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Chapter 1 Gimme Shelter
An African American college campus sits on top of a hill on the eastside of downtown, spitting distance from the Governor’s Mansion, State Capitol and City Hall. Huston-Tillotson University is a historically-black school and is actually the oldest in the city, founded decades before the world-renowned and fabulously wealthy University of Texas. Huston-Tillotson is on 7th Street, one block north of the city’s infamous party corridor, Sixth Street. This area of the formerly black and Latino eastside has been the most gentrified part of what has been arguably the most-gentrified city in the United States in recent decades, Austin, Texas, aka the World Capital of Live Music, affectionately known as River City like in The Wizard of Oz, because freaky and unnatural shit happens in this Texas city, just like in the movie.
There’s a fence around the campus and at the front gate there is a guard in a guardhouse, even though on the back side of Huston-Tillotson you can sneak in easily enough. “Can I walk around campus and just look?” the guard, who is a middle-aged black woman, unarmed but willing to stand her ground, is asked by a visitor.
“No, you cannot.”
The temptation is to tell her that danger to Huston-Tillotson may include prowlers but the biggest risk, by far and away, is posed by white real estate developers. Who don’t even need to visit the property to know they would kill to get it. This campus—all 24 acres—is the most sought after “unattached” land in downtown Austin. Unattached means, in the local context, still owned or inhabited by colored people and as yet un-redeveloped by whites. In this city during recent years “the development community” has tended to think of property ownership by minorities as a purely temporary condition. Black and brown housing, churches, schools—the redevelopment and gentrification here has spared neither the elderly or infirm, not the poor, crazy or vulnerable. As a consequence there’s been Black Flight and the city’s streets have filled with homeless, disproportionately African American considering that there are few Negroes left in town.
Recently a quaint retro practice of the Austin police force has been revealed, picking up homeless black people downtown and offering them “courtesy rides,” that cannot be refused, getting the poor or dispossessed out of the way of busy white people downtown and dropping them off in the traditional black homeland of East Austin, a practice said to have been imported from San Francisco, where many of Austin’s newer arrivals are actually from. In Baghdad by the Bay the homeless are reportedly picked up on city streets by SFPD and driven to surrounding counties. It’s a kind of catch-and-release but for people. The reverse is also said to happen, a practice by suburban cops, picking up the homeless outside San Francisco and dropping them off in the city. The only problem in Austin is that the eastside, where the homeless are deposited, is no longer black.
Dr. Robert Reddick is an African American educator at the University of Texas, who grew up in East Austin and has taken his graduate classes to Huston-Tillotson and is now a high-ranking administrator at Forty Acres, as the UT campus across town is called. He warned a few years ago that moving HTU out of East Austin would be the death of the black community in this capital city. Already the African American population has fallen from close to 15% of the city total to 5%.
Latinos, who sometimes seem like a hardier and more successful ethnicity when living near invasive white people, have also begun to decline demographically. A local Tejana politician remarked a few years ago that Latinos who were suddenly being offered $200,000 for their modest homes in East or South Austin—which seemed like a lot of money to the homeowners at the time—did not realize that they wouldn’t be able to find housing remotely comparable to their old homes at a similar price anywhere else in the city, and instead would face long commutes to Austin jobs from surrounding counties, if they moved to the suburbs. Many still took the offer. Ditto many local blacks, who mostly moved east. The black community in Austin was already in critical shape at the time Dr. Reddick spoke and is now on life support. The prognosis is just not good. HTU’s location is prime, and by development standards the campus is huge in a town that has already been developed, it seems, to the max. In fact to call the black school’s site merely “prime” is like calling Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos merely “wealthy.” It’s an understatement by a couple of orders of magnitude.
At one time you couldn’t get white people to go to East Austin. Now you can’t get them to leave.
