Huston-Tillotson University has been sitting on the same patch of East Austin since before Texas had paved roads. About a thousand students. Private HBCU. Historically Black neighborhood on every side of it.
Into this, a couple bought a house.
Directly across the street. For, by the woman’s own announcement, $1.5 million. And then, according to senior Bri Nunn, who posted the whole thing to Instagram, they got to work.
Notes on students’ windshields. A Black professor’s car boxed in with their trash and recycling bins so he couldn’t leave. All of it over parking on a public street where, per Nunn, people had been parking “for YEARS with no complaints.”
So Nunn walked over with her phone and asked a simple question: are you the ones leaving the notes?
The woman didn’t deny it. She did, however, offer a set of facts she found relevant. They paid $1.5 million for the house. And, apropos of absolutely nothing, “Y’all’s graduation rates are at 25%.”
Nobody asked about the graduation rate. The graduation rate was not parked on the street. (For the record, federal data puts it around 34%, which she would know if she’d done any research before buying a house across from a school she intended to fight.)
Nunn, still calm, pointed out that this is a historically Black neighborhood.
The woman’s response, at full volume: “THIS IS OUR NEIGHBORHOOD!”
She had lived there for weeks.
Then came the standard closing sequence. “Get off my property,” said to a woman standing on a public street. “I’ll call the cops,” said about parking that her own husband, standing right next to her, admitted was legal. Nunn told him to “get your wife.” He appeared to try.
Here’s the thing about East Austin. Black families were pushed there by a 1928 city plan that put the services they needed on one side of the highway and nowhere else. They built a neighborhood around a university that has been educating Black students since 1875. Then the money came, the prices went up, and the people who could afford $1.5 million houses started arriving with the firm belief that whatever they bought came with the street attached.
It doesn’t. The street is public. The students were there first. The school was there first. The neighborhood was there first.
The couple hasn’t been named. No one has reported whether the cops ever came. The notes, presumably, have stopped, because the entire internet now knows where the house is.
She paid $1.5 million to be a guest. She just hasn’t found out yet. Hope she enjoyed the block party.