Fighting for Affordable Housing in Austin: A Conversation with Mandy De Mayo, Director of HousingWorks.
Mandy De Mayo is the Executive Director of HousingWorks, a non-profit organization on the front lines of the fight for fair and affordable housing in Austin. We sat down to … Continue reading
Shared Services at UT
Austin would not be the city it is without the University of Texas: it is one of the economic, social, and cultural hubs of the city. It employs tens of … Continue reading
Austin Within and Beyond the Dome
As improbable as the metaphor might seem, Austin is a glimmering and warming snow globe. A steadily growing number of tourists behold a beautiful kingdom of sun. Austin is a … Continue reading
Making Granite Shake
The state capitol of Texas sits in the center of Austin on the top of a hill. Its sunset red granite looks pink in the sun. Statues dedicated to a … Continue reading
The Most Beautiful City in the World
I do not want to write about leaving Austin. I don’t want to write about it because it feels like generalizing. Because, as someone noted, African Americans are the most … Continue reading
The End of Education
Oh, Austin. The world has been witnessing your gentrification from all angles. When we look back as recently as Richard Linklater’s early filmography, we see a more desirable city than … Continue reading
Finding Loston
Is this the End of Austin? How presumptuous. Endings and Beginnings are always the same process. Austin has been around for a long time; only it wasn’t always called Austin. … Continue reading
Hashtag Why Austin
In the popular imagination, Austin exists somehow separate from large scale geopolitical conflicts and historical trends. Despite our understandings of this increasingly linked world, things happening on the other side … Continue reading
The Souls of Austin
TEOA asked Robert Jensen, “How does a rapidly changing city avoid losing its soul?” Here is his response: The question presumes that Austin has a soul. I’m skeptical, for several … Continue reading
The Beginning, the Middle, and Not the End
In the beginning, when Austin was born, it was named Waterloo. Young, little Waterloo had humble beginnings as a small Texas town in the hill country, but Mirabeau B. Lamar … Continue reading
Cities Do Not Have Souls
How does a rapidly changing city avoid losing its soul? First by discarding the idea that it has a soul. Cities do not have souls. They have traditions and histories … Continue reading
The Capitol Complex
Austin’s status as the capital city of Texas is both a privilege and a burden. State government employs thousands locally and is a major contributor the local economy. The State … Continue reading
Interview: Imagine Austin
Approved by the city council in summer 2012, “Imagine Austin” is a 30-year plan based on 18,500+ ideas and contributions from Austinites. According to the plan’s authors, “Imagine Austin” provides … Continue reading
An End Both Slow and Urgent: Blackness in Austin
Like many grad students, I always expected a fairly definitive end to Austin, a time when I was called upon to fulfill my life’s work after years of honing my … Continue reading
Ann Richards and the Future of Austin
When Texas Monthly writer Jan Reid published his well-received biography of Gov. Ann Richards in late 2012, TEOA couldn’t help notice some moving passages about her death in 2006 and legacy. We … Continue reading
A Conversation With Thor
About halfway through Thor Harris’s A Post Apocalyptic Tale of Friendship (2010), a mutilated and deformed figure hauls a shark-filled aquarium through a desert populated by wilted flora and equally … Continue reading
Photos by Caroline Koebel
Angela Davis and Harriet Tubman street art (and the subsequent absence thereof) on Pedernales between 5th and Santa Rosa, Austin, 78702. November 2012. Caroline Koebel is an Austin-based filmmaker and writer … Continue reading
Whiny Austin: A Nonfiction Cartoon
“Austin ain’t what it used to be” is the moldiest cliche under the violet crown, yet Austinites can’t stop talking about how the golden age of “real Austin” disappeared five … Continue reading
The End of Austin 