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by Lawrence Wright
A user can live in several places, but can only settle in one. You may not notice the difference until you locate the city, town, or rural parcel that sounds like a separate internal arrangement. For much of my life, I’ve been in moving. I grew up in Texas, Abilene and Dallas, but as soon as the door opened I fled barren culture, backward politics, lack of herbal beauty. I met my wife, Roberta, in New Orleans of racism and suffocating conformity in Mobile, Alabama. In our married life we live in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cairo, Egypt; Quitman, Texas; Durham, North Carolina; Nashville; and Atlanta, all sought after places with a lot to recommend. We have traveled all over the world. I spent swaths of my professional life in places you’d expect: New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D. C. , all cities I love, but haven’t chosen to settle in.
Unconsciously, the years we wandered, we were looking for a home. I fostered a conception of an ideal community, one that combined qualities I enjoyed elsewhere: the physical beauty, say, of Atlanta; the joyful music of New Orleans; an intellectual scene fueled by a primary university, such as Cambridge or Durham; a position with healthy energy and simple access to nature, such as Denver or Seattle; A position where we can locate friends without problems and raise children safely. I’m not saying we haven’t been satisfied in any of the places I mentioned, but something prevented us from deeply identifying with them.
In 1980, I joined the editorial staff of Texas Monthly in Austin. The population then was just over 300,000, the length of Lexington, Kentucky today. Thirteen percent of Austin’s citizens were students at the University of Texas; Another five percent were university and staff. The only other significant presence in the city is the state capital. You can park freely on most streets. , for five dollars, you can choose between red meat cutlet and sirloin, accompanied by red beans and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Above the sign on the warning growling “Remember: you came here for the Raw Deal – the Raw Deal didn’t come for you. “
Life in Austin was unconventional, approachable, spontaneous, joyful and cunningly funny, as if we were in a fun secret that the rest of the world ignored. Even then, the position had a reputation for being great, but in my experience, it was just incredibly relaxed, almost to the point of stupor. There was an explanation for why director Richard Linklater titled his 1990 portrait of the city “Slacker. “I was satisfied to be in Austin for a while: I embodied everything I still enjoyed about Texas. —friendship, vitality, social mobility—but he also opposed the pettiness of state politics, even though it was the capital. However, staying stayed violated my desire to keep my distance from Texas. But Roberta said she would never live anywhere else.
“Keep Austin Weird” was the unofficial motto of the town; you’ll have noticed it on bumper stickers, guitar instances, and VW buses, accompanied by another slogan, “Onward Thru the Fog. ” Array This one is harder to explain. In 1967, Gilbert Shelton, the author of the “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” comics, envisioned a character named Oat Willie: a skinny, shirtless guy with a Pinocchio nose, dressed in polka-dot underwear, holding a flaming torch, and been in a bucket. oatmeal on wheels Austin’s stoned counterculture followed the character as their mascot; a popular major store was called Oat Willie’s. An origin story explained the character. Oat, a UT student, was conducting an experiment with oatmeal when he was startled by the news of President Kennedy’s assassination: “Dazed, he did not realize that his hand had touched a control knob that released RADIOACTIVE ELEMENTS into your bucket of oats. ” As Oat Willie climbed into the bucket to pound the oats, RADIOACTIVE ELEMENTS fused his feet to the bottom. There was no cure, so he attached wheels to the bucket, like a primitive Segway. After various adventures, Oat Willie found himself in New York, as fog choked the city. People were trapped. “SAVE ME!” They cried. “WHERE ARE MY HANDS?” Fortunately, the bucket of oats floated and Oat controlled to row to the Statue of Liberty and borrow the torch from him. As he led the New Yorkers to safety, he yelled, “Forward through the fog!” If that makes sense to you, you deserve to have been in Austin back then.
The town was pretty, with cypress-fringed Lady Bird Lake dividing it north and south. A burgeoning literary scene grew out of Texas Monthly, and many work groups packed clubs and bars. There were a handful of tall buildings in the city, most commonly banks. I’m not forgetting the status in the convention hall on the more sensible ground of the tallest twenty-six-story tower, and the hunt in downtown Austin: parking lots, warehouses, and a small advertising district. To the north was the magnificent Capitol, fashioned from pink granite, and beyond it was the University of Texas, whose buildings were made of limestone and Spanish tiles. To the south, across the river, was Travis Heights, the community where we lived at the time and where Roberta taught at a public elementary school. To the west of this was Zilker Park and its sacred bathing spot, Barton Springs. On the east side were communities of color, separated from the rest of the town by I-35, called the Interracial Highway. For all its charms, Austin was plagued by racial divisions that have plagued its character and reputation to this day.
Residents appreciated that Austin felt like a small town. While we suffered a lot of inconvenience, you had to replace the planes if you wanted to pass almost anywhere out of state, it seemed valuable. We watched Dallas and Houston in horror. The mantra was “If we don’t build it, they may not come. “He hoped that Austin, if it grew, would institute height restrictions that would keep the city in human proportions, like Washington or Paris. Who needed skyscrapers in Austin? Everywhere I looked, there was wasteland or little used.
Several months ago, I inducted Joe Ely, the rock troubadour from Texas, into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame. I told how Ely, a Lubbock native, moved to Austin when he was a young guitarist, alternating exhibitions with Stevie Ray Vaughan at a club. called One Knite, where they earned fifteen dollars in tips. Ely had supplemented his source of income in a typical Austin way: as a llama herder in a circus.
After the induction ceremony, Roberta and I spent a night at the W Hotel, next to the Moody Theatre, where “Austin City Limits” is filmed. When Roberta opened the blinds, we had a feeling familiar to all longtime residents: We had no idea where we were. It was even difficult to discern which direction we were facing, because skyscrapers blocked the horizon. Ten structure cranes were visible from this single window. Today, two projects compete for the name of the tallest structure in Texas, one seventy-four stories and the other eighty.
I play in a local band with Ricardo Ainslie, a psychologist and professor at the University of Texas. (Rico plays guitar; I play keyboards. ) He recently told me, “There is a line in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ in which Freud invites the reader to think of Rome not as a geographical area but as a psychic area. We were on the terrace of Julio’s Café, one of our favorite places to have lunch, although we had to protect the food from the quiscales. I think that’s true,” he continued. We have an emotional relationship with cities. We identify with them, not without ambivalence. We may complain about traffic, for example, or service failures, “however, when calamity strikes, we are suddenly aware of the feeling of psychic loss or dislocation. When our peoples go through profound transformations, we are presented with challenges. He added, “No town in America has replaced more than Austin in the last two decades. “
Austin is the fastest developing primary metropolitan domain in the United States, having grown by a third in the last ten years. It is already the 11th largest city. New jobs are absorbing newcomers as fast as they arrive. Every day, the metropolitan domain welcomes 355 new residents, while 238 Austinians leave, many of whom are forced to leave due to high rent and asset taxes, or the disaffection many of we feel at home. . due to the speed of replacement and the loss of qualities that the city had in its day. Austin is now characterized by sweltering traffic and unaffordable restaurants. It was never known as a home for billionaires and celebrities, yet in recent years notable refugees from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and New York have rushed to the city, with other expectations of what Austin deserves and inordinate strength. to shape the city. around your wishes. Locals sneer at the Hermès boutique and Soho House on South Congress, once the city’s hippest street. Evan Smith, one of the founders of the Texas Tribune, told me: “Austin now has an upper class.
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Elon Musk is just one of the billionaires newcomers to Austin. Not long ago, there were two or three; Now I hear there are fourteen. Imagine inviting new neighbors to a pool and they turn out to be elephants. When they start, adjust things.
