Ep. 3 – Gentrification, Racial Justice, and Changing Demographics in Austin, Texas: A Conversation with Dr. Eric Tang

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to Race in Democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice, and citizenship.

[0:00:21 Peniel] On today’s podcast, we’re pleased to be joined by Eric Tang, one of my colleagues here at University of Texas at Austin, who is the director of the Center for Asian American Studies and associate professor and associate chair of African and African Diaspora Studies.

[0:00:38 Eric] Thanks for having me,

[0:00:39 Peniel] Eric. This is a week after the election, the midterm election. We’ve talked about on this show, the national implications of what just happened. I want to drill down and really have a Texas focused episode one. What is the BlueWave mean for the state of Texas? The city of Austin, but Houston and other places. But when we think about Austin right here and racial justice, I want to have a conversation about racial equality here in this city because this city is a booming city. But your work has really shown us that there’s a huge population decline among African Americans in this city and away. As Austin is getting richer, it’s getting more and more racially segregated.

[0:01:21 Eric] Yes, that is the not so great news about Austin, Texas. This progressive oasis within a ah, very conservative state what some have called the the blue oasis within the red state. So despite its progressive reputation, it’s kind of outlier status politically within a very conservative state. The truth is that Austin is also the most economically segregated metro area in not only Texas but the United States.

[0:01:57 Peniel] Wow

[0:01:58 Eric] What that means is that in Austin, you are more likely, excuse me, less likely compared to any other metro area in the United States, you’re to live next to somebody of a different class background than you. And this should concern all of us because metropolitan areas cities are meant to function as sites of economic heterogeneity, as sites of social mobility. And what that means is that in order to be socially mobile, you have to be around people of different class backgrounds, right? This is the classic narrative of the city, but in a city like Austin, you were the least likely to live next to somebody over different class background, and that in the end yields less social mobility for all.

[0:02:47 Peniel] And why is that you’ve written the report for the Institute for Urban Research and Policy Planning here about out liars and sort of gentrification, the history of Austin, the East Side, especially where we see a lot of gentrification over the last 10 15 years. What’s the history behind this city being so racially and economically stratified?

[0:03:10 Eric] So this city has a history of racial segregation and that racial segregation was rather statutory against African Americans. In other words, it was a Jim Crow City, and in 1928 the city of Austin created a so-called Negro district in which it moved the majority of African Americans who once lived all over the city into this one quadrant.

[0:03:36 Peniel] That Negro District discount. Whoa!

[0:03:39 Eric] Yeah, well, that’s what they called it in their documents. We’re going to create this Negro district to deal with the quote unquote segregation problem. And you know whose problem was this? So this is the problem of white people who did not want to live next to African Americans as the city grew, and African Americans were living in pockets all over central and West Austin. So what they did was, they said, OK, the city leaders, that is, if you’re African American and you want to avail yourself of a public education. Or if your Children want a public education, you have to move to this part of town because here and lives the only school that your Children are allowed to attend. Because, mind you, this is prior to 1954 and Brown versus Board of Ed, where all black schools were not only permitted, but that was the law.

[0:04:32 Peniel] So there was an incentive to move to the East Side.

[0:04:35 Eric] There was an incentive to move to the east side, but really was compelling people to move to the East side. In addition to that, they said, if you continue to live in your communities in west and central Austin, we won’t modernize those areas. We won’t run utilities. We won’t give you water meters. But if you move to the east side to the S so called Negro District, we will eventually. That didn’t happen for decades, but eventually that did happen. So all of us compelled. About 80% of this population is black population moved to the east side, whereas once they lived all over now fast forward. Several decades to the 19 nineties, that area just east of downtown becomes a prime site for gentrifiers because it’s so close to the downtown central business district. In other words, the people who designed this 1928 plan to segregate African Americans never envisioned that one day this area would become prime real estate for a new gentrifying class. So it’s the convergence of old school Jim Crow racism and new school neo-liberal gentrification converging on this one community that led to the rapid displacement of one particular racial group in Austin. And that group, of course, is African Americans.

[0:05:50 Peniel] I wanted to break down Eric, what you just said in terms of neo liberal and define that for our listeners because that’s a word that I hear a lot. And certainly I think of it as sort of public funds being redistributed towards private and at times, you know, wealthy institutions and corporations. But what do you mean by neo liberal?

[0:06:09 Eric] What I mean by that is the way in which the market, the private enterprise, is allowed to dictate so much of social policy. And so the kinds of hands off approach that the government will take towards issues of housing

[0:06:31 Peniel] working in the city, like always in a city like Progressive City,

[0:06:34 Eric] right, allowing, for instance, affordable housing, housing that’s designated for lower income people to be managed by the dictates of the market. Allowing neighborhoods to revitalize based on private investments alone as opposed to public interventions to remedy and redress past inequalities is what I mean by neo liberal.

