Poor Jonestown

[Summerohsev]

Originally Posted by rednoise

I grew up in Jonestown (from 1999 - 2006.) And to be clear, I lived in Jonestown. I didn't live in one of the mansions in the hills or in one of the vacation homes, where the rich folks came to chill at the lake when it had water in it. While I was living there, we got a police department around 2000 or 2001. They were a bunch of keystone cops; rejects from other towns. The city was primarily served by the county. Jonestown was poor; a lot of working class folks (like my family) who sometimes struggled. Shortly before I left high school, Jonestown had started the process of gentrifying. A lot of people lost their homes and they were bought up by people who would redevelop them, or developers bought up land just on the edge of the town and build huge suburban box homes. Folks who wanted to live in some place like Westlake, but didn't make quite enough to do it.

"Vast forests" is a dumb way of putting it, but, yes, there we had a meth problem and there were a lot of make-shift (usually shake-and-bake operations) labs set up in the woods. At one point, we were considered to be the meth capital of central Texas. If you can find a Travis County cop or a Leander cop who was working in that time frame, or before, they'll confirm this. One of my friend's dads actually had a meth lab that blew up. There were more than a few times that we had helicopters flying over the town and raids down the street from my house, and in other parts of the town. Back then, we had just two gas stations, True Grits, a bank and a few other small businesses. If you had walked across the lake bed in Jones Brothers Park when there was no water (which was often -- it'd get drained away so the rich folks down river could have something pretty to look at all year round), you'd find used needles and **** there.

There was no employment options for a while and people either had to commute into Austin, Cedar Park or Lago Vista to find jobs. Which was difficult, especially for a lot of people who didn't have cars, so a lot of people made their money in drugs (and prostitution to a lesser extent.) And those folks were good, more or less, about not getting caught. We had the LV Feeder come through Jonestown next to the library, which would cut through most Cedar Park (not stop), except for at Lakeline Mall and the transit center right on the edge of Cedar Park, off of 620 (where the train station is now.)

It was a place of, more or less, misery. Lots of poverty, lots of drugs, quite a bit of domestic violence (much of went unreported to the police.) But my part of Jonestown was considered the "good" part. Much of the drug concentration was in Nameless Hollow or Cherry Hollow or somewhere abouts Nameless Road. Travis County cops were up and down there all the time. I got pulled over a couple times and interrogated because cops thought I might've had illegal drugs in my cigarette pack. That's where you had the greatest amounts of labs and busts, in part because some parts of Nameless are extremely remote, and there are lots of guns up there.

I realize this thread was from 6 years ago, and I'm sorry for necroing it (I found it on Google, incidentally) but it's still good to register something here. The Wiki is (or was; I just checked and that tidbit is no longer there) correct, essentially. Nowadays, it's much more expensive to live there. My wife and I were just checking house prices. My family bought our house -- a simple 3 bed, 2 bath, 1-story small house, for about 75k. I looked and the only sub-100k houses that are there are "handyman specials," and smaller than the house I grew up in. There's developments, where they just razed entire faces of hills in order to accommodate the not-so-rich, but-rich-enough people to live there. Which is new tax revenue, I suppose, and Jonestown has quieted down a lot since I moved away from there. But, really, the town's "transition" into basically an extension of Lago Vista, came at a cost of families (my friends and neighbors) being forced out of their homes. What would've been a better way of easing the transition is introducing better job opportunities, economic programs and treatment programs. But Jonestown's story is a lot like other small towns that have been engulfed by Austin and the rush for property here: poorer folks are being concentrated elsewhere to make room for rich folks.

I could have written this myself. Everything you said is true. I grew up in Jonestown between 1998-2006. I was on the other side of 1431 from the lake, on Clearview Dr. My best friends lived a on W Lake Terrace Dr and Edna Rd. We ran all over that town as kids and spent a lot of time down at the lake. Definitely walked across it a few times when the water was low. My dad also grew up in Jtown and always told me that there were meth heads there, and to look out for weird people, but nobody ever bothered my friends or myself. Although, I was never allowed to go to Cherry Hallow. My parents knew what happened over there and didn't want me to get caught up in that mess. It was a good childhood for the most part. My mom worked at the Texaco gas station when it was still around, so we spent a lot of time walking down there to get fountain drinks and snacks. Honestly, we were bored a lot of the time and would walk through wooded areas to see what we could find. We did come across weird "tree houses" and "forts", as we called them, but looking back, those were probably something to do with drugs.