I just hate those bumper stickers popping up around Austin that say “Don’t Move Here.” Many a Facebook post expresses the same.
I get the joke, but it’s just not funny.
This is a post about the future of Austin. It’s a post about Mayor Adler and his challenger this Fall, Laura Morrison. It’s a post in some ways about about the inevitable. It’s a little bit about Amazon, and it’s a lot about making sure Austin’s continued rise benefits everyone.
“We can only say the state of our city is strong if we are affirmatively building a future in which we preserve the soul and spirit of Austin.”
Our problems aren’t any one person’s fault, and no more the fault of a newcomer than a decades-long veteran.
If we ever stop being hospitable, we really will have lost the soul and the spirit of Austin. If we ever stop being a refuge and a block party and a march for good over evil, we really will have lost the soul and the spirit of Austin.
If we ever stop using our disposable income to vote for how we want the city to be, we will have lost the soul and spirit of Austin.
Instead of saying “Don’t Move Here” I’d rather we say what so many of you said to me when I first showed up, 12 years ago.
In fact, when we say “Don’t Move Here,” we start sounding a lot like the anti-immigration nationalists we so strongly oppose on the national stage. I’m flabbergasted by my liberal brethren regularly these days, and this is just one reason why.
Unless we are going to build a Trump-like wall around Austin, we have got to be more solution minded.
I’m not particularly interested in hearing more from complain-y do-nothings, and least of all Laura Morrison, who already had her shot at addressing these issues in her first stint on Council from 2008-2015.
During her tenure, the issues in play were exactly the same as they are today, and the progress made was to my mind and many others’ deeply unsatisfactory.
Folks like Morrison can be eloquent when talking about Austin’s problems, but remain woefully short on ideas and action.
Every single one of Morrison’s answers to a difficult question — about transportation, about economic segregation, about homelessness, about CODENext — ends up with a non-committal “we have to strike a balance” or “we have to look at that closely” or “I think there are ways that we can grow, without doing that” — to which no specifics nor any follow-up is ever offered.
The one thing Morrison did do?
She led the anti-Prop1 PAC “Our City, Our Safety, Our Choice,” which fronted the fight against Uber and Lyft in Austin.
The net result? The Texas State Legislature overruled us and Uber and Lyft are back, more free to operate than ever before.
When meeting with technology companies and their workers, Morrison is likely to bring up her professional training as an engineer at her time at Lockheed. Don’t take the bait.
In case you have erased all memory of the ugly battle with Uber and Lyft from your mind, now is the time to recall:
Mayor Steve Adler had actually negotiated a signed, precedent-setting MOU from both Uber and Lyft that extracted important concessions from both companies, most important of all related to ensuring both driver and passenger safety. Tax revenue and data sharing were the other key components.
What caused that fight in the first place was later obscured: the rideshare-related numbers for rape and sexual assault had indisputably risen according to SAFE and our own Police Department. Folks predictably cast doubt on those numbers but they held up under scrutiny.
The philosophical argument about the utility and efficacy of fingerprinting drivers was less compelling to me personally and for many of you; regardless, Adler had solved this also. His innovative Thumbs Up! ordinance passed; a corresponding 100% voluntary identification program was to use market dynamics to incentivize validation instead of requiring it.
Alas, Council rejected the MOU, afraid to act. At the time it was much more popular to put the vote to the people, avoiding what had become a political third rail for everyone.
Uber and Lyft of course did themselves zero favors with their brash tone and dishonest backroom dealings. But I and many others were strongly in search of a workable compromise, instead of a temporary moral victory, followed by swift rebuke.
It’s really easy to fear-monger like Morrison does. “Everything’s going to change,” she loves to say. Change in Austin is not only not new, it has been constant for more than 100 years.
Morrison never goes so far as to claim she can prevent change, but it’s clear she intends to slow it down as much as possible. In the process of making her argument, Morrison enlists the typical boogeymen: real estate developers, Californians, technology companies, and businesspeople generally.
The funny thing is that those constituencies are forwarding some of the most progressive initiatives in the city, driven by a race to recruit, train, and develop talent (more on this later).
The scariest speaking point in Morrison’s arsenal? “It's time for a leader whose priority is the people who live here right now,” she often says.
The Chronicle’s Michael King was quick to pick up on this rhetoric in his interview of Morrison this past January when she first announced:
“[You make] a fairly sharp distinction between the people that live here “now” and the people that are going to live here. Does that mean people who have lived here for five years? For 10 years? Does the door slam tomorrow?”