Of course, such court cases are harbingers of a booming economy, the kind of nuisance many other people in other places would love to have. In any city whose identity is changing, it can be difficult to avoid the feeling that a golden age has slipped away. Newcomers to Austin fall victim to this homesickness almost immediately, and with a lifelong resident like myself, the symptoms can become comically acute. But the feeling is more like watching someone you love turn into someone you never expected. It doesn’t mean you’re not in love anymore, it’s just that complexity has entered the relationship. Austin 40 years ago was like a graduate student with modest tastes and few resources; now he wears jewelry and flies first class. She’s sophisticated, well-traveled, and well-connected, and those things aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just misleading. Nostalgia is a way of remembering when things were more undeniable; it also makes us think that undeniable things can be boring and frustrating. Rather than flee the vapors of memory, I made the decision to rediscover myself with the existing Austin that I live in, a city that is rapidly transforming into the next great American metropolis.
Austin’s long-term was decided in January 1983, when Admiral Bob Inman, recently retired from the Navy and former deputy director of the CIA, was selected to lead a new consortium called the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium. Japan ruled the semiconductor production industry. At the time and had announced an ambitious effort to create computers capable of generating synthetic intelligence. Reagan’s management saw this as a serious threat, and MCC was the answer. Twenty of the largest high-tech companies in the United States, plus Microsoft, Boeing, G. E. and Lockheed, would share their resources to secure long-term U. S. control. The first resolution was where to locate this new entity.
MCC would exist for a decade, and the city selected to host it would inevitably be transformed. Possible predictable options would have been Silicon Valley or the Boston suburbs, but Inman, narrow and succinct, with arched and skeptical eyebrows, proposed an open contest. Fifty-seven communities bid. It’s an advertising auction never noticed in America.
A variety committee of the site comprised of Inman and six CEOs held its first hearing circular. Mayors, governors, university presidents and business leaders joined forces to champion their cause. public education, time, air connections and access to graduate scholars in electrical engineering and computer science. In the first circular, San Antonio made the most productive presentation, led by its charismatic mayor, Henry Cisneros. it was a study university,” Inman told me.
The competition narrowed down to four: San Diego, Austin, Atlanta and Research Triangle. Although Inman graduated from the University of Texas, he liked San Diego, a city he had enjoyed his days in the Navy. The team met on the campus of the University of California. George Deukmejian, governor of California, made the committee wait for twenty minutes, read a speech, and then left. Such atmospheres mattered. ” They would have been much better if he had never shown up,” Inman concluded.
When the team traveled to Austin, Pike Powers, chief of staff to Texas Gov. Mark White, welcomed them for breakfast in the giant atrium of the L. B. J. Library, housed by Mrs. Johnson herself, who “served quail,” Inman recalls. The team was inspired by Austin’s quality of life and affordability. Employees who moved to the domain were promised reduced loan rates. What closed the deal was the university’s commitment to providing reliable talent. science, at a million dollars each. The university then softened its offer by investing thirty-two of those chairs, but the study committee made its decision. “Austin won by leaving,” Inman said. The result was a surprise for both the East Coast and the West Coast. “
It was also a surprise to Austin. Je the set of astonishment and uneasiness that the decision received. At the time, Austin was a liberal entity unique to Texas: “blueberry soup on tomato,” to use the unappealing metaphor that prevailed before each and every one. Every major city in the state turned blue a decade ago. You can argue that if you draw a line between Washington, D. C. and San Francisco, Austin is the most liberal American city south of this border; At the same time, it fueled reactionary resistance to change, especially when expansion was a likely maximum.
As well as M. C. C. completing his research, a first-year pre-med student at U. T. upgrading computers in his bedroom from parts of inventory and obtaining contracts to supply computers to the state of Texas. His so-called Michel Dell. Il retired at the end of his first year, after capitalizing his business on a thousand dollars. His production team, he later recalled, consisted of “three guys with screwdrivers. “In 1992, Dell, the C. E. O. de a Fortune 500 company. He has become Austin’s first billionaire.
Dell reminded me that Austin already has an organization of technology companies. “In the sixties, IBM came here,” he said. In the ’70s, you had Texas Instruments and Motorola. “Founded in Austin, Sematech arrived, some other consortium created to encourage semiconductor manufacturing, which brought with it Robert Noyce, the visionary co-founder of Intel. “It’s like Benjamin Franklin moving to Austin,” Dell told me.
Genuine wealth came to the city, first with the “Dellionaires” who invested in Dell in its early years (thanks to Roberta’s pressing advice, we have modest investors). The capital and the university were no longer the main economic forces of the city. Austin’s cultural appeal wasn’t the only draw for tech giants; Texas has given fabulous tax incentives.
Other towns aspired to such an influx of tech-savvy professionals, but Austinites were ambivalent about the economic upturn. People moved to Austin because of what the town was, but by moving they helped erase that history. Road to apartments and work buildings. Barton Springs, once crystal clear, has become cloudy due to developmental runoff. The valuable capital was shaded through glass towers that reflected the Texas sun, causing sidewalks to crackle. Traffic, crime, and other stressors in major cities have made the old days more excellent than they were.
Each new Austiniter brings a little bit of the culture they left behind. It doesn’t matter how interested the newcomers are, their attitudes, preferences, prejudices, new flavors in the cultural stew. Austin will never taste the same again.
Other Austinites I spoke to had gone through similar searches to find an ideal home. Luke Warford grew up in Rhode Island, then lived in New York, Cincinnati, and London, where he pursued graduate studies in economics. He spent a year in Ethiopia. ” Every extra dollar I made in my twenties, I spent on travel,” he told me, as we sat in an East Austin coffee shop. A thirty-three-year-old marathon runner with dark brown hair and beard wore a baseball cap commemorating the Uvalde massacre. After running on Facebook in Silicon Valley, he put down roots: “I looked to go somewhere where I can have a very big impact, and where there are a lot of opportunities, and a young, active place. The walking and biking trail around Lady Bird Lake, “the most beautiful running spot you can imagine,” convinced him.
Another thing in their resolution policy. ” Texas will be the state with the greatest political importance in the next decade,” he said, and sought to be part of it. Texas, in his assessment, had “thirty million other people ruled by entrenched morons. “Changing that would be a huge undertaking, but Warford likes to solve “big, intractable problems. “He went to work for the Texas Democratic Party, discouraged and ineffective. pronouncing that he was seeking the post of Commissioner of Railways.
For a young person who decided to replace the world, there may not have been a better option. The Railroad Commission, despite its quaint name, has nothing to do with railroads: it regulates oil and fuel in the state. . There is no longer a really large entity in the United States for energy supply. The Texas grid failure in 2021 was a cause for Warford. Wayne Christian, one of the 3 commissioners, was re-elected the following year. Christian is a tea-Republican Party who is inducted into the Texas Gospel Music Hall of Fame. It was supported almost entirely by the industry it nominally regulated. His solution to replacing the weather: “Turn on that damn air conditioner. This turned out to be a winning platform.
Warford was unfazed by his loss. He is convinced that it will help Texas turn blue and that it will replace the United States. Texas rewards risk-taking, he told me, “This is definitely my experience. I mean, I’m a state Democratic candidate for a pretty respectable, high-profile candidate. “workplace 3 years after I moved here.
Eduardo (Eddie) Margain, an investor in real estate and oil and gas, has lived in Austin for fifteen years. He bought iconic downtown buildings, adding the noble Driskill Hotel—”Texas’ premier Los Angeles,” he calls it. He was also an organizing force in bringing professional soccer to Austin in 2021. Until then, the city was the largest Los Angeles city in America without a professional sports team. Margain and I met at the Q2 stadium, where the plos angelesys soccer team is. He is intense and energetic, with a narrow face and light blue eyes, his hands leading the conversation. “We’ve sold out every single game from the beginning,” he told me, as we walked onto the beautiful field. His circle of journalists was born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2008. His stepfather, Alejandro Junco de los Ángeles Vega, owns a media conglomerate whose main asset is the center-right newspaper Reforma. Margain, realizing how violence can grip a country (newspaper offices were burned down and the circle of relo angelestives lived in constant risk), became the head of the Austin Metropolitan Crime Commission. . Austin is still one of the safest cities in the United States, but crime has increased. In the fall of 2020, the city council cut the police budget by a third. He also called off the new cadet lockdowns, and drill resumed, the city being in dire need of officers. There is no visual traffic control, and since 2021, the homicide rate has hit an all-time high. But Margain is not afraid. “If we fix public safety, we’re going to be the most productive town in the world,” he told me.
Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir, the data analytics company, and introduced the investment generation company 8VC, among many other companies, came to Austin from Silicon Valley. “I love Texas,” he told me. There’s this spirit of the Texas border: other strong people who face demanding situations and do it bravely. “It’s the myth I grew up with, but it still has the strength to summon marketers like Lonsdale. He worries that the emerging charge of living in Austin will disenfranchise the other people who made the city so different. “You need to have a lot of hippies because they make music and food better,” he told me. “But you just don’t need them in government. “
After attending Stanford, Lonsdale became an intern at Peter Thiel’s PayPal and met 3 long-time billionaires now living in Austin: Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, and Elon Musk. (Musk claimed to live in a $45,000 space in the lower end of the Texas town of Boca Chica to be close to the launch site for his rocket company, but he has also been seen at friends’ mansions in Austin). Called the “PayPal mob,” they brought with them the disruptive self-image and libertarian politics that characterized their Silicon Valley businesses. Palantir, which was founded in Denver but has offices in Austin, exemplifies the ethical complexity of today’s tech culture. The company has been criticized for allowing the US immigration government to use its complicated software to arrest parents of undocumented children and for collaborating with the N. S. A. to improve the software the firm used to spy on US citizens. But with the pandemic, the government tracked outbreaks by analyzing COVID-19 data with Palantir software, and the company’s algorithms would be used in Ukraine to monitor Russian troop deployments. David Ignatius of The Washington Post described Palantir’s code as “the most complex combat intelligence and control software ever seen in combat. “
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One of the wonderful things about Austin, Lonsdale told me, is its central location, which avoids the need for cross-country flights. I asked if air connections in Austin were good enough for roaming business owners. before,” he said. The nasty answer would be that, of my top twenty or thirty prominent friends who have moved here, they all have planes anyway. “
According to Lonsdale, Austin also gives a common ground in the political sense. He considers himself a “right-wing moderate person” who opposed Donald Trump. opinions, such as when he tweeted about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, that any man who takes six-month paternity leave is a “loser. “He radicalized him as opposed to the “extreme left” policy. The people felt dangerous. Friends complained that their young people were indoctrinated in school about gender politics. “It will have to be so far-fetched,” he said. He felt they lived in a “decadent society that doesn’t work. “
In Ustin, he highlighted the fact that other people who strongly opposed his policies discussed their differences with him in a civilized manner. He told me: “In Francis, when I was confronted with someone, I would say: ‘You are an evil person. So there’s still something very healthy in Texas. I am very hopeful that we can continue to do so.
In 2018, Lonsdale founded the Cicero Institute, a think tank and lobbying organization that promotes deregulation. He is also the president and main funder of an educational startup: the University of Austin, called UATX. It is intended to be an intellectual environment of free movement. , contrary to what Lonsdale considers the “nihilistic, Marxist” inclination of the new academy. Among its early supporters were critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali, playwright David Mamet and journalist Bari Weiss. These opposites would arguably feel less out of place in Austin, which has long navigated a tension between its progressive city government and the radical right-wing policies of the governor and legislature.
I spoke with the founding president of UATX, Pano Kanelos. Former director of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, is a burly and jovial guy with a gray beard. He went to Northwestern, earned a master’s degree in political philosophy and literature from Boston University, a doctorate from the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral degree from Stanford. He is a student from beginning to end; It even has a perfectly ovoid head. But he believes higher education in the United States has gone wrong: It’s incredibly expensive and packed with bureaucrats. Like Lonsdale, he believes liberal ideologues have stifled debate on campuses. free or simply oppositional.
I pointed out to Kanelos that Austin was already well stocked with schools and universities. “I totally disagree,” he said. Every large city has a large public studies establishment and a large personal studies establishment. , we need to be the Stanford of your Berkeley. Me said UATX will host its first elegance in 2024. “The time has come for new establishments,” he said. If you’re going to build a new university today, anywhere in the country, maybe in the world, it’s in Austin. “
My community in Austin, Tarrytown, is named after the upstate New York village where Washington Irving depicted “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. “When Roberta and I moved here in 1995, many of the houses were one-story cabins inhabited by bureaucratic professors, in the middle of a cedar forest. Now there are billionaires. You don’t know who your new neighbors are because traffickers sign confidentiality agreements. I know what you’re thinking, but Tarrytown isn’t as big as River Oaks in Houston or Highland Park in Dallas: street after street of Gatsthroughesque mansions. There are more prominent communities in Austin, but it’s almost unlikely that truly luxurious homes will be won in the city’s feverish real estate market.
The land that has become Tarrytown was subdivided through the heirs of Governor Elisha Pease, who lived on an enforcer estate, built in 1854, called Woodlawn. The space is 8 thousand square feet, on 4 acres amply provided with majestic living oaks. It replaced hands recently, but no one knows who bought it. A white Rolls-Royce was swept through the neighborhood, fueling rumors that it was Beyoncé. York to Houston because of taxes. ” All of Silicon Valley is now in Austin,” he said in 2021. “I have my cowboy hat. “
A friend of mine, a real estate developer, lived about ten blocks from us, in a beautiful Georgian space with an extra lot. Two years ago, actress Emma Stone reportedly bought it. I walk past assets several times a week. absolutely remade in the manner of a Hollywood star. I’m thrilled to have her in the neighborhood and yet Austin drew her here.
Roberta and I got a glimpse of Austin’s long journey when, in 1998, Matthew McConaughey moved into a two-bedroom bungalow across the street. He grew up in Texas, Longview and Uvalde, and planned to attend Southern Methodist University to practice law in Dallas. His brother Pat asked, “Have you been to Austin?You can walk into a bar barefoot and have the sheriff on your right, a local Native American on your left, a hippie on the other side of the sheriff, and a lesbian on the other side of the Native American, and they’ve probably been served through a blue-haired dwarf. All of them will share a beer. And all you have to do is be yourself. . McConaughey went to UT and earned a film degree in 1993.
Five years later, he’s a celebrity who can live anywhere, but can’t wait to return to his sleepy school town, where he had his first big break from filmmaking, in Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused. “When he came to our street, Austin was no longer the position McConaughey remembered. This was highlighted when he was arrested for playing bongos in the middle of the night with the windows open, for being “messy,” said a policeman in my backyard. me, and suspected of possessing a small amount of narcotics. (McConaughey eventually paid fifty dollars for violating a strong statute of limitations. )It wouldn’t even have been commented.
Rather than leave the city, McConaughey appointed himself Austin’s minister of culture, taking music, sports, youth advancement and tourism as his goals, in an effort to maintain the qualities that shaped the city. Austin’s identity. a cinematic elegance at U. T. called Script to screen. On days when he’s in shape, catch him at the football stadium, dressed in the team’s orange and white colors, running on the sidelines as a motivational coach. He is known for arriving at the stadium in a Lincoln decked out with a longhorn hood ornament, driving past cheering enthusiasts as he gives a hook salute. He became the main investor in Austin, participating in the Eddie Margain consortium that took the team to Major League Soccer. McConaughey even helped design the university’s new Moody Center, a stadium that can hold fifteen thousand people. It’s a little unsettling living in a town that’s been taken over by an eccentric actor who once starred in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. Lately, he was laughing when running for political office. Who knows. I think of him as a New Austin mascot, a graceful incarnation of Oat Willie, guiding us through the mist.
