Only Onward: Lawrence Wright’s Austin and the Politics of Nostalgia
In February of last year the New Yorker published an article by Lawrence Wright entitled “The Astonishing Transformation of Austin.” Wright is the author of several books about al-Qaeda, one about COVID-19, an excellent investigation into the Church of Scientology called “Going Clear,” and more. In this piece for the New Yorker, Wright explores the idea of Austin as his home but also as an evolving entity, with new Austin striking a much different pose than the Austin of, for example, “greasy spoon” the Raw Deal — a restaurant Wright frequented as a staff writer for Texas Monthly beginning in 1980.
For the busy commuter, you may listen to Wright’s entire article in full in a little under the time it takes to get from north Austin to San Antonio (a trip of almost 80 miles, or “just down the highway”). The city he profiles first emerged in the popular and contemporary imagination as a ‘laid-back’ enclave of cheap living and scrappy entrepreneurship, then became a tech paradise escape from LA (or San Fran) with enormous skyscrapers currently crowding out the memories of what was once a tinier town.
To some, many of the incidents and histories recounted in Wright’s piece will be interesting, even new. For a longtime resident (not compared to Wright, but to some of my peers), the nostalgia is decadent — once again, the overstated point that Austin is the town that birthed Slacker, again with Matthew McConaughey playing bongos in the nude. Janis Joplin — who was made to feel an outcast in Austin for reasons much more real and personal than the encroachment of buildings — is exhumed. But all this backstory has a point, as prelude to judgment. What Wright sees is a changing city, but one that is possibly losing its heart while taking in an infusion of new blood.
The past was not perfect, as he acknowledges by addressing the white supremacist city planning that birthed modern Austin: “Austin’s original sin was the 1928 Master Plan, which pushed Black and Latino residents into neighborhoods on the east side,” he writes. But the disappointment baked into Wright’s piece does not find its locus in the scaling up of continuous reaction on behalf of the state government, or in class trench warfare on behalf of that entity and their corporate handmaidens (where I find most of Austin’s new negative energy to be located), but in the Austin he knows disappearing and changing.
Wright’s article touched me — which is why I’m responding to it — but in part because I felt as though I was reading an article with some very obvious, very serious and accepted commentary (Austin is bigger and is changing) combined with a very strange thesis about where the city is going next, and who Wright suggests is steering that navigation.
I have my own thoughts about what is and isn’t fun, or cool, or genuine about Austin. What I want to address instead are the questions Wright’s piece raises surrounding what it is like to really live here, and to argue that talking about Austin now means seriously considering who exercises power in this city, and on behalf of whom. The fun questions about how Austin evolved, culturally, including a long digression Wright imparts on the mascot “Oat Willie,” serve us less when we consider that “cultural capital” relies much more on the second word in that phrase, and not the first.
Austinites are becoming displaced economically. Wages are not rising enough to keep up with the cost of living, the dream of home ownership is now a mirage, and without a firm consensus of what to do — and the courage to turn those ideas into policy to advocate on behalf of people who work to survive — all we have are competing fantasies about what Austin was, is, and will be.
Eight paragraphs into his piece, Wright tells an anecdote wherein he is inducting musician Joe Ely into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame and finds himself staying at the luxe W Hotel downtown:
“When Roberta [Wright’s wife] opened the blinds, we had a sensation known to every longtime resident: we had no idea where we were. It was difficult even to discern what direction we were facing, because skyscrapers blocked the horizon. Ten building cranes were visible from that one window. Today, two projects are competing to claim the title of tallest building in Texas, one at seventy-four stories and the other at eighty.”
The incongruity of inducting an iconic but locally-affixed musician into the ACL Hall of Fame while peering out the unfamiliar windows of a fancy hotel is noted. But does Joe Ely, at this point, need to be further commemorated? And how difficult is it really to stomach (one guesses) a complimentary stay at an upscale hotel?
Perhaps this rings so soundly as a metaphor to Wright because he believes the “live music capitol” Austin, the Joe Ely Austin, is over: “It’s difficult to defend the motto that Austin is the ‘live-music capital of the world’ when so many small venues have shut down,” he says.
