Texas Juneteenth Celebration Threatened as Black People Leave Austin

For years, the community of East Austin would stroll to Rosewood Park, a public space in the area, and celebrate Juneteenth. But lately, as housing costs in the neighborhood have jumped, some have been forced to move away, adding challenges to the way they can mark the day.

This year’s Juneteenth event—which commemorates the news of the abolition of slavery—will take place on June 15. The community celebrates with a parade and a gathering at Rosewood Park.

“Where gentrification, what it has done is all the people that used to live in the area that we do the event used to be able to walk to the event,” Lee Dawson Jr. Vice President of Greater East Austin Youth Association, an organizer of the event, told Newsweek. “Now that gentrification has happened, they’ve moved out to the outland areas, so now they have to drive into the area and find places to park and do all that.”

The youth association has been helping to organize the event for two decades. Dawson said that expensive housing was pushing people away from the area.

“What’s making them move further away is the price for housing,” he told Newsweek in a phone interview. “It’s getting too expensive for some people that’s a single household to be able to live in East Austin.”

That includes rental costs and people being able to afford to buy a home, he added.

Folks could buy a home in the area for under $50,000 in 1995, Dawson said.

“Now, you can’t find a house under $300,000,” he said.

The resulting effect of such high housing costs is the makeup of the community in East Austin is changing.

“As far as the African-American or the Latino community, a lot of them are moving outside of the Austin area,” Dawson said. “And it’s not only East Austin, it’s Austin period, that we have a downfall in the African-American community,” Dawson said.

Austin has seen a rise in prices for housing, a development that escalated during the pandemic when an influx of migrants from other parts of the country created competition for homes which in turn helped to push the prices of rental homes and houses available for sale.

Dawson said inflation…