by Mike Clark-Madison
It’s baby’s first birthday – “Corner to Corner” first appeared a year ago
this week – and I feel in a valedictory mood. Not to celebrate the existence of
this column, but rather the existence of its subject – henceforth, let’s make
the first week of October “Austin Neighborhood Appreciation Week.”
What the heck is a neighborhood, anyway? We use it all the time in Austin as a
magic power word, like “innovation” or “fiscal responsibility” or “quality of
life.” We currently have a much-touted Citizens Planning Committee, composed of
average folks and city board and commission chairs, working to provide Austin
with the tools for “neighborhood-based planning.” This dovetails with parallel
labors to establish neighborhood-based policing and neighborhood-based social
services. (And, of course, we have tried to do this sort of innovative urban
planning before – Austin Tomorrow, AustinPlan, the R/UDAT report.) All who
transit the political stage, no matter what their goals or how they meet them,
present themselves as standard bearers for the neighborhood interest – or at
least they don’t dispute that neighborhoods are sacred and good. Yet we all define the term differently and attach the “neighborhood” label to
most any current city issue. For some folks, all of East Austin, from the river
to Round Rock and from the interstate to the county line, is a single
neighborhood. For others, the seemingly integral entity of Hyde Park is
actually several neighborhoods whose interests are potentially in conflict. The
dictionary, last refuge of the indecisive, is no help – it defines
“neighborhood” much the same way it defines “culture,” a group of people, in
this case living in a particular area, with common characteristics.
Now, if by “common characteristics” we mean opposable thumbs and a
carbon-based chemical structure, then sure, we all have something in common
with our neighbors. Yet most Austinites live in a “new city” of migrants and
transients, taking pride in our “diversity” as if we really had a choice in the
matter. The only demographic many of us share with our neighbors is our
economic status, but neighborhoods are almost never defined solely in economic
terms – in fact, that seems sort of taboo – and their issues are never
presented as class issues. So if, in effect, most every neighborhood in Austin,
even the ones that seem homogenous, is culturally, demographically, and
spiritually integrated, then what meaning can we attach to “neighborhood”? And
why, in political terms, are neighborhoods Nirvana?
Back in the beginning, each
installment of “Corner to Corner” had a little mission statement attached,
wherein we (in the guise of scene-setting) shoved my dogma about neighborhoods
vs. macrodevelopment down your throats. We stopped doing that, partly because
it’s rude, and partly because it gets tedious to read (and write) the same
stuff every other week. But mostly, I had misgivings, clearer now than they
were then, that I wasn’t helping resolve Austin’s chronic civic confusion
because I don’t know what “neighborhood” means, either.
But I would like to, not only because it’s my job, but because “neighborhood
issues” are where the action is in Austin public life. In itself, it’s not such
a big deal – and is likely a good thing – that “neighborhood” means different
things to different people, and possibly means nothing at all. Certainly, it
means something different in Austin than it does in most other cities; here,
neighborhoods routinely change their shape, change their size, develop split
personalities, die, reproduce. But without some clear referents on what makes
up a neighborhood, it makes it real hard to decide how to go about
solving our chronic “neighborhood issues.”
The Austin political system, like American health care, is very good at
managing trauma through surgery – let’s excise this tumor over Barton Creek,
let’s transplant a baseball team to give the city an artificial heart. But it
fails at promoting wellness and holistic health, which in political terms means
all those “basic services” and “quality of life” issues like busting the bad
guys, fixing the streets, tearing down the slums, helping the small businesses,
maintaining the parks. These are neighborhood issues, meaning they take
different shapes and have different importance to different people in different
parts of town. They’ve never been amenable to ready-made solutions crafted by
consultants and professional civic managers who, no matter what their talents,
are trained to view all cities as collections of interchangeable parts. Yet our
political process offers no real alternative to top-down, magic-bullet
planning.
Look at Downtown, for
example. For most of contemporary Austin political history, Downtown hasn’t
been perceived as a neighborhood at all. It is now, as you can see by its big
“D.” But whose neighborhood is it? If you go down and look around, you could
surmise that the “Downtown community” consists of small businesses, state
employees, and skyscraper workers, entertainment and restaurant patrons, and
social service agencies and their too-many clients. How do these people get to
express their views on downtown-related topics? The Downtown Management
Organization (Austin DMO, Inc.), being a creature of a special tax authority (a
public-improvement district or PID), is obligated to respond to property
interests, even if it wishes to do otherwise. And most of the people whose
lives take place downtown do not own property there. The city’s Downtown
Commission is of vague authority. Without single-member districts, our city
council members represent whatever neighborhoods they want to represent, and
only one – Max Nofziger – has chosen to represent downtown. Given all this, it’s little surprise that – even with all those plans of the
past to give them ideas – city staff and their consultants have taken a
magic-bullet approach to downtown renewal. The presumption behind the
convention center, and behind the city hall and downtown megamall and
light-rail proposals, was that these projects could single-handedly bootstrap
Downtown, as they had in different cities with much different downtowns.
