I didn't know we were moving to Austin.
It was 2006. I was three years old, and my parents told me that if I got in the truck, I could watch movies on my DVD player for three days straight.
My dad drove our moving truck all the way from San Diego, letting me swing my legs over the edge of the passenger seat with a large triply-folded comforter serving as my airbag. Growing up in California, he had his fun living in a trailer in Malibu and once seeing a single deer from the hills of Los Angeles. But ultimately, the state left him with a visceral adverse reaction to six-lane highways and ten-dollar coffees. So he gathered me, my mom, and the dog, and whisked us away from the elevated highways of SoCal. We arrived at a West Austin suburb where the roads clung to the lake with a frightening desperation.
Almost as soon as our truck pulled into the driveway, a neighbor walked down the hill to introduce himself. "James" spent most of his time as a retiree volunteering with a local prison ministry, and he moved to Austin with his wife in 1999 to be closer to their grandchildren. Transplants themselves, but you would never notice unless you listened to their subtle Arkansas accent. My parents' first greeting to him was stiff, because in California it's normal to be critical of old men who offer to babysit your daughter. But as the signs we passed on the state border proclaim, friendly is the Texas way. Newcomer or not, I would soon know James and "Agatha's" home better than the homes of my own family members.
Two people and one little girl stood around a bright yellow moving truck in the driveway, and none of us knew that we were about to be living in one of America's fastest growing cities, that our neighbors would increase by a third in nearly every direction, or that the year "2006" would become one of the most common words in our vocabulary. Because these days, people don't ask you if you're from Austin. They ask you when you arrived. And 2006 would win any question of who got here first almost every time.
We've all heard about what happened to Austin, either from the young transplants who love it or the old natives who bemoan that it isn't what it used to be. Last year in The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright proclaimed that the town "once celebrated for its laid-back weirdness, is now a turbocharged tech megalopolis." But cities mean different things to different people, and Austin means something entirely different to me, a semi-transplant semi-native who remembers those narrow lake roads every time she is asked where she grew up. After all, I used to think it was normal for a city to grow with a girl.
We lived in a suburb called Lakeway, and the map in my head of this neighborhood is like a tree: the main road is the trunk, and the streets peel into a dizzying number of directions the same stochastic way that branches reach into the sky. There's a reason all these roads trickle toward the lake, even if the cycle of drought and flood makes it one fickle idol to build a town around. Back then, the lake was the neighborhood's biggest asset.
Without the lake, no one would come to the resort or the spa. No one would come to the golf courses or tennis club. The closest food store was four miles away, and there wasn't a movie theater for another twenty-four miles. A Dunkin' Donuts tried to open on our biggest road (the "trunk" in my mind map) and shut down within about a year.
Even if my kindergarten self couldn't feel it, change had always been a part of this community. We drove past vacant Native American Mounds on our way into town, where "Keep Austin Weird" was already stickered on every cafe counter and speed limit sign. The slogan grew in momentum in 2004, after the owner of BookPeople used it as a rallying cry against letting a bookstore chain into town. Twitter held a launch event at South by Southwest in 2007, reinforcing the city's ties with major tech companies that had already been planted with the Dellionaires and the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium (MCC) that moved here in the 1980s.
It was hard to be worried about all this development once the Recession hit, when it felt like there wasn't enough economic activity for our little pocket of the city, or for our family. My mom was a real estate agent lucky to secure a listing that wasn't a foreclosure. My dad briefly took an extra job downtown trying to buy commercial properties. Even amidst the national mortgage meltdown, this family's living staked on people buying houses in Austin, in finding the city as amazing a place to live as we had. After all, it was an amazing place for me to grow up.
I settled into Texas life with the ease of any young child. I learned to square dance in kindergarten and told my teacher I would be a longhorn at UT Austin. After school, I crept up the hill to James and Agatha's home, asking if I could feed Agatha's fish or stuff myself with her famous crescent rolls.
On weekends, my dad got us all in the car and we tore up and down roads dotted with bluebonnets, blasting Don Edwards from the CD he bought at a country music concert.
And he'd tell you a tale of the ol' days
When the country was wild all around
Sit out under the stars of the Milky Way
And listen while the coyotes howl
Now the Long Horns are gone
And the Drovers are gone
The Comanches are gone
And The Outlaws are gone
The years passed and the recession dragged its feet on the way out, and I was in seventh grade when the first sniff of true change impacted my life for the better: Lakeway got an HEB—a proper grocery store—on that same main road that couldn't keep a Dunkin' Donuts alive a few years before. That's what happens to every girl when she lasts for ten years in a small town and makes it to the seventh grade, I thought. Her town gets a grocery store.