Wright quotes Terry Likcona, producer of Austin City Limits since 1978, opining that “‘[i]t’s always been a part of our mission to continue to showcase Austin music. Every year, there are at least three or four Austin artists that we consider ready and deserving, whether it’s somebody like Black Pumas or Gary Clark, Jr., or Marcia Ball. It would be a really sad day if people just stop caring about getting out to see a show.’”
Austin City Limits performances are now held at the comparatively enormous Moody Theater and not on the campus of the University of Texas (a transition mentioned in Wright’s piece), which may account for some light guilt on Likcona’s part regarding his organization’s leap from old into new Austin. Otherwise, how else can one even countenance the idea that Austinites may “stop caring about getting out to see a show”?
A broadcast from the end of 2023: the ACL Music Festival has bloated to two separate weekends, giving locals the opportunity to not just see a show, but see it twice (non-Austinites may be confused to learn that ACL the show is a completely different entity than ACL the festival, but it is too true). The sprawling (in a good way) Levitation festival closed out October with four days of eclectic psychedelia, and in venues all across town.
You may see country music at Sagebrush or The White Horse or The Broken Spoke; EDM at Superstition and perreo at Cuatro Gato; indie/electronic rock or whatever it’s called now at the Chess Club, Cheer Up Charlies, The Parish, Emo’s, Hotel Vegas, the Coral Snake…the list can literally go on and on. I cannot posit the logical leap from bragging on still-active Austin artists (Marcia Ball’s first album came out in 1978, before Wright even moved here, and she was scheduled to play one of her nine October gigs at the semi-legendary venue The Saxon Pub) to forecasting them playing to empty rooms.
Wright introduces us to musician Emily Gimble, who
“moved out of Austin in 2016. She is a part of Texas music royalty; her grandfather Johnny Gimble played fiddle with Bob Wills, who is considered a founder of Western swing. Years ago, I had the opportunity to play with Johnny, one of those luminous moments which music offers. Emily’s dad, Dick Gimble, played bass with Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, among others. Emily, a gifted piano player and singer, was named the State Musician of Texas in 2020. She’s the kind of person Austin can’t afford to lose.”
With all due respect, Gimble has one release on the “music” section of her website, an EP called Certain Kinda. Can Austin not “afford to lose” her because her “dad, Dick Gimble, played bass with Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, among others”? Or is she simply an ineffable talent, and who mostly performs live? Wright does not say. Do we decide what music in Austin, or even in Texas, is worth seeing based on the Texas Commission on the Arts, or by opening our own ears?
Either way, point taken — Austin seems like it was better, now sucks, and is changing for the worse. This thesis is also expressed by many Austin-via-wherever transplants Wright goes on to interview in his piece. As he puts it, regarding the gulf between expectations and the new reality:
“In any city whose identity is changing, it can be hard to avoid the sense that a golden age has slipped away. Newcomers to Austin fall prey to this nostalgia almost instantly — and, with a longtime resident like me, the symptoms can become comically acute. But the feeling is more like watching someone you love become someone you didn’t expect.”
Some newcomers Wright meets are anxious, but about Austin becoming the place they just left. Patrick McKenna, a former San Franciscan and general partner in Comeback Capital (Comeback “Invest [sic?] in early stage companies based in the American Heartland” according to McKenna’s LinkedIn page. One of these American Heartland companies is Dapper Ape High Society NFTs) believes that
“‘San Francisco failed through success.’ He worries that Austin, newly drenched in venture capital, will make similar mistakes: ‘If Austin stops being affordable for those who make it an interesting place, it will stop being an interesting place.’”
For context, anxieties regarding change brought about by money or simple time, however well-founded (or not), is an evergreen concern for Austinites. One article passed around years ago was an account from The Austin American Statesman in 1983 wherein residents freely gripe about the changes happening in the city. What was the catalyst for concern? From that Statesman piece: “Last May, Austin was selected over 57 other places as the site for the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, or M.C.C., a joint research venture of 11 major American computer makers to compete with the Japanese in building the next generation of information technology.”
Wright’s article directly addresses that early break in the Austin subconscious. He concludes, after M.C.C. was slated to come to Austin:
“Other cities longed for such an influx of tech-savvy professionals, but Austinites were ambivalent about the economic bounce. People moved to Austin because of what the city was — but, in the act of moving, they helped obliterate that history. Treasured music clubs were razed to make room for apartments and office buildings. The once crystalline Barton Springs became clouded by runoff from development. The dignified capitol was shadowed by glassy towers that reflected the Texas sun, making sidewalks sizzle. Traffic and crime and other big-city stressors made the old days appear more glorious than they actually were.”