[0:07:00 Peniel] And so when we think about Austin, I think Austin in the last 10 15 years in terms of cities with population growth, is the only city where we’ve seen a decline in African American population. So what can be done? What’s what are some strategies when you think about, um, you know your work here and what social movements, community organizing anti racist movements, whether they trying to do right here in the city of Austin And then I want to bring it back out to to Texas and this latest midterm election. Is there any good news in terms of trying to really adjust these inequities?

[0:07:36 Eric] So a city like Austin ah is experiencing the gentrification effect in a number of different communities. What I’ve pointed out in my researches, how the African American population, owing to the history of segregation, were hit first and hit hardest by this trend, which again is a trend impacting all of all, Austin. Like no race, no racial group is immune to what’s happening in terms of the gentrification effect. I would say that what happened African Americans was really the belt was a bellwether for what’s coming to a lot of neighborhoods in Austin and the remedy. The redress of action begins with a robust, affordable housing program. In a city like Austin, we tend to forget that the middle class in the United States was largely designed by government intervention.

[0:08:36 Peniel] Absolutely. The New Deal.

[0:08:37 Eric] The New Deal making home ownership easier for working class people, particularly white working-class Americans, absolutely, and so public moneys went into the creation of a stable middle class. And that’s stable middle classes is provides for that economic heterogeneity that I spoke of at the outset. Today. We think that somehow public intervention of that sort is, um, not only anachronistic, but somehow wrong and wasteful.

[0:09:12 Peniel] Well, and we say it’s Socialists, right?

[0:09:14 Eric] Yeah, it’s socially say it’s Socialists with the capitals as if it’s an expletive.

[0:09:20 Peniel] Now, when we think about what’s going on in Austin right now, in 2018. We’ve got a mayor who’s considered a progressive. We’ve got a city Council that is progressive. How can we get that affordable plan and how robust should that affordable housing Plan B? Because certainly right now, politically, there are people who are talking about housing for all. Scholar Matthew Desmond has the best seller Evicted won a Pulitzer Prize for that, looking at Milwaukee and housing and making an argument that housing is the number one civil rights issue of our time. You don’t work in reporting on those who stayed and were left behind in these gentrifying neighborhoods in Austin and how they’ve had to fight for resources and access to schools and all these different things. So how can we turn this idea of affordable housing into something that is really the civil rights issue of our time, but something with real policy heft right here in the local community?

[0:10:15 Eric] That’s a great question, and my answer to that is that we need to go big or go home.

[0:10:21 Eric] And what I mean by that is, I don’t think it’s enough to do private public partnerships with developers to carve out, say, 10% affordable housing for people who make 80% or higher of the medium family income. Right? I think, in order to get to the deep affordability crisis that we’re talking about in Austin and that is that, you know, 50% or below medium family income, the people who make that amount, you need to have a strong public program that begins with a public fund for affordable housing, and that public fund can be capitalized in a number of different ways. Bonds. It could be capitalized through the existing land that cities like Austin own. It could take the form of community land trusts. And then once you’ve created this affordable housing which stays affordable in perpetuity because the public sector is in many ways monitoring it, you have to make sure it goes to the families that need it most. So that’s just scratching the surface. And I think that this is not just, you know, good for cities when it comes to reasserting that economic hydrogenated that we’re talking about. But it’s also good foresees because it makes them sustainable for the long haul,

[0:11:42 Eric] meaning if you want cities to continue to function as they historically have, then you need to provide adequate housing stock for the people who actually work in this city. You can’t have people coming in from, you know, 30 miles east of the city limits in order to work in A said, You can’t have teachers who work for the Austin Independent School District who can’t afford to live in the very city that they teach in.

[0:12:08 Peniel] Now, when you think about public funding for affordable housing, I never see that in terms of Bond has a bond measure, and that’s something that we’re voting on. How do we make that happen? Is it enough community support? Is it enough signatures, or is it pressure of the City Council? How do we get a bond measure that says we want affordable housing? And we’re gonna put this much money towards affordable housing, even if it includes increase in taxes? Because I know this past election, I voted on bond measures for parks and recreation and all kinds of things that I know gonna increased property taxes. But I thought it was the right thing to do for the whole city.

[0:12:42 Eric] It is the right thing to do, and the good news is there was a measure, Proposition A, which looked at right affordable housing. Andi had Bonds as a key

[0:12:51 Peniel] to do that passed.

