by Harold McMillan

This is a piece about the high price of living and working in Central City Austin. This is a piece about being a working artist in Downtown Austin, Texas. It was inspired by real life and a recent article in the New York Times. It is not direct and to the point. Life, and this piece, in my view, are not that clear-cut. My life, at least, is multi-layered and complex and is not easily read from one angle. History matters. The future, ways to approach the next phase, are important and must be informed with some thought of how we got to the present. In short, this is a ramble. Go with me on this, please.

I am not the kinda guy who spends a lot of time talking about the good old days of Austin past. I've been here for about 18 years now. I like this town, I am invested here. Austin has a lot that appeals to me, on a number of different levels. I now consider Austin my home. But to sit and bitch about the passing of the old days, about how good life used to be here, to pine away about how old time Austin was soooooo cooooool -- nope, that ain't me.

I do, however, have big concerns about where we are now and what the future holds.

I don't spend a lot of time trying to bring back the good old days because, let's face it, 18 years ago I was a kid (many of you were kids with me, too). I'm not ever going to be, nor do I want to be, 20 again. I had a good time then. And yes, Austin was really a cool place to live. To tell you the truth, it probably was a cooler place to live back then. But reality still says (I do too), that we will never pass that way again. Nekkid swimmin' at the lake, dope smoking on Auditorium Shores, and other 1980s-style normal-ness left Austin when Texas Republicans came out of the closet -- and, for some of us, as soon as we turned 30.

So, I still say, I am not the one to call on to go public and tell my stories about just how cool Austin was in the free love 1970s and '80s. Lets just say we all had a good time, raised a lot of hell, didn't make much money, and didn't pay high rents for the privilege of living in the Central East Austin, Clarksville, Hyde Park, Travis Heights, or Cherrywood neighborhoods.

You see, back then, these neighborhoods were student ghettos, poor "minority neighborhoods," communities of artists and musicians and working-class neighbors with kids. The climbers, the up-and-comers, the high-tech middle managers, the YUPPIES and BUPPIES were all heading out to the 'burbs, driving fast in their Volvo station wagons, 2.1 kids in the back, running away from "inner-city poverty and neglect" and the public school's grimy masses of "at-risk" kids.

It was boom-time in Central Texas. New business starts all over the place, 10-story-tall construction cranes littered the downtown skyline, and the newly moneyed wanted nothing more than a nice little house in West Wells Lake Steiner Branch Lago Ranch. You know, the close - to - six - figure - but - not - quite income-restricted security gate - and - walled - down - home family kinda neighborhood that we all grew up in, just north of Dallas/West of Houston. The message, and it was clear, was that the inner-city neighborhoods should be left for the poor and the boo - hoo - student - artist - musician types.

And we were quite happy in those neighborhoods. The landlords would not fix the bad plumbing, but what do you expect for $250 a month. Life was good.

And downtown? Well, just let the prostitutes and street people have it. After all, Downtown Austin after 5 p.m. (in, say, 1979) was no place for proper folks who believe in God, vote Republican, wear a suit and work nine-to-five. Downtown Austin in 1979 was where you worked, did your banking, and paid your taxes. Downtown was where the clean sidewalks rolled up at 5 p.m. to make room for the seedy underbellies of the city's night crawlers to leave their slime.

By the mid-1980s Downtown Austin was touted as the next -- for sure, by god -- jewel in the Texas crown of beautiful and lively city centers. Boom-time had arrived and the building frenzy was upon us. It seemed that every corner had a new high-rise going up, way up: New office space for the coming commercial surge that would bring Downtown Austin to the forefront of the time's petroleum-fueled economic bonanza. Life was good.

With all of this big money working -- and working hard -- in Central City Austin, the city fathers and a handful of entrepreneurs decided that maybe it was time, for starters, to clean up Sixth Street. After all, the crown jewel of Texas' little cities needed a downtown entertainment district.

