1928 Austin city plan

The city of Austin, Texas, was established in 1839 to become a planned capital for the Republic of Texas. Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar appointed his friend Edwin Waller to oversee the surveying of the new city and to develop a city plan for its layout. Waller and fellow surveyors laid out a grid plan fourteen city blocks wide, with a central four-block town square meant for the Texas Capitol. This "Waller Plan" determined the shape of what is now downtown Austin, and it was not until the 1870s that Austin expanded significantly beyond the bounds of the 1839 city plan. Race and zoning From the Civil War to the early 1900s, most of Austin's African American population lived in a number of freedmen communities distributed across the city, such as Clarksville and Wheatville. White city leaders were interested in moving black residents out of the central city and concentrating them into a racial ghetto on less valuable land, in part to reduce the cost of providing "separate but equal" racially segregated public amenities throughout the city. In 1917 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley that the enforcement of racial housing segregation through local ordinances was unconstitutional, but the city continued to search for a way to establish de facto housing segregation in Austin that could satisfy this new legal standard, and this was to be one of the goals of the new city plan. ==City plan==

s and boulevards from the plan Koch & Fowler submitted their finished proposal to City Council in January 1928, in a document titled "A City Plan for Austin, Texas". The 80-page report included a large section on the development of the city's street plan, another on the design and placement of municipal parks and other urban green spaces, and a number of shorter sections on other public amenities such as public schools, cemeteries, fire stations, and a proposed civic center. Other sections discuss the development of the city's railroad and streetcar networks, the desirability of a municipal airport, the establishment of a new municipal zoning code and rules for land subdivision, and the city's integration into the development of the surrounding region. The "Street plan" section noted that the Waller Plan's street grid continued to serve the central city well, but that the shortage of paved roads combined with the impact of obstructions such as the Capitol and the University of Texas campus forced excessive traffic onto a handful of streets. Detailed recommendations for the expansion and improvement of particular streets filled most of the section. In particular, it proposed the construction of four new bridges to connect central Austin with its suburbs, three of which were eventually built as the West Fifth Street Bridge, the Lamar Boulevard Bridge, and the Interstate 35 Bridge. The report emphasized the potential aesthetic value of bridges and other new constructions, urging that they be given ornamental designs. The "Parks and boulevards" section argued for the importance of public green spaces to the physical and emotional health of citizens, recommending locations for new or improved park facilities throughout the city. It noted the good condition of the three surviving park squares from the Waller Plan (Republic Square, Wooldridge Park Square, and Brush Square) and their value to the city as "beauty spots and breathing spaces". The plan recommended the preservation of greenbelts along Shoal Creek and Waller Creek and the banks of the Colorado River, as well as other wooded areas within the city. One section of the plan called for the development of a new civic center district on the north shore of the Colorado, to include a new municipal auditorium and event center, and a new central library downtown. Another section called for the creation of a municipal airport, suggesting that it be built in southeast Austin on what is now the neighborhood of Travis Heights. Housing segregation One of the city plan's recommendations, detailed mainly in the "Schools" section, is the establishment of a "negro district" on the southeast fringe of the city, east of East Avenue (now Interstate 35) and south of the City Cemetery, which the plan identified as the neighborhood with the highest preexisting concentration of black residents. After noting that explicitly racial zoning was not legally feasible (thanks to Buchanan v. Warley), the document advises that the city concentrate all public amenities aimed at black citizens in this region, so as to draw the black population to it. ==Legacy==

from the plan In response to the plan, City Council adopted a resolution defining new city limits and establishing Austin's first zoning code. The civic auditorium the plan called for was not built at the time, but thirty years later the city built the Palmer Auditorium across the river from the site the plan recommended; it has since been redeveloped into the Long Center for the Performing Arts. East Austin Though the vast majority of its contents dealt with the sorts of city planning issues that still confront Austin today (transportation, utilities, parks, schools), The "pull" incentives recommended in the city plan were complemented by "push" incentives when the city avoided extending the sewer system or paved roads into the existing freedmen communities elsewhere in Austin, and real estate "redlining" also pushed African Americans east of the central city. ==References==