In school that day, I burned with jealousy at a group of girls whose parents called them out of class early so the whole family could get to opening day first. When I ran to my mom's car in the pick-up line and we sat in the congestion that was becoming our daily third space between work and home, she described everything she had the chance to see on her lunch break. There was a display case of little cookies that you could place into a paper box with tongs and buy by the pound. There was a box in the bakery department that smelled like butter and sold warm tortillas. There were so many different brands of peanut butter that she brought home two different jars just so we could choose our favorite. I brought my legs up, pushed my fingers through the loops of my cowboy boots, and smiled. This felt like living in a city.
When we joined James and Agatha for a weeknight dinner, I couldn't believe that they didn't care for the new HEB. They said that it was too overwhelming, as if the store's bright lights, free sample tables, and late hours made it the town's new nightclub. I thought they must not have gotten a good look inside; did they see the sushi bar? It wasn't that, they said. They were just too old to learn another store, and they said I would understand one day.
Around the same time, Austin also got its first cat cafe, to arguably much less excited fanfare. The cafe's landlords demolished the local piñata store Jumpolin, reportedly without any prior notice, to make room for the new establishment, which had nearly $60,000 worth of Kickstarter support. The cafe would face years of protests, some of which turned violent, before closing in 2019. Jumpolin found a new location (not without difficulty) before also closing for good in 2020, citing rising rents in the neighborhood.
Austin means different things to different people, and my own story diverges heavily from the people of color who bore the brunt of the city's demographic transition. The reality is that Austin's I-35 highway was intentionally constructed in the 1950s as the point of separation between black (east) and white (west) residential areas, and in the 2010s East Austin became less and less affordable with the migration of wealthy tech workers downtown. But as a middle-schooler, the word "gentrification" was a social studies vocabulary word, and I didn't think it could possibly be related to the HEB or to the pinata store. I was still at a naive point where I thought if people just compromised, Austin could have it all. We could all just try the new cat cafe and pick up a piñata on the way home.
By the time I made it to high school, my classrooms were standing room only. Austinite Evan Smith remarked that Austin was growing an upper-class for the first time in its history, as suddenly Google and Apple expanded their presence in the city. Our narrow lake roads weren't made to hold so many people, and they were starting to buckle.
When I still joined my dad for his long drives down country roads, we saw no more country roads. Now we saw tessellations of McMansions. Oh look, another yuppie IPA joint that looks like it flew straight in from SoCal's Rancho Santa Fe. Soon our favorite Mexican restaurant surpassed ten dollars for its lunch special, marking the occasion with whiteout and sharpie on a laminated menu. We teased the owner about it, even though he didn't find the new rent prices a laughing matter.
The most symbolic point of mourning for me and other locals was the installation of a Hermes on South Congress, the funky street where teenagers used to buy Halloween costumes from Lucy in Disguise with Diamonds and take suggestive pictures under the Austin Motel sign. Months later, Lucy in Disguise closed in what I took as a traitorous act of cultural succession.
That's when a phrase became more and more common in Austin: "Don't California My Texas." As if "Keep Austin Weird" was now too ambitious of a goal and the city had to set more realistic priorities. While I chanted this phrase loud and proud, I always felt like a hypocrite saying it. I might have minimal memories before that bright yellow moving truck took me to Texas, and I might have worn hot pink cowgirl boots every day of middle school, but at the end of the day, I will always be a California-born Austin 2006. At the end of the day, I grew up helping my mom run open houses and send out listing mailers, selling the McMansions I hated to stare at, and I'll always be incredibly proud of her for getting her business through the recession and starting her own real estate brokerage.
If I was happy about the grocery store and the movie theater and even deep down that stupid cat cafe, does that mean I also asked for the spaces they replaced to leave?
When I asked my dad about it on another long drive, he drew a clear distinction between "us" and "the other, more recent, Californians." "We" came here to become Texans, to get away from California. "They" came here to recreate California. I still wonder who gets to decide who the good and bad Californians are.
The same month that I graduated high school, Elon Musk announced Tesla would be moving to Texas. We all knew he meant Austin. With "city folk" fleeing the pandemic, Austin's real estate business became a victim of its own success, and my mom had plenty of clients wanting homes but no vacant homes to sell them. Builders cut deeper into the lake roads and further up the hills. They say if you build it they will come, but the people were already here and tapping their feet impatiently.
By then the cracks in my perception of the city and its changes deepened. Maybe this unease had always been there, or maybe I only got around to noticing it when I had to decide between college at UT Austin or college at Johns Hopkins. I mentioned the dilemma to James and Agatha during a Christmas get-together before COVID. They said they couldn't think of any school better than UT Austin, except possibly A&M. But in the privacy of a high school counselor's office, my advisor burst with energy to say that leaving just might change my life.
So I left the city behind as if it were a childhood friend I had grown apart from, insisting that this wasn't goodbye but merely a break. Maybe in that time the cranes downtown would thin out, or maybe, miraculously, the McMansions would blow away like tumbleweeds.