I recently told McConaughey about the disorientation I felt when I searched the jumble of skyscrapers outside the W Hotel. “There are a lot of shadows in Austin now,” he said. If a city can maintain a sense of style, keep its DNA, keep its soul, Austin has the ability to do that, because it has an identity. “But he fears that the newcomers will exploit the openness of the city. “in every other position I’ve been,” he said. But we will also have to be wise. You don’t need to leave a tyrant in your kitchen. So when we open our Rolodex and say, “Yes, it happens!”Yes, take this genuine property!”, we will see how it will happen in ten years. »
“Don’t make California my Texas” is a word our governor, Greg Abbott, likes to throw at it. He and California Governor Gavin Newsom resumed an ideological war that, first, heated up under the reigns of their respective predecessors, Rick Perry and Jerry. Brown. Perry had the nerve to run radio classified ads in California to trap corporations into moving to Texas, using as bait the absence of a non-public source of income taxes.
In September, Newsom attended the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. “I like Texas, okay?” He said: “None of this is personal. And I’m pleased to bring Austin back to California. I’m just saying. He recently bought billboards in Austin and other cities whose state legislatures have passed very restrictive abortion laws, declaring, “California is in a position to help. Despite divisions in Texas’ business community, the state’s many right-wing social policies — e-book bans, reckless gun legislation — have yet to make a dent in the immigrant population.
One-tenth of the newcomers to Texas are from California. In recent years, only in Austin’s domain, they have brought Tesla, Oracle and other high-tech companies. The city’s skyline is now explained through Google’s candle-shaped building. Apple recently built a giant campus. Politically and culturally, this historic migration has consequences that we have not yet resolved. The two states are at opposite ends of the national policy shift. In California, the Republican Party collapsed. In Texas, Democrats haven’t won a state election in twenty-eight years, and for the past two decades, Republicans have completely dominated government. The consolidation of party strength in either state has strengthened ideologues on both sides.
I assumed the newcomers would tip Texas blue. He is naïve. Many of them, like Peter Attia, a doctor and podcast host, were Californians fleeing what they saw as bad schools and inept government services. , along with City Council moves like cutting the police budget in 2020. “Those of us who got here from what I call a fault state are warnings, ‘Hey, guys, you don’t need to do that. ‘I’ll show you what it’s like to have needles in your front yard, and what it’s like when you feel uncomfortable walking out of a restaurant. That’s why we left.
The net result of those migrations can make California bluer and Texas redder. Strategist Karl Rove, who, more than anyone else, helped move Texas from an all-blue state to an existing all-red state, told me that a 2022 vote of the newly registered Texas electorate found that fifty-nine percent would vote Republican and 41% would vote Democratic. He presented a warning about the future of Austin. La tech network first stretched from Silicon Valley to Reno, Nevada, with the result that “Reno has younger, more dynamic and more liberal. “
Many California imports identify more as libertarians than progressives or conservatives, reinforcing Austin’s living-and-living atmosphere. Since I arrived here, Austin has been perceived as a liberal stronghold, unlike the conservative state in which it is unearthed. Although the city council remains progressive, Austin’s dominant tone (social tolerance combined with turbocharged capitalism) is closer to libertarianism than liberalism.
Linda Avey, founder of 23andMe, moved to Austin in 2021, from the Bay Area, after falling in love with “the feeling of keeping Austin weird. “, I think that’s why San Francisco attracted me so much in the ’80s. But the bohemian culture that drew him to San Francisco faded away as the tech industry went haywire: “Artists, teachers, firefighters, and all the other people so obligatory to the A network may no longer live there. “San Francisco has been characterized by the presence of rich and homeless people consistent, along with the obvious absence of young people, the city least consistent with the capital of any city in the country.
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Patrick McKenna grew up on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, raised by a single mother who worked as a postman. After attending the University of Southern California on a scholarship and earning a master’s degree in foreign finance at Georgetown, he joined a small tech company funded through Benchmark, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. Benchmark had offices on the mythical Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of Silicon Valley. McKenna was traveling from San Francisco, which wasn’t really considered part of Silicon Valley at the time. The adventure to Mountain View, San Jose and Redwood City exceeded 90 minutes. Google, Facebook and several venture capital firms have opened giant offices in the city. McKenna recalled, “It’s actually the workforce that drove the generation. “And the people were not in a position for that.
The tech sector boosted tax gains in San Francisco, but the boom was marked through massive disparities in profit sources. The locals didn’t see the benefits “or their school isn’t sponsored by a tech entrepreneur program,” McKenna said. “We were so busy building our businesses that we didn’t think of the best local school. “McKenna blames the San Francisco government for not making sufficient investment of the fiscal provision in schools and infrastructure. “In the end,” he said, “entrepreneurs like me were vilified. “
McKenna to try his luck in some other city. Just like Bob Inman had done with M. C. C. , McKenna came up with a list of criteria. The most sensible thing was skill. The tech industry is voracious in its need for professional painters. High-quality schools and universities were essential, not only to nurture the skill pool, but also to increase the vitality of the culture. Quality of life was not just a matter of cost of living; it was art, music, public spaces, architecture, bike paths. McKenna was also looking for a “trusted network. ” The tech industry, he explained, is based on referrals. One way to get in is by painting for a Silicon Valley titan like Google or eBay. “We know they have wonderful education programs,” he said. “We know how they build their code. ” Another way to get in is to get an engineering degree from an illustrious school like Stanford or M. I. T. Then there is the venture capital community. McKenna told me, “If you’ve painted at a startup funded through Sequoia Capital or Kleiner Perkins, and even if that startup fails, you’re part of Trust Netpaintings. “
Austin, he realized, “you have so many netpainting nodes. ” He said, “Kids coming out of UT can enter netpaintings through an assignment on Google, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, or Apple; You can paint for all those corporations here.
McKenna’s view is that “San Francisco failed for success. “He worries that Austin, recently flooded with venture capital, will make similar mistakes: “If Austin avoids being an attractive place for those who make it an attractive place, it will avoid being an attractive place. “. “
Emily Gimble left Austin in 2016. Es part of Texas musical royalty; his grandfather Johnny Gimble played violin with Bob Wills, considered one of the founders of Western swing. Years ago, I had the opportunity to play with Johnny, one of the brilliant moments that music offers. Emily’s father, Dick Gimble, played bass with Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, among others. Emily, a talented pianist and singer, was named Texas State Musician in 2020. It’s the kind of user Austin can’t lose.
Property taxes and rents drove her out of town. But there was another irritating factor: Austin had become too loud. Gimble said: “When you’re on the road, you’re on a bus and it’s purring, or I’m on a plane and it’s purring, and it’s purring on the sound control, there’s noise. I don’t know if it’s a musician’s thing or something human, but every time I pass by the house, I just don’t need to. Listen to anything. So he moved to Lockhart, a small town known for barbecue. It’s about half an hour south of Austin, and it’s quiet, as it was in Austin. Gimble recently had a baby, which makes it harder to drive around town. Pay attention to music, as I occasionally did when I was younger. She said, “Every once in a while, I’ll stop by to see Jimmie Vaughan late at night and it doesn’t matter because you listen to some of the most productive music. “in the world. “
Gimble is part of a larger artistic diaspora that Austin is experiencing. To be sure, the surrounding communities are fertilized through the escaping talents. Gimble has observed a small network of music and art galleries springing up in Lockhart, the character of the city still significantly replaced. Not long ago, he stopped at a coffee shop. ” There was a label on the refrigerator: ‘Don’t do my lockhart,'” he said. “And I was like, ‘This is so ridiculous. ‘ Then, the moment I left, I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my Lockhart. ‘
“I spent my whole life trying to build Austin’s reputation so we can have access to more quality entertainment at an affordable price,” said Wilson, the entrepreneur who created the world headquarters of Armadillo, the place that cemented Austin’s music scene in the seventies. – he told me. ” Now I can’t get a bus to the city center. “
It’s living in a village without Wilson’s fingerprints. Not only is the armadillo gone; Raw Deal, which he also founded, has long been bankrupt. His beloved restaurant, Threadgill’s, has closed, another victim of the pandemic. the weekly musical improvisations that first attracted the attention of the public to a student of the U. T. called Janis Joplin.
