by Ken Martin
Photography by Barton Wilder Custom Images

"Inspiring visions rarely (I'm tempted to say never) include numbers."
Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos, 1987.

As a financial accounting officer, I wrestled with numbers for more than a dozen years. I grew sick of numbers, so much so that twenty-four years ago I got out of that line of work to take up journalism. But numbers keep coming back to haunt me. Numbers are everywhere and, unlike the Marines with whom I spent more than twenty years, numbers can't be ordered around. They can only be sorted, arranged and studied, like chicken guts strewn before some oracle.

While I wish it were otherwise, the bald truth is that to understand some things I must return to the towering mystery of numbers. One of those things is the community in which we live. We may know a few friends. We may understand our neighborhood and our place of work, and some civic organizations to which we belong, but to know our community-to comprehend the breadth and depth of it-we must turn to demography, the science of vital and social statistics.

The places that track our community by the numbers are themselves numerous. The US Census Bureau, part of the Department of Commerce, is the mother of all statisticians. Among the keepers of the numbers closer to home are the Texas State Data Center, part of Texas A&M University, and the Texas Workforce Commission. And, for our own little piece of Central Texas, there's the Sustainability Indicators Project of Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. Finally, there's City Demographer Ryan Robinson of the City of Austin's Transportation, Planning and Sustainability Department.

All these entities have a presence on the World Wide Web and tapping into even a fraction of the information available leaves one bewildered. How does one find the important needles of information in the mountainous haystacks of data? You can't simply pluck them out; you can only put on your hip boots and wade through the muck to find pieces that illuminate one of the most intriguing questions we could pose: Who Are We?

What kind of people populate our city?

You may ask, what difference does it make if we know how many of us are Asian, black, Hispanic or white? How many are straight, gay, lesbian? How many are well off and how many are practically starving? How many have children? How many children? How many of those children have two parents living at home?

These things matter a great deal. Political action (and reaction) stems more than anything from self-interest. Political power plays a huge part in our lives. Politics holds sway in matters of ( love (who you can marry, who may adopt children), ( hate (racial profiling, how justice is meted out, hate-crime legislation), ( life (the right to choose, a teen's ability to terminate pregnancy without parental consent, how much funding will be provided for healthcare and to find cures for diseases), and even ( death (the right to death with dignity, assisted suicide). All these things and more depend upon how we perceive ourselves.

Who lives in Austin?

Census 2000 tells us that Austin's population pegged out at more than 656,000, an increase of more than 190,000 people in the last decade. City Demographer Robinson says population growth is usually the main focus of attention, but what's often overlooked are the rich details that underlie the overall trend.

"Look at Las Vegas, a rapidly growing city but about as diverse as a jar of mayonnaise," Robinson says. "Austin is a pulsing, growing, changing place that's a hell of a lot more interesting."

For example, take central East Austin, the area bounded by Town Lake, I-35, US Highway 290 and US Highway 183. Within that area, the number of whites decreased by more than 2,200 between 1990 and 2000, the number of blacks declined by nearly 2,800, and the number of Hispanics shot up by more than 17,000. The conclusion: East Austin has been largely abandoned by middle-class blacks who fled to the suburbs, Robinson says. While many of the blacks who moved away still come back to East Austin for church on Sunday, even that may change in time, as new religious institutions spring up in the suburbs, or as East Austin churches open outlying branches or uproot themselves to follow parishioners into the hinterlands.

The East Austin houses vacated by the whites and blacks provide what Robinson calls "de facto affordable housing" which now is occupied by "pioneering Hispanic households," the first generation of immigrants who use the neighborhood as a port of entry into the local economy. Whatever the specific points of origin for these new Hispanic residents, they are arriving in droves, and they bring far more children. Citywide, there are now more than 200,000 Hispanics, more than thirty percent of Austin's total population.

There are nearly 66,000 blacks in Austin, making up 9.8 percent of the population in 2000. That's a sharp decline from 1990, when blacks accounted for 11.9 percent of the population.

The number of Asians had grown to nearly 31,000 in 2000, or 4.7 percent of Austin's total population. That's a significant increase from the 2.9 percent Asian share of the population in 1990.

Because the population of blacks in Austin is dwindling and the Asian population is growing rapidly, Robinson says, "If we turn the clock forward fifteen years, there could be as many Asians as African Americans." This is happening at a time when neighboring metro areas like San Antonio are experiencing "absolutely no growth" in the Asian population.

The school systems are even more diverse than the overall city. Hispanic, African American, American Indian, and Asian students currently comprise 61.3 percent of all elementary students in Travis County, according to a February 2002 report by the Travis County Health and Human Services Department.

