Just about twice a year during the 1970s, as Israel Lopez grew up in his home on Vasquez Street in Southeast Austin, the front yard would flood with sewage. One Christmas Day in the early 1980s, he was not able to go outdoors until city workers cleaned up the mess, which the family blamed on decrepit city sewer lines.

His mother still lives in the house, which sits across the street from the weedy Montopolis Little League baseball fields and Lopez bought a place of his own two doors down. The occasional flooding continued despite what he says were years of calls to the city to replace aging sewer pipes. So it was not much of a surprise to him one day this May when a pool of stinky water appeared in a storm outlet ditch by the ball fields.

It smelled like dead fish, said Lopez, 40, but he was dubious anything would be done.

As it happened, Stefan Wray and his wife, Pam Thompson, neighbors who had recently moved in as part of a larger demographic shake-up that has brought more whites and higher-income families to the area, walked by with two city officials whom they were persuading to support a proposed walking trail through a nearby trash-strewn creek. The city officials promptly directed the water to be sucked away by city vehicles.

Wray and Thompson followed up with a slew of e-mails, and, in a project that began in early June and is due to end by mid-August, the city is replacing nearly 1,200 feet of corroded concrete pipe, dating to 1957, at a cost of $112,000, said Steven Schrader, who manages a sewer engineering division at the Austin Water Utility.

The demand for the pipe overhaul is a microcosm of what some residents and city officials say is a change in environmental expectations, even if it's a modest one, prompted by a combination of changing demographics and stepped-up engagement from City Hall. Nowhere else might the juxtaposition of old and new Austin, of environmentally neglected and environmentally hip, be so pronounced.

At the same time, the socioeconomic tension and the tincture of race have dripped into discussions of the area's green aims, as the neighborhood mulls issues of who ought to set its environmental agenda. On Wednesday, Montopolis residents will meet to decide whether to expand language in the neighborhood plan to encourage a network of trails and the use of open parkland.

Packed together in the neighborhood are old housing stock, some of it dilapidated, mobile homes and small, handsome new houses that look like something out of a new urbanist manual.

Those new homes are the Frontier at Montana, an ambitious city project that broke ground in 2006 and meant to be the first affordable housing neighborhood in the nation composed of homes that would use less energy than they would generate. That aim has failed — the city was new to the homebuilding business and finances didn't work out, said Fred McGhee, a homebuilder who has been active in the Montopolis Neighborhood Association, and currently only three of the 60-odd homes in the neighborhood have solar panels, a crucial component of most zero net energy homes.

But even with the affordable housing component — which requires that homeowners in the new neighborhood make no more than 80 percent of median family income, or $59,050 for a family of four in Travis County — newcomers tend to be better off than their neighbors. And, unused to the feeling among many old-time East Austinites that they have been unheard by City Hall, they are more likely to demand city services.

While the surrounding neighborhood averages 43 percent of median family income, according to 2000 census data, the most recent available, the 63 homes at the Frontier at Montana neighborhood earn, on average, 52 percent of median family income, according to records with Austin Housing Finance Corp.

The new neighborhood is also significantly whiter: Nine out of the 63 households, or 14 percent, identify themselves as white. According to the census data, 0.4 percent of residents in surrounding homes in the Montopolis area are white.

Across this part of East Austin, builders have raised flocks of houses, changing the population's makeup in ways that might not be clear until the 2010 census is released.

You have an influx of new residents coming in who are more environmentally aware and probably know of particular city programs and incentives they can use, said Oscar Garza, an environmental compliance specialist with the city's Watershed Protection Department and coordinator of the city's East Austin Environmental Initiative, an outreach program that began in the 1990s. They put more focus on environmental awareness, and that infuses that into the neighborhood.

Source: Statesman.com