The music scene was born in Austin because it was young and cheap. (Wilson first paid five hundred dollars a month to hire the huge arsenal of the former National Guard that housed the Armadillo. )Artifacts from Wilson’s Austin are on display in his home office. : an Autoharp like the one Joplin used; a comic strip by Gilbert Shelton of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers; Jim Franklin’s memorable musical posters, adorned with photographs of the nine-striped armadillo, whom Wilson calls a “hippiedom icon. “Every call in this paragraph was a cultural landmark in Austin in the ’70s and ’80s; now perhaps only Joplin’s resonates, and even then, his arrangement with Austin is an indistinct memory. “Growth is strange,” Wilson said, combining New Austin and Old Austin into a succinct equation.
While Wilson was building a house for the Austin music scene, Louis Black left “to locate America. “Black grew up in New Jersey, lived in New England, then moved to South Carolina and Florida before coming to Austin in 1974. “I fell in love love,” she said. He enrolled in the U. T. , taking English classes, “which I hated”, so he switched to filmmaking. He was restless. Like other shapeshifters in Austin’s story, he was looking to create something, but he wasn’t sure what it would be.
In 1981, Black and his friend Nick Barbaro introduced Austin Chronicle, a progressive tabloid inspired by Village Voice. “We think it would be easy,” Black recalled. It was terrible at first, we didn’t have enough money. “From the beginning, the Chronicle shone light on local music, becoming an essential reference for players and clubs in the city. The role eventually held, leading to an even bigger business. In 1987, Black and Barbaro, along with Chronicle staff member Roland Swenson and band manager Louis Jay Meyers, started South through Southwest, as a gathering place for musicians and others in the industry. “Guys who have been in the music business for fifteen years would never have met a record company executive,” Black observed. The founders expected another 300 people to show up. Twice as much. ” We didn’t know what we were doing,” Black said, but it’s transparent that SXSW, as it’s known, filled a need: “It’s about the punk spirit: there’s no difference between who’s in the audience and who’s in stage, yet a foot and a half.
SXSW has lost that intimate feeling. Now you have the environment without a TED talk venue. That’s partly because SXSW has expanded far beyond music. In 1994, it added films and interactive media, appealing to the generation community. The festival grew so fast that the organizers lied to minimize its scale, unable to do it themselves. Then, in 2007, Twitter hosted a first launch event at SXSW. As Black said, “All of a sudden, everyone started saying, ‘See you in Austin. ‘””
I asked Black how Austin had changed. “There was a significant network here that had a vision of what a city deserves to be,” he said. Austin would be creative, cooperative, non-competitive, ecologically and politically modern. “We succeeded AND created this glorious stall where everyone came, which then destroyed the fundamental idea.
Before moving to Austin, my wife and I had a brief stay here in the early 70’s while she was completing her master’s degree. I worked at the local PBS station as a carpenter and handyman, moving heavy light fixtures around Studio 6A on a tall wheeled ladder. I’m not a big fan of heights and my confidence didn’t boost through what looked like blood stains on the concrete floor. Two years later, Studio 6A became the original “Austin City Limits” home. Willie Nelson played for the pilot, and from then on the country began to consider our town as a musical epicenter. The show has featured Stevie Ray Vaughan, Doug Sahm, Roy Orbison, Lyle Lovett, Asleep at the Wheel, and many other wonderful artists. To draw a crowd in the early days, the exhibit featured loose beer. Laura Bush one of the waitresses. (That was before she married George. ) Now “ACL. ” it is the longest-running music show in television history, with a custom-built concert hall that can seat about 3,000 people.
“At the time, it was a country-inspired showcase,” Terry Lickona, the show’s longtime producer, told me. “The concept was to recreate the atmosphere of Armadillo. ” For a long time, progressive country music ruled the show. “Then we went through an era of ten or fifteen years where we were looking to discover who we were and what kind of music we were looking for to play. We have yet reached the point where our overall philosophy is “anything passes. ” . . . If it’s a smart live stream, then, yes, pass it on.
Lickona arrived in Austin in 1974 from Poughkeepsie, New York, to attend Willie Nelson’s annual 4th of July picnic, as did “A. C. L. It was taking off. ” national artists rather than local musicians. It’s hard to protect the motto that Austin is the “live music capital of the world” when so many small venues have closed. Lickona noted, “It’s been part of our project to continue showcasing Austin’s music. Every year, there are at least 3 or 4 Austin artists that we consider in a position and deserving, whether it’s someone like Black Pumas or Gary Clark, Jr. , or Marcia Ball. It would be a really unhappy day if other people stopped worrying about going out to see a show.
Just when I was feeling discouraged by Austin’s music scene, I spoke with Henri Herbert, a flamboyant young pianist from England, who grew up imitating the tongue strokes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Then he met the masters of boogie-woogie in Austin, such as my teacher, Floyd Domino, and Marcia Ball. “We used to play his songs in one of my bands,” Herbert told me. He conducted at SXSW in 2016: “I met all the wonderful musicians and I noticed the music that lives here. “He had tried his luck in London and Paris, but he had to supplement his source of income through hot dishes. I wanted to be in a place where I could play every day.
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He moved to Austin in 2019. Es exciting and terrifying. ” I just had my keyboard and a backpack,” he said. That year, he was nominated for Best Keyboard at the Austin Music Awards, along with some of his heroes. “Something told me I might just come here, not looking to take things but give things, and I would be part of this beautiful community. “
Gina Chavez is more ambivalent. Born in Austin, she toured the world as a musician, but never discovered her plos angelesce in the city’s musical culture. She calls Austin “a city of legends,” and adds Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan. But his music didn’t resonate with her. ” There is a word in Spanish: Nunca me llos angelesmó los angeles atención. ” It never caught my attention. ” “
The music Chavez plays — Latin, hard-hitting, bilingual, infrequently political, wonderful — would probably be better in Miami, or even San Antonio, down the road. It wasn’t until she played an NPR Tiny Desk concert that Austin the trendsetters seemed to notice her. “If I had the ability to go back twenty years, I would have liked someone to look me in the eye and say, ‘Gina, your tribe probably wouldn’t be here. ‘When she looks at the artists who have controlled leaving the Austin scene, she wonders, “Are any of them female?Are any of them homosexual? She told me, “Here we have a lot of ability to break barriers. But do we have ears to hear them?
In 2020, a twelve-foot mural of Gina made the impression on East Cesar Chavez Street. The artist, Levi Ponce, invited her to take a look. “I’m in shock,” he said. It was right after the global lockdown, so it was one of the only times I went out. Pretty wild. “
“Austin is an incredible position with many glorious attributes, but it’s also a scary position,” Tam Hawkins, the chef at the local black chamber of commerce, told me. scary part. ” Over the past decade, the proportion of black citizens in Austin declined from 8% to 7%, while the proportion of Asians increased. The percentage of Latino citizens also decreased, from thirty-five to thirty-five percent. three %.
Austin’s original sin was the 1928 master plan, which brought black and Latino citizens into Eastside neighborhoods. The city preserved sewer systems and paved the streets of liberated communities on the west side, with lasting consequences. “We did a task called Black Austin’s Taste, about the history of black food entrepreneurs,” Hawkins said. “We found that there were more black-owned restaurants here in 1863 than in 2018. “
Because of gentrification, East Austin is now a melting pot: a position of art studios and food trucks where other people from all walks of life line up for beet toast and tartare. At the same time, much of the character on the east side sacrificed. A watershed moment in this cultural turf war occurred in 2015, when a piñata store unceremoniously razed its owner and repositioned itself through a temporary café for cat lovers. Some lively local traditions, such as weekend gatherings at Fiesta Gardens with lowriders and the rise of trucks, have prompted lawsuits from newcomers who don’t enjoy Tejano music and stereo hip-hop sound.
