by Sarah Enelow-Snyder
Old-timers love to celebrate the “golden age” of the places they know and love, it usually ended just before new folks moved in. A writer who grew up just outside of Austin — and now calls Brooklyn home — was surprised when she found herself feeling like an old-timer. But, she makes a case for the fresh eyes and energy that newcomers can bring.
July 22, 2020
The Donn’s Barbecue of my childhood had a pickle-and-onion station by the soda fountain, and I loved walking into that waft of tangy smoke. I was a predictable kid, always having chopped beef between two slices of white bread.
Kay, a friend from Brooklyn, had recently moved to Austin, and I invited her to Donn’s that afternoon. I was in town with my boyfriend, and I wanted to show them where I grew up. My nostalgia started to dissolve though, when Kay asked about vegan options. I was sure there were none unless they had a wedge of iceberg without dressing.
My boyfriend and I picked up Kay in our rental car. Her apartment complex looked like a newly constructed hotel with a front desk and a coffee bar. It looked like her money was going further in Austin than it had in Brooklyn, which I appreciated because I’d been living paycheck-to-paycheck in Brooklyn for the last 10 years.
We stopped at a drive-through vegan restaurant on our way to Donn’s. The line of cars stretched way back onto a busy street. I’d never seen anything like it in Austin, and I was getting annoyed at how often I said this.
Donn’s felt warmly familiar. My boyfriend and I piled our plates with brisket, ribs, potato salad, and baked beans, and Kay got her hands on some lettuce. We sat lazily with no one rushing us out so they could turn our table, something all three of us would expect in Brooklyn.
I struggled to pinpoint why Donn’s felt like home and a vegan drive-through felt like the “new Austin.” After all, in the ‘90s, I myself went to Wheatsville to pick up freshly ground almond butter, and that food co-op has been there since 1976. Austin has long been a funky haven for counterculture.
I finally realized that no single thing unnerved me about the new Austin. I just couldn’t handle this much change, and it felt like that change had arrived quite suddenly. But did it?
Austin Motel. Photo by Tony Reid
Austin’s popularity is many decades old, but in another sense, it’s recently taken off. U.S. News and World Report named Austin the best place to live three years in a row from 2017 to 2019. WalletHub named it the No. 4 best large city to start a business in 2019. Black Austin Tours just launched in 2019, providing what feels like a new and long overdue experience for visitors: walking tours that tie Austin’s centuries-old Black history to contemporary Black life in the city. Founder Javier Wallace described his core audience as Black women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and additionally he has a significant white female clientele. “They’ve never been exposed to many of these things before,” he said.
Austin has made so many cameos in glossy travel magazines, I can’t remember where I first started seeing them. To that end, visitor spending nearly doubled between 2010 and 2019, from about $4.3 billion to $8.2 billion. South by Southwest delivered its greatest economic impact to the city in its 33-year history in 2019.
Between 2010 and 2019, the Austin metro area gained about 30 percent of its population, more than half a million people, making it No. 3 in the nation for percentage of population growth. Hays County, part of the metro area, gained more than 46% of its population over that time period.
How the Covid-19 pandemic will affect Austin’s boom remains to be seen. Before the pandemic, the Texas Demographic Center predicted that the Austin metro area will exceed 4.5 million people by 2050, more than double its 2010 population. But now, many Americans are rethinking where to live. Some are looking for more affordable housing in the wake of layoffs and pay cuts, and many companies are going completely remote, eliminating the need for certain types of workers to live near an office in a major city.
It’s almost a waste of breath to say that Austin became very hip over the years. However, it’s now so fashionable that I can barely distinguish it from Brooklyn, where I currently live. In Brooklyn, I would expect a barbecue place to have multiple vegan options and an hour-long wait, and a festival to sell out in the blink of a cursor. Austin now has boutiques that sell $40 bottles of lotion and the same delicate necklaces I’ve seen dangling in shop after shop in both Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon. It has cold brew in mason jars at coffee shops that all blend together.
