in the early 1870s by former slave Charles (Griffin) Clark. Adewumi's photo is of three generations of residents: Cecilia Glasco, Salvinia Dukes and Madison Fresch.