When I stumbled into Austin, Texas in the Summer of 1962, it was the greatest place in the world. The natural beauty of this eden, it’s rolling hills, serene lakes and vast, welcoming parks straddling the broad Colorado River were just a part of the attraction. The large University of Texas campus with its signature Spanish Renaissance architecture stretched out over 400 charming acres; the vibrant Mexican section added a mixture of color, sound and festivity not often experienced on this side of the border; the iconic taverns, beer gardens, Tex-Mex joints and music halls were melting pots of curious students, Capitol City politicians, burned-out beatniks and church league softball teams mixing comfortably. If you arrived at Scholz’s on stilts and singing Mammy, you might not get a second look. It was Live And let Live to the nth power in Austin, Texas.
A sparkling city like this in an arch-conservative state like the Lone Star draws the best and the brightest. High-school graduates from reactionary backwaters piled in, grateful to be freed from their small-town intellectual prisons. Artists of every stripe made the pilgrimage and stayed. Musicians rambled through, took a second look and settled down. Small businesses operated by local entrepreneurs sprung up to challenge the traditional shops, many of them with no more collateral than a wing and a prayer. There was barely a single chain business the length of Guadalupe Street where it fronted the UT campus. It wasn’t the Age of Aquarius yet, but you could see it coming from the top of the 29-story Texas Tower.
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| There is overreach, there is bad taste and there is ugly, all of them brought together and tied with a nice bow with The Oasis On Lake Travis outside Austin, Texas. |
Y’all Come!
Of course, the problem with places like 1962 Austin, Texas, is that everyone wants to live there. Well, not everyone. Gilbert Shelton’s half-brother, Steve, previously a student at tight-assed Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College, was gobsmacked by the unstructured libertine environment and after a few weeks of it went scurrying back to dependably dull College Station. But most young people bought what Austin was selling…the freedom to engineer your own trip, however crazed it may be. And when the word got out, it got out big. The population of 202,000 in 1962 exploded to 2,117,000 by 2021, with no sign of abating.
Alas, the streets aren’t any wider, the parking spaces couldn’t possibly keep up and you’re liable to spend an hour now sitting in your car on the interstate trying to get from one side of town to the other, an experience I enjoyed just two years ago. A few of the fine old places remain scattered throughout town but you need a helicopter to get to them. This has not slowed down the Austin migration one bit, as dozens of tech businesses, many fleeing even busier and more expensive California, are buying up land from the capital to San Antone. New arrivals, unfamiliar with the glories of Old Austin, seem crazy about the place, and it still has tons to offer. The Old Guard, however, looks out the window to the ever-increasing numbers of gigantic new buildings on the verge of blotting out the sun and sighs. What do we have now for what we have given up? A fair question for Austin and for all those places like it which choose concrete over sod, an endless din over serenity and wealth over soul. Good luck with that. Just do us one small favor. Don’t mess with Pflugerville.
Gainesville, Florida was, is now and ever shall be much smaller than Austin, Texas. It’s population in 1960 was a mere 29,701 and is now a reasonable 128,610. The roads are pretty much the same as they were in the Sixties but it’s still possible to get from here to there in acceptable time. The city is an oasis of sanity in a morosely red state, same as Austin, and attracts people for many of the same reasons. There is no immediate danger of the town being overrun by invading hordes, but there is more than one way to spoil the brew and the city is heading in that direction.
Gainesville has always been a mellow place, the pace there slower than that of Austin. In and around the city, much of Old Florida remains in all its laid-back splendor. In the late sixties, Gainesville was the runaway capital of Florida as dissatisfied teenagers bolted from their homes by the hundreds, looking for their own version of San Francisco. The opening of the Subterranean Circus by inexperienced young people and its subsequent success led to a spate of youth-oriented businesses managed by twentyish entrepreneurs stretching the length of University Avenue, from the University of Florida campus to a previously stodgy downtown. Kids flocked in from everywhere on weekends and not just for the football games.
Gainesville raised a plethora of musicians, fostered an incredible number of places for them to display their wares, became the true non-country music capital of Florida. Students accustomed to life there often stayed after graduating, willing to take lesser jobs than they might find elsewhere to continue living the dream. Others left and soon returned, unable to find the town’s equal, pining for the good old days. People probably feel the same way about Boulder, Madison, Columbus, Athens, Georgia and any number of other places which have found and developed the secret formula. “We like it here!” was Gainesville’s motto and we certainly did. But look over there—is that a diamondback twisting through the Garden of Eden?
