Austin at Large: The Road Goes on Forever …

First came the East 11th Street NCCD, then the urban renewal plan, then the 12th Street NCCD. That happened between the late 1980s and mid-2000s; the Central East Austin Neighborhood Plan, which covers the entire area shown here, was adopted in 2001. (Courtesy of city of Austin)

Austin Sanders' Council recap in this issue is mostly focused on things City Council chose not to do at its last meeting – approve changes to vertical mixed-use zoning and its attendant density bonus, and initiate a pilot guaranteed-income program. I get to write about what did happen at said meeting – yet another eye-opening contretemps about the future of East 11th and 12th streets.

To recap: I live in Swede Hill, the neighborhood on the north side of East 12th Street. While I was here at the Chronicle the first time, I chaired the team that wrote the Central East Austin Neighborhood Plan, adopted way back in 2001 and not really updated since. I then chaired the Organization of Central East Austin Neighborhoods – OCEAN – which serves as the neighborhood plan contact team for Central East, for a few years after that. The neighborhood plan incorporates the East 11th and 12th Street Community Rede­vel­op­ment Plan – that is, the urban renewal plan for those corridors, which was adopted in 1998, was supposed to expire after 20 years, but then got extended. I left the Chronicle for my 12-year consulting sabbatical in early 2005; in 2009, then-Mayor Lee Leffing­well appointed me to the Urban Renewal Board, which oversees implementation of that plan. I served on URB for about nine years, as chair for the last four of those.

While I was still on the URB, we initiated the zoning case that, more than five years later, finally landed at Council last week. (It went to Planning Commission last year.) It was intended as a cleanup maneuver, not really designed to change the entitlements on any particular property on East 11th and 12th. See, in addition to the neighborhood plan and the urban renewal plan, there are also separate neighborhood conservation combining districts – NCCDs, just like in Hyde Park and Travis Heights – for East 11th and East 12th. The 11th Street NCCD actually predates the urban renewal plan and includes what was back in the day known as the Bennett Tract, now home to a bunch of apartments and condos that overlook I-35. The zoning case was intended to make all four of these sets of entitlements and project controls match up.

The Opposite of A Bonus

You may already be picking up on the irony here. Every single one of these separate plans and interventions was intended to make it easier and more attractive to invest in East 11th and 12th streets. At the time this all started, East 11th – the historic Black Downtown of segregated Austin – was mostly vacant lots owned by the URB, which is technically a separate agency, not a city department (like the Housing Authority), so it gets to own property, which confuses people at City Hall.

Instead, these different plans and interventions – I haven't even gotten into the Austin Revitalization Authority here, maybe a future column – each created a barrier to redevelopment. Part of my job was to keep this stuff straight in my head so I could explain it to others, including Mayor Steve Adler and my own council member, friend, and name-cousin Natasha Harper-Madison. East 11th has started to catch up, largely because of developments on privately owned property and a bunch of streetscape and infrastructure investments early on. East 12th looks much as it did when I moved to the neighborhood in 1993. There are now townhomes on the south side blocks near I-35; there's been some light infill, remodeling, and turnover on the commercial spots, particularly between Comal and Chicon. That's about it, while every other Eastside corridor has blown up, some more than once.

Back to the Council meeting. If this was just a cleanup that's been in progress for years, why did hordes show up and call in to oppose it? And why were they all white?

Yes, We Must Go There, Sorry

You may have heard that over the post­-urban-renewal decades Central East has become more than a little gentrified. My neighborhood is no different, though it was ancestrally whiter than the ones to the south. (It was settled by Swedes, including the family from whom I bought my house in 1993.) We have multimillion-dollar McMan­sions and "secondary apartments" larger than the original homes, yet we're also a National Register historic district; it's a perfect storm for crazy neighborhood politics.

I single out my own neighbors, among the several different Central East neighborhoods in OCEAN, because they are the reason this cleanup effort became a racially polarized mess. If we're going to sync up all the entitlements on East 12th, then some commercial properties (vacant and existing) could seek a conditional use permit to open a bar. They'd still have to go through the NIMBY gauntlet to get it, but the very possibility that, say, the venerable King-Tears Mortuary could someday be the site of a cocktail lounge got my neighbors up in arms and organized. Slippery slope, Rainey Street, and all that. There's also an undercurrent of conspiracy theory regarding the Dallas-based developer that's acquired a number of East 12th Street properties, which is no secret and requires no gnostic knowledge or corrupt intent to understand, though for my neighbors it's like The Da Vinci Code.

So yeah, all the opponents of this supposedly consensus-based vision for East 12th are white folks who got here late, no surprise. The flip side: the many Black business owners, artists, and advocates (the constituency from whence Harper-Madison came) who want 11th and 12th to actually be the cultural heritage district that all this activity was intended to restore, lo these many years ago. Those folks know what many of you and our friends in the Music section know: Art doesn't pay the bills. Whiskey pays the bills and the artists.