Covid-19 is taking a toll on these attractions as well. South by Southwest 2020 went digital, as events worldwide adapted to stay-at-home orders, if they weren’t postponed or canceled. Austin’s famous bar-and-restaurant scene went dark, and some places didn’t survive. Restaurant and music venue Threadgill’s, at which Janis Joplin used to play, closed for good. In late June, new Covid-19 cases surged in Texas and the state began to reverse its reopening.
Photo by mitchell kmetz.
My Austin came way before the pandemic. It existed in the ‘90s somewhere between Richard Linklater’s film, Slacker, and today’s ATX brand, of which South by Southwest is a significant part. My experience revolved around the University of Texas campus, where my father taught political science. I wandered up and down the drag, aka Guadalupe Street, sifting through CDs at Technophilia, watching cheap matinees at the Dobie, shooting pool in the dimly lit student union, eating bacon cheeseburgers at Players, maybe cruising up and down Sixth Street, and pretending like I was in college instead of high school. The cash I made in my after-school tutoring job was enough to enjoy all of those things. It all felt very accessible.
For decades, UT was a chief aspect of Austin’s identity as a college town and state capital. Many undergrads were on the “eight-year plan,” because Austin was affordable and slacker-friendly, said J.B. Bird, director of media relations at UT Austin. He moved from Boston to Austin in 1990. “People didn’t immediately ask you what you did for a living,” he said, as so many people had day jobs just to fund their art.
“When I got out of UT in 1978, there really weren’t any jobs, unless I wanted to go work for UT or the state government or a shop,” said Roland Swenson, co-founder of South by Southwest.
“I won’t say I graduated,” he laughed. “I left to pursue rock and roll studies.”
By the early ‘90s, UT was gaining more international recognition, said Douglas Dempster, dean of the college of fine arts. The city started to evolve from a college town into something more cosmopolitan and expensive, something branded as ATX. Home prices in four of Austin’s zip codes increased by 80% or more between 2010 and 2015 according to the city government. Median rent increased 21% on apartments of all sizes between 2014 and 2020, according to data from Apartment List. It’s possible the pandemic could, at least somewhat, curb the cost of living.
Bird said by email that starting in the 2000s, the widespread marketing of the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” was yet another signal that the city was becoming a real commodity: “There's nothing weird about marketing your weirdness.”
“Like Brooklyn once upon a time, it was a magnet for young, creative types, and that’s long past,” said Dempster. Students now graduate faster to get on with their careers, said Bird.
Allen’s boots. Photo by megan markham
Guero’s TacO Bar. Photo by cassandra dunn
Careers in Austin are abundant now, often with tech companies and younger startups. Outdoorsy, a peer-to-peer RV marketplace, relocated from San Francisco to Austin in 2018. It moved partly to be closer to its customer base — in a warm climate that encourages outdoor recreation — and partly because of Austin’s inventive vibe and lower cost of living, said co-founder and CEO Jeff Cavins. Austin’s outdoor recreation has been very attractive for Deidre Mathis, founder of Wanderstay, a hostel in Houston. Mathis has visited Austin eight times over the course of her six years living in Houston. “I find myself always being outside there,” she said of hiking, renting a boat, and attending outdoor festivals.
The “California-ing” of Texas has been well documented, with some Texans resenting their new neighbors from the coast, but Cavins said that’s mostly a political fear — he’s found Austin to be a welcoming place, so long as you keep it weird and respect it. For example, he said it’s common in the Bay Area to be in the office at 9 p.m. on a Friday, but that’s not part of Austin’s work culture.
Austin doesn’t feel like San Francisco yet, said Cavins. “It feels like a town that kind of came together through hippie culture,” he said. On the other hand, Lady Gaga may drop into a club to play an impromptu set. Back in the ‘90s, my beloved Rage Against the Machine went to Houston and San Antonio, but not Austin. It just wasn’t a mandatory stop on a tour.