How discombobulated was Wright himself about this influx of monied chipmakers and big tech in the ‘80s? Regarding Austin’s Dell computers, he writes that “we became modest investors.” In at least this case, change was coming from inside the building (that was built on top of a collapsed music venue).
Speaking of change, “[n]o city in America has changed more than Austin has in the last two decades,” states Ricard Ainslie, Wright’s bandmate in local blues group WhoDo and UT professor. Austin has changed more than…New Orleans during and after hurricane Katrina? Or even Houston after hurricane Harvey? Ainslie also relates that “Austin is the fastest-growing major metro area in America, having expanded by a third in the past ten years.”
In May of this year the Census offered a different statistic, at least regarding the influx of residents (“The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX metro area had the highest numeric increase in population between 2021 and 2022 of any U.S. metro area, with an annual jump of 170,396 people”) but either way it’s hard to imagine either Dallas or the growing San Antonio receiving the same treatment in The New Yorker — not mad, just wistfully disappointed — that Austin receives.
Shellacked-haired New York transplant Evan Smith is quoted as observing that “‘Austin now has an upper class.’” Now? Our uber-rich, entrenched city brethren (read: not from elsewhere, or not recently) are quickly brushed over in Wright’s article, even though Michael Dell of the aforementioned Dell computers was worth 15.9 billion an entire decade ago (according to Forbes). And that’s saying nothing of the unfamous but sometimes infamous creatures of capital in West Lake Hills and beyond. The “independent, fee-only advisory firm” Austin Private Wealth (its real name) was founded ten years ago. Can we really expect that their only clients until 2020 were “modest investors” in technology like Wright?
Unfortunately, change can not come quickly enough for a revolution in higher education, as we are also made to imagine that Austin is lacking when it comes to a well-balanced, quality (private) collegiate community. This is best expressed by Pano Kanelos, the “founding president” of a would-be institute of higher learning he and his fellow founders have dubbed the University of Austin, or UATX. “‘Every great city has a great public research institution and a great private research institution. As I’ve said to my friends at U.T., we want to be the Stanford to your Berkeley,’” he tells Wright.
It is at this point where I effectively lose what is left of my patience (roughly 6 out of 24 pages in). I know musicians leave Austin because of the high cost of living — but I also know many musicians staying or who have arrived here recently. Likcona may fret about a day when Austinites stop going out to see live music, but the well-scrubbed (and day-glo’d) masses who stream past my place on the way to the ACL festival very much beg to differ. Some of them — many of them — attend both weekends. We can argue about the merits of the old Emo’s versus the new, but both venues were created to fill a need, which is to see and experience live music and Austin culture.
UATX does not fulfill any need save for the vanity of its founders and donors, and ostensibly to save their students from “illiberalism” while enabling them to embark on lofty goals like “creating a business and scaling it.” It is also, somehow, intellectual catnip to a weird amount of journalists, and I can only imagine why. So far, the school can only gesture to one academic accomplishment of sorts — a “forbidden courses” summer program that took place last year…in Dallas. Wright notes that its “early supporters” include “Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali” (to be joined, one surmises, by a Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism critic), David Mamet and one Bari Weiss, the latter being a gormless elder millennial with the political instincts and cultural literacy of someone twice her age (as of July 7, 2022, Weiss is on the board of trustees at UATX, and not just an “early supporter,” as Wright refers to her).
Weiss’s association with the UATX should immediately have given Wright significant pause. Mostly known for diving into the shallow end of the pool as an op-ed writer for The New York Times, her hostility toward both social justice and factual accuracy made her such a pariah in that newsroom that she rage-quit and now blogs at The Free Press. When she isn’t publishing debunked TERFy screeds disguised as honest investigations, her Midas touch in reverse has extended to her other pursuits.
Featured in the very same New Yorker that afforded Wright his article is a heavily detailed piece on FAIR, another Weiss joint that sublimated one parent’s grievances regarding creeping wokeness into…well, institutional “tribalism,” amongst other things. While it’s possible to read FAIR’s fail as a kind of aberration or, on another pole, as par for the course in the often contentious and frustrating inner world of a new nonprofit, it’s worth noting that the disease that ravaged FAIR is already presenting in UATX — a muddled and personalized set of cultural grievances crystallizing into an obsession with wokeness and early notable advocates jumping ship. “University of Chicago chancellor Robert Zimmer and Harvard professor Steven Pinker announced that they will be parting ways with the institution after initially being listed as two of its advisory board members,” wrote Vanity Fair of UATX in 2021.
