7 ms·
God Save Austin
- bonoetmalo 9y ago.
- corpMaverick 9y agoIt is not really about gentrification. It is more about music and culture. It ends with a beautiful story about Willie Nelson.
- alsetmusic 9y ago> . Stand by your words. Editing a comment to remove it after seeing downvotes undermines your credibility as a whole.
- bonoetmalo 9y agoOriginal replyer was correct, I should have read the full article. Edited the comment long before the downvotes. I don't stand by my words, move on.
- alsetmusic 9y ago> Original replyer was correct, I should have read the full article. Edited the comment long before the downvotes. I don't stand by my words, move on. So edit the comment and disavow the statement. Removing it from the record is a form of whitewashing history.
- davidw 9y ago> The very places that made Austin so hip are being demolished to make room for the hotels and office spaces needed to accommodate the flood of tourists and newcomers .... > When we arrived in Austin in Sigh...
- bigdubs 9y agoEveryone is a newcomer. What it comes down to is if you add to the zeitgeist or detract from it.
- Kalium 9y agoThe drawbridge mentality is increasingly common in major cities. A place was perfect when you moved there and fell in love. Any changes since then are but a fall from grace, an unwelcome change that destroys everything you love and insults your wonderful memories. It's a deeply human and very understandable response. Of course, that isn't the same as making good policy.
- csours 9y agoThere's a walking/hiking trail behind my house. One of my neighbors hates the fact that the trail has been 'improved' and now other people use it. He was used to it being 'his' trail.
- hkmurakami 9y agoLife is obviously about collecting positive externalities. ;)
- Spivak 9y agoIs this supposed to be an unreasonable opinion? I run all the 'bad' trails in my city because it's nice to be alone. Just because something is a net gain doesn't mean some people don't lose.
- csours 9y agoThe reason I bought that house in particular is because of the trail and green space. I think its funny(?) that he was complaining to (at?) me, and I'm part of the problem. > Just because something is a net gain doesn't mean some people don't lose. See also free trade. Consumers benefit, but some workers lose.
- Endama 9y agoI find this really puzzling, as Americans, we seem to have this strange implicit assumption that the market should protect and reinforce culture. That is to say, that as demand increases for cultural artifacts, that the market should grow without affecting access to such artifacts. It seems that when this assumption does not seem to play out, our reflex is to say that the markets are obviously failing and that policy should step in in order to preserve the integrity of the culture (i.e. we need to stop ruining our neighborhoods with all this development and letting all these _other_ people in!). I feel like this is putting the cart before the horse. IMO (and I'd love to hear other people's opinion about this) cultures are emergent properties from markets. When people come together in order to trade goods and services, market forces will reward economies of scale to those who minimize costs associated with things like time to market, access to labor, etc. This increase in density with others leads to community development, which in turn leads to an exchange of collective values, shared cultural artifacts, etc. From this perspective, the desire to limit market expansion is really an attempt to say which values are acceptable and places incumbents as cultural police for which values are allowed entrance. This seems entirely antithetical to the American ideal of being a nation of immigrants and/or being a culture of acceptance and tolerance.
- lazerpants 9y agoThis problem seems to arise due to the implicit power that money carries, especially when it hits communities in the US that have their own culture and have eschewed using money as a proxy for power (maybe it was lower income inequality in earlier decades). Whereas NYC has always been about money=power=lifestyle, that was never the case for many communities, and it's being thrust on a lot of people who never subscribed to that, who live in places where they want to do their own thing in a low key way without worrying about construction or ever increasing prices. I can sympathize with their unhappiness, and I feel that way about Denver when I visit the area where I grew up. I also have a lot of relatives in Austin and hearing about how it went from a fun small town to a place clogged by traffic with spiraling housing prices, but is still the only simulacra of "home" to them, does indeed sound unappealing. Edit: rereading my comment, it doesn't quite articulate my point, which is that people who want to be outside of this big noisy money grabbing game, and just get to be people, are justifiably unhappy about market determined culture interfering with their lives.
