Every city's crime is unique. It has a personality of its own shaped over time by both nature and nurture, by the geography and the politics. We read about and watch shows on New York City, Chicago, LA, Miami, but my hometown isn't like those places.
I've lived in Austin, Texas my whole life, and it's almost a cliche now to opine on how much it's changed. But some things about this city are just as they were, trapped in amber, unable to change, stuck. They couldn't move forward in this fast-moving city, and so they got left behind. People, neighborhoods, mindsets--this progressive city is not only innovative in its technology, but in its many ways to sweep things under the rug. No time to stop and fix, keep pushing, growing, advancing.
In the late 1880s, Austin found itself in the throes of serial killings. The one responsible was never found. But he had multiple horrific murders under his belt before the town began to panic. How did he manage that? How did he get away with it for so long? The answer is tragically simple: color of his early victims' skin. It wasn't until a white woman was murdered that the town's most powerful flew into a fearful fervor, and I'd bet you can guess who they began scapegoating first.
And even then, back in the 1880s, Austin was already billing itself nationally as a progressive city.
When the highway systems went in in the early '60s, Interstate Highway 35 formalized the dividing line between White Austin and Black Austin, neighborhoods that had been established during the transparent racism of the eighteen hundreds and reinforced through various laws and lesser roadways in the time since. The result was that "west of 35" and "east of 35" were spoken in different tones of voice, even up through the 1980s, when I was born.
Where I was born was east of 35, the forgotten side of the interstate. We sold that house in 1994 for $55,000, and when I look up the value online now, it's listed at $560,000.
Some things have changed in Austin, sure, but not enough. The housing prices have increased tenfold, but are the folks who lived there in 1994 all making ten times the income? Do they have ten times the opportunity? Or has progress left them behind, pushed them out to farther and farther reaches of the city?
Gentrification is nothing new. Inequality is nothing new. But the evolution of it—and the groups affected—vary from place to place, and it's in that specific history where we find the bitter aftertaste that is each city's crime.
West of 35, the soil is easy enough to plant in. There's caliche rock about 6 inches down, though. You get used to accounting for it, that healthful soil just above the hard, impenetrable shelf. With access the right tools, you can grow quite the garden. Meanwhile, the soil east of 35 is a dense clay, fertile for its own kind of plants. The trick is to learn what can and can't thrive on each side.
I've lived north, south, east, and west in this city, and I've seen how things grow here. I know the tensions. We're a future-focused city in a traditional state. We're a population of wonderfully naive idealists with a drug trafficking highway flaying us down the middle. We're crusaders for green energy who are backed by oil money.
And that leaves a certain impression. Austin's not like anywhere else, and neither is its crime. My mysteries are love letters as much as they are grievances. I write about this city that shaped me, that filled me up with contradictions, that showed me the flaws of both sides, that taught me "You still aren't over it yet?" isn't part of a proper apology for wrongdoing.
There's a lifetime of this tension inside me, and now I get to share it through the Dana Capone series.