UATX has also managed the impressive feat of embarrassing itself before even opening enrollment by granting 2023 lectureships to a rogues’ gallery of reactionary weirdos. Of these, only Richard Hanania, a comparatively new voice, merits actual disgust — but it’s earned. In May of this year, he tweeted: “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way. It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”
In his piece, Wright takes care to examine the forces in government that created the typographical template for segregation in Austin and interviews history professor Peniel E. Joseph, who posits — regarding Black residents in Austin — that “‘you need resources if you’re thinking about how to bend the wealth gap, the education gap, and the residential-segregation gap.’” Joseph has written three books with “black power” in the title; Hanania would like to see that power behind bars.
My guess is that Wright was not aware of Hanania or, if he was, the depth of his bigotry, but as with the inclusion of an “Islam critic” as part of their bedrock, UATX was signaling very strongly in what direction they would tilt (while I was writing this piece, Hanania was given the boot from his speaking invitation at UATX after it was revealed he was a nazi. He was previously also a visiting scholar at the Salem Center for Policy at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, a venture funded in part by nepo baby Harlan Crow, who also donated money to create FAIR).
Remember the telling mention of Kanelos’ “friends at U.T.,” a linguistic signal putting him proximate to workers at a real college. Unfortunately for him, UATX is spiritually and fundamentally closer to schools of the Prager or Bovine variety. Still, UATX president Pano Kanelos believes the “UATX will “welcome its first class in 2024.” Inshallah.
The private-over-public philosophy is not just a measure to balance the two genders of research universities, as in the wishcasting of UATX as a supplement to UT. Instead, the desire to create a private alternative to a public one is a broader part of a theme for the Austin waiting to be born, and one echoed again and again by newer arrivals and by one notable longtime resident profiled by Wright.
Meet Joe Londsdale, recent San Fran to Austin resident, deregulation activist and co-founder of Planatir. Planatir, as Wright explains, “has been criticized for allowing U.S. immigration authorities to use its sophisticated software to arrest parents of undocumented children, and for working with the N.S.A. to improve software that the agency used to spy on American citizens.” What follows is a big but: “But during the pandemic the government tracked outbreaks by analyzing COVID-19 data with Palantir software, and the company’s algorithms are reportedly being used in Ukraine to monitor Russian troop deployments.” This, to me, is a little like learning a child pornographer picks up litter at the park once a week.
Londsdale has “‘always called myself socially liberal and fiscally conservative,’” and to put this personal philosophy (and noxious cliche) into practice, he is another investor in UATX, in part to combat the “‘nihilist, Marxist’ bent of contemporary academia’’ he believes is undergirding modern day collegiate education. Graduates of the University of Texas like myself will find the accusation that a university like ours is either “bent” toward nihilism or Marxism not just odd, but entirely upside down, what with our school’s military science program and investments in fossil fuels and longstanding literal monuments to white supremacy. A brief search reveals Londsdale heaps cash on politicians like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, which automatically makes his assertion of any interest in the “socially liberal” laughable.
The aforementioned Comeback Capital’s McKenna is an individual more adroit than anyone else in Wright’s piece in speaking out both sides of his mouth. He says of his former home: “‘People’s lives were getting more expensive, but their kids weren’t getting invited to join an internship, or their school wasn’t being sponsored for a tech-entrepreneur program,’” (NO!) and, “‘We were so busy building our companies, we weren’t thinking about the local high school.’”
Wright summarizes: “McKenna blames San Francisco’s government for not investing enough of the tax-revenue bonanza in schools and infrastructure. ‘In the end,’ as he sees it, ‘entrepreneurs like myself were vilified.’” So…McKenna and the nameless “we” weren’t considering the “high school,” and somehow that’s true and not his fault, but the government’s?
