Andrew M. Busch - City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas

This book was published with the assistance of the Wells Fargo Fund for Excellence of the University of North Carolina Press.

2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis Regular by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Busch, Andrew M., author.

Title: City in a garden : environmental transformations and racial justice in twentieth-century Austin, Texas / Andrew M. Busch.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047656 | ISBN 9781469632636 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469632643 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469632650 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Austin (Tex.)History. | Austin (Tex.)Race relations. | Sustainable urban developmentSocial aspectsTexasAustin. | City PlanningEnvironmental aspectsTexasAustin. | City planningSocial AspectsTexasAustin.

Classification: LCC F394.A957 B87 2017 | DDC 976.4/31dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047656

Cover illustration: Skyline of Austin, Texas, at dusk Adobe Stock/Brocreative.

Chapter 6 was originally published in a different form as Building A City of Upper-Middle-Class Citizens: Labor Markets, Segregation, and Growth in Austin, Texas, 19501973, Journal of Urban History 39, no. 5 (September 2013): 975996. Chapter 7 was originally published in a different form as The Perils of Participatory Planning: Space, Race, Environmentalism, and History in Austin Tomorrow, Journal of Planning History 15, no. 2 (May 2016): 87107. Both are used here with permission.

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This book began as a hazy idea conceived in a graduate seminar at the University of Texas in 2005. Since then a wide array of people have helped me turn that idea into a book. Without their generous assistance and support I never could have finished this project, and I wish to thank them.

At the University of Texas, my most immediate thanks go to Jeff Meikle, who guided me with positivity, good humor, and wisdom. Other members of the Department of American Studies faculty, especially Steve Hoelscher, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Janet Davis, mentored me. Ella Schwartz was indispensable in the process as well. Among my graduate student cohort, I wish to especially thank Tony Fassi, Jason Mellard, Gavin Benke, Andi Gustavson, Jeremy Dean, Robin OSullivan, John Cline, Ben Lisle, and Danny Gerling, all of whom either read part of the manuscript or discussed it in depth with me. Eliot Tretter has been a generous guide and mentor and has shared a wealth of knowledge about Austin. I would also like to thank Randy Lewis, Stan Friedman, Josh Long, Elizabeth Mueller, Sarah Dooling, Patrick Vitale, Scott Swearingen, and Bob Fairbanks for great conversations and input on this project.

Other scholars have helped me on my intellectual journey. At Illinois Wesleyan, Brian Hatcher and Mike Weis both stoked my interests in history and introduced me to a world larger than I had previously grasped. At Purdue, Elliott Gorn, Nancy Gabin, Mike Morrison, Jon Teaford, and Susan Curtis introduced me to American studies and challenged me to become a scholar. At Miami University, Kimberly Hamlin, Damon Scott, and Peggy Shaffer mentored me as a teacher and scholar and were generous in reading and discussing my work. I just arrived at the University of Texas at Dallas, and my colleagues here have been wonderful. Chris Sellers and Shana Bernstein provided valuable feedback as anonymous readers and improved the book immeasurably with their thoughtful comments.

The University of North Carolina Press has been wonderful and supportive through the entire process. My editor, Brandon Proia, as well as Jad Adkins have been a joy to work with. The wonderful people at the Austin History Center helped me locate countless collections, photos, and maps. Thanks to all of them, and especially to Mike Miller, Molly Hults, Susan Rittereiser, and Nicole Davis. I would also like to thank all the staff at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and at the Lower Colorado River Authority.

I would like to thank my family for their unconditional support. My grandparents, Dick and Connie Houck and Martha Busch, taught me to be curious and were always encouraging. My siblings, Eric, Betsy, and Maggie, put up with me and often challenged me to be a better person. My parents, Ellen and Mike Busch, never lost faith in me despite my many shortcomings and have been consistently selfless and supportive. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Renee Searfoss, for her unending support personally, professionally, and intellectually, and my son, Frank, for being a pretty cool three-year-old. I dedicate this book to you two, my people.

In the new economy we have to make sure we do not create unintended results.

Austin mayor Kirk Watson, quoted in Rosenblum, Mayor Offers Strategy

In the twenty-first century, Austin, Texas, has become a model of dynamic, sustainable urban development. While most American cities declined under the weight of the Great Recession, Austin flourished. A litany of sources, such as Forbes , Time , and CBS, called the city a boomtown and named it the top metropolitan region for economic growth and small businesses in 2011. While some of this growth is due to the continued ascension of Texas and the Sunbelt more broadly, Austins core strategy reflects a set of principles that are much different from those of its regional neighbors. In Austin, environmental sustainability and a green urban planning philosophy are linked to quality of life and economic growth, part of the new economy that assumes that people and businesses factor general well-being into locational choices.

Along with its economic resiliency, Austin has recently been praised for its creativity, forward-thinking urban planning, and sustainability.

Yet urban plaudits are rarely without tensions, contradictions, and externalities that expose the limits of sustainable development. Amid robust economic growth, there is abject poverty and flight among minorities in Austin. African Americans have lost population share in Austin every decade since 1920 and experienced a real decline from 2000 to 2010, even as the city as a whole grew by 20 percent during this same period. Austin is one of the few metropolitan regions in the United States with a higher percentage of African Americans in suburbs than in the central cityand poverty in Austins suburbs rose by 143 percent between 2000 and 2011, the second-fastest increase in the United States. African Americans who live in the city continue to lag, averaging half the household income of whites. The citys population as a whole had a poverty rate of around 23 percent in 2011, among which a majority are people of color. In some transitional neighborhoods, poverty is 2,000 percent greater among African Americans than among whites. These statistics indicate that, despite economic growth, sustainability awards, and an overall strong quality of life, Austin is not a particularly sustainable place for its historically disadvantaged residents. It makes sense, then, to ask why the concept of urban sustainability has developed in a way that seems to exclude so many people from its benefits and why Austin is a city so tied to its natural environment yet so bifurcated by race.