This chapter explores intensifying segregation in the postwar era and argues that segregation was an important component of the city’s growth model. Even in a relatively liberal city like Austin, racial relations took a backseat to economic and demographic growth. City leaders used federally-sponsored urban renewal to remake the landscape, but doing so necessitated dispossessing thousands of minorities and destroying their neighborhoods. African Americans, in particular, had trouble finding new homes. By the 1970s Austin was more segregated than at any time before.
The natural beauty of Austin, Texas, has always been central to the city’s identity. From the beginning, city leaders, residents, planners, and employers consistently imagined Austin as a natural place, highlighting the region’s environmental attributes as they marketed the city and planned for its growth. Yet, as Austin modernized and attracted an educated and skilled labor force, the demand to preserve its natural spaces was used to justify economic and racial segregation. This effort to create and maintain a “city in a garden” perpetuated uneven social and economic power relationships throughout the twentieth century.
In telling Austin’s story, Andrew M. Busch invites readers to consider the wider implications of environmentally friendly urban development. While Austin’s mainstream environmental record is impressive, its minority groups continue to live on the economic, social, and geographic margins of the city. By demonstrating how the city’s midcentury modernization and progressive movement sustained racial oppression, restriction, and uneven development in the decades that followed, Busch reveals the darker ramifications of Austin’s green growth.
This essay documents labor market and residential segregation in Austin, Texas, in the three decades after World War Two, arguing that despite the city’s relatively progressive culture it was as racially segregated as most Northern and Southern cities during the period. In Austin, being progressive usually meant supporting New Deal policies, encouraging strong ties to the federal government, and promoting responsible, nonindustrial growth much more than fighting racial inequality or rejecting the sanctity of private property rights. Segregation, ironically bolstered by federally supported urban renewal, which undermined black property rights, helped maintain a nonindustrial image that city leaders used to market Austin as a pleasant place to live and do business for knowledge workers. The resounding defeat of open housing in 1968 maintained de facto segregation and demonstrated the fallacy of race-neutral housing policies in the South. Today, the deleterious effects of segregation and dispossession are still felt among the city’s African American and Latino residents; current economic trends mirror those from the 1960s.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.