Liz Lambert, Austin hotelier, made a new movie and it left me feeling incensed. I wrote about it.
it’s all about when South Congress was run-down in the ‘90s. it obscures Lambert's role & the harm of gentrification. https://www.texasobserver.org/liz-lamberts-new-film-offers-a-shallow-portrayal-of-a-changing-austin/

for the doc, Lambert filmed everyone at the motel she owned. she records ppl without informed consent, one man while he’s sleeping. at the end, she evicts all the ppl who have been living there on the verge of homelessness, and asks them on camera where they’re going to go next.

everything about it is voyeuristic, dehumanizing, and unethical. more on that in the review. the aesthetic quality of recording people on the street from a distance has the same vibe as recent images posted by the racist, classist group Save Austin Now to promote #PropB.

it’s an anthropological project: Lambert went into a community that wasn’t her own and captured it (she states her faulty reasoning in the piece). she’s not an anthropologist, but that makes it worse, not better— she doesn’t follow any of the best practices modern anthropologists

strive for, her work has broader reach, her power over her subjects’ lives was direct, and she stands to profit from it. part of what I tease out in the piece is how it accidentally feels like a study of HER position, as developer, as de facto landlord, and as culture maker.

the fact that all the other reviews I’ve read have been positive really bothered and confused me. this is so Austin. we need to talk about the contradictions of "progressive" Austin, and Liz Lambert is a prime example.

the film left me thinking about all the frameworks we can (and must) see this through. it’s about racism, colonialism, the ever-adapting dispossession of Black people and their homes. this is part of a much larger process (american racial capitalism).

there’s also a Marxist critique here: developers & landlords exploit people as they create capital. capitalism is supposed to work this way, gentrification is systemic, but Lambert didn’t *have* to take an active role in it. we can always work against it, and many of us do

we’ve been grappling with the issue of homelessness in austin, so this release feels especially out of touch. if it makes you mad, go vote @NoOnPropB. these systems won’t be dismantled by a ballot proposition, but they’ll be escalated by its win.