Regardless of these ideas’ merits, they do not address Downtown’s “neighborhood
issues” – having a convention center in the southeast corner of Downtown hasn’t
kept those blocks from being one of Austin’s busiest crack markets.
Progressives often read more into the power and property of these ideas’
proponents than they may need to. The real problem is that there’s no mechanism
to come up with alternatives, no vehicle through which Downtown tenants and
“day residents” (that would be working stiffs) can involve themselves in the
overall planning process. If there were, we might have had sidewalk cafes or
street markets a long time ago.
Likewise, it’s hard to address Downtown’s “neighborhood issues” when there’s
shifting consensus over the district’s boundaries. Back in the R/UDAT (Regional
Urban Design Assistance Team) era, five years ago, Downtown revitalistas wanted
the district’s boundaries to be as wide as possible, partly to bring more money
into the PID. Some of these outlying areas – the University of Texas, for
example – would desperately like to be considered part of Downtown Austin,
while others, notably the neighborhoods just south of the river, would like to
avoid that fate at all costs.
And then on the inner East-
side, you have a lot of “pro-Downtown” sentiment, but it takes two different
forms. One vision is associated with Councilmember Eric Mitchell, with the
Eastside as a commercial and service center to Downtown, bearing little
resemblance to what’s there now. The other is in part ascribed to the Guadalupe
and Swede Hill neighborhood associations, and holds that those and adjoining
neighborhoods can provide the affordable inner-city residential component of
downtown renewal (or, to toss in yet another ill-defined holy word, a “compact
city”). Needless to say, these two views are in bitter conflict, made worse by
questions over who gets to speak for the 78702 zip code – the black
councilmember who doesn’t live there, or the black, white, and brown residents
who do. In Downtown, there is too little neighborhood representation; on the Eastside,
one might argue there is too much. Anyone can go down to the Municipal Annex
and proclaim a neighborhood association, encompassing whatever boundaries give
them pleasure, with themselves as its poobahs. And many people have,
particularly where the Eastside is concerned. On top of this, since the city’s
own HUD-supported “neighborhood” programming is heavily focused on East Austin,
there are additional layers of neighborhood organization created by city
government. And on top of that, East Austin is often perceived as a community
of color, and only of color, rather than the most diverse area of Austin, and
if unified by anything, then only by economic status. So groups defending
African-American and Hispanic interests can also assume the role of
neighborhood activists. Some blocks in East Austin are “represented” by more
groups than they can count, including some little known to the residents.
In addition, the erratic and chaotic nature of the city’s network of
neighborhood associations makes it hard for the Planning and Development
Department to provide more than desultory notice of upcoming hearings. It also,
probably, is evidence that, traditionally, the city has not been much concerned
with giving different neighborhoods a venue to express their different views on
“neighborhood issues”; if they were, they would have come up with a better way
to do it. Right now, the only way most average neighborhood residents can
influence city decision-making is to go to the city council and/or the Planning
Commission and throw a hissy fit, earning the tag of “malcontent,”
“rabble-rouser,” or worse. We hear a lot (especially in the daily’s editorials)
about Austin’s political culture of discontent, but the only real alternative
would be a culture of acquiescence; the tools for consensus-building (speaking
of holy words) don’t yet exist.
This brings us back to the
Citizens Planning Committee and “neighborhood-based planning,” especially to
the common reference to a “Portland model.” Oregon’s largest burg, like many
cities in the Northwest, has well-defined roles for its neighborhood groups, at
several stages in the planning process, and in areas beyond the purview of the
Austin Land Development Code. Our colleagues in the Rain Zone tell us that –
while neighborhood issues are volatile there as everywhere – the sort of
displays we’re inured to seeing at council are pretty rare, since few people
make a lot of fuss about being left out of the process.
Can yet another valiant urban planning effort change the status quo? Perhaps
it can, if we take it seriously, and thus force our leaders and their minions
to take it seriously, as well. Applying a “Portland model” to Austin would
involve not just rewriting city code but resculpting the entire city planning
apparatus, including the Planning Commission itself and many of the existing
neighborhood associations, with the business end of an ax. AustinPlan et
al. now gather dust at the Austin History Center because they lacked such
an instrument – one that the citizens alone hold in their hands.
These are just observations from the last year’s peregrinations through
Austin’s front yards, side doors, and back streets. One of my resolutions for
the coming year is to give you the opportunity to address these issues
yourselves. (After all, if Oppel’s TQM radicchio journalism can turn the
daily’s boosteritis into a virtue, surely the Chron – which was
community when community wasn’t cool – can be a venue for citizen input.) Tell
us about your neighborhood, what problems it faces, how you solved them or
could solve them, whose help you have or need. Tell us whether you think
single-member districts, city-sponsored neighborhood councils, or whatever idea
piques your interest would help or hurt Austin’s attempts to grapple with our
civic issues. Write the Chronicle or e-mail me at: Crnr2Crnr@aol.com (If
you forget that address, just remember: Leave out all the vowels.) Next time,
we’ll return to the regularly scheduled program. And it’s been a very good
year. n
This article appears in October 6 • 1995 and October 6 • 1995 (Cover).