Either way, Wright finds what is perhaps a strange correlative in conversation with Alan Graham, creator of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a nonprofit that describes itself as “a social outreach ministry that has been empowering communities into a lifestyle of service with the homeless since 1998.” Mobile Loaves & Fishes houses, in their Community First! Village, 400 people. For perspective, Wright notes that “an official head count in 2021 found nearly thirty-two hundred Austinites experiencing homelessness, including people living in shelters.”
“‘The concept around Community First! is that, if you want to mitigate this pandemic of homelessness, the whole community is going to have to get involved,’” Graham tells Wright. “‘The government should only play a subsidiary role. We have abdicated that responsibility almost entirely to the government, and that’s a failed model.’”
No piece about Austin could possibly ignore the influx of new celebrities in town, especially as we live in a time of supreme, almost breathless dry-humping of the famous. Wright does not disappoint in finding us a few, though of the more seasoned variety. While “influencer” is the mythologizing term used to confer leadership qualities onto the conspicuous consumption of Gen Z internet denizens, (for a local example see Jason “1,000+ Standing Ovations and Unique Content” Dorsey, who unfortunately tied his brand to that of the now-defunct label “Gen Y”) inside the intentionally personality-obfuscating world of professional networking websites, you’ll meet the influencer’s staid aunts and uncles.
Let’s take a quick look at what’s being said on LinkedIn. “What is your opinion on embracing authenticity and standing with Elon Musk?” asks Shanzeh Shunaid, “Founder & CEO at SMB Services.” She writes:
“Embracing authenticity is indeed an intriguing concept, especially in a world where truth can sometimes be elusive. In a time when misinformation and fake news are prevalent, the idea of valuing and seeking authenticity holds appeal. That is to say, the notion of an authenticity-driven future and the pursuit of truth in AI development are important considerations. This is where Elon Musk’s vision of TruthGPT comes into the picture; That [sic] is to shape the business landscape and revolutionize the way we interact with AI. And of course, only time will reveal its true potential.”
Or, like most of his bullshit, the only reveal will be the lingering whiff of hot gas. One of the least responsible public actors of our day is feted, constantly, with tributes to his…authenticity? I suppose Musk truly and authentically believes worker protectionsare a thin concern compared to the heroic aim of sending garbage into space or to finally answering the Jewish Question.
Wright is not as enamored of Musk as the aforementioned LinkedIn contingency: his trip at the end of his piece trailing a “gleaming metallic art work” and conceptual nightmare featuring Musk’s visage (sitting on a goat’s body that is riding a rocket) to Tesla headquarters is anticlimactic, and the expedition reads as folly. Wright also lands a light jab that Musk was not at HQ when the ugly behemoth arrived because “[h]e was busy dismantling Twitter.”
Instead, Wright is happier to lend credulity to a different subject and another recent Austin transplant, Joe Rogan. “The experience of being on [Rogan’s] podcast is like having a curious fellow pull up a barstool next to you; three hours later, you’ve unloaded your life story,” recounts Wright. This strikes me as cringy, but not disturbing. This statement Rogan makes and which Wright quotes regarding frequent guest Alex Jones is: “He’s a head-injury case. I was a cage fighter. I’ve known a lot of guys with head injuries.”
This is pretty clearly an admission on Rogan’s part of disability abuse — I’m not sure how else to describe bringing on a guest that the host literally believes has a brain injury, only to point and laugh at their expense later — or maybe it was all a bad joke. Either way, we don’t know, as Wright was apparently too settled on his barstool to push back.
I personally don’t know if Jones is disabled; I simply know that he’s awful. I’ve had the misfortune of hearing Jones’ voice on and off again over the years — something sadly endemic to most Austinites — and I have always attributed his logorrhea to part self-aggrandizement, part paranoia and maybe, at one point, a twist of genuine frustration with U.S. foreign and domestic policy. However, any concerns Jones may have had for the victims of American interventions abroad have washed out of his system like so much Brain Force Plus. For a man forever huffing and puffing on the particles of Building 7, he clammed up pretty immediately looking for the ‘truth’ about 9/11 when Infowars guest Donald Trump was elected president (note: for more on Jones and his connection to homegrown preacher of hate Texe Marrs, see the chapter “Fruit of the Poison Tree” in my book Chalk Diary).
Speaking of notable Austinites, it’s strange to read a profile of our city with some big names missing. One is Lance Armstrong, who has fully embarrassed himself, his sport and his city but whose name is still — for worse and worse — associated with Austin. The other is Leslie Cochran (1951–2012), known by most Austinites simply as “Leslie.”
