On Aug. 1, 1991, humor columnist John Kelso asked American-Statesman readers for assistance.
“I’m asking for your help in finding the top slacker in Austin, Texas — the very slackest of the slackers. The king of the slackers.”
If a historian today were to pinpoint the last time Austin was truly affordable, it would be during the reign of Kelso’s slacker — the archetype portrayed in Richard Linklater’s 1990 film “Slacker.”
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Kelso explains that the slacker is: “The sort of overeducated, undermotivated, eccentric kook who is attracted to college towns across America. In earlier times, we’ve called these colorful misfits beatniks, Bohemians and hippies.”
In 2026, you might ask: How could such misfits survive in a growing city already becoming a tech hub in the 1990s?
Statesman classified ads show how different the market looked in 1990: a two-bedroom bungalow in a historic neighborhood rented for about $500.
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“HYDE PARK — 5203 Avenue F. 2-1, carpet. CACH, range, refrigerator, no pets. $495.”
By the way, “CACH” stood for “central air and central heat” as opposed to window units or maybe wood furnaces. Google Maps suggests that the same narrow house is still there.
At one point, seven of us students crammed into a three-bedroom stucco house — barely 1,000 square feet — north of Mueller Airport.
That era, however, was coming to an end.
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Ten years later, in 2000, just before the dot-com boom turned to bust, Statesman headlines screamed: “Austin is no longer affordable! What will happen to the artists, students and blue-collar workers?”
In fact, the biggest campaign issue during the 1999 municipal election was affordable housing.
This newspaper grilled candidates on their solutions. Public-private partnerships? Fewer regulations? Limits on speculation? Granny flats? Rent control?
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About this series: The Cost of Living explores how Austin became so expensive, who is being squeezed by the city’s economic boom and what local leaders are — or aren’t — doing to address it. Struggling to afford Austin? We want to hear from you. Please share your story with us via email at hello@statesman.com.
The exterior of the I Luv Video building is painted with distinctive movie murals, including one of Teresa Taylor, who appeared in Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” and worked at I Luv Video in the 1980s.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILE
A generation later, Austin faces another — and very real — affordability crisis. This year, as the Statesman documents the current economic crunch, it is crucial to remember what came before it.
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Hark back, for instance, to Austin’s miserable decades as a frontier outpost with few creature comforts before the Civil War.
Later, the city endured years of boarding rooms and back-porch bread lines during wartime and the Great Depression.
The explosion of cheap suburban housing after World War II coincided with the time when the beatniks, hippies and, yes, slackers, reinhabited the leafy inner neighborhoods that had been abandoned during white flight, or because of racist policies that emptied many of the city’s former freedom colonies.
In this first of an occasional series of “From the Archives” columns, we revisit the affordable slacker era of the 1980s and early 1990s, when your columnist began writing for the Statesman.
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Personally, I was disappointed to miss out on Kelso’s “king of the slackers” finals. I certainly looked the part: ponytail, skinny limbs, thrift-shop shirts, shorts and sandals.
Entertainment editor Ed Crowell educated me: “Michael, you file too many stories to be a true slacker.”
Kelso, one of this newspaper’s finest writers when he found the right subject, died in 2017 from complications of a fall after a second bout with cancer.
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Back in 1991, he landed on a natural winner that ran under the headline: “Let the nominations begin for the king of the slackers.”
Be aware in advance that Kelso’s published humor could sometimes cut too close to the bone. In person, he was a pussycat.
“You probably know a slacker,” Kelso wrote. “Lord knows there are enough of them around town. He (or she) comes here to attend the University of Texas to become a petroleum engineer or a sociologist. He (or she) ends up dropping out and playing guitar with an obscure rock band with a quirky name, like Chicken Luggage or Existential Tamale.”
As a contest prize, Kelso promised to write about the winner. He also joked about putting them on the guest list at Liberty Lunch (a defunct nightclub).
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“That’s another thing that defines the slacker. He (or she) spends about half his (or her) time trying to get on the guest list, so he (or she) doesn’t have to pay that cover charge to hear live music.”
Kelso noted that the Austin movie, “Slacker,” had been praised in Newsweek and Rolling Stone, and that the hit film ran for many weeks at the Dobie Theater.
“Austin may have more slackers living in it than any city in America,” Kelso wrote. “I’d estimate an easy 10 percent of the city’s people are slackers. And many of them are going to this flick to see themselves in lights.”
What were these slackers seeking?
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“The slacker feels about work the way a slug feels about salt,” Kelso wrote uncharitably. “Rather than hold a job, the slacker prefers to create. Perhaps he’s writing a book. Sure, he started it 10-12 years ago and he’s still working on the first chapter. But it’ll be about some weird conspiracy theory the slacker holds dear — alleged ties between the Camp Fire Girls and the sale of arms to the Iranians, Elvis is alive and reincarnated in the body of Saddam Hussein, like that.
“The slacker isn’t stupid, mind you. He’s often an intellectual — in a screwball sort of way, he has many, uh, unusual ideas, most of them based on rampant paranoia.”
Kelso assured the readers that none of these traits is set in stone.
“A slacker may possess all, or some, of them. Then again, he may have some that I’ve neglected to mention. Like a dog at home named Bilbo Baggins.”
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“Most slackers have some higher education. The slacker may have accumulated hundreds of college credit hours. He may be within one final exam of his B.A. But no real slacker ever got a degree. The slacker wears his ability to avoid traditional employment like a fancy Panama hat. He hasn’t had a job in years and he’s as proud of this as a soldier with a Medal of Honor.”
Kelso’s humor sometimes went too far, but he got the anthropology of the Slacker Era right.
“The slacker probably doesn’t own a car,” he wrote. “If he does, it’s an old van with an Oat Willie’s bumper sticker and the engine is fixing to explode.
“The slacker lives in a rent house over on Avenue D, or an apartment near the UT campus, with several other slackers who chip in on expenses. Occasionally, an argument breaks out about who ate the last slice of baloney in the refrigerator. It ends when one calls the other a capitalist.”
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Statesman columnist John Kelso was born in Oklahoma, but spent decades in Austin as both a beloved and contentious figure. He died in July at the age of 73.
Austin American-Statesman
Kelso crowned David Lee the king in September 1991. Nineteen years later, in 2011, the columnist didn’t even recognize the erstwhile royalty when he ran into Lee at Strange Brew, a 24-hour coffee shop.
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“He’d gained weight,” Kelso wrote. “David Lee used to make a living as a human guinea pig. He regularly submitted himself to live-in drug studies at Pharmaco, a drug research firm. David Lee is recession proof. He’s a master at getting you to buy him a coffee of java. And he didn’t seem to have changed much.”