Building a City of Upper-Middle-Class Citizens

Abstract

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 Perils of Participatory Planning

“…Schools were almost entirely segregated in the 1960s and 1970s, meaning that interracial social contact was extremely limited among youth as well. 22…”

“…Their knowledge was the product of decades of municipal indifference to Eastside issues and, in some cases, blatantly disregard for the rights and property of eastsiders. 35 Early issues with participation focused around the consulting groups that the City of Austin hired to implement Austin Tomorrow, National Leadership Methods (NLMs). NLM was largely a source of concern among neighborhood groups that were active in early phase II work, but they also promoted some agendas that appear inherently undemocratic.…”

“…Although minority Austinites did not riot on the scale of many larger cities in the 1960s and 1970s, discrimination in housing, employment, and social services was acute. 56 Upon Austin Tomorrow's inception, then, Austin was very much a bifurcated city in terms of race, class, and opportunity, which complicated the program's ideas of producing democratic urban space and led to both a lack of participation and a focus on the needs of only part of the population. Planners never understood that history and geography played key roles in east Austin's frustrations.…”