Some of the players

I've been poking around in the Austin Chronicle's archives, and it appears that institutionally there are several players on the east side. One is the Austin Revitalization Author­ity, a city-created nonprofit developer whose mission is to spur development along East 11th and 12th streets. Lately they've been clashing with neighbors (such as the Guadalupe Association for an Improved Neighborhood, or GAIN) over the size of a project in the 1100 block of 11th Street. One tension there is the possibility that the Victory Grill, a long-standing blues bar, will be overwhelmed by the new buildings.

GAIN shares some board members with the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corp., another nonprofit developer on the east side.

Apparently one of the concerns around gentrification is "vertical mixed-use" development, which locals say tends to raise property values (and thus taxes) and increases traffic. The project mentioned above is an example of VMU.

Another area group is the Organization of Central East Austin Neighborhoods (or OCEAN), which appears to be an umbrella for several neighborhood orgs. Earlier this year OCEAN tried and failed to put some brakes on gentrification by backing an amendment to the building code that would have stopped allowing big McMansions on smallish lots. Former Dallas Cowboy Thomas Henderson lobbied against the change with accusations of racism. (The original McMansion ordinance passed in early 2006.)

It's not clear from my readings so far how these entities map to local ethnic, racial and economic groups.

Here's a graf from last November:

While investment in a disinvested community is in theory a good thing, on the Eastside it's happening so fast that longtime residents are being displaced. As one speaker put it: "The tidal wave of market forces is rising too quickly, with little or no time to adjust. The dam has broken, and the water is coming over." In the 78702 ZIP code, for example (bounded by I-35 and Airport Boulevard, between the river and Martin Luther King Boulevard), the median sale price of a home in 2000 was $77,000. It since has shot up more than 250% to $195,000 (with a 150% increase just since 2005), with property taxes to match. State Rep. Eddie Rodriguez talked about how the city's Homestead Preser­va­tion District (under his House Bill 470) can help East Austin housing values "slow down, so people don't have to move to Pflugerville" -- which has been absorbing Austin's displaced African-American community.

So that's a survey of the terrain in East Austin.