At one time in time for example nice college girls—white UT coeds, sweethearts of Sigma Chi or whatever—wouldn’t go east of Interstate 35, which was the border between the white and black sides of Austin. But their boyfriends did go east, often to rent the charms of the legendary Titty Mama, an African American woman with an existential rack who introduced a generation of University of Texas frat boy to the joys of coitus. Today, standing on the corner of the HTU campus, near where Titty Mama once walked a beat—doing her best to bring the races together through the most fundamental commerce, pleasure—you’re only a block or two from the State Cemetery, final resting place of Governor Ann Richards, the late great black Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Texas empresario Stephen F. Austin, among others. A few blocks beyond the cemetery is the Austin police headquarters, home to los puercos who have shot, beaten and abused generations of African Americans and continue to do so even today.
A few blocks still further, you arrive on Congress Avenue. South is the Colorado River and north is the State Capitol. Between the two, for example, still on Congress Avenue, is the office tower that houses the Texas Tribune which has played its own racist and sullied part in the gentrification of the city. Practically no white institution, especially parts of the media, is blameless, from the New York Times down to the local newspaper. Everyone has had a piece of East Austin or played a part in its cultural realignment, you could say, in recent years. Looking north from HTU’s campus for example, a relatively short commute is Dell Computers, the city’s largest employer, principal workplace of many of the gentrifiers, and home of the gentrifier-in-chief, Michael Dell, the original computer guy in town who made the decision that black people were expendable and their property could be redeveloped to provide housing for new tech employees, Dinks as they are called, for “double-income no kids.” The great man has not shown any remorse.
As Michael Dell told the New Yorker magazine last year, in a story about Austin’s growth and big-city transformation, regarding the breakneck and uneven/unfair nature of development in recent years, "I tend to be more of a pro-change guy, If you're not comfortable with that, you're gonna have a really hard time." Truer words have never been spoken.
The daily Austin American Statesman reported a few months ago for example that the African American population center in Austin is now in another county, displacement has been so great. But the direction of Black Flight in recent years, east, towards Bastrop County and the pineywoods of East Texas, is now also threatened because fleeing minorities run into the world’s most obnoxious/richest man, Elon Musk, whose Tesla carworks and tunnel experiments and God-knows-what-else are taking up land and resources there too, on the border of Travis and Bastrop counties. There’s no modest-income way out, in other words, as more well-paid engineers and techies are still arriving. Gentrification is not, however, a natural disaster, it’s purely man-made and blame can be assigned, which serves a useful purpose. In order to identify and shame the bad guys, who are not all white. Most are, with one prominent exception. Some of the names may surprise you. Asked once, a decade ago, about the likelihood that the black woman who was then president of Huston-Tillotson would acquiesce to white real estate developers’ desires to take over her valuable inner city campus, and agree to move the university farther east to a less convenient location—in exchange for a big wad of cash—a major civil rights figure in Austin said that it wasn’t the president of the school you had to worry about, but the H-T university board. Like other cash-poor land-rich black colleges, HTU relies for support on a wealthy group of sponsors that includes rich white businesspeople. In the past, HTU’s board has included a lot of West Austin faces, ex-mayors and even the First Lady of Texas, Celia Abbott. These people call the shots, not the black academic who runs the day-to-day academic affairs.
Human-made tragedies have human actors and the gentrification of East Austin and the possible selling of the HTU campus would have a handful of prominent players, either directly involved or having laid the groundwork. Michael Dell the computer guy is certainly somewhere at the top of the list. He is apparently not a fan of the colored peoples of the earth, either in Austin, or in Palestine, where he is a rightwing supporter of the State of Israel, a subject that we will return to shortly because it is linked to the views of rich Jewish business interests, just as in East Austin. There is a certain recurring theme in gentrification and in Palestinian disenfranchisement: land. It’s all about real estate.
Indeed, some of the very same money flows that have disemboweled East Austin have also cut the heart out of the West Bank. The same money, and some of the same people. This is not going to be an antisemitic rant. It’s much more of an anti-Zionist wail, not religion so much as identity, greed and corruption in which some American Jewish businessman are particularly prominent. It’s also about race traitors—Toms in other words—and it’s about whose narratives count, and whose do not.
