10 episodes
Growth Machine KUT & KUTX Studios
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- News
Housing prices in Austin have exploded in the past decade, leading to a city that’s not just unaffordable — but also highly segregated. None of this happened by accident. It’s the result of decades of decisions about what — if anything — gets built in Austin and where. From a master plan to move Black and brown residents to one part of town, to fights over how to protect the environment, to an outdated land development code — all of these are pieces in a machine that’s engineered Austin’s housing market.
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We Planned This
(Episode 1) Austin has grown a lot in recent years — and the East Side has been impacted the most. To understand the city’s pattern of displacement, we have to go back to 1928. The full transcript of this episode of Growth Machine is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is […]
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Roads to Everywhere
(Episode 2) I-35 is more than a road. It’s been sculpting Austin’s housing scene for more than 60 years, encouraging endless sprawl and making gridlock a lifestyle. Take a drive with us through the highway’s history. The full transcript of this episode of Growth Machine is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The […]
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Listen to This Podcast or We'll Poison Barton Springs
(Episode 3) In the 1990s, Austin voters passed landmark protections for parts of southwest Austin that sit on top of the aquifer that feeds Barton Springs. That set off a chain of events that had a profound effect on how the city would grow in the coming decades. The full transcript of this episode of […]
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Smart Growth or Dumb Growth?
(Episode 4) When a new mayor came to power, he found what he thought would be a compromise — a way to bring new businesses and build housing for all the people coming to Austin without threatening the city’s ecological gems. It turned out to be more complicated than that. The full transcript of this […]
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Welcome to Silicon Gulch
(Episode 5) Not that long ago, Austin’s economy was sleepy, to put it mildly. People came here for UT, to work for the state or for the military. A little more than 50 years ago, a bedsheet changed everything — including the housing market. The full transcript of this episode of Growth Machine is available […]
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There Go The Neighborhoods
(Episode 6) Austin last re-wrote its land development code in 1984. Sounds boring, right? Well, that rewrite made it harder to build denser forms of housing. We explore the history of zoning in Austin and the opposition to changing the rules today, which could make the biggest difference in fixing Austin’s affordability crisis. The full […]