- csours 9y agoPeople want to live near downtown Austin because it is cool. It is cool because of all the cultural stuff that happens there (music, comedy, parties, education, etc). Price pressure increases on the dive bars and quirky places and they close up as condos replace them. The dive bars are not replaced (who wants to live above a bar??) Downtown becomes less cool.
- simulate 9y agoWhat cities will see the kind of growth Austin has experienced in the next twenty years? Perhaps Raleigh, Denver?
- bonoetmalo 9y agoMinneapolis and Asheville both have decent tech scenes although I don't know if they have the tourist capacity to encourage tech people to move there.
- microDude 9y agoMy old boss moved to Bend, OR, but was surprised when I did not follow him. He did not give me a pay raise to afford the $400k entry house for my family. I could have lived out in the sticks, but wanted to be able to walk to downtown, like I do now.
- bonoetmalo 9y agoYeah, after living in a house for so long I absolutely could not see myself moving back into a condo/apartment again, for any job.
- timemct 9y agoReporting in from Asheville: the tech scene here is incredibly small. Most of the people I know here in town that are working in any sort of tech space are remote workers. Asheville is indeed a city that's seen a lot of growth over the past 15/20 years and is often talked about in the same way as Austin; I'll often hear someone say, "when I moved here in YYYY, is was so great; I miss the old Asheville." The city officials seems dead set on promoting tourism and not supporting a tech industry. I'm still here because I love this town and want to help promote the its tech scene.
- eitally 9y agoI'm under the impression that Denver (and Boulder) already have. The Raleigh/Durham metropolis certainly is, too, because it's not just Raleigh. In fact, although Raleigh is the largest single city, the conglomerate of Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Apex, Chapel Hill, Carrboro (not to mention Knightdale, Zebulon, Garner, and Clayton to the East/South), has been thriving for a looong time. The tech presence has only been growing quickly over the past decade, but Cisco, IBM, Netapp, Microsoft, Google, Citrix, Redhat, Allscripts, and many others all have significant presence there. This doesn't include non-tech tech, like Genband, Gemalto, Cree, and more, or all the biotech/pharma there. We lived in Cary for 13 years until moving to San Jose two years ago. There are many reasons we miss it.
- dlandis 9y ago> "The very places that made Austin so hip are being demolished to make room for the hotels and office spaces needed to accommodate the flood of tourists and newcomers who have come to enjoy what no longer exists" Anyone know what places he is specifically referring to with that statement? I didn't see any specific examples mentioned in the article.
- bonoetmalo 9y agoA good/recent example is the Graffiti Park. https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local/austin-graffiti-park-demolition-approved-relocation-the-works/uaTGxx4a62ucPDgm3bAj1M/ https://www.mystatesman.com/news/local/austin-graffiti-park-... Another is Uncommon Objects, an antique store originally on South Congress https://www.statesman.com/business/uncommon-objects-moving-from-longtime-south-congress-home/j0hWIrm7w5oe8mlBFYUoHI/ https://www.statesman.com/business/uncommon-objects-moving-f...
- lazerpants 9y agoGraffiti park is gone? :(
- drcongo 9y agoDon't forget Rainey Street.
- bm1362 9y agoI’m from Austin and have met many tech people who want to move there. They’ll get a rude awakening when they actually look for jobs- it’s slim pickings and the satellite offices there for major tech companies often work on pretty boring products.
- bonoetmalo 9y agoI was lucky enough to get a job with one of the "old tech" Austin companies (being IBM, Dell, National Instruments, ...) and I'm really enjoying it. We have a couple of main tech offices here, like HomeAway. But yeah, the rest is satellite offices.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chiph 9y agoAustin gets looked-down-on by the SV types for being the home of many lifestyle businesses (I used to work for one). But y'know - they provide a product that customer pay for, they employ people, and they tend to be around for a long time, unlike a lot of the here-today, gone-tomorrow startups. There's nothing wrong with "boring" if it makes you money.
- bm1362 9y agoI worked at Polycom for two years out near the Freescale campus. Talk about a lifestyle company, the product (cheaper conference phones than Cisco) barely changed and we had so many company outings. I felt it was a scam, like some kind of middle class adult daycare.
