Grew up in Austin and family has been here for several generations. Mr. Wright puts it best:
If you live long enough in a place, it becomes haunted by ghosts: memories of events and friends long gone still inhabit spaces that have been levelled and covered over by the unstoppable newness.
I've moved from Austin as have most of the people I know, or they've passed away. To me it is a city of ghosts, not just those that have left, but the entire groups of people who have been priced out and excluded. Gentrification destroys neighborhoods and destroys cities. Whether this process is beneficial or harmful is a matter of perspective.
Austin as a place, and the American continent as a whole, has been over thousands of years and especially the past few hundred, a land of displacement. Numerous American Indian tribes displaced each other, and the Spanish, the Mexican, French, Anglos, and so forth. To be truly American, in the continental sense, is to be not only a displacer but to eventually be displaced yourself.
To have experienced the displacement in only one to two decades is a concentrated experience, perhaps shared in a fortunately peaceful way, but economically violent, by other groups over time: the Greeks in Anatolia after Turkish independence, the population transfer in Israel and Palestine, or between India and Pakistan at partition. Having a city stolen from you by the monied is preferable to getting forced out by a mob, but if you can't pay rent or property taxes, the sheriff is coming to pay a visit and he's armed.
The old Austin was fun while it lasted, simultaneously boring and exhilarating. But it's dead, and we natives should have a funeral for it, and either in town or out, move on. Meet me down by one of the few remaining moontowers and we'll crack open a Lone Star for one final tribute to Leslie and, with SRV playing in the background, toast to our dearly departed. Ausitn, you had a good run, here's to your memory.