Notice the craftsman bungalows lining Rainey Street, now converted into some of Austin's most popular bars and restaurants — but the story here is more complicated than craft cocktails and string lights. For most of the twentieth century, this was a working-class Mexican American neighborhood, home to families who had lived in the shadow of downtown for generations. Residents spoke Spanish on their porches, walked to Our Lady of Guadalupe for Sunday Mass, and built a tight-knit community largely invisible to the city around them.
In the early 2000s, the city rezoned Rainey Street for commercial use, and within a decade virtually every residential structure had been converted into a bar or demolished for new construction. The families who once lived here could not afford to stay. What replaced them is undeniably lively — Banger's Sausage House, Container Bar, Lustre Pearl — but the transformation stands as one of Austin's clearest examples of gentrification erasing an established community in the name of entertainment.
The original residents were not given a choice. Their neighborhood became a bar district. Austin is still reckoning with what that means.