From the UF campus to the heart of the city, which once featured a single scrawny edifice more than four stories high, horrendous large buildings are popping up like kudzu vines, multiplying like hydrilla on speed. Entire city blocks are being razed, their colorful and popular shops blasted to Kingdom Come to make room for the pleasures of the Huns. Football fans went into catatonic fits when the iconic Swamp restaurant fell victim to the invading hordes, but that was just one of many sad losses. The unique storefronts which once dotted the Avenue have been lost to the ages, to be replaced by forty little pufferbellies all in a row. And why? Because money rules, because bigger is better and devil take the hindmost is the philosophy of those we elect to administer our cities. These people wouldn’t recognize soul if it showed up with a neon-yellow ID tag, are somehow incapable even of discerning they are helping to destroy the same fabric of a town which made it inviting. “What can we DO?” they wail plaintively. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re not going to believe it, but they have this new thing called zoning. Give us a call and we’ll tell you about it. Don’t wait too long.
I Left My Trash In San Francisco
Anyone who has spent time in the midst of “the homeless” soon realizes a simple fact: there are the legitimately disenfranchised who need and deserve help and there are the tagalongs who like what they call “the life.” The numbers in the latter category are increasing by leaps and bounds, especially in overly permissive cities like Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, which have made The Life so enticing that cavalcades of bums pour into town daily. No shoes? No Shirt? No problem, here you go—wear these to dinner tonight at the festive feeding grounds---we’re serving Steak Diane this evening. You can get there on the free light rail trains. There’ll be a man to block your hat while you ride.
These two cities and several others are losing tourists in droves, their mayors and other leaders terrified to ruffle the ultraliberal feathers of much of their populace. Hotel organizations are pleading for help, tourist businesses are screaming bloody murder, regular citizens are locking their doors as the once deferential “homeless” are pissing on their begonias and robbing them on the streets. The City needs an Iron Fist at the helm, a bat and bullhorn-toting guy like recently deceased New Jersey school principal Joe Louis Clark, a man who kicked ass and took names, a disciplinarian, a stud who spoke truth to people who needed to hear it. Where is Fiorello LaGuardia and his sledgehammer when we really need him?
Welcome To The Hotel California
When Siobhan and I vacationed in Oregon a couple of years ago, almost everyone we met there was a California expatriate. The Cali property owners, finding their real estate had zoomed to astronomical financial heights, took the money and ran. The rest moved because they couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Quick now---what’s the big problem with a place where only rich people can afford to live? That’s right, they have no one to cater to them. No self-respecting tycoon wants to go to the kitchen at San Francisco’s Saison to retrieve his meal. And what doyenne wants to park her own car at Providence in L.A.? It’s downright gauche!
Not everyone can pick up and move to Oregon, so what’s a poor boy to do when the rents escalate to the edges of the universe? Many people with full-time jobs in California cities live in tents. Years ago, Aspen, Colorado suddenly recognized the city was running out of service personnel, threatening the existence of many of their posh enterprises. Immediately, they set about to build low-cost apartments and succeeded in keeping their workers. California has low-cost housing, too, but out there they call it slums. There is often resistance to constructing these units by residents in the vicinity of a proposed development, afraid their own real estate will decline in value, so it’s not a simple trick to get this done. But it’s no longer just wishful thinking in The Golden State, it’s a necessity. The tent cities expand by the day, defacing large sections of their cities, zipping up the crime rates, running off tourists and costing untold millions. Many California cities have become too much of a good thing, so attractive that everybody wanted to live there. And now everybody does.
What Can You Do In A Case Like That? What Can You Do But Spit In Your Hat?
In late January of last year, a group of unhoused mothers in West Oakland organized under the title Moms 4 Housing and occupied one of the many vacant homes in the city. They were violently evicted by police but gained overwhelming community support and media attention. Eventually, the property’s absentee landlords, Wedgewood Properties agreed to sell the home to the Oakland Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that buys land to maintain permanent affordable housing for low-income communities. The struggle of Moms 4 Housing is worth paying attention to, a testament that there are tactics available for communities that wish to take the housing bull by the horns.
Community land trusts are agreements between a non profit and a community that ensure the long-term affordability of housing. Generally, a nonprofit---which has community members on the board to ensure that it serves the community’s needs---buys land and leases parcels to individuals and families at an affordable price, separating the cost of the land from the cost of housing. Though residents can build some equity, they cannot sell the homes for large profits, which ensures that the CLT can keep the homes affordable for future residents. There is a resurgence in community land trusts across the country and their numbers have risen past 200.
Portland, Oregon, which is overrun by legitimately homeless people as well as freeloaders looking for an easy mark, has come up with The East Portland Community Investment Trust to help low-income residents build equity and fight displacement by having community ownership of local property.
EPCIT’s first acquisition was Plaza 122, a commercial property in East Portland’s Mill Park neighborhood. Through EPCIT, individuals or families who live in the four nearby Zip Codes can invest between $10 and $100 per month to retain ownership shares in the property.