“I hope this does not become Seattle,” said Cavins, adding later, “Austin needs more Japanese restaurants.”
I remember scouring Austin for a sushi place, so I could try it for the first time at age 17 – specifically because I was going off to college in upstate New York and didn’t want the other students to think I was a hick.
I spent a lot of time in Austin, but I actually lived in a place called Spicewood about 30 miles west of the city. Donn’s Barbecue was almost halfway out to my neck of the woods. Back in the ‘90s, Spicewood was the sticks. It had a couple of kitchens serving chicken-fried comfort food, a few houses, some trailers, and that was mostly it. There was no school, library, courthouse, movie theater, grocery store, or anything that would lead me to call it “my hometown” instead of “the area I grew up in.”
I have many good memories of Spicewood, mostly of spending time outdoors, the very reason Outdoorsy relocated to the region. I grew up on ten acres, and my brother and I ran around making forts between trees, crafting bricks out of mud, and scaring the deer away. When my brother went on camping trips with his Boy Scout troop, I tagged along with my father, who was the assistant scoutmaster. I also grew up with two horses and my father and I would ride the hundreds of unfenced acres around us. Sometimes we rode through Willie Nelson’s property, which we were not at all supposed to do, but his back gate wasn’t locked very well. He had a wild west town, like a movie set, and when we were done exploring, we snuck back out the way we came in.
My bad memories are mostly related to racism. Being a biracial Black girl with a curly afro made me stick out; kids at school in Austin told me I was dirty and had a rat’s nest on my head. They tried to rip my hair out of my scalp. Spicewood had racism, too, but at least my house was a safe zone far away from my bullies.
Now Spicewood is so developed, it’s actually part of Austin, not a different place altogether.
Barton Springs Pool. Photo by tomek baginski
After we ate at Donn’s, I drove my boyfriend and Kay the rest of the way out to Spicewood, slowing down in traffic I’d never experienced on Highway 71. My parents had divorced and moved away years ago, my mother to Chicago and my father into Austin. As I pulled onto my road, I saw dozens of new driveways and houses where thick cedar brush used to be. I rounded a corner and saw my old house from a distance — painted beige over its original adobe red. I stopped short of the road’s dead end, where my house sat.
I felt so disoriented, suddenly tired, and I parked near our weathered old barn for a few minutes. I imagined our horses trotting up to the gate to meet me, whinnying behind me as I walked into the barn and let them into their stalls. I’d fill their buckets with grain and slip a leaf of hay into a rack on the wall for each of them. We were always happy to see each other.
I didn’t want to be in the barn without any horses in it, and I didn’t want to see my old house up-close if it had been painted beige.
I kept driving out to what we jokingly used to call “downtown Spicewood,” which consisted of a rusty old gas station where we bought scratch-off lottery tickets, a tiny post office where we picked up our packages, and a burger joint that I figured had been there since the dawn of time. I hadn’t said much since leaving my old house and parked in front of the post office to gather my thoughts.
“Babe, there’s someone behind you,” my boyfriend said.
I didn’t believe it until I looked in the rearview mirror. There was indeed another car. In Spicewood. And its driver needed me to get out of the way. I’d had enough and drove us straight back to Austin.
Photo by jeremy banks
Cavins of Outdoorsy said he goes out to Spicewood regularly and referred to Lake Travis, near my childhood home, as the Lake Tahoe of Austin. I was simultaneously flattered and stunned.
If Austin is now a juggernaut that will stop at nothing to eclipse rural areas like Spicewood, where in history do we look to find the “real” Austin, or its ideal version?
Even toward the end of my high school career, Austin was changing. I could feel the traffic worsening and see the businesses turning over on the drag. Out in Spicewood, we magically acquired a street number instead of a route number, and one day part of my road was suddenly paved.