Morrison’s response was typical: “Nobody has the power for the door to slam – if somebody had the power, would that be good? Probably not.”
It gets better. She continues: “the fact of the matter is, we need to make sure that we don’t turn people into losers.”
To me that’s code for protectionism, not egalitarianism. Morrison isn’t worried about the people who are already hurting. She’s looking out for folks who are not losing now, but are worried they will start losing soon.
Remind you of anyone else’s rhetoric? Shall we just say it aloud together? Is it really time to Make Austin Great Again?
I think that’s precisely how Morrison’s campaign intends to have a fighting chance against Adler.
Invoke a particular way of life, romanticize it, and protect it. Hat-tip the little guy, and act like the incumbent has a swamp worth draining. Get elected. Start governing like it’s 1980, or earlier. Most importantly try like hell to give your NIMBY old guard donors their Austin back, come hell or high water.
Here is why I am still all-in on Steve Adler and why I think you should join me by giving whatever you can to his re-election campaign.
Steve is a convener who gets things done, but who also goes out of his way to make sure others get all the credit.
Steve is not a career politician. He’s a successful lawyer and committed philanthropist who isn’t worried about optics. He isn’t afraid to stand up to Abbot, Paxton, Sessions and Trump.
In recognition of this fact and more, the Anti-Defamation League gave Steve Adler and Diane Land the Audrey Maislin Humanitarian Award last year, which is a huge honor not to be taken lightly. It’s not just another one of these nice gala things that people in power are given to curry favor.
Neither Steve nor Diane ever hesitates to speak truth to power, and it shows. They have demonstrated time and time again that they are fierce advocates for the oppressed, the segregated, the discriminated, and the powerless. Their record in these matters is substantial.
In times like these our Mayor must be incredibly effective in affairs both foreign and domestic, so to speak. There’s no one else in Austin right now who can pull off that combination without sacrificing one endeavor for the other.
And I do love it when Steve gets his lawyer on.
Whether he is fighting SB4 tooth and nail, collaborating with Judge Eckhardt to protect Austin’s right to be a sanctuary city, or leading more than 50 other cities to join us in recommitting to the Paris Climate Accord, Adler makes me proud to live in Austin and to be part of these precedent-setting fights.
Steve’s “worst” flaw is trying to pull the sword from the stone on tough issues that no one else has the courage to touch.
Sidebar: here’s a good related read in case you missed it: “Why the nation’s mayors are watching Austin Mayor Steve Adler” in the Statesman.
Accomplishments: here are the Mayor’s 2017 accomplishments. It’s a big list.
Priorities: Adler’s priorities for 2018 are here.
Donate: here’s where you can give to Adler’s campaign.
The hands down, no question, most alarming thing about Austin is that we are #1 in the nation in income inequality. That’s not a good list to be atop of.
Every other issue in my mind takes a back seat to this one.
Not nearly everyone is benefiting from Austin’s growth and prosperity. Our community is still suffering from the mind-bending injustice our leaders perpetrated way back in 1928.
And no, keeping companies like Amazon out of Austin isn’t going to help our #1 problem.
The jobs and the growth and the money that companies like Amazon and Apple and Oracle bring are not at all the problem. Folks worry about what Amazon would do to traffic, or affordability. The actual problem with these big new HQ projects is routing and bridging the opportunities they comprise to everyone in the city.
I know a lot of people who’d love to wade through traffic for an $85K yearly salary. I was at Huston-Tillotson University a few weeks ago with President Dr. Colette Pierce Burnette. Their students’ desire for tech jobs is consistent and intense, across a dozen majors.
A fix will not happen overnight, but again, addressing Austin’s intense, perverse, historic economic segregation must be our overriding priority.
Good news: our newly-minted Master Workforce Development Plan is strong, and can serve as a reliable template for decades to come.
The Austin Monitor captures the plan’s purpose and progress in a few succinct paragraphs, for those of you who may have missed it:
At last week’s City Council meeting, a procedural public hearing paved the way for the formal addition next month of the Master Community Workforce Plan to Imagine Austin, which is the city’s plan for the next 30 years. But it’s the work being done with high-profile employers like Samsung and job training providers such as Austin Community College taking place quietly in the background that proponents of the plan expect will soon produce more applicants for positions that employers said they’re having trouble filling.
The workforce plan has a stated goal of creating 60,000 middle-skill jobs in three high-growth sectors – health care, information technology and advanced manufacturing – as well as lifting 10,000 residents out of lower-class income brackets.
