“They see me when they’re walking their dogs and they don’t even wave-it’s like I don’t exist.”Ī new three-story build next to two East Austin bungalows. “This whole area is turning into one giant hotel for rich white people and tourists,” Thompson said. As a Black woman living in East Austin, she is acutely aware of how rapidly the neighborhood’s demographics are changing-though, in her experience, few Austinites seem to care. The home was being turned into yet another short-term rental (STR), joining four other newly constructed homes on her block.
But after noticing that extra trash cans had been placed in the driveway, Mary Thompson, a 69-year-old retired social worker who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years, knew exactly what was taking place. One neighbor wondered whether the home was being reimagined as a corporate retreat another thought it was going to become a business of some kind. When workers demolished a fence and rolled a yellow school bus into the crowded backyard, past a newly constructed pool, curiosity turned into concern. At one point, a construction crew converted the residence’s garage into a bedroom. After weeks of shrill buzz saws and nonstop hammering, the house’s front yard was littered with Amazon boxes and construction trash piled high. It didn’t take long, however, for the Castro Street renovations to strike some neighbors as odd. Seemingly overnight, modest one-story homes that had stood for seventy years were being torn down and replaced by large, contemporary dwellings with clean lines, geometric shapes, and conspicuous coats of white or black paint.
For several years now, the formerly quiet East Austin neighborhood, which had for decades been home to the majority of the city’s Black and Latino residents, had been in a state of flux. When the modern, two-story home on Castro Street was sold for nearly $1.3 million this past spring and renovations began, neighbors barely noticed.
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