Almost every Austinite I knew in the early 2000s has Leslie lore. The first time I remember seeing him was at Eeyore’s Birthday, wearing his trademark leopard-print thong. Leslie also had some mixed feelings about Austin, especially at the end of his life, but he was very vocal about what he loved about the city and what was worth protecting — namely, the most vulnerable people who live here. Unlike a few of Wright’s interviewees, he did not see the plight of the unhoused as a problem to be solved through silencing, exiling, or simply criminalizing the people affected.
When I saw Leslie at that festival, he was protesting the Austin Police Department’s treatment of the homeless, a population of which he was a part. Contrast that with newcomer, “doctor and podcaster” Peter Attia’s concerns: “‘The only thing I find distressing about Austin is that it is taking a page out of the California playbook,’ with such city-council actions as the slashing of the police budget in 2020.’” Here is Wright on the same “slashing”:
“In the fall of 2020, the city council defunded the police’s budget by a third. It also suspended new cadet classes, and although instruction has resumed, the city is woefully short of officers. There’s no visible traffic enforcement, and since 2021 the murder rate has hit a historic high.”
Let’s take a closer look at the timeline for clarification. In the summer of 2020, Austin City Council indeed voted to “cut its police department budget by $150 million…after officers and the city’s top cop faced months of criticism over the killing of an unarmed Black and Hispanic man, the use of force against anti-police brutality protesters and the investigation of a demonstrator’s fatal shooting by another citizen,” reported the Texas Tribune.
And then? Again from the Tribune: “This year, council members reversed the cuts to the police budget — which now sits at a record $442 million, more than a third of the city’s $1.15 billion operating budget. The council paid for three new cadet classes but didn’t restore the 150 positions.”
From my perspective, it looks as though necessary, corrective measures meant to protect citizens and hold to account a police force heretofore unaccountable — so that a portion of the police budget could move toward social services designed to prevent the circumstances that lead to an “officer involved shooting” in the first place — was passed in City Council and then reversed. Wright’s piece does not address the salient, final fact that no defunding or slashing occurred, and that the police budget, in the final sum, increased enormously.
I suspect this omission has something to do with the surrounding cultural baggage around the defund movement, and that even the idea of defunding could be seen as evidence of Austin being yanked into the same swamp of syringes, homeless encampments and gender politics that “ruined” San Francisco. After all, that place “felt dangerous,” says Joe Lonsdale, and Atilla also reminisces bitterly of “…what it feelslike when you’re uncomfortable leaving a restaurant” (all italics mine). In actual fact, Austin had more reported homicides than San Francisco in 2021.
Wright and many of his interviewees pose a number of questions about the health of Austin and attendant comorbidities: the rising cost of living and how to approach the tragedy of the unhoused; Black flight; a loss of cultural character. To change Austin, some say, we should swallow a cocktail of privatization and deregulation — a tune humming throughout Wright’s piece.
But there is an alternative. We could also harness the power of people who really live in the real Austin. “Freedom should be given to all people, not just to a few people because of their dominance,” said Leslie in 2000. If “dominance” is unclear, I’m sure Leslie would permit me adding, “as in, not just people who own private jets.” Such a freedom would consist of something beyond one’s ability to live under a roof — or in town at all — based on market dictates, and which hinges on the demands of people who want Austin to be even more livable and free than it is now.
In his piece, Wright tends to interview owners of sports teams, settled academics, millionaires and billionaires, musicians connected to a scion — that sort of thing. To get a perspective on what a different, better Austin could look like, I decided to speak with someone who shares that belief in an inclusive city, and whose vision and approach is about as far from libertarian bromides as humanly possible.
Heidi Sloan is an Austin farmer who I first met at one of the many meetings or events hosted or promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization to which we both belong. I would see Sloan at these events and I also became more and more accustomed to hearing from her as well, as she became very comfortable speaking up in a meeting or at city council as a part (and on behalf of) Austinites advocating for paid sick leave, increased funding for public housing, and much more.
An adept, passionate communicator with a strong understanding of public policy, I was not surprised to learn she had the ambition to run for office. I was excited about Sloan’s campaign to represent U.S. House District 25 in 2020, and was part of a group of her supporters who joined her in person to file the paperwork to make her run official.
