Audrey McGlinchy

Jake Wegmann, a professor of housing and real estate at the University of Texas, stood on the sidewalk in Mueller, a large mixed-use development on the site of Austin’s old airport. He pointed across the street to a string of attached, two-story homes.

Annette Naish used to work for FEMA, traveling across the U.S. responding to natural disasters.

“I found out that in this country there are some of the most wonderful people in the history of the Western world,” she said.

Aubrey McIntosh sauntered out of an office on East Seventh Street, a new pink moustache in hand.

“I would hate to not be able to drive,” said McIntosh, a retired chemistry professor who had just reactivated his Lyft driver account at the company’s local office.

Billy Thogersen offered to narrate the scene.

“People are [milling] about, looking at 24-by-48-inch maps of the new zoning, lots of colors and confusing acronyms and codes,” he said in the cafeteria at LBJ High School in Northeast Austin. The room, emptied of students, held roughly 30 community members interested in hearing more about CodeNEXT, the city’s rewrite of its land development code.

Justin Hill, 36, grew up in Convict Hill. He remembers the Southwest Austin neighborhood, which is part of Oak Hill, as a mix of rural and suburban – lots of cedar, oaks and rocks. His house butted up against a cliff, which descended into thick woods, where he and his younger brother would spend hours after school or on the weekends exploring.

Rehab El Sadek marries silly and sober. Take her outfit: a colorfully patterned turtleneck atop a stern dark skirt. Her straight, black hair in low pigtails. Glasses.

Austin City Council Member Greg Casar sat on the floor, his back blocking one of the two main entrances to a state building on the Capitol grounds. He’d taken a seat as part of a sit-in Monday to protest Senate Bill 4. 

Members of the Texas House of Representatives today will consider Senate Bill 4, popularly known as the “sanctuary cities” bill. The bill would create criminal and civil penalties for law enforcement officials who do not honor all requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain suspected undocumented immigrants.

But how does an ICE detainer request work?

As the City of Austin moves forward with the renegotiation of its public safety contracts, activists are asking for several changes to the city’s contract with the local police union. The contract, which is negotiated every couple years, dictates pay, discipline and the legal rights of officers.

Early on June 24, 2016, Austin City Council Member Delia Garza checked her watch.

“We’re making a decision about $720 million at 1:35 in the morning after lengthy discussions,” Garza told her colleagues. “After, in my opinion, no real agreement on this.”  

Two women – one grown, the other growing – sit in a University of Texas office. The younger one, just 6 years old, wears a gray T-shirt, pink leggings and cowboy boots, which dangle from the edge of her chair. The other woman wears a blue linen top and bangles on her arm. Between them sits a more than 1,000-page document.

The Travis County District Attorney’s Office will no longer bring all police shooting cases before a grand jury. Flanked by representatives of the local NAACP, police union and the Austin Police Department, District Attorney Margaret Moore announced the changes – effective immediately.

Socar Chatmon-Thomas pointed at an apartment building under construction along the south shore of Lady Bird Lake, near East Riverside Drive.

“This whole thing used to just be nothing,” said Chatmon-Thomas, who has worked in Austin real estate since 1994. “Just fields and that’s it, and nobody lived over here.”

Austin City Council members learned last week that the completion of the new downtown public library has been hit with delays, again.

“I do think that it is getting very close, but I don’t have a specific date that I can give you quite yet,” Toni Lambert, acting director of libraries, told council members at a budget meeting.

Property ownership can be a stealth business, with land changing hands before anyone even has time to notice.

For the past four years, one North Texas company has quietly bought up property on East 12th Street. Ironically, the company takes its name from a cry of surprise and discovery: Eureka!

On a vacant lot at the corner of East 12th and Salina streets, Ada Harden sees a silver screen where a fence now stands.

“Can you imagine a theater sitting right here?” she asks, giggling. She certainly can.