Since the plan was unveiled last June, employers in similar industries have been courted to participate in ongoing sessions to identify the needed soft skills and common challenges that make it difficult for them to find and retain new employees. Their findings are then presented to representatives from Austin Community College, Goodwill of Central Texas and Capital IDEA to help those organizations tailor their existing job training programs to better suit the needs of the market.
Thus far those workforce development programs are being funded in part with $660,000 in workforce data management contracts Workforce Solutions has secured with the city and Travis County, which includes some contributions from Google and JP Morgan Chase. Ongoing fundraising efforts are expected to contribute as well.
If Amazon can commit to helping build these kinds of socio-economic and racial bridges both notionally and materially, I want them here. And same goes for every other company considering a move to Austin, large or small.
As Mayor Adler said in his letter to Amazon as part of our response to their RFP (full text here):
Our long-term goal in Austin is to both preserve the soul of our community and make it accessible to all – even as we excel as a community that continues to attract top talent. What new solutions and long-term investments in workforce development, affordability and mass transportation might we achieve together that would not have been possible otherwise?
I firmly believe that Austin and Amazon can help each other achieve solutions to our biggest challenges. Even as you assess our community’s great assets, I ask you to look at our community’s greatest challenges as an opportunity to help craft a story for Amazon and for Austin that will be told for a long time.
Now, about those complaints. Are housing prices way up? Yes.
Are folks selling their homes and moving to cheaper enclaves in the suburbs to stave off property taxes they can’t afford? Are musicians moving to Lockhart and further, in search of more room to breathe, and make art?
Absolutely. Yes. Unequivocally. And irreversibly.
Austin’s going to need to be an active and innovative partner to Pflugerville and Round Rock and Manor and Taylor and Bastrop and Lockhart and San Marcos. Austin’s going to need to continue to aggressively invest in affordable housing. We are going to have to get together at long last and pass a new land use code, too.
Our current land use system is almost 50 years old and it’s the engine behind many — if not most — of our shared frustrations about Austin’s growth and development. Not passing a new code is not an option.
By the way, it is okay to complain about the flawed process of producing CodeNEXT, but no one should be up in arms that it’s hard to get this right. No other American city has grappled with the challenges Austin currently faces and succeeded. We are at the cutting edge in terms of defining of how modern cities can best scale.
For a super smart deep dive on this issue, read Nautilus Magazine’s “Why New York Is Just An Average City.”
We’re going to have to raise taxes too, a tough sell here in Texas, no doubt. This will most likely happen via larger and larger bond measures, with transportation and our school system remaining serially at the forefront for at least a decade. We’ve become a big American city, like it or not. It is time to acting like one too. That process starts and ends with infrastructure and education.
We are also going to have to consider community micro-bonds to fund and perhaps outright reclaim some of our struggling institutions. We are going to have to re-fund our longest-suffering school districts with private money too.
We are going to have to offer a lot more *paid* internships so that folks who don’t have “friends and family money” have equal access to personal and professional development opportunities.
We are going to have to continue being a “Kitty Hawk” for things like autonomous cars and delivery drones, no matter how uncomfortable or controversial.
We are going to have to continue fighting passionately, and standing steadfastly, as Mayor Adler consistently has, against SB4, as we are the epicenter of the nationwide fight about sanctuary cities; for the Paris Accord as a leading green, smart city; for restorative justice in our local courts and jails; for innovative, community-based policing; and against a state legislature that champions states’ right while denying incorporated Texan cities the same privilege.
And look, we have just got to vote —not just at the ballot box — but with our time, talent and money — on how we want Austin to be for years to come. Spend nights and weekends working on the causes you care about most, and spend cold hard cash on the stuff you value about this city above all else.
But of course, vote at the ballot box, too, for God’s sake. Vote again. Keep voting. Vote in the little stuff. Vote in the big stuff. Vote for fun. Vote even though it’s boring. Vote because so many others can’t.
As Beto has said more times than I can count, Texas isn’t a red state or a blue state. It’s a non-voting state.
We are actually 51st in the union in voter turnout (that number includes Puerto Rico). Sadly, Austin is no better than the rest of our fair state in this regard.
Travis County turnout dropped a whopping 50% between the 2016 Presidential election and last November. Some dropoff is always to be expected but wow. That’s pretty bad, friends.
Part of it I have to think is that folks are exhausted. No doubt others underestimate the importance and effect of local politics. But what I really think is going on is that for most people, Austin is wind at our backs, and we’re too often too busy to really notice, or care. Austin protects a lot of us from a lot of things. The mandate to vote shouldn’t be one of them.
