On Saturday, March 8, an Austinite and two visitors tackled a hot topic in the Live Music Capital: making the city affordable for musicians.
Although an entire South by Southwest (SXSW) conference track could come at the issue from a housing perspective, this particular panel focused on the three panelists' respective projects creating rehearsal spaces in retired buses, using vacant builds to temporarily host pop-up projects, and breathing new life into public spaces that fell into disrepair.
Called Music Urbanism in Motion: Affordable Spaces to Preserve Austin's Cultural Pulse, the panel featured Michael J. Winningham of Junkyard in Austin; Brian Phillips of ISA / Meantime in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Kady Yellow of Downtown Vision, Inc., in Jacksonville, Florida.
Despite the panel's name, it dealt with Austin roughly the same amount as the other two cities. Plus, the ideas discussed could easily be adopted — or adapted — anywhere in the world. Austin's going to need it if it wants to hold onto the title of Live Music Capital of the world, especially with places like Lockhart poised to steal it.
Hop on the bandwagon
Winningham, an Austin musician who formerly played in the band Gold Beach, was primarily there to represent his new project, Junkyard; it just launched with help from Big Bill, Franklin Barbecue, and others on March 1, 2025. In short, he plans to convert retired city buses into modular practice spaces that can also be used for performances and other events.
Part of Winningham's varied professional background has been in affordable housing, but prior to this idea, he hadn't been seeing much progress in using those skills and connections to benefit musicians, specifically.
"When I exited home building and got into affordable housing, what was happening in Austin was there was noise ordinance issues, and development was just rapidly taking over," said Winningham in the session. "Artists were getting displaced. In 2021 ... middle class venues, were decreasing, largely. Bigger venues were getting set up. Things were happening so rapidly in Austin, it felt like nobody had a hold of it."
However, meeting Phillips shook something loose within Winningham's sense of unfulfilled responsibility. He was inspired by the Philadelphia-based architect's work in smaller spaces for affordable living. In turn, it primed him to create his own idea while reading an article about Austin's CapMetro buses going electric. (This particular plan hit a speed bump in recent months, but it's only temporarily parked.)
Winningham says the process has shown him how much inventory there is to work with in retired buses. The buses will be donated to the nonprofit, Junkyard, and converted into "Junkpods" that are free to use for "recording, rehearsing, sleeping, gathering, working and can even create pocket venues," according to the project's website.
Pass the mic
The idea Brian Phillips highlighted was similar, but at a very different point in the lifespan of a space. He grew tired of watching new buildings sit empty while clients waited for retail tenants to sign on. His solution: invite creatives to test run their projects in the space. That solution is called Meantime.
That means no overhead for an artist just starting to introduce their work to the public, and a more lively city overall that people feel free, happy, and safe to move around in.
"Vacancy is bad for cities. Kind of end of discussion," said Phillips. Pointing to a diagram in the panel's accompanying slideshow, he explained, "[On] the left, [there's] this argument for the more national, waiting-for-the-big-fish strategy, versus the right, where you're looking at sort of local energy."
"The thing that we've realized," he continued, "is every city in America is full of people that are out on the weekends, tabling in a parking lot or willing to pop up and make music. ... Every time we put out a call there's an unlimited number of people who both have something to share and start, but also are willing to make it happen very quickly and without a lot of infrastructure."
Kady Yellow knows that feeling. Her project, Placemaking Jax and namely its Placemaking School that teaches the systems she's developed, has also seen an outpouring of interest from the local community.
The team refurbishes spaces like alleys that don't appeal to or hold any current value for most residents, making them available to creatives for community events. Some projects have included transforming the city's fraught public monorail system into a venue for dance parties and cleaning up an unfriendly alleyway for a Tiny Desk-inspired concert series.
Placemaking Jax hosts office hours and other community talkback sessions to make sure it's representing the real needs of the people its serving. And Yellow herself is conscious of the extraction that can happen from creatives to institutions, or the fear of breaking the rules to get a project off the ground.
