Mining Out Austin’s Cultural Wealth
Prior to the mid-90s, few people moved to Austin to get rich, you went to Houston & Dallas for that. Once it was geared up, the ability of the tech economic engine to generate huge wealth for the players in high tech left the rest of us behind, the creative ‘bait’ drawing in high $ players who wanted to benefit from the cultural wealth without reinvesting in those who created it. That’s why so many of us are considering leaving Austin & going to places we feel valued.
As Dale Watson said in his recent interview with KUT: “I just really feel the city has sold itself. Just because you’re going to get $45 million for a company to come to town — if it’s not in the best interest of the town, I don’t think they should do it. This city was never about money. It was about quality of life.”
Austin is at risk of losing our identity as a sustainable ecosystem because the perennials–those who hold the history and have contributed both money & much more to the ‘soil’ in which the ‘new’ Austin has grown–are uprooting and finding new places to “get involved, stay curious, mentor others, [be the] passionate, compassionate, creative, confident, collaborative, global-minded, risk takers who continue to push up against [the] growing edge and know how to hustle” [source: Meet the Perennials]
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We ‘perennials’ came to Austin — and stayed — for reasons beyond money. However, without acknowledgement and support for our contributions, we can easily leave and reroot elsewhere, something that’s happening daily.
These are the discussions I hear every day here in Austin between & among perennials who feel undervalued and tempted to leave this place we’ve built through our capital investment far beyond money creating the ‘soil’ in which the sought after millennials are encouraged to root. But, those millennials that are so sought after by the city also have a new pattern emerging: they come here, gather financial & knowledge capital and return back to the towns where they can not only find value, but also feel valued.
Without the people holding the history of a place, there is no natural mechanism in which these millennials are guided to become perennials. There are ways to change this pattern, but they’re not going to come from the top down.
The bottom line of this post is not that progress is bad, it’s that rewriting the story of Austin without actual Austinites at the table brings forward a story of distorted values. We end up with a town that is Austin in name only, no longer rooted in the idea of community that brought us here and still has the power to keep us engaged.
If the perennials leave and the millennials are just passing through, will the only thing weird about Austin be that it’s a mashup of Colonial Williamsburg & EPCOT with animatronic representations of Leslie, musicians and creatives doing their work within a holographic Slackerville? Sadly, we don’t have long before we’ll know the answer.
