Early on a Sunday evening a year and a half ago, I went for a walk. I walked down the alley out the east door of my building, turned right on Waller, and headed down to the park by the river.
The park sits on the east edge of the turnabout below Interstate 35 after you cross the river—a traffic no-man’s land most useful for getting out of Rainey Street, across the interstate, or for finding a parking space from which to access the 14-mile trail that circles the water. The roads are almost always quiet. The park is almost always pastoral. But on this evening, a stretch of parkway was not quiet. Instead, a half-dozen sedans were cruising through, swerving back and forth across the pavement. The sedans were older. Their backs were lower than their fronts. Out of their hubcaps protruded long spokes. Their subwoofers were woofing. They slalomed like stock cars warming their tires. I was uncomfortable. I was scared.
I’d seen cars like these before, since moving to Austin. I didn’t know anything about them, really—just that they existed. I’d never seen them do the swerving. I’d never seen them there by the park. But they made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t know why they were what they were.
As I got towards the other side of the park—over by Chalmers, I think—I saw the party, and I realized this was not anything nefarious. Grills smoked. People yelled and laughed. I was embarrassed for having been scared. But I was still confused. And on the walk up to Haskell, and then back over to Waller and up towards home, I read about slab’s—“slow, low, and bangin’” (or “slow, loud, and bangin’”—the internet offers either as the subject of the acronym) cars that, and please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong, originated in Houston but have some popularity on Austin’s East Side. What I’d witnessed was the meeting of one of Austin’s car clubs, part of the social fabric for decades on the East Side—the vast section of Austin across I-35 from the part of town that redlining and segregation long dictated was for whites only.
Yesterday, Texas Monthly published a piece about that specific car club—the one I’d witnessed that night towards the end of 2019. Residents of a new apartment building near the park are scared of the club, just like I was. But unlike me, they either haven’t read about it or have for some reason not been swayed by reading about it. They want it shut down.
I’d encourage you to read the piece in full. It’s gutting, and the piece has more depth than just, “Rich white people try to stop traditional Black and Hispanic community gathering because it makes them uncomfortable.” That’s the summary, yes, but it’s deeper than that. And that alone is a rather deep wound.
I don’t live on the East Side anymore. I loved it over there, and I’ve recommended it to friends moving to town. I didn’t move out all that intentionally—the rent was rising, we found a better place up in Central Austin, we were sick of our building not cleaning the stairs after dogs peed on them. And I’m not convinced moving out of the East Side intentionally would be all that noble of a thing. But I do, more and more, feel a sense of embarrassment similar to the one towards which my fear pivoted on that walk in 2019. It’s not a sense of embarrassment that I lived on the East Side. It’s a sense of embarrassment about how I lived on the East Side.
This paragraph from the Texas Monthly piece struck me:
Chale Nafus, a local historian and longtime professor at Austin Community College, has lived in East Cesar Chavez since 1975. Sitting on his large front porch, facing a wall of new hotels rising a few blocks to the west, the 78-year-old told me the first wave of non-Hispanic white residents were artists who wanted to live in a “thriving, warm community” and “partake in the culture.” But he said that now, many of the newest residents obsess over exaggerated threats to their safety. Nextdoor, a neighborhood social media app, bristles with concern about unfamiliar vehicles being parked on the street, and complaints about loud music that violates city noise ordinances or a homeless man who has peacefully paced the neighborhood for decades. “I have to refrain from responding, ‘Good lord, don’t you understand where you’re living and what this once was?” Nafus said. “But it’s too late now—the tsunami has arrived.”
I’m relieved to say I never complained about safety on Nextdoor, and that I never called the police on traditional community gatherings. But I also didn’t really get to know those gatherings, or what they were about. I walked past them, the same way I walked past historically Black churches and told myself falsely that sometime, I’d go to a service there. I lived in a building much like the one in question in the Texas Monthly piece—one of gentrification’s trademarks, blocky and new and built on a block of torn-down houses where prior residents had been priced out by a combination of rising rent and property taxes—and while I didn’t really know the full story when I moved in, I had a good idea of it when I signed my lease, even if I didn’t know it too consciously or explicitly. I was a passive participant in what’s often pitched as the “revitalization” of a neighborhood, but for some reason ends with everyone who used to live there being gone. I’m embarrassed to have lived that way, that way. I’m embarrassed to have not gotten to know my neighborhood in anything more than an observational sense. I’m embarrassed to have indirectly contributed to the exploitative elements of its cultural shift.
I don’t know what all to make of gentrification. Many of the stances I see on it either fall fully in favor of gutting neighborhoods on in some nebulous rhetorical space in which the alternative offered seems implausible, if an alternative is offered at all. The exploitation that often accompanies it is bad. The gutting of neighborhoods is sad. I would prefer a phenomenon in which “economic development of a neighborhood” meant economic development of a neighborhood, and not replacement of a neighborhood with one more financially prosperous. But I don’t know how to make that happen.
What I do think, and this is just a thought, is that this problem is one of fear. And I realized that through a second paragraph from the Texas Monthly piece that struck me (and again, I’d encourage you to read the whole piece). It was the final one:
About one hundred feet away, a twentysomething member of a car club in shorts and a T-shirt, who said he goes by the nickname “Kilo,” calmly watched the bizarre scene unfold. Born and raised in Austin, he said he’d been coming to the park to check out custom cars and connect with old friends since he was a kid. He wondered why instead of calling the police and creating unnecessary tension the blond woman and other angry residents hadn’t walked across the street and introduced themselves first, opening up dialogue. “If you come with good energy, you’ll find out that we’re just here to chill and enjoy the cars and the scenery,” he said. “Don’t be scared.”
Part of what was so gutting about the piece, for me personally, was having felt fear around the exact same car club these apartment residents were so against. I recognized that feeling from those fifteen minutes of discomfort, seeing cars weave back and forth, people hanging out of windows shouting. I, like the apartment residents, was scared, and while thankfully, my own scaredness didn’t drive me to the sort of action these residents are trying to take, it did probably contribute to the fact I always just kept walking, and the fact I never did get myself out into the East Side the way I knew I should. I let the scaredness get the best of me. For the whole year and a few months I lived over there.
And so that closing line struck me, and I’d guess it’s wise, and something so many of us with the cultural power need to remember when we’re in a rare position of discomfort:
Walk across the street.
Introduce ourselves.
Don’t be scared.