Hawkins told me that she herself is one of five remaining black owners of advertising assets in East Austin. “There’s nothing sinister about the preference to buy, expand and earn income,” he said. “The ominous thing is that some ethnicities are not part of this process. “Hawkins understands the logic that drives other people to the suburbs: “Why do I spend $1. 6 million on a two-thousand-square-foot space when I can just walk through, say, Leander and pay nine hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for a four-thousand-square-foot space and send my kids to a public school instead of a personal school?”From this point of view, greater and faster transportation to and from the suburbs, easing market tension in the city, would go a long way toward solving Austin’s housing crisis.
Peniel Joseph, a black historian at the U. T. , told me, “The city doesn’t really admit its history of racial segregation. The only spaces where races converge, Joseph said, are sports and music. Otherwise, “things actually diverge in terms of resources and access to education. “He praised the U. T. for introducing various equity initiatives, namely a crusade called You Belong Here, which aims to attract and retain college students and academics of color. But, he said, “you want resources if I’m thinking about how to close the wealth hole, the education hole and the residential segregation hole. “He continued, “How does it have an effect on things like voter suppression or differential remedy in the corrupt justice system?”
Technology staff have replaced the racial character of the city, Joseph said. businessmen, lawyers, doctors, teachers,” he said. But those other people remain in Houston. “
I observed, “And the biggest driving force behind the expansion in Austin is a notoriously white Asian industry. “
“This is a recipe for a black cultural disaster,” Joseph said.
The east-west divide in Austin stood out in last year’s mayoral race. Kirk Watson is a white liberal Democrat who served as mayor from 1997 to 2001, then spent 13 years in the state Senate. Watson’s opponent, Celia Israel, who called herself a “dedicated liberal lesbian Latino left. “She served in the House of Representatives from 2014 to 2023, where she was a founding member of the L. G. B. T. Q. Caucus and a standard-bearer on the left flank of the Democrats. The candidates’ platforms were similar, but their identities were not. West Austin solidly for Watson, who elected independents and conservatives. East Austin equally resolutely progressive. Only nine hundred and forty-two votes brought Watson to the top. The difference between his supporters is not so much ethnic as generational.
Watson told me that many of the upheavals Austin has been facing lately were already evident in his first term as mayor; He cited transportation and affordable housing. What it has replaced is scale. ” Now we are a big city,” he said. will have to act accordingly. “
I drove down the west side of Austin with Laura Gottesman, a real estate agent. “I’ve worked with a lot of other people from other cities who used to do business our way,” he told me, adding, “For Austin, his word is your bond, a handshake is the genuine deal. It’s a small town in the sense that we all know each other, our paths will cross and you won’t burn bridges.
We toured Clarksville, one of the freedman communities that was exhausted through the master plan and is now almost entirely white. When Roberta and I first moved to Austin, Clarksville was a hippie enclave, yet it has long since switched from patchouli and tie-dye T-shirts. T-shirts. ” The value of feet in this community is outrageous,” Gottesman said.
John Mackey lived in Clarksville. Coming from the counterculture of the 70s, he was a vegetarian with long hair and a beard who thought business was a bad thing. In 1978, he and his girlfriend, Renee Lawson, opened a small grocery store to keep fit. Safer Way, which refused to inventory meat, seafood, coffee, and anything containing very subtle sugars. It was a fiasco. Two years later, it merged with another health food store in Clarksville, creating the first Whole Foods Market. This time, he was less doctrinaire about what he wouldn’t sell.
Then came the Memorial Day flood of 1981. Anyone in Austin that day will tell you stories. We were in the h8 of Travis H8, but the rain was so incessant that it collapsed part of our roof, which spilled on our piano. Eleven inches fell in 3 hours. Thirteen other people died. Whole Foods at the back of a hill on North Lamar Boulevard. Back then, car dealerships covered the street, and when the downpour subsided, locals were left with the dazzling sight of Volkswagen and Subarus tangled in the trees. Foods, who had no flood insurance, 8 feet underwater.
This would have been the end of the story without the consumers and neighbors who showed up with mops and rags, cleaning up the destroyed inventory. This continued for weeks. The staff worked for free. Suppliers produced goods on credit. A month later, Whole Foods reopened. Mackey learned that his business would never have survived if he hadn’t discovered his position at the center of the community. It’s a well-known parable in Austin, but it also marks a transition from counterculture to what Mackey calls “conscious capitalism. “A formula in which, according to him, heroic marketers (like him) improve the quality of life of everyone with their imagination, creativity and passion.
Many prosperous newcomers to Austin share this philosophy. “I have problems with the law,” Gottesman said. I have difficulties with other people who come here before writing their own rules. In Austin, no one cares who you are, but you’ll have a good reputation if you contribute.
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If you live in a place long enough, it becomes haunted by ghosts: memories of long-dead occasions and friends still inhabiting spaces that have been leveled and blanketed by unstoppable novelty. It is a form of double vision: you see things that no longer exist. It was on my brain as we drove a few blocks south to Baylor Street, where a handful of mansions built by the old aristocracy, places where Clarksville’s black servants would have worked, were magnificently renovated. The late Bill Wittliff, who was a dear friend, had a place of business in an old space on Baylor Street. Best known as the screen editor on “The Perfect Storm” and the television adaptation of “Lonesome Dove,” he was a giant of the Austin film scene and a mentor to young screen editors and managers. His workplace was where a long-suffering publisher named William Sydney Porter is said to have lived. Porter had a daily assignment as a teller at the First National Bank, and in 1894 he was accused of embezzling $854. 08, which led to a five-year criminal sentence. Behind bars, he made the decision to take the pen name O. Henry and wrote some of the most enduring short stories in the American canon.
Speaking of ghosts, I recently went to a medical clinic on Cameron Road and quickly learned that I had been there before. Long one of old Austin’s strangest strongholds: the seat of American atheists, founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who came to prominence as a plaintiff in the 1963 Supreme Court case that ended mandatory prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Life called her “America’s Most Hated Woman,” a call she enjoyed. Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” overturned bingo tables in a church and sued the pope. , arrogant and pompous, and almost single-handedly gave atheism a worse call than ever.
When I arrived at the venue for our first interview, I was told, “Madalyn is napping. Need to check it out? My advisor took me to O’Hair’s office. Through a window, a dozen fans looked at the “first girl”. of atheism” I sleep on a sofa, wearing a floral dress. “It’s a bit like Lenin’s grave,” my consultant said, echoing my thoughts. Monopoly of data through the mail.
When I wrote about O’Hair, his public life had been reduced to a weekly showing on Austin’s public access channel, hosted by his son and granddaughter. Atheism was a matter of a circle of relatives. When I got here through a recording, she looked at me sadly and said, “You’re actually harassing us, right?”and achievements
After the article was published, there was a knock on our door. An officer handed me a document that said, “YOU HAVE BEEN PROSECUTED. It was already in the news. They called friends. They were sadly dizzy. A Jungian scholar congratulated me to say that O’Hair was an eruption of my unconscious. The local newspaper called it a defamation lawsuit, but the genuine claim was that he had used O’Hair’s “celebrity” without permission: a line of attack for a loose speech champion. She never acted and the case was removed from the list. In 1995, O’Hair, his son and granddaughter disappeared and several hundred thousand dollars were withdrawn from one of the organization’s accounts. Five years later, their dismembered bodies were found. in a shallow grave on a South Texas ranch (I had nothing to do with it).
