Editor’s Note: Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City , by longtime Observer contributor Alex Hannaford, will be published on October 1 by Dey Street Books . The following consists of an original introduction by the author followed by an excerpt, published with permission . Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City is, as the title suggests, about the Texas capital. But it’s no travelog. It’s a book about gentrification and climate change and race and guns and affordability; it’s about the various tech booms that caused a rampant surge in construction and saw more people moving to a place I used to call home than it could ever really accommodate. It’s also about how my love affair with Austin soured: For the best part of 20 years, I had a front-row seat to witness the profound changes taking place in what would become America’s fastest-growing city. And as the subtitle suggests, the book is not just about Austin, either; the themes I’ve attempted to tackle—from homelessness and the environment to how the city treats its immigrants and what the future holds—are interchangeable with so many other cities in America too. I first stumbled upon Austin in 1999. I was on a coast-to-coast road trip with a friend of mine from England—apparently American road trips are something us Brits love to do—and we planned to take three months driving from New York (where we bought a 1988 V8 Pontiac Firebird off an undercover cop) to San Francisco, but with quite a few detours; up to Chicago, down to New Orleans, through Houston, and then on to New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California. Austin wasn’t on our list of stops—I’d barely heard of the place, honestly; this was years before SXSW was internationally known—but someone we’d […]
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