As is so common with progressive politics, especially in Texas, hope is often cut with disappointment, even disillusionment. Sloan lost the democratic primary to Julie Oliver, and Oliver went on to lose to republican Roger Williams in the general election. When I began thinking about this piece, I realized I needed to speak to Sloan to get her perspective on running a progressive political campaign in Austin, and because I wanted to learn more about organizing around issues like homelessness in Austin. Sloan previously worked at Mobile Loaves & Fishes and Community First!, even during her campaign.
“Everything was really hard then, but, you know, the loneliness for people out there (at Community First!) was a lot,” she said about the time directly following her campaign and as the onslaught of the pandemic began. “I started looking for an opportunity to start my own farm, probably like six months after that.” Sloan now is the sole proprietor of her own farm, The Farm at Caracara.
Sloan speaks with an emphatic cadence, and on this occasion she is wearing her trademark bandana in her hair. In conversation with Sloan I learn that Community First! includes homes for people who previously experienced homelessness but also includes “intentional neighbors” who have moved into the Village “to serve our brothers and sisters who are transitioning out of chronic homelessness,” according to the Community First! website. I also learned that Sloan considers much of the work done by her former nonprofit “palliative.”
“Mobile Loaves, just like every other nonprofit that exists, doesn’t exist to solve the problem of homelessness, just like every food pantry doesn’t exist to solve hunger, or to prevent hunger from happening in the first place […] it is palliative care. Sometimes that palliative care is intervention in chronic homelessness to really meet a deep need in someone, and sometimes it is literally palliative care for someone who is dying. A lot of people who move there [to Community First!] are actively dying, whether they know it or not. That doesn’t exactly leave space for a hopefulness of…not necessarily of reintegrating into the broader community, but recovering — in some way recovering your own individual capacity.”
“It is not a way of like, ‘Oh, I can save enough money and get an apartment someday,’ — that’s not real. It’s barely enough money to say, ‘I can go to the movies every once in a while.’ Getting a vehicle, no. Having a family, absolutely not. That’s not a possibility for people who move there. So, it serves some folks really well, but it neither looks upstream and says we want to prevent homelessness and the suffering therein from happening in the first place by addressing root causes, nor does it say some people experiencing chronic homelessness can have a better life. I mean, Community First! is a better life than living on the street. But there’s not a vision for becoming that whole person.”
The root causes of homelessness, and poverty in general, are not something one organization like Mobile Loaves & Fishes does or can meaningfully address, which Sloan acknowledges. We discussed Houston, where a government-run ‘housing first’approach has cut the amount of individuals experiencing homelessness by 63%. “My understanding is that the biggest change that [Houston] made, the sort of turning point for getting people on the same page was actually establishing a continuum of care from the city level, saying, ‘Here is how the process works,’” she says. “We don’t have that [in Austin]. It is such a mess — it is really horrible.”
When it comes to change and growth in Austin, Sloan takes issue with what she calls “this sort of libertarian analysis, that if you just set the table the right people will come to the table […] when the table was set specifically for corporations to begin with, this whole analysis of a specific point in time where things started to change, well, what really was the impetus for that? It was supporting this giant business to come and get a tax break here. You know the localized economies are ecosystems, right? Austin has an extremely high cost of living at this point. It didn’t used to — talk about an informalized economy…think about the drag in the seventies, it’s how everyone existed. The velvet rut!”
The “velvet rut” as a concept is not addressed in Wright’s piece — I’m guessing because such a lifestyle can no longer be sustained in Austin — but I remember when stagnation, not disruption, was the fearful pallor cast over this city. The rut is described here by Austin (and Austiniste) Kleon: “Back in the 70s, a lot of musicians moved to Austin because it was so laid-back and cheap, and because it was a respite from Nashville. These musicians didn’t need a lot to live on, and they were comfortable with gigging, so they never really became ambitious to do anything else because Austin was so comfortable: that’s the velvet rut. It’s real, and it’s easy to get stuck in it. You start to think, ‘I’ve got my breakfast tacos, my sunshine, my BBQ, and my food trucks. I’m just going to sit here and do my thing.’”
