Earlier this week, Community Not Commodity launched electronically a petition demanding that the Austin City Council take strong action to stop the displacement of local residents before enacting CodeNEXT. Displacement is a citywide problem, but it is most pronounced in East Austin, where luxury developments are pushing out families that have lived there for generations.

Austin’s “new urbanists” and other supporters of CodeNEXT were quick to attack us, using identity politics to distract from our demands for social and economic justice:
 
 

 

The fact is I created our anti-displacement petition hand-in-hand with Jane Rivera, co-chair of the Housing Committee of Mayor Steve Adler’s Task Force on Institutional Racism and Systemic Inequities, and it was then adopted unanimously by Austin’s La Raza Roundtable.

Here’s what matters, though: Austin’s new-urbanism crowd is attacking us in order to obscure the fact that CodeNEXT is a land-grab, pure and simple. Big real-estate companies are squeezing current residents out of neighborhoods on both sides of I-35 in the name of profit. If those residents remain divided along class and racial lines, then the industry’s foot soldiers will have an even easier time evicting them.

Community Not Commodity isn’t fighting for West Austin, and it isn’t fighting for East Austin. It’s fighting for all of Austin.

Allow me to close with a couple of questions: Do the city’s new urbanists have a solution for the ongoing displacement of Austin’s longtime residents? If so, what is it?