Fair Fight

IN 1974, WHILE HE WAS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT THE University of Texas at Austin, John Henneberger started volunteering with a community group in Clarksville, a former Freedman’s Town near downtown Austin. The neighborhood, which was then still predominantly black, lacked basic infrastructure like sewers and sidewalks, and a proposed crosstown expressway threatened to wipe it out entirely. Until he saw the conditions in Clarksville, Henneberger says, he had always assumed the government treated its citizens equally. He was appalled by the blatantly racist response from local government when community members tried to organize.

That sense of injustice has fueled his work ever since. In 1988, he and fellow organizer Karen Paup co-founded the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, known today as Texas Housers, to advocate for low-income Texans—and help communities advocate spoke with Henneberger, a 2014 MacArthur “genius grant” fellow, about the future of fair housing in an increasingly unaffordable state.