A big player in this mix is named Kirk Rudy, a business guy—a real estate developer—past leader of the all-powerful Real Estate Council of Austin, and founder of the most politically important development firm in town, Endeavor Real Estate, which is the largest developer in Central and South Texas, actually, a locally-born company now with properties across the country. Another notable in the corruption context is media maven Evan Smith who is former editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly, where he had the dubious distinction of never hiring or publishing a black person during ten years in the job and is not a fan of the black peeps either. Smith is founder of the Texas Tribune where he kept the lid on reporting about gentrification and is another powerful bad guy in this screenplay. When Smith was interviewing Barry, at the end of his presidency, it was just after Smith had hired his first black staffer at the Tribune, five years into the site’s creation and after hiring dozens of whites and Asians. Barry, the first Black President, came withing months of granting an interview to a journalist who did not employ black people. But being Barry in Austin has been almost solely about Barry, first Black President, not about the less-unique colored peeps. There is of course a cast of thousands when change happens as quickly and on the scale it has happened in Austin in the past quarter-century. In little more than the last decade, for example, the population of the city has increased by sixty percent. As techies and jobseekers have arrived like locusts, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
One person who cannot be blamed, actually, is Elon Musk, not because he’s a humanitarian or has racial equity credentials but because he has probably never even consciously thought of black housing or gentrification, for bad or good, in his life. There’s a powerful argument to be made that you have to be conscious of wrongdoing in order to do wrong. Musk is clueless. People like Kirk Rudy, Evan Smith and Michael Dell are not.
In any case, the number two bad guy, the second heaviest of the heavies in this motion picture, the middleman, or bagman, as you like, facilitator to the elimination of black people in East Austin, is former Mayor Steve Adler, who left office two years ago after pushing development to its limits without regard to who got hurt. A few years ago in the middle of Adler’s term in office, someone—the author is unknown—went to the sidewalks around Zilker Park, which has also been in danger of redevelopment—and using a large rubber stamp like the kind a businessowner might stamp a receipt “PAID” or “OVERDUE”—but larger—stamped instead, “EAT SHIT MAYOR ADLER.” To signal dissatisfaction with city policy. Years before that another anonymous tagger, apparently a foreigner, had done the same thing on Sixth Street during the Bush Presidency’s run up to the Iraq War, with all the false talk of weapons of mass destruction. That stamp, every dozen yards or so on the sidewalk downtown, read, “YOUR PRESIDENT LIES,” which of course was true. It’s not clear whether Steve Adler actually eats or has eaten shit in the past, but while in office his hands were certainly covered with the stinky stuff. And he spread it on everything he touched.
People—even those living far from River City—may know Steve Adler as the mayor who, during the pandemic, made broadcasts asking people to stay at home, to prevent spread of the disease. Only later did it become clear that his videos were coming from his condo in Cabo San Lucas. Even a Jewish columnist at the New York Times—Smith, Dell, Kirk Rudy and Mayor Adler, all the heavies that you can count on the fingers of your hand here, as it were, are Jewish businessmen, a description that has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with reality. Even a Jewish columnist at the Times, which is a publication that is not generally in the business of calling out wrongdoing by Jews, as we’ll see later, wrote that Mayor Adler’s video calls to the public from Cabo “reek[ed] of entitlement and irresponsibility.” That was Mayor Adler’s tenure in office. Watching him at City Hall, where he poured oil on the flames of development, without regard to the consequences for ordinary residents, was like watching a slug or snail move across the sidewalk, except he moved faster. He left a trail.
Mayor Adler was said to have shown an early interest in the redevelopment of the HTU campus while in office. This was at the same time for example that he was persuading a black Baptist minister to move his congregation east, freeing up inner city land close to downtown for development, much to the chagrin of the black churchman’s parishioners. The black pastor said that Mayor Adler just started showing up at services one Sunday to talk with him, and not because the mayor intended to convert to hardshell Baptist, either. If one were really paranoid, two names associated recently with Huston-Tillotson would cause immediate unease for the gentrification-wary. For black people, that is, those for example who don’t trust white people as a general rule? The first is the aptly-named Diane Land, who is an Austin developer herself and wife of Steve Adler. She’s on the HTU board. Enough said. Almost. A frequently-voiced suspicion is that while in office Mayor Adler continued to do development deals, indeed he admitted to—in some cases—participating in City Council votes in which he said he decided not to recuse himself, because of the small size of his holdings. He is also rumored to have used his family as conduit for what his city position would not allow him to do directly. The former mayor has not answered requests in the past to release a full list of his wife’s holdings, btw.