"Our total demographic profile, with a significant share of white, black, Hispanic and now Asians, is more of an East Coast or West Coast urban profile," Robinson says. That's in sharp contrast to the more traditional southern pattern, in which cities are mainly populated by either blacks and whites, or whites and Hispanics.

Amid the ebb and flow of populations in various parts of town, one of the most notable trends is what has happened to the urban core in the last decade. "The urban core had a significant population growth for the first time in thirty years," Robinson says. "In the seventies and eighties you had depopulation of the core, the making of a donut. In the nineteen-nineties, you had a filling of the donut. It was an out-and-out renaissance of the urban core."

This had a significant impact on the inner city. "Long neglected neighborhoods shot up in value," Robinson says. "Every unit in town became occupied. People poured money into renovations and add-ons."

While the population in the urban core has increased, Robinson says the share of the families with children in the urban core has decreased. "Crestview (an area bounded by North Lamar, Burnet Road, Anderson Lane and Justin Lane) fits this example. The folks moving into Crestview don't have kids. They're young professionals, same-sex couples, not mom and dad and two kids."

How we live

The city is made up of more than 265,000 households.

What does it portend for an East Austin neighborhood in which more than four hundred households with children are headed by women with no husband present? Or a North Austin neighborhood with more than a thousand such households? Indeed, according to Census 2000, there are more than 17,000 such households in Austin. This equates to 6.5 percent of all housing units.

Today, more than 100,000 Austin residents are school-age children between the ages of five and seventeen. A high percentage of students are considered economically disadvantaged, evidenced by the fact that they qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. In Austin Independent School District, 48 percent of students qualify, Manor ISD 57.5 percent, and Del Valle ISD 63.3 percent. Fully 54 percent of elementary school students in Travis County qualified for free or reduced-price lunches.

According to the 2001 Sustainability Indicators Project, accredited child care facilities in Central Texas report that enrollments are nearing total capacity, and access to subsidized child care is not keeping pace with population growth and may get worse.

Austin has perhaps the lowest rate of owner-occupied housing in the nation, Robinson says. Even though home ownership in the city increased significantly in the nineteen-nineties, owner-occupancy is still less than forty-five percent, according to Census 2000. Contrast that to Pflugerville, which Robinson says has owner-occupancy of about ninety percent. The statewide average for owner-occupied housing is nearly sixty-four percent. So how does Austin, a city in which a clear majority of residents are renters (who by nature move much more frequently than homeowners), develop and sustain a common vision of itself? How successful can neighborhood planning be, given the transient nature of so much of the population?

Mayor Pro Tem Jackie Goodman, who is literally the mother of the city's neighborhood planning process, says "The preponderance who participate (in neighborhood planning) are homeowners and people who are committed to live in that neighborhood their whole lives." She says the city must follow through by enforcing the zoning that comes from the council-approved neighborhood plan and by ensuring that long-range infrastructure improvements, such as streets, sidewalks and drainage, are accomplished. "If the infrastructure is not there, the plan sort of crumbles because you can't sustain it," she says. Still, a core of neighborhood residents loyal to the plan must watchdog the process and continue to advocate for it. The whole planning scheme is at risk in neighborhoods that suffer low rates of home ownership. Historically, in virtually all the neighborhoods, that vital core has somehow remained, even as the leadership changed and priorities evolved, she says.

A major factor affecting the amount of owner-occupied housing is the availability of affordable housing, (defined as having yearly payments no more than twenty-eight percent of a household's yearly earnings, after a ten percent down payment). The 2001 Sustainability Indicators Project found that affordable homes remain beyond the reach of many potential homeowners. And despite the slowdown in the economy, the median price of homes has continued to edge upward. Renters, on the other hand, are finding cheaper housing because apartment occupancy rates have fallen drastically.

From 1990 to 1999, overall income increased to reach an average annual wage per job of $38,000 in Travis County. Yet, according to the Community Action Network, the umbrella group that oversees funding for social services, as of February 2002 there were more than 105,000 people in Travis County living in poverty ($17,050 for a family of four). That's about 13 percent of the entire population. The Texas Department of Human Services estimates that in Travis County there are up to 200,000 working poor, defined as living at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty income guideline. Nearly 153,000 people in Travis County do not have health insurance.

On any given day, there are an estimated 3,977 homeless persons in Austin, according to the Travis County Health and Human Services Department's report of February 2002. A local expert believes the numbers of homeless people are far higher. Richard Troxell, president of Austin-based House the Homeless Inc. and chairman of the national Universal Living Wage Campaign, says, "There is no reasonable methodology for counting the number of citizens that pass into or out of homelessness...There is an inadequate level of services for which many people have stopped trying to compete. In 1999, an Austin report evidenced that there were 6,000 women and children existing day-to-day in area motels. The Austin Housing Authority has a waiting list of at least one and a half to three years. Undocumented workers live six to ten in a room. 'Quality of life' ordinances-such as no sitting, no lying down and no camping-have driven alienated citizens deeper into the woods. The number will never be clear. What is clear is that whatever the number is, they come from our working class...I say pay them a Fair Living Wage and let them bring themselves in from the cold."

