Austin's 1928 City Plan and the Making of East Austin

In nineteen twenty-eight, the city of Austin commissioned a comprehensive master plan. The consultants who produced it included a recommendation that has shaped the city's residential geography ever since.

They designated a specific area of East Austin as the city's quote Negro District. The plan proposed locating schools, parks, and public facilities for Black residents exclusively within this zone, with the explicit purpose of persuading Black Austinites to relocate there. City services, including water and sewer improvements, were then extended into East Austin and withdrawn or withheld from Black neighborhoods elsewhere. A separate Black high school was constructed on the East Side. The city had, without passing a single law that said race on its face, engineered residential segregation through infrastructure investment and service denial.

The boundary that divided East from West Austin in that plan traced very nearly the line that Interstate Thirty-Five follows today.

The East Side that Austin's technology-boom gentrification has been consuming since the nineteen nineties, the neighborhoods east of that highway, the music venues on East Sixth Street, the food trucks and the renovated bungalows, were created in their current shape by the nineteen twenty-eight plan. Black Austinites were concentrated there by design.

By the first decades of the twenty-first century, the same desirability that had led the city to exclude Black residents from western neighborhoods had reached across the highway. East Austin real estate prices climbed. Longtime residents were priced out. The same city government that had used infrastructure to enforce segregation in nineteen twenty-eight was now largely powerless to prevent the market from finishing the displacement the plan had begun.