I could look to the ‘90s to find my favorite Austin, but I remember mythologizing the ‘70s back then, the city of Stevie Ray Vaughan and real hippies, not the nouveaux hippies who wore fake bell-bottoms called flares, as I shamelessly did. The Austin American-Statesman chronicled how the city’s counterculture flourished in the ‘70s, setting the stage for everything thereafter. The civil rights era had come, hordes of baby boomers became young adults, and music venues multiplied.
If I don’t have a problem with the ‘90s version that steamrolled over the ‘70s version, why do I recoil at the 2010s? What’s the difference between Austin’s population being reshaped by the expansion of IBM in the ‘70s, Dell in the ‘90s, or Amazon in the 2010s? Or Willie Nelson influencing Austin City Limits versus South by Southwest hosting Johnny Cash and expanding into film?
Today, Austin can brag that it’s majority-minority: the Black population percentage has incurred small losses, but the Latino and Asian population percentages have risen steadily since the ‘70s. And yet, recent violence during protests against police brutality reminds us that Austin harbors centuries-old racism, despite its misleading reputation as a blue island in a red sea.
That declining Black population shows the community’s displacement, said Javier Wallace, founder of Black Austin Tours. “Black people in Austin have experienced Austin in the most racist, oppressive, Jim Crow way.”
“Austin might be liberal for some people, but some people were not afforded the right to be in this ‘weird’ place,” he said. Wallace’s Austin roots go back before the 1970s and even the 1870s. His family came to the area as enslaved people in the early 1830s, when Texas was still part of Mexico.
Photo by Charles Fair.
“I don’t really believe in golden ages,” Bird said. “You have to be careful about what you romanticize.” Austin’s once-cheap housing was partly the result of the savings and loan crisis in the ‘80s. “People were suffering economically,” he said.
“Whenever somebody moves here, they’re told it was so much better 10 years ago,” said Swenson of South by Southwest. “I laugh at that because I remember it 50 years ago.” My own memories only go back so far. I tend to think of South by Southwest in the ‘80s and ‘90s as quintessentially Austin, and yet, it’s always had a New York audience, said Swenson. In fact, it was modeled after a New York event called the New Music Seminar. “It wasn’t supposed to just be about Austin or just be about Texas,” he said.
This debate is a bitter old pastime in New York as well. Whenever you arrived, that was just a few years after the real New York died. In a sense it’s perennially true: I arrived in the ‘00s and as soon as I went to the famous music club CBGB for the first time, it closed for good. Not too long after that, I saw Whole Foods, queso, and breakfast tacos — all Austin exports — start popping up around the city.
I can’t confirm this with data, but the newcomers to Austin and Brooklyn seem very excited, and that energy can make a city. A caravan of taco trucks, thumping outdoor jams, the promise of a creative career, the unnameable vibe you get when you walk around a new place that’s humming with activity — it’s all so enticing when seen through fresh eyes. Old-timers may respond to this wonderment with an eye roll, but maybe the newbies are onto something.
“It’s always a good time,” said Deidre Mathis of visiting Austin from her home in Houston. “There’s so much to do.”
I was supposed to go to South by Southwest back in 2000, as part of my high school journalism class, but the passes never materialized and I figured, oh well, maybe next time. The years went by, and I’ve still never gone.
I guess I could wear this like a badge of authenticity, that the legendary South By is so touristy. But so are New York’s Empire State Building and the Top of the Rock, and I’ve been up to those observation decks many times. It doesn’t matter how many chattering tourists are lined up with me. Every time I see that view, my heart stops for just a second, and I’m reborn.
Editor’s note: It is very rare that we update stories post-publication but we gave the author an opportunity to include additional information from Black Austin Tours and Deidre Mathis after receiving this note from the author: “All of the people I interviewed were white men! My voice is a big part of the story, but I missed an opportunity to include Black voices besides my own.”
Sarah Enelow-Snyder is a freelance writer from Spicewood, Texas, based in Brooklyn, New York.
Header photo of the Pennybacker Bridge by Jeremy Banks