The median age in Austin is 29.6 years, meaning half the population is younger than that age and half are older. When it comes to the sexes, there are nearly 19,000 more males than females. But how does the population stack up in terms of relationships? According to Census 2000, nearly 142,000 (53.3 percent) Austin households were occupied by families (defined as a group of two people or more related by birth, marriage or adoption and residing together). The other 124,000 households (46.7 percent) were classified as nonfamily (places where a person lives alone or shares the home with unrelated people).

No one knows with certainty how these numbers break down in terms of sexual preferences. Census 2000 classified more than 67,000 people living in households as nonrelatives, and classified nearly 17,000 people-or 2.6 percent of Austin's population-as unmarried partners; in Census-speak, unmarried partners are gay and lesbian couples. The actual number of gays and lesbians is likely much higher, as certainly not everyone who responded to the Census would have felt comfortable identifying themselves openly.

The Austin American-Statesman published an array of stories June 3, 2001, based on a survey of 1,265 gay and lesbians and interviews with some forty respondents. The stories stated that "an overwhelming majority of lesbians and gay men feel safe, comfortable and satisfied with the quality of life in Central Texas." Thirty percent of the respondents were parents of children.

The Statesman study grew out of findings by Carnegie Mellon University that showed Austin ranked third in the nation, after San Francisco and Washington, DC, for concentration of gay couples among major cities. Unlike some other cities, however, there is no gay ghetto in Austin, and gays and lesbians are thought to be well dispersed throughout the population. One indication of Austin's tolerance is that voters have shown no reluctance to elect gays and lesbians to public office, including State Representative Glen Maxey and Travis County Sheriff Margo Frasier.

While we don't know everything about the sexual preferences of adults, we do know something about the practices of teenagers. Overall teen pregnancy rates in Travis County declined from 46.1 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage women in 1996 to 36.6 in 2000, according to the Travis County Health and Human Services Department. Of the total population of teen females in Travis County in 2000, there were 871 pregnancies. But there was a distinctly different rate for racial groups. The pregnancy rate per 1,000 for Hispanic teens was 64.3, the rate for African-American teens was 47.0, and the rate for white teens was 14.9.

How we work

The ten largest private firms in 2000, in terms of numbers of people employed, were, in descending order, Dell Computer, Motorola, IBM Corporation, H-E-B Grocery, Advanced Micro Devices, Solectron Texas, Seton Healthcare Network, St. David's Medical Center, Applied Materials, and Wal-Mart Stores, according to the 2001 Sustainability Indicators Project. These ten employers accounted for more than ten percent of all jobs in the Austin-San Marcos market, while the ten largest public employers accounted for almost nine percent of the jobs.

As of January 2001, the fifty-five companies that employed 1,000 or more employees in Austin-San Marcos accounted for more than 156,000 workers, or 23.2 percent of the total employment in the region.

Thousands of workers have been laid off since then, and the unemployment rate in Austin-San Marcos had risen to 4.5 percent as of December 2001, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. This contrasts with Bryan-College Station's ultra-low 1.4 percent unemployment, at one end of the spectrum, and the 12.5 percent unemployment blight suffered by McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, at the other. The statewide average unemployment rate was 5.1 percent.

The Texas Workforce Commission reports that twenty-eight Travis County businesses permanently laid off fifty or more employees in 2001, accounting for more than 8,900 workers separated. In contrast, only four companies laid off fifty or more workers in 2000, for a total of 780 workers separated.

The Texas Workforce Commission reported as of December 2001 that 3,400 jobs were gained over the year, an annual growth rate of just 0.5 percent, compared with annual growth of 5.8 percent for 2000.

Despite the recent slowdown, the long-range trend has been one of tremendous job growth in the region. Over the last eleven years, nonagricultural employment in Austin-San Marcos jumped from 395,500 jobs in January 1991 to 693,300 jobs in December 2001.

What of the future?

One fear is that the trajectory of overall population changes may portend the day when the population of Austin will consist mainly of the super rich on the west side and the super poor on the east side. Whether that will come to pass, only time will tell, but the trends being seen now in high rates of poverty do not bode well.

Meanwhile, the political consequences of our city's changing demographics will land in Austin voters' laps if we have to go to the polls May 4 to decide whether future city council members should be elected from geographic districts in which they live. (The City Council had not decided by The Good Life's press deadlines whether to call such an election, as recommended by the Charter Revision Committee.)