"I appreciate looking to Austin and hoping we don't do that in Jacksonville, Florida," said Yellow." I'm studying cities now [that show] the abuse of creativity, that viscous cycle where they bring in artists, they bring in blood, sweat and tears, and then they kick them out. And it's actually hard to find case studies of keeping the artists there."
Calling to back another panel she attended about artificial intelligence replacing roles across the human spectrum, she encouraged attendees to do one of the few things that will be left mostly unscathed: throwing dinner parties and inviting people.
A section for the cynics
Readers who can smell gentrification a mile away can't be blamed for feeling suspicious of projects to clean up and throw events in these public spaces. How many times has a fun new festival in Austin put a park out of use for a week or more, closed roads, created massive waste, or skyrocketed hotel rates? How many formerly underground events have abandoned their punk sensibilities for corporate sponsorship? SXSW, itself despite its many opportunities, is an offender.
Below are some responses from the panelists after the official talk concluded. At the bar downstairs at the Fairmont Austin, CultureMap asked for their thoughts on mitigating gentrification in their efforts and inviting in creatives whose distrust might keep them at arm's length.
The responses have been edited for brevity.
Michael J. Winningham: What Junkyard is doing is specifically for the musician and music community. So we're trying to create resources for them. We are not using existing real estate right now; we are transforming city busses into practice spaces for Austin musicians and finding land where they can go.
Every institution, nonprofit or for profit, has to show a track history of the kind of work that they do, and I think it's really important that their track history points to the mission of that group. I work in affordability, selling homes for the affordable community, which means people that are making less than 100 percent MFI, medium family income of Austin. I have a track history of doing that. We develop those properties and they become homes — that are bought for very reasonable prices — that we don't even sell.
I also think that people need to be very curious about development. It's very easy to be not curious. To say, oh, it's just too noisy, or it's too close... You might be right about that. But whether or not a development is doing some good for the community, be curious about it, because there are a lot of affordability measurements that are built into development for people to be curious about.
Brian Phillips: I just will start by saying it's not just punks, but Black and brown communities who have never had any ability to be spatially present in the mainstream. And in Philly, which is a majority Black and brown city, has serious issues with under-investment in poverty.
I think part of what we've seen is this ability to start bringing these under-heard voices of entrepreneurship into the fray, which is not going to happen through long-term, high-dollar business. Honestly, it's like anything but [those businesses]; that's how you address it. The moment that Shake Shack or Sweetgreen or Starbucks shows up, that's representative of their number crunching, statistical analysis of where they can make money.
We're trying to offer alternatives. There are zero tools. What we're doing is not perfect, but literally like, nobody has any real strategy for how you occupy spaces outside [the market's mainstream].
Kady Yellow:The problem comes from a lack of connectivity and communication. Where do we go to meet our developers? Where do developers go to meet artists? The way I met Michael is I went to the developers conference ... and I realized there's a huge language barrier. They're talking about profit; they have to talk about profit. I look at an empty downtown, I have to talk about people.
It's how developers are talking about art spaces. They're not being nuanced with it — they're just saying 'art' because they know that art's in demand. They don't understand if they're needing dance space [or] a rehearsal space, [which is] is not the same as gallery space. But what type of space does the community need? If the community is saying it, but it's going into other community members who aren't the developers, you're burning energy and exhausting the pipeline.
I get so mad when people say, just buy a building. It's such a privileged thing to say — it's not that easy. It's really, really hard even to buy a cheap building. ... A developer's power is the ownership. Gentrification narrows down to ownership. So when artists get weary of those things ... reach out to [developers], invite them to a venue. Let them see the rawness and the realness and start to speak each other's languages.
I'm really thankful to be in Jacksonville, because I'm not sugar coating. I'm like, it's going to happen. We have to get ahead of it now. So I create mixers where I tell the artist to dress a little fancy and tell a developer to dress a little cool, get them in the same room, and all of a sudden, there's a human connection. ... People want to be a part of something that's changing and growing, but not at the cost of them not being able to afford to live there.
