Book Review: Lost in Austin - The Evolution of an American City. by Alex Hannaford. HarperCollins, 2024.
The book is author Alex Hannaford’s lament about changes in Austin, Texas, since his initial visit to the city in 1999. This at first spurred your reviewer, who moved to Austin in 1969, to think, “1999? Well, isn’t that just too precious?”
Yet Hannaford hits almost all the right notes, his elegy to Austin all the more bittersweet because he arrived at the moment the city’s magic began fading at an accelerated pace. Despite his late arrival, his experiences jibe with my own, and his great love for the city – or for the city as it was – matches mine.
At first, Hannaford writes, “Austin embodied the notion you could do something different with your life. This was the city of reinvention, exciting, bubbling with opportunity and optimism.” Not a Hollywood, where you can simply pretend to be someone else, but a place where you could find, and pursue, your life’s true calling.
The good news was that Austin was a liberal oasis in deep red Texas! The bad news was that small, isolated Austin was a liberal oasis in a huge, huge Texas. It’s not small any more: Population has grown from a quarter million at the time of my arrival, to a million in city limits today, and a total metro area count of well over two million.
The problem of growth, as Hannaford articulates it, was that the high quality of life in “America’s most talked-about city” continued to attract counterculturalists, but to a much greater extent, attracted money. Austin’s “weird” culture, of which we were so proud, succumbed to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t contribute to that culture. That is, to people who were so insecure they believed all they could bring to the party was money – and so shallow that all they wanted from the party was money, and its trappings.
Root causes of all this, Hannaford continues, were higher rents driving artists, musicians, minorities, and teachers from the city; the “grow or die” ethos of the new high-tech companies; and “government policies that prioritize wealth creation over community, repurposing cities as places that generate wealth for the rich instead of places that serve the needs of the poor and middle class.”
As a result, he goes on, “Austin no longer stood out.” The worst thing that can happen to a distinctive city is to come to look just like anywhere else. Austin has now experienced the worst: A generic skyline, a dearth of inexpensive music venues (it’s “Live Music Capital of the World” tagline now a sad joke), and devastated ethnic neighborhoods.
Before anyone outs your reviewer via a letter to the editor, I’ll confess to much personal guilt about this. I was deputy director of Austin’s IC2 Institute, the nerve center of the city’s tech transformation. Having met so many engineering PhD grads in the ‘70s who drove taxis to avoid having to leave Austin, I wanted to build a community where they could put their education to use.
I believed other young techies would move to Austin and embrace its culture. I believed the California polluters who said they had come to Austin to start nice clean software companies. Both beliefs proved wrong.
Hannaford documents how the influx of tech has moved Austin’s libertarianism in a rightward direction, a la Joe Rogan, and away from its former tolerant leftism. In fact, nonproductive conservatism had long been an undercurrent in Austin, with manifestations in transportation and in real estate.
For example, the author bemoans the state of public transportation in Austin. Long before his day, Southwest Airlines lobbyists had torpedoed the inter-city Texas High Speed Rail project, which was to serve Austin. Austin’s commuter light rail was built, but somehow, yes somehow, it runs so infrequently as to make its use inconvenient for almost everyone. “See?” the automobile advocates crowed, “Commuter rail was a bad idea!” Citizens rallied, though, to defeat a proposed east-west freeway along the riverfront, to create instead the park that is now Austin’s crown jewel.
The Homebuilders Association of Greater Austin, reports Hannaford, saw to it that inclusionary zoning was outlawed. City Councilwoman Bridget Shea’s house was “bought by a developer who built what she described as a hideous exoskeleton on top of it in order to expand the square footage.” Likewise, the last time I sold a house in Austin I remarked to my agent that the buyer’s plans bypassed several attractive architectural possibilities. Confirming my fear that Austin’s culture was finally toes-up, he replied, “These days it’s only about price per square foot times number of square feet.”
I knew and respected many Austin mayors and council members. But when they let a builder get away with calling a drainage ditch in my neighborhood a “green belt,” it became clear that real estate interests, not the city council, controlled Austin. Hannaford remarks, “Nobody in any position of power seems willing to challenge the developers and put a stop to the stampede.”
Lost in Austin notes that in 1965 a sniper atop the University of Texas’ tower perpetrated America’s first-ever mass school shooting. (Ten years after, I made a nervous joke while walking under the tower with my date. In reply, she revealed the sniper had shot and killed her twin sister.) Hannaford documents the doubling of the murder rate in Austin by 2021 and implies that the rise is due to psychological stress from the growth of the city.
He avers that longtime Austinites spend so much time looking back in nostalgia that they’re incapable of looking forward. Day-to-day hurdles of living in Austin today can make it hard to look forward: “I have to fight my way through miles of strip malls full of useless national chain stores, just to get to Antone’s or Waterloo,” a friend of mine remarked, referring to two downtown, homegrown music businesses. As in other cities, air conditioning has separated people from community. With the city’s high susceptibility to climate warming, Austinites will spend still more time indoors, isolated from neighbors.
Hannaford details the city’s generic problems with drugs, crime, and homelessness, but places those in a larger context: “I wanted to explore Austin’s plans to secure its future,” he writes. Yet he concludes with the downbeat, “You can’t reverse Austin‘s changes, but you can prolong the city’s decline.” (He has since moved to New York.) There may be other smaller cities where cultural renaissance can occur, he opines, but ultimately they’ll suffer the same fate Austin has. He cites Aspen, Colorado, where exactly this has happened.
With a brief nod to the Smart City movement, he asks, “What if technology could make the city more livable, more equitable?” It was our Institute’s belief that changes in technology and values jointly create the future. The needed tech is available, but: Is Austin now too big to share values? Is community irretrievably lost?
Our goals in the ‘80s, to create jobs and wealth, succeeded, but at the expense of Austin’s traditional and disadvantaged citizen groups. Few UT engineering PhDs are driving taxis any more, but the city’s artificial intelligence entrepreneurs now strive to eliminate the engineers’ hard-won knowledge-based employment. Many challenges remain, some old, some new.
Lost in Austin is factually correct according to my recollections, with the exception that it was columnist John Kelso, not musician Marcia Ball, who first announced that the Frost Bank building looks like a giant nose hair clipper.
An index would have benefited readers, especially as the book carries lessons for many other cities. It is not merely an engaging personal and historical account. It is also a valuable reference volume.
Fred Phillips is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Elsevier’s journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change, and author of Social Culture and High-Tech Economic Development: The Technopolis Columns (Palgrave, 2006). With D.S. Oh, he co-edited Technopolis: Best Practices for Science & Technology Cities (Springer, 2014) and Smart City 2.0: Strategies for City Development and Innovation (World Scientific, 2023). He now lives in Albuquerque, and heads TANDO Institute, the organization of the former IC2 Institute Fellows.