[0:12:52 Eric] It did OK, but the thing that we need Teoh keep in mind is that these can’t be one off activities. We should find ways to capitalize the construction and maintenance of affordable housing by linking it to the housing glut that we see in Austin in general. So like the extent to which developers who build in Austin will see a social responsibility to also create affordable housing again, not as some kind of sweet deal where, like they get all these tax breaks and other breaks for carving out a studio apartment that honestly goes to my graduate student, not to like a family of four.

[0:13:36 Peniel] And that’s the neo liberal, market driven notion of affordable housing that we’ve gotten to. Because the United States federal government stopped building affordable housing in the early 19 seventies, the Great Society on the New Deal was still building public housing and affordable housing. We’ve gotten out of that business and we’ve given it when we think about capitalism and market imperatives to private developers that we incentivize Annette that includes hut right. The Housing and Urban Development Office really is a market based notion of affordable housing.

[0:14:07 Eric] And there’s no evidence to suggest that this is really making the kind of dent that we needed to make in terms of the precarious condition that we find that so many families find themselves in, Right. So this isn’t just me, like engaging in some kind of name calling like, you know, neo liberal, public private partnerships, you know, and like saying it with some disdain I’m not. It’s ah, like name calling. What I’m into is concrete evidence to show me that these partnerships have actually worked to deal with deep affordability issues in cities like Austin.

[0:14:40 Peniel] All right, I want to talk about Texas and the midterms. And what are the midterms, perhaps reveal about the direction Texas is headed into where we could have this public policy agenda. And right now I’m not even thinking the federal government, I mean statewide and citywide that would go big or go home with housing, desegregation of public schools and neighborhoods, all these social justice issues that are very, very impactful in terms of race and democracy. What do you think in terms of this Beto effect? We see Harrison County has a new executive judge, 27 year old Lena Hidalgo. So many Latinas and blacks and progressives got elected really across the state, but Countywide not just in Austin but in Houston as well. And the biggest counties in Texas all voted for Beto. He lost by 213,000 votes in the Senate race against Ted Cruz. But when you think about cities cities, the major engine of Texas is economic development, even though we have oil and gas in West Texas. But cities voted for a progressive agenda,

[0:15:46 Eric] absolutely. And I think you know the, um kind of razor thin margin that characterizes Beddoes loss in this election tracks with the demographic changes in Texas is major cities. Yes, so it makes sense. At the same time, I think the campaign he ran did go big. It didn’t try to soft pedal issues of universal health care issues of economic inequality, so on and so forth. And to me, it was heartening to see how well he did, because it shows us that there is a lot of room for the things that we’re talking about by way of public intervention in the state of Texas, which for so long has characterized itself, as you know, anathema to public intervention. At the same time, we can’t undervalue the trump effect in energizing a whole generation of young voters who realize that it’s time for them to step up, given everything that they’re saying coming out of this administration. And so I think the better effect is is one piece of the puzzle. But the trump effect is another. The paradoxical way in which he’s energized and politicized. A generation of voters here in Texas, of all places to begin thinking about the kinds of proposals that you know it’s a 10 or 15 years ago were thought again to be everything that Texas wasn’t.

[0:17:25 Peniel] Yeah, and the reason why I brought a Beto and how I think it relates to housing in Austin and the African American community in Austin Latinos, other people of color is that I think what I saw at the national level it with Beto and Stacey Abrams. Andrew Gillem, Georgia, Florida Texas was political rhetoric that really connected citizenship in democracy to racial justice and economic justice. So in a way, this idea of what Kimberly Crenshaw’s called intersectionality right all these different ways, how we live in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality. I saw it really articulated in those campaigns in a way that I think you’re right in terms of that trump effect is part of this. But I thought what was so optimistic was bringing people to the table, really on a platform that’s very similar to what Dr King talked about Martin Luther King Jr in terms of a beloved community and poor people’s campaign. When he talked about what citizenship actually met, he talked about housing and and people not being hungry. And now this included whites from Appalachia and Native Americans and Mexican Americans in black people from Marks, Mississippi. And he wanted that on the public policy agenda, made an argument that it should be the public policy agenda, but also linked that to ending war and ending violence all across the world. I felt that this election cycle in 2018 even if people didn’t identify it as such, I felt that

[0:18:48 Eric] absolutely, you’re absolutely right. That’s there. So you know, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, you know, races the mode through which classes lived right? People understood the intersectional nature of what was happening, and that did get articulated in their own way. But here’s the rub. White people also experienced their race right experience class through the race, and I wonder how many of them who feel the economic pressures that defined this period. The economic equality is that to find this period, identify racially making a lot and as a result, find a lot of appeal in trumpism and the white cultural nationalism which also defines this period.

