Spend enough time in our state capital—say, an afternoon—and you’re almost certain to hear a version of “the Austin jeremiad.” It’s a parable of declension, with the narrator wailing that the Austin of today isn’t nearly as appealing as the city of yesteryear. Early iterations of this tale stretch back at least to the dawn of the eighties, prompted by the closure and then the razing of the Armadillo World Headquarters, the legendary music hall that played host to the likes of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Given the city’s billing as the Live Music Capital of the World, it’s no surprise that subsequent generations have pegged Austin’s fall to the disappearance of other venues, like the Electric Lounge and Liberty Lunch, both shuttered in 1999, or Southpark Meadows, paved over the next year to accommodate a shopping center. (That said, even Austinites’ nostalgic tendencies have their limits; you’d have to search far and wide to find someone wringing their hands over the recent teardown of the cavernous, ear-wrecking Frank Erwin Center.)
Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City (Dey Street Books) is journalist Alex Hannaford’s breezy and readable contribution to this genre. It hews mostly to the conventional account of degeneration and will thus elicit a chorus of “amens” from many Austinites, especially when Hannaford calls out controversial residents by name, whether of the homegrown variety, like Alex Jones, or more recent arrivals, such as Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. But his research and reporting may lead readers to a surprising conclusion: For all its undeniable charms, the lamented lost Austin of the past may never have been all it was cracked up to be.
Hannaford’s first trip to the city, in 1999, was almost by accident. He was plotting a cross-country drive with a friend when an aging musician in Philadelphia browbeat the pair into adding the Texas capital to their itinerary. Hannaford was smitten: “Austin was unlike any place I’d been before . . . We were deep in the heart of Texas, and it felt like that isolation had somehow served to freeze Austin in the 1950s . . . It was a weird, intoxicating mix of frontier town, hippie holdout, and indie mecca, with too many Mexican restaurants to count.” Although he soon returned to his native England, he sought out chances to return, persuading a British newspaper to let him cover the 2001 South by Southwest music festival. Two years later he met his future wife at SXSW and shortly thereafter moved to Austin. The couple had a daughter in 2011. “At the time it seemed like a perfect place to raise a family,” he writes. “I didn’t think we’d ever leave.”
But over the next decade, Austin soured for Hannaford (who has written for Texas Monthly). Unsettled by the increasing militance of the state’s gun culture—in the summer of 2019 a young man armed with an assault rifle and a 9mm pistol was apprehended at a park near Hannaford’s daughter’s school—he and his wife decided they’d had enough and moved to New York’s Hudson Valley. Although he confesses to missing Austin occasionally, he’s deeply pessimistic about its future. The “magic has worn thin,” he says, “And I don’t see it coming back.”
Throughout Lost in Austin, Hannaford argues that whatever the grumblings of the discontented from previous eras, the turn of the twenty-first century really was a tipping point, brought on in part by Austin’s tech boom and the city’s jaw-dropping growth. Since 2000, Austin’s population has mushroomed by nearly 50 percent, to just under one million people; it is now the nation’s eleventh-largest city. That expansion has led to soaring housing costs, infuriating traffic jams, and a commercial construction boom that has at once transformed the city’s skyline but left Austin with a glut of postpandemic vacant office space.
Hannaford’s wistfulness is not entirely misplaced; there really were salad days in Austin, the product of a peculiar alchemy that coalesced in the seventies and early eighties. (Though some might say Austin was a distinctly enlightened and cultured place as far back as the late nineteenth century, thanks to the establishment of the capital and the university.) Hannaford cites the work of Dowell Myers, a former urban planner at the University of Texas, who published a paper in 1987 that, among other things, examined the “unique assets and amenities” that made Austin special. Those variables were “the state capital, the University of Texas, the laid-back lifestyle . . . an abundance of water resources for recreation, and the homegrown music scene.” Old-timers might recall that the restaurant landscape was uninspiring, housing was cheap, Willie and his buds were throwing down at the Austin Opry House, and the beer was ice cold.
There were always intractable problems, though, most notably the city’s vicious segregation, which Hannaford acknowledges, even though it complicates his prelapsarian vision of an urban idyll. Austin has never been very welcoming to its communities of color, especially its Black population. As Hannaford explains, the city plan of 1928 deliberately drove Black people out of Clarksville, now one of Austin’s most desirable neighborhoods; many of the displaced found homes in East Austin and were then cut off from downtown when Interstate 35 was built in 1962.
This legacy of racial discrimination is a poignant reminder that Austin was an ideal place for only some, specifically the white residents whose inexpensive accommodations—so central to the Austin myth—were made possible to some degree by the exile of Black residents. Hannaford’s initial impression of the city as dipped in amber from the Eisenhower era is thus uncomfortably on the nose. Progressive Austinites’ belief that their city stands apart from the rest of Texas thanks to its open-minded and inclusive politics can be sustained only through a cultivated amnesia.