When Plaza 122 was in foreclosure, it had a mere two-thirds occupancy rate. Two years after its purchase, it reached full occupancy and is now home to a variety of businesses owned by people of color. As more neighbors invest (EPCIT is set up to accommodate up to 500 investor-owners), they will eventually buy out the original investment from the previous owners. EPCIT is the only outfit of its kind in the country, but the model is ripe to be duplicated elsewhere.
In Richmond, Virginia, Bon Secours Health System has used its community investment funds to support the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust and incubate its latest initiative, the Richmond Land Bank. The MWCLT serves as the City of Richmond’s designated land bank by repurposing vacant and tax-delinquent properties for the public interest.
Limited equity housing cooperatives (LEHCs) are democratically owned and managed by a nonprofit cooperative organization. Like community land trusts, LEHCs limit the equity a member can earn with the home’s resale, preserving the long-term affordability of the housing stock. One example is the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association established in 1991 in New York City after decades of local organizing. The objective was to have an anti-displacement advocacy coalition birthed in response to earlier urban renewal policies.
Removing decades of despicable housing practices brought about by corporate greed and state complicity is not easy and the current tactics range from run-of-the-mill tax-break tinkering to more radical platforms, like the one shouldered by Moms 4 Housing that posit housing as a human right. The supporters of these strategies are fighting to win and are beginning to take back what has long been reserved for their wealthier neighbors: the right to a home. Salud!
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
The Best
Court Lewis has been a Flying Pie reader since its beginning ten short years ago. In addition to his valet duties at wife Margaret's horse facility near Johnson City, Tennessee, he also operates a weekly radio program and mucks about in local politics, trying to save the neighborhood from the incursion of savage outlanders. Once, however, he was a lad transfixed by sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
Best Day: Court Lewis, Unicoi, Tennessee
The first time I saw Jimi Hendrix live was in early 1967, when few people had ever heard of him. This was only days after a breakthrough performance at the Monterey Pop Festival. Jimi and the gang were opening for, of all people, The Monkees. Consider the brilliance of that packaging job. Anyway, my folks were out of town and I had driven with a friend to Miami Beach in his GTO, the obvious intent to pick up girls. This was not a difficult feat in those days. The two we found wanted to go to a concert at the Convention Center to see those darling Monkees, a ticket which was above our normal date budget and below our usual aesthetic standards. Nonetheless, we went with the hopes of later getting lucky, as young lads are wont to do. Buying tickets an hour before the concert, we got promoters’ seats which had just been released….a front side row right next to the stage.
When Jimi’s band came out, I was transfixed. They looked like aliens. I had never seen or heard of anybody looking like this---Big afros, psychedelic threads, platform shoes. when they started playing Purple Haze, I almost fell off my seat. I was transported. The intellectual audience, on the other hand, a sea of teeny-boppers, was less enthusiastic. They started booing….shouts of “Go home, niggers!” filled the air, even during the breaks when Hendrix could clearly hear them. Meanwhile, our two girlfriends who had previously thought we were cute catches, were quite taken aback by our enthusiasm for these odd ruffians.
By the time the band had finished their first set, I was worried they’d be so discouraged by the rough treatment they might bail. Desperate to prevent that from happening, I jumped up and ran to the nearby backstage entrance door and went from room to room looking for them. That’s right, me in my Gant madras shirt, Bostonian loafers and JFK haircut. I rushed up to the first one I found---Noel Redding, the bass guitarist---grabbed him by the shoulders and said something like, “You guys were great! Don’t listen to those kids---they’re just children, they don’t know anything. Keep playing, you guys are like nobody else and you’re going to be super-famous!”
I think Noel was stoned, though I was no expert on these matters at the time. After he recovered from the shock of being grabbed and shouted at by this maniac who came out of nowhere, he just mumbled, “Hey, man, it’s cool.” Then reached down and handed me the Are You Experienced? album from a pile behind his chair. In that instant I knew these people were on their way and didn’t need me to talk them down off any ledges. I also knew i wanted to get back home and listen to that album as soon as possible.
The girls were dumbfounded we wanted to skip seeing The Monkees. “We’re staying,” they said, haughtily. “We’ll call our parents when it’s over.” Fine with us, see you around. We made the three-hour drive back home, woke up my younger brothers and played that album on the big living-room console stereo….not once, but over and over until the sun came up. It might have been The Best Day Of My Life.
Later, when I went to college in upper New York State, I was the only one there who had that album. It had just been released in the U.S. that week. I stuck my stereo speakers out on the dorm windowledge and played it at top volume. crowds would gather down below to listen. For a brief but lovely interval, I was semi-famous. Those weren’t bad days, either.
