Growth Machine

Introducing Season 3 of The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout

The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout is back for a third season, and Growth Machine host Audrey McGlinchy will be co-hosting some of the episodes with M

Introducing: 24 Hours in Austin

The new podcast 24 Hours in Austin tries to answer the question: What does a day in the life of Austin, Texas sound like? A team of audio producers from KUT spent the las

Grow or Die

(Episode 7) Now that the machine has done its job, what now? We explore some of the existential questions that Austin’s housing market has wrought. The full transcript of

Pigs in a Parlor

(BONUS — Deleted scene!) We go back 100 years to tell the origin story of modern zoning.

There Go The Neighborhoods

(Episode 6) Austin last re-wrote its land development code in 1984. Sounds boring, right? Well, that rewrite made it harder to build denser forms of housing. We explore t

Welcome to Silicon Gulch

(Episode 5) Not that long ago, Austin’s economy was sleepy, to put it mildly. People came here for UT, to work for the state or for the military. A little more than 50 ye

Fertility Drugs for Cars

(BONUS) We talked in episode 2 about cars and roads — and how they affect where we live. We didn’t talk about one other way that cars affect housing: making places to put

Smart Growth or Dumb Growth?

(Episode 4) When a new mayor came to power, he found what he thought would be a compromise — a way to bring new businesses and build housing for all the people coming to

Listen to This Podcast or We’ll Poison Barton Springs

(Episode 3) In the 1990s, Austin voters passed landmark protections for parts of southwest Austin that sit on top of the aquifer that feeds Barton Springs. That set off a

Roads to Everywhere

(Episode 2) I-35 is more than a road. It’s been sculpting Austin’s housing scene for more than 60 years, encouraging endless sprawl and making gridlock a lifestyle. Take

We Planned This

(Episode 1) Austin has grown a lot in recent years — and the East Side has been impacted the most. To understand the city’s pattern of displacement, we have to go back to

COMING JUNE 22 | Growth Machine: How Austin Engineered Its Housing Market

Housing prices in Austin have exploded in the past decade, leading to a city that’s not just unaffordable, but also highly segregated. It’s the result of decades of decis