It’s not all bad news. In fact, an incredible amount of the new has been incredibly good. It’s useful to remind ourselves of a few things.
Yes, UT is churning out high quality talent, but so are Huston-Tillotson, the Acton School of Business, St. Ed’s and ACC.
I think what Gary Keller is doing on Red River is awesome. We haven’t nearly saved live music yet, but we have the appropriate levels of panic and corresponding commitment to get the job done.
There is a ton of innovation going on in Austin around homelessness, affordable housing, tiny housing, and more. Have you visited Community First Village, which has pioneered a game changing approach to solving chronic homelessness?
Divinc is a local business incubator focused on women and people of color, and it is churning out high-quality, high-growth companies. 3/4 of the last graduating Techstars class had either a woman CEO or a woman on the executive team, no small thing sadly, in tech.
Speaking of UT, they recently hired Scott Aaronson. The university is building an incredible new quantum computing center around him, the first of its kind.
When was the last time you went to the Harry Ransom Center? Have you been to the new Ellsworth Kelly building at the Blanton?
The New York Times called Kelly’s Austin a “temple of light” and suggested that “no contemporary artwork of this scale by a major artist has matched its creator’s initial ambitions so perfectly as Kelly’s Austin.”
In fact, the paper’s art critic M.H. Miller went so far as to conclude that:
Long the music capital of the Southwest, Austin is now also a burgeoning outpost of the tech industry. But the presence of Kelly here almost instantaneously transforms it into an important art destination, the kind of place people make pilgrimages to.
Our new medical school and teaching hospital are out of this world. Do you know about how they have completely reimagined the clinic from the inside out? Do you know what it takes — and means — to be a Trauma 1 center?
Mueller’s a big real estate project sure, but it is also the #2 green neighborhood in the whole U.S. according to Redfin, and an exciting precedent for future development.
Do you support Urban Roots and the Sustainable Food Center? Austin Bat Cave? SAFE? UMLAUF? The Thinkery? Foundation Communities? The Trail Foundation? The Texas Civil Rights Project?
Do you know about Manor New Tech high school, where you can see the best STEM curriculum in the country firsthand?
RideAustin emerged from a nasty fight about who gets to set the rules, but it is not just solvent, but writing big checks to other Austin nonprofits every single month, $350K in total and counting.
If we are lucky, Meow Wolf makes Austin their 3rd location. Liberty Lunch is long gone and so is Las Manitas, but The Skylark is still kicking, and so is the Sahara Lounge.
Wth all the traffic and our kvetching about it, we didn’t even drop down to #2 in the 2018 best places to live. We stayed #1. Even if we slide to number 4, 5, or 6, we are in great shape compared to most cities.
Obviously, I remain optimistic. Very much so. I’d love to hear why you remain so, too.
12 years ago, when I first got to Austin, another patron at Wink one table over stood up to tell us that we were “the problem” with what Austin was quickly becoming, having overheard our table’s conversation about my recent arrival.
Which was kind of funny in and of itself because we were all at...well, Wink. On the west side of Austin, sipping fancy wine with abandon.
This conversation is not new. These sentiments are not new. Generations before us invested in the icons and institutions that make Austin what it is today, in education, the arts, business, health and more. For that they should be lauded, and hopefully their example inspires us to do the same once more.
Those generations also irresponsibly kicked the can down the road on transportation, education, systemic racism and inequality, zoning, healthcare and more. We are left today to clean up several messes we didn’t make. But let’s not spend too long lamenting the errors of those who came before us.
I’m here for the long haul. I hope you are too. I’m glad we are talking about Amazon. I’m glad Amazon is talking about us.
I’m glad Steve Adler has an opponent. The contrast is striking, and useful because of the conversation it forces about original and modern Austin, and about complaining versus getting things done.
I’m glad we have a lot of work to do. Even better, we have the money, the talent, and the drive necessary to fix what’s broken.
I grew up in Baltimore. I love Baltimore. And it is doing better, slowly and surely. But Baltimore is not Austin, not yet anyway. Most cities would love to have our problems.
Again, we have every ability to solve what ails us. And I think we have a duty to do just that. For those of us to whom Austin has given so much, it’s time to give back.
Steve has the biggest fundraising deadline of his reelection campaign on June 30th at midnight. That’s in 6 days.
Current and potential opponents will look at his report when deciding what their next moves will be. Please help out with a donation of $25, $50 or any amount that you can.
The max is up to $350 per person or $700 per couple, as allowed by our City. Click here to donate now.