- SeanBoocock 9y agoStill a fairly vibrant game development community. Have the whole spectrum from AAA to independent studios of varying sizes to several successful work-for-hire studios.
- karmajunkie 9y ago
- georgeecollins 9y agoSan Francisco, and many other places in the US, have been far more taken over by tourists than Austin. As someone who was born in the SF I can remember how important it was to the local economy in the 80's before tech moved into the city. Tourism changed SF before the tech boom did. My parents, also from SF, (well mom was born in Oakland, but dad was born in SF) talked about how what was charming about the city had changed, before many people reading this were born. It's always changing! If you feel a place is no longer charming, guess what? Some other place is becoming charming.
- vpribish 9y agoResistance to change in SF from old-timers always surprises me too! SF has been constantly, radically, changing since it's founding - gold rush, the fire, WWII military port, the 60's cultural shift, then the more recent things we all are aware of. If there's any place in the country where resisting change is out-of-place it's here. So, ironically, it's the people who want it like it was that are most at odds with the longest-standing character trait of the city. smh
- georgeecollins 9y agoAll places are changing, some faster than others. The Berlin of Christopher Isherwood and the Paris of Hemingway are long gone. The funny thing for me is when I say my mom's family moved to the Oakland hills after the earthquake, they think I mean in 1989.
- technofiend 9y agoMy aunt moved to Austin in the late 1960s when it was a sleepy little college town of 50,000 residents and 250,000 students. The population waxed and waned with the seasons and you could still swing on a rope into Bull Creek or camp under the stars in the nearby hills. I have many happy memories of that and swimming in the other places in and around Austin. More than twenty years ago there was enough growth that people asked City Council to consider annexing the unincorporated areas around Austin but they refused. City Council didn't want the responsibility, so developers built in the hills and put in septic systems in an area with a lot of clay soil. Now the waterways are so polluted from runoff you don't want your dog in Bull Creek much less yourself. You have the tussle over Barton Springs that resulted in the salamander habitat taking precedence and suddenly big chunks of the pool are off limits because of aquatic plants that can't be removed. Still, probably better than Nestle just coming in and damming off the pool so they could bottle the water and sell it. Change is inevitable, but managed change is far preferable the other kind; Austin planning for their growth would be much more charming place than it is today. It might not be any less expensive and the locals would still be grumbling about the influx of outsiders but their quality of life would be better.
- amclennon 9y ago> The Colorado serves the same purpose as the Seine in Paris, as a cultural divide. Slightly off topic, but I've always found it fascinating how much rivers and other bodies of water can have a drastic impact on the culture despite how easily we can cross them. Also see San Francisco / East Bay, Manhattan / Brooklyn, or really any other city where water is involved.
- ravitation 9y agoI'm from Austin, but I haven't live there since I moved away for college. This attitude, that Austin is destined to become a "megacity" or that Austin is now showing signs of "inauthenticity", is both amusing and somewhat disgusting to me. Austin, to me, was never about "[Keeping] Austin Weird" (a slogan born from a marketing campaign, not some organic cultural movement, in 2000), or about its "flourishing musical subculture". Austin is and will always be, I think, simply home to me. The author's obsession with these, to be honest, relatively meaningless aspects of Austin's national (or international) image strikes me as the most inauthentic thing about people that call themselves Austinites. Where true authenticity is found in the mourning of the inevitable transformation of cities is when a city's ability to be home is lost. When people are displaced from areas that mean more to them than some hip music venue, or the place where I met Willie Nelson. Give me a break.
- fhood 9y agoIt is funny how people always seem to represent this as the entire city going down in flames. Sometimes cities grow. It happens. But the hole in the wall bars and auto shops and whatever don't stop existing, they just change neighborhoods. People just don't like it when familiar things change. They never have, and they probably never will.
- handbanana 9y agoI don't have anything to add other than I hear a lot of people from Austin/that live in Austin refer to it as the "best city in the world" - or something similar. It's a great city, but far from the best
- jpster 9y ago>Something similar is happening now in the city, with the video game industry and national intelligence. There are so many ex-spooks moving to Austin it has become a kind of Texas Abbottabad. Why is it attracting people from the intelligence community?