Alex Hannaford’s first visit to Austin in 1999 mirrors the experience of many people who have moved to the Texas capital. He felt he’d found a unique cultural oasis, where the weather, music, and lifestyle were all incredibly vibrant and affordable. He met a girl and transplanted from London in 2003, and raised his family here until finally leaving in 2020. For Hannaford, the city he fell in love with had evolved into something else.
There’s a risk of reading Lost in Austin as just another nostalgic rip on the city’s growth over the past two decades. Yet Hannaford brings his journalistic background to bear in outlining just how the city’s decisions helped lead to rapid unaffordability and that idiosyncratic culture being co-opted by charlatans and grifters.
“The facts are that for the longest time, Austin was the fastest-growing city in America with a declining Black population. And it’s on the wrong side of the climate crisis,” he notes. “People can turn around and say, ‘Look, we have the greatest restaurants. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, and the economy is good.’ I don’t disagree with any of that. I just think that it grew too quickly and it was ‘growth at all costs.’ There was no consideration for people who are less fortunate – the line cooks, the cleaners, the sort of artists and musicians and people who kind of made Austin, Austin.”
Hannaford delivers receipts as well. Each chapter traces a different element of Austin’s evolution, from the tech economy and gentrification to environmental negligence and the dissipating music culture, outlining how policies both intentional and unintended transformed the city. The cultural oasis had become a mirage that obscured the realities happening over the past 20 years. Hannaford’s book collects the data and stares down Austin’s sacred cows to make the concise but compelling case that we’ve let growth destroy precisely what brought so many people to Austin in the first place.
Yet Hannaford also outlines how Austin has been on this brink before, exhuming a 1987 report by urban planning professor Dowell Myers titled “Internal Monitoring of Quality of Life for Economic Development.” Myers argued a simple truth that if economic growth overruns affordability, a city’s culture declines. For Austin, the unique problem hinged on our growth being tied to the appeal of the culture. That Eighties boom halted with the savings and loan crisis, but the reprieve in affordability was temporary, and, Hannaford argues, Austin learned nothing from experience.
“At the end of the book, I say I think that Austin has gotten lost. But that doesn’t mean to say that I think Austin is a lost cause, completely,” Hannaford insists. “I’m also aware that people moving there, maybe something like live music is not their thing. Things change and that’s fine. There are some things you can’t sort of turn back the clock on, but there’s so much more that you can do to sort of save a city – affordability being the big one. Austin doesn’t have to be unaffordable.”
Highways, Growth & Gentrification: The Changing Face of Austin and American Cities
Saturday, Nov. 16, 3:15pm, Texas Tent
More Books About a Changing Austin
Journalist Megan Kimble joins Alex Hannaford on Saturday’s Highways, Growth & Gentrification panel to discuss City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, which explores the impacts of the nation’s highway policies, using recent interstate expansion efforts across Texas as ground zero to understand the social, environmental, and cultural repercussions both historical and present.
Author Terry Mitchell reps The City We Built: Black Leaders of Austin, an illustrated children’s book highlighting the often overlooked histories of Austin’s Black community by celebrating pivotal individuals ranging from political leaders like Ada Anderson and Azie Taylor Morton to cultural figures Johnny Holmes and Willie Wells. (Changemakers: Inspiring Stories of Black Americans Who’ve Helped Shape History, Sunday, Nov. 17, 12:15pm, Capitol Extension Room E2.014)
This article appears in November 15 • 2024.
