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Half a century after the summer of love and hippie harmony, California is experiencing a summer of loathing and hipster-bashing. Not just hipsters. Artists, techies, realtors, business owners, developers, all are feeling the wrath of a burgeoning and in some cases radicalising anti-gentrification movement. In the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Boyle Heights, protesters are targeting a new cafe with placards, chants and intimidation, tactics which ousted an opera and a gallery.

On Wednesday night the pews at St. Luke United Methodist Church in Clarksville were packed with nearby residents who had come to hear about how their surroundings would be impacted by CodeNEXT, the proposed rewrite of the city’s Land Development Code.

The meeting, which had been advertised for weeks by signs throughout the area alerting residents that “CodeNEXT is rezoning our neighborhood,” displayed the hostility that talk of zoning changes, particularly those that increase density, sometimes provokes in Austin’s central neighborhoods.

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Without a focus on displacement, even well-intentioned policies aimed at helping families stay in their neighborhoods and schools could go awry with unintended consequences that decrease affordable housing stock and force low-and moderate-income families out of the central city — if not out of Austin altogether.

Adler’s approach acknowledges a missing quotient in the way the city has done business across various platforms, including zoning, demolition practices and affordable housing initiatives — actions that were taken without the benefit of data that evaluated displacement factors upfront.

As we continue to debate the meaning and consequences of the displacement of East Austin’s indigenous population, it is important for us to become cognizant of some of the lessons our steroidal real estate markets should have taught us by now.

1: The main cause of gentrification is government, not the real estate market. Gentrification is not a phenomenon of nature or of the invisible hand; it is the logical consequence of political determinations made by elected politicians and other public officials.

Efforts to cast gentrification as primarily a matter of supply and demand are mostly efforts to evade responsibility, as are deterministic claims that we are somehow enslaved to gentrification and are powerless to stop it. At root, gentrification is a human rights violation.

CodeNext attempts to address many of Austin’s most vexing problems, such as traffic, affordability, connectivity and density. And while the effort has drawn impassioned responses from the community — more than 4,000 comments that ranged from cheering the draft to calling it a “special interest boondoggle for real estate speculators” — many have worried that city staffers and consultants from the Pacific Northwest are making decisions about the city’s future in a vacuum.

“Citizens are wondering whose idea it was to start destroying their neighborhoods,” architect and Brentwood resident Don Leighton-Burwell wrote on May 15. “Why are citizens who have paid extraordinary taxes for many years and who have tried to make Austin a great place to live being attacked in this way?”

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