Austin’s public access television also provided an early forum for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who once carved a pumpkin lantern into the air while declaiming the infrared cameras of Austin police officers. Listening to Jones is like listening to Tony Soprano recite “Finnegans Wake” with amphetamines. When Linklater directed “Waking Life,” he introduced Jones as a livid madman driving into town with a public address system, an unintended harbinger of things to come. At the time, Jones looked like another innocent Austin nut with a colorful ability to invent fly conspiracies, “that hyperactive guy we all laughed at,” Linklater recalls.
I once talked about Jones with podcaster Joe Rogan, but another import from California. In 2020, he moved to Austin from Los Angeles and purchased lakeside property. The following year, he invited me to his program. Rogan is five feet 8 inches tall, but his shoulders are as broad as they are tall. He is incredibly muscular and tattooed, but despite his formidable physical presentation, he is friendly and fun. The joy of being on your podcast is like having a curious user pulling a bar stool next to you; Three hours later, you downloaded your life story.
Before the interview, we had our nostrils sealed for a mandatory COVID check, which is interesting, given that Rogan had been heavily criticized for giving vaccine skeptics airtime. I argued that I saw an interview that he did with Alex Jones.
“What do you know about him?” Asked.
“I think he’s a sociopath. “
“It’s not,” Rogan said. I’m a caged fighter. I’ve met a lot of guys with head injuries. He asked Jones if he had ever had a serious concussion. Jones replied, “I hit,” meaning he knocked him down and his head stuck in the concrete. He is 13 or fourteen years old. Rogan had pressed him on how he might have replaced his personality, but Jones was evasive. Jones said, “I had brain damage, there’s no doubt about that. “
Is Jones’ story true or anything else that has confused in his mind?I met him in a component fifteen years ago. I had never heard of it. My Sept. 11 ebook, “The Looming Tower,” came out recently, and Jones sought to present his own theories about what a setup job looked like. He subsidized when it became transparent that he knew much more about the tragedy than he did, yet after that, conspirators calling themselves September 11 Truthers began appearing in my speeches, seeking to get me to admit that the government knew the attack. They even hinted that I was part of the conspiracy. Much of his dogma comes directly from Alex Jones’ broken imagination.
Across the city, new apartments, condos and homes are under construction, but Austin can’t keep up with the boom. The university purchased homes for subsidized college housing, such as N. Y. U. made in Manhattan, because teacher costs were excluded from the market. Students, meanwhile, have been stranded due to rent increases and a shortage of housing on campus. end up on the streets.
In 2019, the resolutely progressive city council to “decriminalize homelessness” by lifting the ban on camping in public places. The architect of the plan, City Councilman Greg Casar, a Democrat who had led police investment, is now a thirty-three-year congressman. Representing the East Side—he has been accused across the conflicting parties of seeking to make homelessness “more visible. “Tent villages immediately sprang up under roads and in public parks.
I love running around Lady Bird Lake, and its shoreline is blocked by tents, tarpaulins, and cardboard huts. While it was an ideal camping spot, runners reported being assaulted by others perceived as mentally unstable. In 2020, the city reduced park patrols and massive piles of trash piled along the shore and spilled into the lake.
Austinites were shocked and conflicted. A bipartisan pac, Save Austin Now, won a poll measure to reinstate the camping ban. He went through a landslide. But the question remains: where do the homeless go? It was a harrowing dilemma, especially after the pandemic broke out. Governor Abbott ordered the Department of Transportation to close the campgrounds under the overpasses, but that only brought more tents and cardboard shelters in parks and on sidewalks. Rebel campers pitched tents around City Hall. Councilwoman Mackenzie Kelly tweeted: “I was harassed and yelled at with obscenities as I was leaving City Hall. One of the men had a steel pipe and at least one knife. I do not feel safe. Eventually, the police began to enforce the ban, and the campers returned to the park’s woods and undeveloped land where they once lived. But the challenge of homelessness persisted, accompanied by much ill will. Austin had been embroiled in the same political war that has raged for decades in San Francisco, with no meaningful solutions. In Austin, the factor gave life to a conservative constituency that few knew had a presence in the city.
I remembered a protest in 1988 when the city tried to enforce a camping ban. A homeless organization “kidnapped” a little goose named Homer (in fact, they had bought it at a country store, for $16. 87) and threatened to eat it if the town didn’t propose various reforms, adding housing measures affordable. Roger Swanner, one of the oienappers, told the Austin American Statesman: “We just need to make the other people in this town realize that we are human beings and we deserve to be treated that way. ” he lowered a Styrofoam barge into the lake, complete with a makeshift cabin. He reminded me of Huck Finn and Jim floating down the Mississippi. Homer the Goose has become a celebrity. He met Willie Nelson. He led parades on Avenida Congreso. He was arrested a protest against housing. The council finally agreed to meet with the homeless delegation, with little success. In 2004, a large shelter was opened in the city, but it had about a hundred beds, far fewer than needed. Homer ended his days at an animal shelter, but managed to make homelessness a factor in typical Austin fashion. The city’s politics weren’t quite as brutal back then, but they were just as irresponsible when it came to homelessness.
Texas, the first state to pass a law, based on a style bill issued through Joe Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute, that makes camping in public a Class C felony, punishable by a five-hundred-dollar fine, and prohibits the state budget from going to any city that fails to enforce the ban. It is designed to keep other homeless people out of public view.
In 1998, Alan Graham, a former real estate developer, approached the problem as an act of Christian charity. Two years earlier, he had attended a Catholic men’s retreat and was encouraged to create Mobile Loaves.
Graham showed me Community First! Village through the golf cart. “We’re focusing exclusively on chronic homelessness,” he told me. To be eligible for residency, a user must have been on the street for at least one year; The average time is ten years. Residents live in manufactured spaces, RVs or small spaces, one-bedroom spaces with no kitchen or bathroom. (Shared services are provided. ) Graham’s creation has become one of the most important social innovations in the country. He and his wife live in the middle of town, in a prefabricated space with an adjacent porch and trinkets in front: an old Coca-Cola sign, a rusty wagon wheel, the edge of a Stutz Bearcat hubcap.
Graham, sixty-seven, has a red face, glasses, a smiling smile, and a gleaming white beard. He wears a silver cross of St. Damian, which he bought on a pilgrimage to Assisi, and a blue gimme cap that pronounces kindness. He studied physics at the U. S. T. before dropping out to become a real estate developer and a “serial entrepreneur. “He saw his business crushed by the 1986 oil crisis, which destroyed real estate in Texas.
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Graham passed me a comic strip he had made with the caption “Homelessness exists at the intersection of many damaged systems and layers of trauma. “These come with foster care, intellectual fitness issues, substance abuse and corrupt justice, but the main direction — the “homeless interstate highway,” Graham explained — is a “catastrophic cycle of loss of family members. “Community first! Village aims to update those damaged circles of family ties with a benevolent social structure.
We pass through a green space where, Graham explains, plants are fertilized with “fish droppings” from a nearby aquarium. An outdoor lawn had a pavilion in the center. We will grow next year,” he said. We seek to create the world’s largest exhibit here!”An amphitheater, built on a budget donated through Alamo Draftspace, a chain of movie theaters founded in Austin, is used for movies, skill displays and karaoke.
Graham has a knack for recruiting Austinites to help him in his endeavors. Small spaces, for example, were designed and built through local architects and contractors. The land was donated through benefactors. The progression now occupies fifty-one acres, but will have tripled in length by the end of 2023: It plans to build enough homes to house fourteen hundred more people, allowing it to accommodate nearly two-thirds of Austin’s chronically homeless population. It is the result of an individual’s mind’s eye and perseverance, as well as citizens who see that effort makes a difference. “We launched a hundred-and-fifty million dollar fundraising crusade,” Graham said. He gathered one hundred and thirty-six. “
Residents pay rent, averaging $300 a month. Graham noted that “70 to 80 percent get some form of government assistance” (Social Security, disability, retirement income, veterans) and that there are paid jobs available in town besides gardening. , cleaning and concierge services. He took me to an “entrepreneurial center,” where several citizens assembled jewelry designed through Kendra Scott, an Austin businesswoman listed by Forbes as one of the richest women in America. The network recently developed its own line of jewelry for an Austin hotel.
