Tech Bros Have Stolen Austin’s Soul

It looms, all glamour and glass, like a strange Wellsian monster. Floor by floor it comes, casting the Colorado River in shadow as it goes. By the time it’s finished, sometime next year, it’ll be the tallest building in Texas, at 74 stories beating Houston’s JP Morgan Chase Tower by almost 20 feet. Yet even more than its scale, it’s the amenities at the Waterline Apartments that really impress.

This, after all, is a place that promises a new Austin, one, its marketers say, that offers “serenity in the sky”. There’ll be restaurants, and retail, and a hotel complete with swimming pool and spa. Far from a repeat of The War of the Worlds, then, the Waterline speaks to another H.G. Wells fantasy, one the writer envisaged as “a great gallery” where people could meet and live in harmony. Nor is it alone. There are 13 similar high-rises coming right across Austin, as its population rises and GDP soars.

This emerging urban Austin, a place of towers and cocktail bars, is fundamentally different from the established centres of the East and Midwest. In beehives like Wall Street or The Loop, office workers historically came in to work, then retreated back to the suburbs each night. Downtown Austin, though, puts residents at its hearts, focusing less on offices and more on lifestyles. Yet if that means amenities galore, this tidy vision risks redefining American cities for the worse — even as the old problems of urban dysfunction always loom.

For decades, the Texan capital was synonymous with a single word: weird. Unlike the conservative countryside, or else oil towns like Dallas, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Austin was a place of lively bars and soul-filled clubs. There was Rainey Street, too, a charming Latino neighbourhood filled with pretty tree-lined cottages. When I first came here, almost half a century ago, I was reminded of nothing less than Haight-Ashbury — the San Francisco neighbourhood so beloved among artists and hippies.

Now, though, this older, shabbier Austin is slipping away. Quite aside from landmark developments like the Waterline, that’s clear enough in the numbers. Since 2000, downtown’s population has tripled to 15,000. In large part, in fact, Kevin Burns argues the ultra-modern vibe can be understood by sheer demand, with the rising forest of towers appealing to young professionals tired of life in the suburbs. “The driver is quality of life,” says the bearded 47-year-old real-estate developer, sipping a coffee as the sound of construction echoes around us.

It’s not hard to see what he means. Life by the Colorado, still feverishly in the making, is pleasantly walkable. There are yew-scattered parklands, and bike lanes and creeks. It’s all surely a step up from the convention centres and stadiums that once got urban developers excited. There’s also plenty to do: dozens of bars and restaurants open in Austin every month, dovetailed by yoga studios and comedy clubs. Yet if the new Austin promises paradise for wealthy hipsters, the hippies of yore seem far less welcome. Downtown, after all, is expensive, hardly surprising when so many of the new arrivals are tech workers, “empty nesters” with far fewer children to feed than their peers elsewhere. An apartment in the sky here will set you back $170,000 more than other parts of Central Texas, doubtless explaining why so many new downtowners are white.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Randy von Liski via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.