Now to some folks' thinking, Sixth and Seventh Streets and Congress Avenue were already pretty entertaining. Believe it or not, in those days, the prostitutes and transvestitutes worked Sixth and Seventh Streets, Congress Avenue. You could hear black blues and Mexican squeeze box music on Sixth Street. You could also hear W.C. Clark with Bill Campbell and Major Burkes at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel, indulge in an Oriental Massage at the Cowboy, buy a $1 pint of beer at Brooks, get a good greasy BBQ sam'itch for two bucks at Scotty's, and pawn your guitar right next door to the Twin's liquor store. It wasn't pretty, but there was life downtown. It was just not what the boom-time visionaries had in mind. Still, life was good.

What Sixth Street, what downtown needed was some polish. What nighttime downtown needed was some more businesses that somehow could match the sensibilities of the new urban frontier visionary (read: greedy guy with some money, who wanted some more, fast. Or young guy/girl with daddy's money who had a dream of financial success in the music business). What downtown needed, apparently, were more establishments that moved further and further away from the cultural reality of the district in which they proposed to do business: a business district, created in rarefied whitebread air, that would reflect the aspirations of the creators of this imaginary golden and sparkling new downtown, rather than the cultural heritage of the city that we all find so attractive (and they wonder why it ain't working. Don't they get it?).

So what did downtown really get from the 1980s, what is the legacy of these urban visionaries?

The boom economy went bust. All of those high-rises sat vacant for 10 years. There was a period of really cheap downtown commercial and residential space. The prostitutes who worked downtown are still there, they are just higher-priced call girls. The street-walking prostitutes and transvestitutes now work East 11th Street and South Congress. Increased rents killed the black blues and Mexican squeeze box joints, the original Antone's, and other spots that actually gave the district an identity that was particular to Austin.

We've mostly got a strip of Sixth Street joints that don't even bother to attempt a connection to Austin's indigenous (ain't that really where the tourist dollar is?) culture. Except for a few, the average Sixth Street music venue has had about six different names/owners during the course of the last 10 years. And there are still some who confuse smooth with the real jazz stuff, lounge with anything close to the tradition, and many who equate cigars and martinis with a scene that has staying power to last through the current YUPPIE fad.

Now, am I the only one who finds this whole situation a little disturbing? Not just for my personal reasons, but for the future, the health of downtown, the scene here in River City? Does this stuff really run in cycles? Are they just setting themselves up for the next crash, the next change of the fickle consumer's taste? Or is this just where we are headed next? Maybe the cigar set has moved in for good. Maybe the soul of downtown has already been sold to the highest bidders.

Am I just ignoring my own take on all of this? If the goal is to take advantage of the latest fad, put the money in the bank and then get out of the market, maybe this all makes sense. Probably just a symptom of my view that some downtown development, the music venues, and even the cafes would do better if they acted as if they were cultural/commercial institutions.

It's not always pretty, but San Antonio sells its cultural heritage to hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. So does Chicago and New Orleans (and Lafayette and Atlanta and San Francisco). Austin ain't no remake of Athens or Seattle or North Dallas. Why not make a big deal of what Austin really is? Why not sell the cultural heritage with which we are blessed? Why not tell the truth?

Downtown Austin, and the central city neighborhoods that surround it, are cool because of the influence of salt - of - the - earth, laid-back and tolerant, civic-minded, progressive thinking folks who have lived and worked here for years. Central city neighborhoods are desirable places to live because of the legacy of the aforementioned folks who color the cultural personae of those communities. They are the ones who stuck around and nurtured those neighborhoods while the YUPPIES and BUPPIES headed for the hills during the 1980s. They are the ones who have always thought downtown should be the cultural center, the soul of the city.

The New York Times article I mention earlier made me think about present-day Downtown Austin. It may seem strange for me to compare Manhattan to Central Austin, but the parallel is there. The housing market in Central Austin is just a smaller model of what is going on in the Big Apple.

If rents continue to rise, if home ownership continues to be just a dream for regular folks, if non-high-tech wages continue to be thousands of dollars less than comparable wages in other markets, living in Central Austin, as in New York, will soon be a thing that only students, the wealthy or the poor can afford or tolerate.

Middle-class working folks with a kid or two will soon be the next group who are forced to live further and further away from downtown. It won't matter how much they love the city, rents have doubled in the last 10 years. Their pay checks haven't.