“We have several drug addicts and alcoholics,” Graham said. He doesn’t try to reform them, but helps keep tabs on other people looking to “play the system” by stealing or pushing drugs, for example. example. At most, everyone has intellectual or physical problems. “The average age here is fifty-six, and the average age of death is fifty-nine,” Graham said. “We had a man who died this morning. “The village has a memorial garden, where the ashes of those who died are placed on a funerary column, with their names inscribed in granite. A wonderful concern among many who live on the streets is that they will die in anonymity, without being surprised and without sorrow. Nearly 300 other people died on the streets of Austin in 2022.
“The concept around Community First! is that if you need to mitigate this homeless pandemic, the total network will have to get involved,” Graham said. “Government only plays a subsidiary role, and it’s a style that has failed.
In 1876, the state charter set an aspect of one million acres of public land in a university formula. A parcel of land in West Texas was selected and eventually grew to a few million acres. It’s not as noble as it sounds; the land was considered so insignificant that no one bothered to inspect it. An oilman named Frank T. Pickrell arrives who, in the early 1920s, makes the decision to drill a well on this land. At that time, the oil domain was located entirely on the eastern side of the state. Pickrell chose the site not because of a geologist’s report, but because it was close to the railroad. He traveled to New York to reassure investors, adding an organization of Catholic women who had taken the plunge. Pickrell was presented with a red rose that had been blessed by a priest and ordered to climb the derrick and scatter the petals while they christened the well Saint Rita, the patron saint of unlikely causes. He did as they suggested. The well tapped into the Permian Basin, the largest box of oil in US history. “He replaced everything,” said J. B. Milliken, U. T. Chancellor. formula, he told me. The formula now has the largest public university endowment in the country: sixty-six billion dollars. Santa Rita’s Number 1 Platform is situated on the edge of the Austin campus, near the football stadium.
Milliken likes to quote Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s expired recipe for building a wonderful city: “Create a wonderful university and wait two hundred years. , M. I. T. , and Harvard. UTAH. has another term. ” Public universities exist to serve other people in the state, so they tend to look more outward and incorporate more into each and every component of the community,” Milliken said. “U. T. -Austin has a strategic plan to be the most influential university in the world. “
Michael Dell echoed that. ” If you find big companies, I assure you there’s a great university nearby,” he said. I observed that it came from a guy who had dropped out of UT after two semesters. “You’re probably right,” he admitted. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot of talented people. And they are the obligatory element for success. Dell, who is fifty-seven years old, has his forehead without eyebrows and the smile in a position of a guy who sees a transparent path in front of him. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranks him as the twenty-fifth richest man in the world. His parents had sought him out to become a doctor; instead, in Austin, he helped fund Dell Children’s Medical Center, the Dell Children’s Research Institute and Dell School of Medicine.
I asked him if he intended to stay in Austin when he dropped out of school. “I didn’t even have the idea, not even for a single nanosecond, to go somewhere else,” he said, though he didn’t exactly have compatibility with the city at the time. “I used to ride motorcycles at Whole Foods,” he said. That’s as far as I had come with Austin’s counterculture. “I didn’t smoke joints at Hippie Hollow,” a lakeside park where clothing is optional. “- drew a square in the air.
I expressed my fear about the rate of expansion that is driving the city to God knows what. Dell reminded me that in each of the 4 decades he has lived in Austin, the city has grown exponentially. He agrees with that, “a tendency to be more of a pro-change guy,” she said. “That’s what we do in the tech world. “He smiled. ” If you’re not comfortable with it, you’re going to have a hard time. “”
Elon Musk has made Austin the centerpiece of his new Texas empire. In addition to the Texas Gigafactory, which would be the world’s largest construction by volume, after Boeing’s plant in Everett, Washington, Musk’s other businesses in and around Austin come with Boring Tunneling Company; Neuralink, which runs on a computer-brain interface; and SpaceX, which seeks to colonize Mars. These are massive additions to the economics of Austin’s domain.
I was concerned about the influence of wealth and generation in Austin taking away the weirdness, however as I learned more about Musk’s presence in the city, I knew that weirdness had really taken a giant step forward. Musk has nine living children (one of whom died in infancy) and a real estate agent told me that he moved them to Austin. (When Musk won an email about this and living with a friend in the city, he responded with two crying and laughing emojis. ) In 2018, Musk and Canadian songwriter Grimes, whose music was described in this magazine, via my colleague Kelefa Sanneh, as “relentlessly weird yet emphatically pop,” began dating. They had a boy, X Æ A-12, and a girl, Exa Dark Sideræl. Shortly after her daughter was born, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had hurt each other. Then he reportedly tangled up with another new Austinian, Chelsea Manning, the newly released trans whistleblower and activist of seven years in an army prison. The relationship reportedly ended within a few months. Grimes pleaded with his “fellow Texans” to sign a petition to relax building regulations to prevent Austin from adapting to another San Francisco. She tweeted: “I couldn’t buy a proper home for my little boys in Austin (yet) without their dad’s help which is insane. “
Last year’s Thanksgiving weekend, I headed to the Circuit of the Americas, Austin’s decade-old Formula 1 track, to meet two crypto brothers who had a brilliant concept to bring attention to their business. They ordered a giant statue of Musk’s head, attached to the structure of a goat (for “the largest ever seen”) clinging to a rocket that could actually shoot flames. The statue cost six hundred thousand dollars to make. The brothers loaded their shiny steel art onto a platform trailer, like a parade float and I drove it to Austin, hoping to provide it as a tribute to Musk and be rewarded with his embrace. It was a “kamikaze mission,” Ashley Sansalone, one of the project’s masterminds, told me. He described Musk as “the ultimate applicable user in the world. “
It was a cloudy autumn day. You may only hear the groan of race cars shifting gears. I estimated that about sixty more people were sitting, eating hot dogs at picnic tables, waiting for the organizers to make a decision when a smart organization had gathered. A woman was filming the occasion for her YouTube channel. Just as the light began to fade, the trailer with the giant statue moved towards the edge of the parking lot and other people in the crowd got into their cars. Two yellow buses squeezed the trailer. I only saw one Tesla in the procession, which was most commonly F-150s and Mustangs. After a few false starts, the procession headed to Route 130 for the nine-mile adventure to the Gigafactory. Of course, there was no chance Musk would wait for them. I was busy dismantling Twitter.
Musk’s steel head crowned what looked like an Egyptian sarcophagus. We went through old farmland that was no longer cultivated while its owners waited for developers to appear, with their giant machines, to build more houses, followed by grocery shopping, shopping malls, schools and fast food restaurants. In this prevailing interim, the winter yellow meadow looked bare. A flock of starlings swirled like a black tornado and settled into the undergrowth. Many cars in front had their danger lights flashing. I imagined that approaching drivers would wonder if we were part of a funeral procession for a beloved community member.
In the distance, Austin’s horizon, vast and cold, depressingly homogeneous in silver light. I noticed it when the sun hits it right and the reflective surfaces catch fire. It’s beautiful then, but it’s not the city I imagined it would become. I used to know the position very well, but every day it becomes more unknowable and limitless, and I feel more like a resident than a citizen. But it’s still part of my psyche. This is home.
We filmed on Tesla Road, which was covered in newly planted trees and piles of debris. One day, Musk promised, he will turn the 2100-acre land into an “ecological paradise. “We pass cautionary signs, “you must have a Tesla ID. “”Then we saw the Gigafactory: sleek, flat-roofed, endless, signaling Austin’s long career as a megacity. We arrived at the door, where the guards had erected a barricade very well. One by one, we returned to the road, where each took their own path. ♦
An earlier edition of this article incorrectly described the designation of land for the status quo of the Texas university system.
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