They Haven’t Kept Austin Weird

Bill Thompson reviews Alex Hannaford’s “Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City.”

By Bill ThompsonOctober 1, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Cultural Studies

IN 1999, ALEX HANNAFORD was a Londoner on a road trip across the United States when the then 24-year-old journalist pulled into Austin, Texas. He was captivated. Every open doorway along Sixth Street led to a live music club with high-octane, low-rent bands of every stripe throbbing through the night. And it wasn’t just the music.

“From the top of Mount Bonnell, the city’s highest point, you could see how Austin lay snug in a bed of vibrant green, how the river, sparkling, carved its way through the middle of downtown, and how the rolling hills kept watch over everything from a distance,” he recalls in his new book Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City, both a love letter to and savage takedown of an overhyped city.

Austin seemed the coolest, hippest, most happening place on the planet, a welcoming town as eccentric and offbeat as many of its occupants. In 2001, a smitten Hannaford took up residence there. But gradually, insidiously, the reality of Austin set in.

As well-known as the state capital and home of the University of Texas was for its music scene, Austin was already becoming a victim of its own allure. Uncontrolled development, gentrification, environmental decay, racism, gun proliferation, water depletion, homelessness, and deterioration—the same forces that had ravaged other appealing American cities—were transforming Austin into an enclave almost solely for the wealthy.

After 17 years, scarcely recognizing the place, Hannaford and his young family gave up. “I didn’t think we’d ever leave,” he laments. “But by 2019, the city had changed. Property prices, taxes, and rents were soaring; cars and trucks sat bumper to bumper on congested highways; the convection-oven weather had finally taken its toll; and, for us at least, Austin’s magic was evaporating in that heat.”

Currently a fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma at Columbia University, Hannaford has written on crime, the death penalty, religion, refugees, and the Mexican border for such publications as British GQ, The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Atlantic, and the Texas Observer. He was co-writer and host of the investigative podcast series Dead Man Talking (2018–20) and wrote and directed The Last 40 Miles (2013), an award-winning animated short film about the death penalty.

He returned to Austin in 2022 as a “somewhat dispassionate” observer—an investigative reporter in point of fact—determined to understand what had happened to the city, explore what he regards as Austin’s decline, and see what could be learned about its past and future. He found a frenetic capitalistic energy completely at odds with the breezy old sensibility.

As Hannaford reminds us, an “affordable city tends to attract a more diverse population, which leads to a richer mix of cultures, traditions, languages, and perspectives.” Yet as more and more people were drawn to Austin, it was also emerging as a major corporate mecca, especially for the tech industry. This made it prone to boom and bust. It also eroded the city’s distinctiveness, destroyed neighborhoods, drove people out, and catered to those with deep pockets and political clout.

By 2019, there was still little or no political will to restrain, much less stop, the city’s rampant growth, though some community-minded activists were already swimming against the current and market forces were exerting their pressures. The fabled music scene—originally a public relations myth that Austin had to grow into over the decades—had changed dramatically, with big-time bands and solo acts squeezing out local musicians and forever altering the beloved South by Southwest festival.

“Austin was still trading on its credentials as the ‘Live Music Capital of the World,’” Hannaford writes. “[Y]et working musicians couldn’t afford to park downtown to unload their gear, let alone live there. For older Austinites who helped cement its reputation as a music city back in the day, what Austin has lost, as far as they’re concerned, is irretrievable.”

Hannaford argues that cities experience cultural golden eras only when artists and activists are able to afford the real estate there. And while newcomers of modest means might still be seduced at first blush by Austin’s glamour, disenchantment is almost sure to follow.

Today, Austin is the 11th-largest city in the United States, with all the problems that arise from rapid growth and the complacency of officialdom. Hannaford chronicles the evolution and effects of each in meticulous detail, from a staunchly left-center perspective. Although the author apportions credit to those things that Austin is trying to do right and recalls with unalloyed fondness the way things used to be, the evidence of decline that he accumulates is telling.

Hannaford felt differently in 1999. “It was a weird, intoxicating mix of frontier town, hippie holdout, and indie mecca, with too many Mexican restaurants to count […] Austin also embodied the notion you could do something different with your life,” writes Hannaford. “This was the city of reinvention: exciting, bubbling with opportunity and optimism. It felt like we were in [the United States] but protected from its worst excesses; a kitsch, retro America-lite where you could forget the real world outside.”

In Hannaford’s estimation, Austin is no longer such a place, no longer an outlier, and no longer linked to the cultures from which it developed, namely Mexican and Black cultures and, later, the laid-back ethos of the 1960s. As such, it runs afoul of French anthropologist Marc Augé’s dictum separating “places” from “non-places.” Places reflect their original cultures, showing through the signposts of change.

By contrast, non-places, like modern Austin, “are homogenous spaces that have had that culture eradicated, replaced with a sterile sameness,” writes Hannaford. “Austin had gone from being a hippie in flip-flops chowing down on Tex-Mex watching a blues band in some dive bar to a guy in a pressed shirt, Patagonia vest, and Allbirds sneakers eating Japanese-barbecue fusion in an air-conditioned new-build.”

To some, that’s progress, and good riddance to the Old Austin: real, imagined, or reimagined. But Hannaford’s having none of it. Although the once-ardent are often the most unforgiving critics, his book is as much an elegy as an examination. If his assessment of Austin is as accurate as the evidence suggests, those who still value a town with a personality of its own may wish to look further afield.

Still, Hannaford concludes, “I hope my love for the city comes through in these pages. I guess ‘Austinite’ will always be a part of my identity.”