Who am I and why do I care about Austin?
I spent 30 years researching and teaching about cities, the last 18 years at UT. I have a PhD in urban geography from the University of Washington in Seattle, where I met my wife, Gretchen. She is a professor of American literature at UT. We have one child, Penny, who was born at St. David’s Hospital on East 32nd St. and now attends McCallum High. We also have two rescue dogs, Dennis and Franklin. Dennis was found living under a bush in Buda in 2020; Franklin was adopted from the Austin Animal shelter in 2024. We’ve lived in Cherrywood since we came to Austin in 2006.
I taught in the Urban Studies program in the Geography and American Studies Departments at UT, as well as in the Community and Regional Planning program in the College of Architecture. I have a deep commitment to public education and have also taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of Minnesota-Morris, and the University of Washington. A first-generation college student, I attended UCLA for my undergrad.
I come from a working-class San Francisco family that managed to make its way into middle-class suburbia in the 1970s. My dad was a third-generation slipcover maker. My mom’s parents were immigrants from Poland who fled rising antisemitism in the early 1900s. (Read my article about my family history and antisemitism). Before she immigrated, my grandmother went to work in a glass factory—at the age of 8.
Because of my background, my teaching and research have always focused on bringing power and dignity to working people and historically marginalized groups. Much of the research I undertook at UT was in collaboration with community-based organizations here in Austin. I worked with Workers Defense Project in their early years, studying working conditions in the construction industry in Austin and Texas in order to improve wages and safety among a largely immigrant workforce, through policy reform at the state and local level. I also partnered with Cooperation Texas, a now-defunct incubator for worker-owned coops, to produce a profile of the cooperative economy in central Texas in order to expand opportunities for community wealth building.
Urban Geographer
Because of my expertise in urban geography, I’ve also worked with the City of Austin, first as Greg Casar’s appointee to the land-development code rewrite Citizens Advisory Group, 2015-17. More recently I worked with the City’s Equity Office, authoring large portions of the Black Dispossession study, which estimated the costs to the Black community in Austin of the 1928 segregation plan, redlining, and racial health disparities. I also authored a review of research on zoning reform and housing in the context of the HOME Amendments to the land development code in 2024, which highlighted the potentially negative impacts of deregulation on vulnerable neighborhoods in the Eastern Crescent of Austin.
A number of my urban studies classes over the years included service-learning components in which students worked directly with City offices or local nonprofits on research projects. These included working with Council Members Greg Casar’s and Delia Garza’s offices on proposals for “participatory budgeting” in Austin, which is a city budgeting process in which residents propose projects in their neighborhoods and decided on where city revenue will be spent. Additionally, classes of mine worked with Austin’s Sustainable Food Center on identifying, mapping, and evaluating sites for potential community gardens, with BASTA! Austin on researching tenants protections in other US cities, and with the Planning Department at the City developing a methodology for equity studies of bond-funded capital improvement projects (we looked at the distribution of recently funded transportation and parks projects in relation to historical marginalization and social vulnerability).
Listen to my interview about HOME with KOOP Radio.
Neighborhood Organizer
I’ve also worked extensively with neighborhood organizations. I’ve been deeply involved with the Cherrywood Neighborhood Association since moving to Austin in 2006, in many capacities, including serving on the steering committee for the last four years. For the past seven or eight years, I’ve also been a member of the North-Central I-35 Neighborhood Coalition (NCINC), working with 13 neighborhood associations and various departments at the City to improve TxDOT’s I-35 project. I was also a member of the group of Cherrywood and Hancock neighborhood residents who brought an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Design Assistance Team to help create a vision for the commercial areas that our neighborhoods share at the Hancock and Delwood shopping centers.
Because of my commitment to the power of working people, during my time at UT, I was a member of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local #6186, and while in graduate school at the University of Washington, I was one of a small group that founded an academic student employees’ union, now United Auto Workers (UAW) Local #4121. My last non-academic job was as an organizer for the UAW in Seattle.
Franklin & Denis
Right: Protest at UT Austin in April 2024, when I stood up for student’s right to protest and against the militarization of our public universities.
Left: My mug shot after I was arrested on false charges from the UT Austin protest.
READ MORE about what happened to me.
