To understand East Austin, you need to know a single document: 'A City Plan for Austin, Texas,' published in 1928 by the planning firm Koch and Fowler, hired by the city itself. The plan contained a recommendation so brazen it still shocks: the city should designate a 'negro district' east of East Avenue — the road that would eventually become Interstate 35 — and concentrate all city services for Black residents in that zone. The explicit goal was to pressure Austin's Black population to relocate there by providing schools, parks, and other services only on the east side.
The plan worked. Over the following decades, Black and Mexican American residents were systematically displaced from neighborhoods throughout Austin and concentrated east of the line. White families received mortgages through FHA programs that explicitly excluded Black applicants.
Deed restrictions in new suburbs prohibited sales to non-white buyers. The freeway that replaced East Avenue in the 1960s turned a street into a physical wall. The result was a city divided not just by custom but by policy, infrastructure, and the deliberate withholding of investment.
That 1928 line still shapes Austin today.