"In trying to draw single-member districts, it's tough to create a black district," says City Demographer Robinson. "It takes fourteen districts before you can get a simple (black) majority-which is just population, not voting-age population," he says. "Is that enough to be sure that district produces a successful black candidate?"

Single-member districts are just one example of how our vision of ourselves and our community will drastically affect the city's future. Do we value the wider geographic political representation that single-member districts would guarantee? Would geographic representation come at the expense of possibly losing the representation of blacks on the city council, something that-for all the flaws in Austin's political system-we have enjoyed since 1971?

These kinds of questions are inevitable and difficult to address. Enough statistics are available to provide for a nearly endless exercise in community navel-gazing. This report only scratches the surface. It's up to anyone who cares to try to come to grips with what the numbers mean and what we ought to do to improve the quality of life. The Sustainability Indicators Project, which identified some forty key areas to track and provides annual reports to measure progress, is an excellent start. The first report was issued in 2000 and the report for 2002 is due out soon.

While the statistics indicate a definite need for action in many areas, the sheer number of governmental entities, each with strict jurisdictional boundaries, does not provide a coordinated way of solving the overriding problems of the region. These problems are interrelated and have no respect for political borders. In a groundbreaking effort, however, the Central Texas Regional Visioning Project has been formed to include Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. A board of nearly seventy community leaders was recently named to address issues such as land use, transportation, air pollution, healthcare and education.

"This is the beginning of an exciting process," announced Neal Kocurek, who chairs the initial board of directors. "The diversity of this board reflects our region. We look forward to having others join us in this broad-based effort to develop a vision for Central Texas."

Ken Martin curses the fact that numbers are unavoidable and keeps in mind the wisdom of English statesman Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), who said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

Demographic Sources

Want to learn more about the vital statistics of Austin and surrounding areas? Here's a short list of some of the sources you'll want to utilize, all easily accessible on the World Wide Web:

—US Census Bureau-Every smidgen of information captured in the deciannual census is sliced and diced by federal experts and much of it's available at your computer keyboard. Set your browser for www.census.gov.

—Texas State Data Center-The Center was initiated in 1980 to establish a state liaison to the US Census Bureau for better dissemination of Texas census data. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, this program was expanded to meet a demand for more timely population estimates and projections. The Center has already published post-2000 Census population projections. Visit www.txsdc.tamu.edu

—Texas Workforce Commission-The Commission oversees twenty-eight local workforce development boards and provides a range of statistical information useful to job seekers and employees, businesses and employers, researchers and policymakers, service providers, and workforce development boards. See www.texasworkforce.org.

—Sustainability Indicators Project-The Project encompasses Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. It was kicked off in 1999 with the intent to increase regional awareness and commitment to sustainable community development, which is defined as providing for current needs without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to provide for their needs. The Project is facilitated by a diverse group of residents committed to the sustainability of the Austin Region (defined as Hays, Travis and Williamson counties). Technical support is provided by the City of Austin's Sustainable Communities Initiative, the graduate program in Community and Regional Planning of the University of Texas at Austin, the Austin Area Research Organization, and public relations firm Tate Austin. The director of the Project is Jim Walker, who offices at Austin Community College, the institutional host for the Project. Telephone (512) 223-7774. You can read the annual reports or print them via your web browser at www.centex-indicators.org.

—City of Austin, Transportation, Planning and Sustainability Department, Spatial Analysis Group-The Group provides a picture of where we are as a city by collecting, analyzing and disseminating urban planning information about demographics, development, employment and land use, including historical data and trends. The Group provides data and information in several formats, including summary fact sheets, in-depth analytical reports, downloadable raw data spreadsheets, and geographic information system files. This includes information about Austin's size, rate of growth, distribution, ethnic character, and socioeconomic attributes. While it's called a Group, the key resource is City Demographer Ryan Robinson, who is the only demographer. He may be reached at (512) 974-6443. Much of the demographic information about the city is available on the Web at www.ci.austin.tx.us/census.

—Central Texas Regional Visioning Project-This group has just recently formed and information about it is currently housed on the web site of the Sustainability Indicators Project at www.centex-indicators.org/planning.html, where you can complete a registration form that will keep you abreast of plans, lodge your opinions about regional issues, and download the process document. For further information, call Executive Director Beverly Silas (512) 837-7777.

—Austin History Center-For statistics that reach all the way back to first census of Texas and early records of the Republic of Texas, this is the place to look. Deciannual census information is on hand beginning with 1840 and stretching to 1990. For an index of what's available, see the on-line library catalog at www.ci.austin.tx.us/library/ahc/census.htm. Or call (512) 499-7480.

-Ken Martin