[0:19:40 Peniel] Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot. Me, I think one of things we saw, at least initially. I don’t know what it’s gonna play out, but they were showing Beto had about 34% of the white vote. You know, statewide, really high numbers is something like 85 or 80%. 88% of black males for black women. It was in the 90 some things for Latinos. It was in the sixties, the high sixties. So I think absolutely there is a a racial appeal to trumpism, which is longstanding, its historic it. It predates this candidates just that this candidate has been able to or this president Rather has been able to utilize that racial national appeal cause I’m thinking of Strong Thurman in 1948 he runs a segregationist, gets three million votes. George Wallace, in 1968 runs, is a segregationist, and by segregation, I just mean as a white supremacist, um, gets 10 million votes, right? And in 2016 Donald Trump Fran, you know, basically as the segregation is, is a white nationalist and got 62 63 million votes. So there is a long history.

[0:20:42 Eric] There’s a long history of it. And then I think it presents us with this important challenge, which is not a new challenge. And that is how do we not allow the profound economic inequality that’s affecting white people as well In this country, animate, They’re racism’s

[0:21:02 Peniel] Yeah, that’s very difficult. It’s also difficult when the media shapes the narrative that white people who have all this privilege are the ones who are being left out, right. I mean, after the 2016 election, this idea of an angry white voter the working class always equals white. There’s no people of color in the working class. There’s rarely women, so they said the working class was white males in West Virginia. Right? That’s hard to the media shapes in there. And people like Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist, really believe that hype and said, Well, yeah, we’ve for gotten about these white voters But we’ve got Alexandria and Casio and Cortez right there in New York. We’ve got Ayanna Pressley in Boston and we’ve got the first Muslim woman in Congress. We do have all these sort of progressive people who are making us rethink what working class means. Rethink what feminism means and rethink what racial justice means. My final question is, what does this mean for Austin? How can those of us who are interested as you are an anti racism and social justice and civil rights in Austin? What can we do right now at this moment? People talking about Beto for president in 2020 and people are very excited in my mind. I don’t think this campaign season has ended. I think people are ratcheting up right now for 2020. I’ve never seen anything like it.

[0:22:18 Eric] So let’s go back to the original kind of dilemma or paradox, which characterizes Austin. It is a very Progressive City, but it’s the most economically segregated and unequal city in Austin as well. What is this about? We have to interrogate what it means to be a progressive city. And although Austin is cultural progressive and has certain social norms, which we would kind of cast is more to the left than to the right, the truth is historically, it doesn’t have strong labour institutions, housing rights institutions, social welfare institutions. And these are the pillars of truly progressive cities like Chicago, New York, D. C. Right, And these institutions gave working people political structure, political momentum during key movement moments. As historians, you in mind both know that it’s really these black labor organizations that anticipated the civil rights movement, a Philip Randolph so on and so forth. We don’t have that history here in Austin. And so part of me believes that the reason why economic inequality has been so run away in a place like Austin is because there hasn’t been strong institutions that represent working people to stem that tide and to advocate for them consistently.

[0:23:43 Peniel] Why did so many people here then congratulate themselves on being so progressive?

[0:23:48 Eric] Because Austin’s a weird place for several reasons, not just culturally, but because it is a university town that draws a lot of heavy people. And at the same time it’s a music town, which draws a lot of creatives. And some people also feel that because it was also the home of the state mental asylum for so long that it drew, you know, like centuries. And that created this. Keep Austin Weird Boston whereby. But you know that sentiment there know that sentiment it doesn’t. It doesn’t run deeply in terms of institutions that translate until long term institutions that could defend neighborhoods against environmental racism. That’s not that’s not the case here. Has it led Teoh say, you know, workers organizations or teachers organizations that are able to control, you know, real estate, as they do in places like Queens, New York, where you and I grew up. Yes, right. We grew up next to like, Electrician’s kids who lived within a city known as a lek. Chester and I was I was blown away by that. What is that? Well, the electrician’s own their own houses, absolutely in perpetuity. See, that is what I’m talking about when I describe a progressive city, right? And we don’t have those institutions. So I think the challenges if we’re gonna ride this BlueWave we’re going to ride the Beto O’Rourke moment is to dig a little bit deeper and try to figure out how we can build institutions that represent working people for the long haul.

[0:25:14 Peniel] I couldn’t have said it better, my friend. That’s Ah, that’s great. Thank you for this conversation. As a fellow Queens, New York native

[0:25:20 Eric] had to bring it, it had to, had to bring it in.

[0:25:23 Peniel] Queens is in the house. Um, thank you for this. And we’re gonna definitely have you back on Look forward to you know, all the great work that you do in the city and on this campus.

[0:25:33 Eric] Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

[0:25:35 Peniel] Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P E N I E L J O S E P H and our website csrd.lbj.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you