The city didn't wait for me to come back. In fact, it gave me more reasons to shy away. A month after I left, the "Great Texas Freeze '' happened; the week where Texas' energy grid all but collapsed and most of the people I loved were left without power. The event still raises eyebrows when you bring it up to the right Austinite at the right time. Yet I experienced it all in a heated Baltimore dorm room, shuffling through phone numbers like a 1990s telemarketer to see if everyone was okay. Agatha assured me in that same Arkansas tempo that she and James were fine. It would be a chance to eat all that food they never got around to looking at in the freezer.
Then in September, Lakeway went viral for our very own 'cornhole Karen' on Jimmy Kimmel. Kara Bell, a candidate for my local school board, made the show twice: once for assaulting a retail worker after being asked to wear a mask, and once for speaking at a school board meeting in support of banning books. Bell was a recent transplant from California, and her videos reinforce many stereotypes Austinites have of California transplants who move to the state expecting a conservative paradise. But none of the classmates in my Maryland lecture halls knew that Bell was a transplant. They looked down at their phone screens then back at me like they couldn't believe this was where I had grown up.
That Christmas, I came home to a La Colombe Coffee Shop, an indoor trampoline park, and a note from James and Agatha. I don't remember exactly what the note said, but there was something about needing more help than they used to and Austin's labor shortage and getting too old for the creeping hustle and bustle of a growing city. I remember the end of the note much better, because it announced they were moving to San Antonio.
We hadn't been neighbors for several years, but I drove down the narrow roads to their house for a last visit, wondering how my dad had gotten a Penske down there sixteen years ago. As I sat in the couches where I used to color and looked across from James and Agatha, now unsteady on their feet but excited to tell me about their new house, I felt the years of things I had to say dilate into those last few moments.
I was always welcome to visit if I was passing through San Antonio. I told them countless times that I loved them because I knew I would never be passing through San Antonio. Agatha invited me to write my name under any of the nativity scenes she had out, so I could take it for myself one day. I said I'd rather not, because what reason did she have to give them away? James and Agatha were so glad I stopped by, but wanted to let me go so I didn't have to drive the lake roads in the dark.
My mom remarked off-hand that she doesn't recognize people in the grocery store anymore, and I burst into tears at the dinner table that night.
From there I made every excuse to avoid coming home, setting off an endless cycle where the more I avoided home, the less of a reason there was to return. When people asked me if I was moving back after graduation, I usually joined the chorus of my high-school friends with the easy excuse that we couldn't afford it as new graduates. In reality, even if I could afford it, moving back to my hometown after being away felt as foreign as moving to San Francisco. And what would I do if my parents, bereft of family history here, threw up their hands at the rising prices and decided to join the 238 Austinites who leave every day? Does that mean I instantly lose the roots that tie me back to this ever-changing skyline?
I'm not proud of the grief that this wavering has brought to my poor parents. But the reasons I had for not coming back were next to the same reasons Don Edwards gave us all on those crooning country road drives.
Well, he cursed all the roads and the oil men
And he cursed the automobile
Said, "This is no place for an hombre like I am
In this new world of asphalt and steel"
It was never what was new that bothered me as much as what was gone.
Now the Long Horns are gone
And the Drovers are gone
The Comanches are gone
And The Outlaws are gone
Now Lucy in Disguise is gone and Agatha is gone and James is gone and gone gone gone everyone is gone.
They say that the people make a place, but as an Austin 2006 you can't stake your life on other people staying there.
This city never belonged to the girl who pulled up in a moving truck with a comforter and her DVD player on her lap. Before me were the hippies, and before the hippies were the cowboys, and before the cowboys were the Tonkawa, Apache, and Comanche whose remnants I used to drive past every day. But it still hurts to think that, while many people regard home as a source of constancy, Austin has for so many of my generation been a home that now feels hard to recognize. Maybe growing up in a city like Austin was what I needed to learn what home is for many in the 21st century. Not a house or a skyline but an interconnected network of people who stretch across the globe.
I now like to say that I have two types of home, and I don't think I'm alone. There's the home that brushes past me when a woman in a fringed leather jacket smiles at me at the airport, grinning "Welcome back," making my voice curl up into an accented "Thahnk yeu" that hasn't come out of my mouth in months. This home comes fewer and farther between now, and to mourn it is to accept there will be a last time that I experience the familiarity of afternoons in Agatha's kitchen.
But there is a second, more resilient kind of home: the postcards from the people who are gone that still stick to your bedroom walls. The reunion with your dad at baggage claim, when he lifts your suitcase from your arms and drives you back to your parents' new house. When it's pitch black on the roads and your feet reach the car floor and he's playing those same songs to stay awake. You could stay awake with him and see that they just built a luxury car dealership on Highway 71, but you realize that this is the first time in months that you can safely fall asleep in the back of a car. And so you do.
