
At one point, a construction crew converted the residence’s garage into a bedroom.

After weeks of shrill buzz saws and nonstop hammering, the house’s front yard was littered with Amazon boxes and construction trash piled high. It didn’t take long, however, for the Castro Street renovations to strike some neighbors as odd. Seemingly overnight, modest one-story homes that had stood for seventy years were being torn down and replaced by large, contemporary dwellings with clean lines, geometric shapes, and conspicuous coats of white or black paint. For several years now, the formerly quiet East Austin neighborhood, which had for decades been home to the majority of the city’s Black and Latino residents, had been in a state of flux. When the modern, two-story home on Castro Street was sold for nearly $1.3 million this past spring and renovations began, neighbors barely noticed.
