Point Austin: Pretend It’s a City

Chris Riley in 2011 (Photo by John Anderson)

The equanimity with which he faced his imminent death – “I feel very much at peace with dying,” he told reporter Jack Craver last month – was very much in keeping with Chris Riley’s clear-eyed approach to life.

The former City Council member passed away too young, at 60 years, yet had succeeded in doing more good for his home town than most of us will manage over decades more. And Riley did so by the seemingly simple effort of looking around his Downtown neighborhood, seeing its structural limitations as well as its enormous potential, and deciding to – as a fellow city-dweller said of another very busy place – “Pretend it’s a city.”

I had been aware that Riley was ailing but was traveling when friends and colleagues held a couple of celebrations, including the naming of a section of the Shoal Creek Trail, in his honor. Other observers, among them Craver and the Chronicle’s Richard Whittaker, have recounted the history of Riley’s public life and his focus on what is now called “urbanism” – that is, trying to make Austin more abundantly livable for human beings – and his official, successful encouragement of such ordinary, crucial amenities as Downtown street life, multi-modal transportation, transit-conscious housing, and effective place-making for thousands of residents. Although he was a Council member for only a few years, before, during, and after he was such an effective advocate for humane public policy that he’s left his mark all over the city, where “urbanism” is now what we do whenever we try to make real neighborhood progress.

I won’t try to add to the historical detail. Instead, I want to pay tribute to Riley, as first and foremost, an honorable man, and as a kind one, as his former colleague Mike Martinez recalled: “He was always, always kind.” Although Riley was subject, early on, to personal backlash and vitriol for advocating initially contentious city policies that have since become widely accepted doctrine, he never responded in kind, and simply went on working, without rancor. And because he was completely committed to open government and honesty with constituents, he once found himself in the middle of the silliest “scandal” that ever troubled the dais: The discovery that Council members talked to each other between public meetings in so-called “private” conversations that Riley duly and honorably noted in his entirely public calendar. Members were investigated and sanctioned for secret “crimes” they had no idea they were allegedly committing – with the long-term result that city government is even weaker in confronting a hostile Legislature that would never accept such restrictions for itself.

I guess that’s water under a Shoal Creek bridge, and in retrospect Riley was later lucky to escape the dais for a few more years of independent activism, and a few more bike rides along paths and shared public infrastructure that he had done so much to champion and create. Thanks to Riley, subsequent Councils can fully comprehend that Austin is indeed a city, and act upon it with greater optimism and effectiveness. They and we can look about all our neighborhoods as he once did, and ask ourselves, How can we leave this particular campsite better than we found it?

Chris Riley certainly did.