I heard whispers of the rut through the 2000s, and then suddenly the concept was razed like so many older east side homes. This interview with Kleon is from 2014, and you can tell the mythos of the rut still concerned him. What at least I didn’t know then (in 2001, when I moved here, or even in 2014) was that taking it too easy was really a small concern and only to a small amount of people — which is why you didn’t see crowds agitated and meeting in front of the Hole in the Wall to protest malaise. There is, however, a utility in advocating for real, material and positive changes for Austinites, and the necessity of demanding everything from affordable housing to environmental legislation from our often indolent representatives.
An obvious downside to organizing around an issue to get it passed in City Council is watching it get squashed by the state. Even though the “Death Star” bill supported by Governor Greg Abbot was declared unconstitutional, the state can successfully smother progressive legislation. For activists who worked hard to blockwalk, educate voters, request signatures on petitions and much more — only to watch that work turn into dust — is, in a word, debilitating.
Sloan says, “watching so many of those initiatives get rolled back at the state level, I think it’s pretty natural to say, ‘Well, how do we overcome the state?’ And it’s either take power at the state or trump them. Congress is one mechanism for trumping state policies. For example, the Faircloth Amendment, which prevents federal investment in new public housing — you can maintain public housing, you can maintain the number of public housing but you can’t build new public housing — can only be changed at the congressional level.”
What can be changed locally, however, is one of the main issues vexing Austinites, and which Wright himself mentions frequently in his piece. Sloan explains that “time and time again, when people poll citizens in the city of Austin: ‘What’s the most important thing on your mind politically, what do you want the city to do?” It’s homelessness. It is! Homelessness and housing, which, as we’ve said, go hand in hand. But the city isn’t willing to say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna step up, we’re going to be the center of things. We’re going to create the continuum of care and you can get on board or you can not get on board’ — nonprofits that there are so many of — because nonprofits don’t exist to create a network of nonprofits, and to serve each other. Maybe they could? I don’t know. But the city sure can — that’s what they do. It’s just one big bureaucracy; that’s what they’re great at. And I think it’s really a lack of courage that keeps that from happening. When the city doesn’t believe that they can be at the root of solving the problem, then that is what they project into the community. It’s super frustrating.” In addition to public housing, “there are services, there is health care and obviously the state of Texas leaves money on the table every year by not accepting Medicaid expansion dollars,” Sloan says.
I ask Sloan if, had she won her congressional seat, she would have felt it was worth it even if she was sent home after that two-year term. “Hell yeah, man,” she says. “To think that Texans would maybe potentially have heard through the grapevine that someone in power believed that they should have a living wage, and decent health care…to think that Texans would have heard someone arguing that public education shouldn’t be preempted by the state…like, it doesn’t change things, but it does make people who just want normal, every day, good stuff for themselves and their families, not feel crazy.”
Lawrence Wright leans heavy on a movers-and-shakers conception of Austin (with few women profiled, save for a puzzling remembrance of Madalyn Murray O’Hair; a brief interview with Linda Avey, a founder of 23andMe; and with musicians Gina Chavez and the aforementioned Emily Gimble); on a kind of “nothing gold can stay” resignation as to change in the capital; and finally on an understandable frustration that the city he has known for so long no longer resembles him.
This last point is the most sympathetic for sure, as it speaks to a universal, earned frustration that, try as we might, as we age we see less of ourselves in the culture that surrounds us. But I only barely recognized the city Wright described — this new, worse Austin — and I felt his prognosis was not only dire but defeated. Reading his piece, I also “had no idea where we were,” just as he felt looking out that hotel window.
Recall that Wright compares Austin changing to “like watching someone you love become someone you didn’t expect.” But Austin is not a simile; it is a real place where people really have to live. It honestly doesn’t matter if Austinites come from California, Dallas, or — like myself — San Antonio. It also doesn’t matter what brought us to Austin, which could have been a job, or school, or a partner, or family, or a whim. What matters is why we stay, and what we do while we’re here.
At best that is manifested in effort and a belief that a big place can be livable and interesting, and that we are the stewards of what we grow. Contrary to the pessimism inherent in Wright’s article, in Austin bad things also end — not just storied music venues or a sense of place — and good things can still happen. We just need to have the courage to make sure they do.
Adam Schragin was the editor of the Austinist (RIP) and has written for the Texas Observer, Rolling Stone and Tablet. His book of essays Chalk Diary is available in physical form at BookPeople (and online), and he has a website.
The End of Austin 