For a decade or so, the section of Austin that Marceline Rideaux calls home has been deteriorating. When the dope dealers took over the main intersections, Rideaux and her neighbors decided they’d had enough.
This year, after battling the Department of Streets and Sanitation, the group obtained permission to hang signs at key intersections declaring their neighborhood a “drug-free zone.”
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Austin seemed like the logical choice with its clean, tree-lined streets, affordable bungalows, and healthy business strips along Chicago, North, and Division. But as the middle-class blacks moved in, hundreds of whites moved out. “The whites were running,” Rideaux recalls. “You would meet moving vans in the alley passing each other: we’d be moving in, and they’d be moving out.” Their pursuit of the American Dream (new home, bigger yard, better schools) took them to suburbia, just as Rideaux’ led her into Austin.
Unfortunately, many business owners left with the white residents, shuttering storefronts along Chicago and Division. Two waves of economic depression (the first in 1974, the second in the early 1980s) ravaged the area as well. In time, the main business strips converted to rows of taverns, liquor stores, vacant lots, storefront churches, and boarded-up buildings. To buy clothes or groceries Austin residents often had to shop outside their own community. Even more infuriating, city services declined.
“We have to fight just for basic services,” Holloway adds. “If you don’t know nobody, you don’t get nothing done. Why do I have to have a meeting to get something done? Why do I have to fight Streets and Sanitation, and pay taxes at the same time?”
The Austin group’s scrapes with city officials over garbage, however, pale in comparison to their struggles against drug crime. In October 1986–after having met with their district’s community liaisons from the Police Department–the group asked to meet with their local police commander. The group demanded that police disperse unsavory characters who gathered on corners. That’s beyond our constitutional authority, the police responded. Then provide more patrols along Chicago Avenue, the group countered. Don’t tell us how to do our job, was the response.
For the time being, the committee members say, there is less drug traffic in the community, although, in all likelihood, the dealers may have moved to other areas.