For example, the city has consistently underfunded public infrastructure and transportation even as Dallas (gasp!) has made investments in both. Austin’s homeless population, Hannaford observes, started to tick up in the late eighties as the cost of living increased because of the first tech boom, and has been “a political football” ever since. Speaking of pigskin, despite the fact that Texas produces a prodigious amount of high school football talent and the Longhorns get their pick of choice recruits, UT has claimed exactly one national championship in the past fifty years. Over that span, the team could be most charitably described as “inconsistent,” although you’re sure to find spicier terms on Orangebloods after a loss. That might be worth a look if the upcoming matchup with the powerhouse Georgia Bulldogs on October 19 goes badly.
What most people think of as the golden age of Austin, in short, served a rather rarified demographic for a relatively brief period of time—maybe 1965 to 2010 if you’re feeling expansive, 1973 to 1989 if you’re of a crabbier bent. And it wasn’t always the same lovely place. The bucolic fifties Austin of Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place was very different from the seventies Austin that Willie helped build, which was very different from the punk rock–inflected Austin of the eighties, not to mention the Austin that Hannaford so giddily encountered in 1999, when plenty of longtime residents thought the soon-to-bust dot-com boom had already sullied the town. Though Austin was always somewhat distinct from the rest of the state, it was never possessed by some pure and eternal essence that the rampant growth of recent years has somehow desecrated. Instead, the Austin lamented by the heartbroken represents a specific moment in the city’s history which, inevitably, turned into something else, proof that, as Robert Frost observed, “nothing gold can stay.”
What wasn’t inevitable was what those changes would look like. Four years before Myers released his 1987 paper, Hannaford tells us, Austin began a concerted and successful effort to attract technology companies to town. The impressively prophetic Myers expressed concern that future development would, Hannaford writes, “kill the quality-of-life goose that lays the golden eggs.” In the decades since, the city has teeter-tottered between encouraging growth and squelching it, in ways that all but guaranteed that many of those qualities of life went the way of the Armadillo.
And, of course, the same communities of color that got screwed over in 1928 and 1962 suffered all over again when gentrification swept eastward and many of the descendants of those pushed out decades ago faced relocation themselves. These underserved populations have long been disadvantaged by Austin’s political class, thanks in part to city council elections being held on an at-large basis. Under this system, each member represented the entire city, rather than specific communities, resulting in a cabal that typically favored wealthy and powerful (read: white) interests. Until 2012, when the council shifted to single-member districts (which took effect two years later), Austin had been the only major U.S. city clinging to this outmoded form of representation.
Like it or not, the Austin of today is a product of choices made by the electorate, by various local and state officials, and by forces that were beyond anyone’s control. So the last thing anyone needs is more Austin Jeremiahs—who those of us living elsewhere find insufferable, anyway. What the city does need, at this point, is better planning for the future—though, to be honest, it’s not always clear what that informed thinking might look like. Is the city trying to curb growth to preserve what’s special about the place, or shape its rapid development so that most of the people moving there can afford the rent? Austin has lately been on a homebuilding spree that has managed to flatten out its absurd real estate values, which is all to the good, though many of those new houses and apartment buildings are uglier than a Sixth Street sidewalk on Sunday morning seen from the window of a Cybertruck.
At the very least, it might make sense to focus on what to do about the demands all those new homeowners are going to put on the limited water resources Hannaford so cherished. “Austin’s natural springs, water holes, and rivers are one of the biggest reasons I fell for the city,” he writes. Thanks to climate change, punishing droughts have threatened many of them, including the fabled Barton Springs, and the Edwards Aquifer, the enormous underground lake that provides water for drinking, farming, and playing, is being depleted faster than it can be replenished. Austin will be a very different place if there’s no water to pour into the countless iced margarita machines at the beck and call of this weekend’s three thousand bachelorette parties.
Still, if Hannaford, by 2019, could no longer tolerate what Austin had become, his wavering allegiance to the city may have blinded him to an alternative much closer than the Hudson Valley. One just down the road, in fact. To be sure, San Antonio faces many of the same problems as its flashier cousin to the north. It, too, relies on the Edwards Aquifer and is suffering from urban sprawl and traffic congestion. People there also love their guns. But San Antonio has retained an undeniable sense of itself, rooted in its history as a Mexican (and then Mexican American) place that well predates the heyday of the Armadillo World Headquarters. The gorgeous Spanish missions are reminders of this legacy, as is the second-best Mexican food in the state (after the border towns, of course). The Riverwalk may be kitschy, but it retains the unmistakable feel of the 1930s Works Project Administration effort to preserve it. In short, my hometown has a self-assurance that’s unlikely to be upended by the arrival of the world’s richest man, the world’s richest podcaster, and their coterie of weird bros. Which is why, as the saying goes, “Every Texan has two homes—his own and San Antonio.”
Andrew R. Graybill, a professor of history at Southern Methodist University, is writing a book about the Texas Longhorn.
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