The second name that draws interest is Celia Abbott, First Lady of Texas, who a few months ago returned to the Huston-Tillotson board after a two-year hiatus. It’s noteworthy that the destruction of the black community in Austin has been a heavily Democratic activity, and liberal Democrats at that. The Austin City Council which has voted the zoning and the building codes and tax breaks that have empowered the bulldozers, so to speak, has been almost exclusively Democratic throughout its history, and almost perfectly bleeding-heart liberal in recent decades. Everything bad in the world has been described by Austin City Council members as coming from the evil Republicans who control most of the rest of Texas. But in terms of the public corruption that has gone hand and hand with the city’s development, an odd and horrific alliance has also been seen recently between the “hated Republicans,” which is sometimes all that Austin’s chattering classes can talk about—the evil governor, the evil lieutenant governor, to say nothing of the evil state attorney general. Who have nonetheless been doing business with the saintly Democrats. Ms. Abbott’s appearance on the HTU board—she comes from a modest and well-regarded Mexican-Texas family and is said to be a wonderful person in her own right—could nonetheless be disconcerting only because there’s so much money potentially involved, and the R’s like money just as much as D’s do. Her husband, for example, has created a number of “opportunity zones” that favor developers, featuring lower taxes, in East Austin. Celia Abbott’s husband is a hard one to figure in this regard.
Greg Abbott is one of the most interesting guys in power in the country. He is doubtless genuinely conservative but becoming and staying governor of the great State of Texas requires him, from time to time, not just to be conservative but to be whackjob conservative, a degree of rightwingedness that is extreme and unnatural but that he can achieve if called upon. Still, the Governor has a disability, that requires him to use a wheelchair, and you can’t help but believe that he knows what it’s like to be different from the majority, to be a minority in fact. You just can’t rely on his sympathy, because his record in office is decidedly mixed.
Recently he ordered state troopers kick ass and take pro-Palestinian protestors’ names at the University of Texas, up the road from Huston Tillotson, but the issue was Israel and, in this country, Israel is usually a special case where rules don’t apply. During the pandemic the governor was not all in on masks or vaccines either, to say the least, but Greg Abbott is leader of a state where a large part of the population was not exactly into pandemic preventatives. In Texas, risk is not often something to be avoided. He was right about chaos on the border before the U.S. government made the call, whether he was right or not about how to fix it. His use of state troopers on the streets of Austin for ordinary police patrols may not have been effective but it is a practice—using state police to supplement local law enforcement—that has been adopted by Democratic governors in New York and in California. Whether he would use his wife’s position on the Huston-Tillotson board, in cooperation with development firms connected to the Democratic establishment, as he has done in the past in Austin, well, it’s not like the Republicans are too picky to do a deal that will lead to money in their coffers. You want to know how they’ll do it, if they do?
There will be an announcement about a big cash infusion for HTU’s ailing finances. There’s going to be more money, the university’s board will announce, for salaries and new programs and buildings. But the university campus will have to leave downtown and move somewhere farther east “in order to have room to grow.” The new campus will be somewhere in B.F.E. although they won’t say B.F.E. The real driving motive will be to free up land for the bulldozers.
How will you know when the deal has actually been sealed?
Have you ever seen a classic movie called The 3 Days of the Condor? Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway and the great Max von Sydow playing a CIA assassin.
There’s a scene where Robert Redford, who is a CIA analyst on the run, asks von Sydow how he, Redford, will know that he’s been betrayed? And von Sydow considers the question thoughtfully. This is an analogy for how it’ll go down in Austin, too.
Max says it’ll be a spring day and Redford will be out walking and someone will stop in a car, someone Redford knows—even a friend—who will be smiling and offer Robert Redford a ride. Redford will get in the car and he’ll be whacked. How will you know, more precisely, how events will unfold in the World Capital of Live Music? In Austin it’ll be only slightly different.
