My Austin friend works in the financial sector. I've known her for 20 years. She's an accountant (with much concern for what's going on in the capitalist world) and she says she's heard Austin is currently the wealthiest city in the nation.
Yesterday and last night I checked out in Austin and I can report that, at least on the surface, there are zero signs of an economic crisis.
I spent the day checking out a part of the downtown, rode the little Armadillo bus (formerly free, now 50 cents), then walked a small part of the many miles of trails alongside the river (for some reason they call it a lake), to Barton Springs pool where I fed almonds and peanuts to a very friendly squirrel (s/he buried most of them) and dropped small pieces of my organic mango into the river and watched the fishies gobble them up. I didn't want to swim downstream from the paid swimming area where the kids were peeing, i mean swimming, so I opted for the goofy little train ride (in preparation for the big train ride next week), chatted with the folks trying to raise awareness about water conservation and the need to save the springs (a third of austin's energy is from coal, there's a much stronger conservation ethic in san antonio than here, and my new young friend is determined, he said, to get arrested at an anti-nuclear rally sometime this summer in Texas). I began my walk back to town to meet my friend (who told me she has opted to pay for alternative energy through her utlilty bill ... that doesn't mean her energy isn't from nuclear sources, but she is at least choosing to support alternatives) after her work day ended. Along the way I met some brave/crazy young guys jumping off various bridges (the signs clearly said not to), and found a quiet and private little place of my own where I waded into the river for a swim. The air was about 102 degrees, and I thought (as I often do in these sorts of situations) about how the indigenous peoples must have loved and appreciated this place with all its greenery and the might Colorado River.
I bought my friend dinner (a small thank you for putting up with me these two weeks while I put the Street Newz together) at a little Thai restaurant, and we went to stand on the bridge with all the other tourists, and staycationers, to watch the bats. Austin is famous for its bats. It's estimated that a million and a half of them live under the Congress St. bridge and, at dusk, they begin their quest for food - apparently 10,000 - 30,000 pounds of insects every night. We got there early, and watched the bridge fill up with people, and the little park at the side of the river, and the river itself with boats of various sizes. I heard many different languages, one young fella said he'd been there last night and a single bat flies out, then millions of them. And that's just what happens .... one bat, presumably to check it out, and then the others begin their mass exit. First from under the southern part of the bridge, swarms of them, flying in formation, forming clouds above the river. Then from the middle section of the bridge, and finally the northern part. We wondered what would happen if the first bat decided it wasn't time to go ... maybe s/he'd set the alarm wrong and it was too early .... did the first bat ever tell the others NO, don't go yet!? And how do they return? Do they swarm back the same way, or return slowly? We did hear that the young stay home, under the bridge, and the mothers return to them. It's an incredible thing, Austin's bats. My friend said she'd heard they migrated from Mexico and found the bridge a pleasant place to congregate and decided to stay.
After the bats we wandered along south Congress st., where there are some of the funkiest stores I've ever witnessed (I'm not much of a shopper, but these were windows and late night stores worth perusing). I asked my friend "where are all the panhandlers?" I'd spent the morning in the downtown, the afternoon along the river park, and the evening on a street with many Friday night partiers and shoppers. Perfect places to see some of the street community, I thought, but I hadn't seen a single panhandler, nor a single shopping cart street person. My friend said there are some panhandlers where she lives, in the suburbs, but I didn't recall seeing any there either. She was talking about the folks who stand at the intersections with signs asking for money or jobs. And that's it, I said? I asked my friend to drive me through the "inner city" on the way home. She had told me about the food banks downtown, but I wondered where those folks spend the rest of their time and I wanted to see the lower income neighbourhoods.
We cruised through the Latino community, and near where the African Americans gather. She showed me where she lived while she was going to College, but said she wouldn't live there again. My friend works for a property management company, and hears about significant numbers of murders in the apartment buildings in the area. Not as safe as when she was a student. No doubt the violence is drug related, I suggested. We saw a lot of police driving through these neighbourhoods, and speculated about how they're involved in the drug trade and perhaps inciting violence. In the local paper there's a story about a police officer who killed a man sleeping in his car recently - the story is that the man was startled awake and reached for his gun, and the cop shot him. It's under investigation. (The right to bear arms ... definitely something that distinguises us Canadians from our sometimes whacky neighbours). We saw several cops harassing one large young Latino man driving a nice car at a gas station. My friend told me she'd heard that local police, across the nation, have been advised that they might have to leave their families and relocate at a moment's notice, for a significant amount of time. We speculated that this is one way police can get away with doing things they wouldn't otherwise get away with - while they live in communities where they're known there are some checks and balances, even here in the land of individualism. Humans are social creatures, there's no getting away from that. And apparently the federal police are trying to get more power in local communities across the USA.
We drove through the downtown. By this point I was considering that either it's true that there's no economic crisis in Austin, or else they've rounded up all the panhandlers/homeless and put them in jail, removing them from the streets. I still hadn't seen any sign of a street community. My friend drove by the Starvation Army - a very large building - and commented that there were no people hanging out outside the building, as there usually are (though she expressly said she never sees folks sitting on sidewalks with caps outstretched - maybe that form of panhandling is "illegal"?). And there, outside Caritas (where my friend has volunteered and says the street folk are not especially bedraggled or wasted on drugs), were six police officers interrogating three African American men sitting on a bench. They had the building open (apparently it's not usually open at night) and were going in and out, talking to the men on the bench. Traffic was slowed, but we couldn't hear what they were saying. I had my camera, but am not keen on interfering in US police actions. We know there are a lot of private jails in Texas, detention centres etc .... perhaps it's true that they're just sweeping the streets and rounding them up and taking them away.
We turned the corner onto 6th street. Austin's Bourbon St. Holy Moly. Plenty of music, loud, lots of intoxicated College/University students wandering from bar to bar ... the street was ALIVE! No sign of a recession, and you'd never guess there's a global environmental crisis ... cars everywhere (we couldn't get into the Mexi-Arte opening earlier in the evening because of a lack of parking) and air conditioning ... and still no sign of panhandlers, or anywhere binners pushing shopping carts. There is no street newspaper here ... there's only one in Texas, according to the NASNA website, and it's in Dallas. There were two buskers last night, one street artist, and one guy selling buttons to the bat tourists.
We pondered where all these people are getting their money. Austin's a capital city, so there's employment for civil servants. The University hires a bunch more. There are a couple of big banks who hire lots of people. There's some IT industry. But ultimately, my friend suggests, it's the music scene that really brings the money in. The restaurants are full, the retail stores (some with US built goods, more with China built stuff, even the new retro clothes are Made in China) seem to be thriving. So there are jobs in the service and retail sectors. Maybe, we pondered, the whole "Keep Austin Weird" motto, which is about supporting the local economy, is keeping the money flowing around town rather than out of town and into the pockets of the big unlocal corporations. We drove a few more blocks to the neighbourhood where the older thirty-something evening crowd gathers - again lots of loud music and many peoples.
My friend, who predicted Barack Obama would make it big many years ago, and warned people about last year's economic crash long before it happened, now fears that the US dollar will tank somewhere around October. It's hard to imagine, considering what we saw in Austin, that there's any such thing as a recession. As with any city in the capitalist world, there is a "lower class" somewhere. Capitalism insists on a percentage of unemployment (around 8-10%) in order to function properly. I tried to explain to my friend that there's no way a person could walk down any busy street in Victoria without seeing several panhandlers. But they don't exist in Austin -- what's going on?!!??
Maybe they all died from the heat.
For more information:
Austin Food Bank
Photos from my day off in Austin