It’ll be a hot day for example, hot as hell because that’s increasingly what days are like in River City. There will be that press release about a big infusion of cash for the historically black Huston-Tillotson University. The release will say there will be money for new buildings and new faculty and a new campus, somewhere out in the eastern part of the county, maybe in another county altogether. The words “room to grow” will be part of the wording and prominently displayed. The press release may include the names of important members of the board, like the Texas First Lady. If a new university president is mentioned to shepherd the university’s new direction, the body of the old president will be found a few days later, floating face down in the Colorado River, her hands tied behind her back. Austin police will rule suicide.
Those 24 acres will get new zoning, courtesy of the Austin City Council, for office towers or, alternatively, “mixed use,” with expensive retail on the bottom floors and high-end condos up top. Just as the construction is completed, the developers—who knows, maybe Endeavor Real Estate? Just as the project is completed the developers will go back to the City Council with bad news. That 25% of the housing in the project that the developer promised would be low-income apartments, a promise made in exchange for the great zoning the Council has voted? The developer will say that “the numbers no longer work,” and there won’t be low-income housing on the site after all, and the City Council members will shake their heads and bemoan the cruelty of Fate but will tell the developers, who may or may not have ties to their Council campaigns, not to worry about it. And that will be the official end of the old African-American community in the Texas capital city, the old East Austin. The real heavy in this scenario, the one man who has told white business interests that it’s okay to destroy minority lives in Austin, Texas, Live Music Capital of the World, is actually a Negro.
He's the black guy who has done arguably the most to wipe out the black community in River City, although he’s had a lot of competition. His name is Barack Hussein Obama II and he was 44th President of the United States, the first black President in fact. Remember how often Barry was here in River City during his time in office? A hint: He wasn’t here for the tacos, bro. He was really here for the money. Barry corrupted the local government, sold out minorities in Austin not once, not twice but three times. And made a lot of money doing it. He’s making money still. Coincidentally, days after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel last year, as the ferocious Israeli offensive took shape, students at Harvard University began protesting a suddenly-cancelled visit to the university by former President Obama.
“Barry, Barry, you can’t hide,” they chanted. “We charge you with genocide.” The students were right.
A significant part of the suffering of the Palestinian people in recent years, and especially in Gaza at the hands of the Israelis, can be laid at the feet of the Obama Administration, Barry himself and his then-United Nations ambassador and now-head of U.S.A.I.D. for the Biden Administration, the multi-talented Samantha Power, a liberal white chick who, among others, including former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, another “liberal,” was an Israelophile in office. Barry and his administration went for the money. Interestingly, and in an intertwined dynamic, the gentrification of minority neighborhoods in Austin can also be laid at the feet of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party he led. It’s all about land, just like in the Middle East, as in the Live Music Capital of the World, and money, as seen thru the lens of corrupt of government. This will not be a moral or ethical treatise. It’s factual, related to land in Austin, and dollar flows from Texas to D.C., and from Washington to Israel. In both places, in Palestine and in Austin, Barry sold out the colored peeps. Let’s take a look.
First, however, the two names you need to keep in mind. One is of course former Mayor Adler, who was the last mayor of Austin, for eight years, during much of the city’s incredible and unsustainable growth. In an interview with the L.A. Times a few years ago, during his time leading Austin’s City Hall, speaking with a sympathetic journalist who apparently did not check, Adler described his legal specialization as civil rights. He completely forgot to mention the part where he’s actually been a real estate development attorney with a specialty in eminent domain, while doing occasional duty for the Anti Defamation League, representing Jewish not black civil rights. The other person you need to know is the aforementioned Kirk Rudy—a friend of the ex-Mayor and of the ex-President. There is certainly no doubt about his profession. He’s a land developer and the preeminent land guy in Austin, which for the last few years has been the most POC-unfriendly real estate market in the nation. Kirk Rudy is founder of the incredibly successful land development company in the Live Music Capital of the World, Endeavor Real Estate. To set the scene.
So, like, there’s a protest chant for what happened in Austin, too. Maybe not as good as the Harvard students but it’ll do:
Barry, Barry
Please don’t lie!
All you did in Austin
was
Gentrify
