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God Save Austin

austinmonthly.com

46 pointssamclemens67 comments

I 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.

This 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.

I'm not arguing that it isn't uncomfortable, nor that people aren't justified in their unhappiness, I am arguing that the desire to use policy to express that unhappiness and uncomfortability upon the polity is wrong (I would even say it's selfish). Their comfort when "things were better" was built upon the market at the snapshot in time they enjoyed it. To demand that the market revert to that time is, by definition, regressive.

I mostly agree, but the point I'm making is that the people who made Austin a mecca for interesting culture moved there precisely because it was not a market oriented culture. So of course they're unhappy about the change in cultural orientation, and without money themselves, they have little recourse outside of policy (though they do have the ability to shape policy given the long term power structures there). And I'm not sure it's wrong to try to prop up established elements of the culture they like, though I do suspect it's untenable.

> I would even say it's selfish

> (previously) cultures are emergent properties from markets

Honest question: Do you think selfishness is a bad thing? As you seem to have such apparent respect for the primacy of markets, I would think not. Why then would you choose to jab people with this idea that they're being selfish? Is it because you think they would be against selfishness and are therefore being hypocrites?

(Disclaimer: I've lived in Austin for 16 years, and spent a lot of time here for four years before that while my brother was in school here, which gives me a thimbleful of street cred as a longtime resident compared to those who were here in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. But its long enough that I have seen a ton of change in the last decade in a half.)

There's a couple of threads of thought in your comment that are worth addressing separately.

> 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

The market is only good at doing one thing: finding local maxima to a profit curve. If whatever you're interested in can't be distilled to a profit metric somehow, the market is completely oblivious to it, and there are many intangibles we find valuable that fall into this category. When we're lucky, we have tools to link the thing to economic metrics. Other times we don't have good ways of doing so. An example of the former would be a carbon tax, which front-loads the full cost of introducing carbon to its initial purchase. You alluded to good examples of the latter in the form of cultural preservation, which is not as one dimensional as "gentrification" and includes all kinds of things like dying languages, musical heritage, oral tradition, and yes, places where Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin played early in their careers.

The reason I find this noteworthy is that you're positing the assumption that markets should protect culture and find it puzzling that people think this way. While I think there are people who do so, I think the opposite: most of us recognize that this neoliberal assumption is false and markets do NOT protect cultural heritage. Because for most of us cultural heritage is worth preserving, it needs non-market-driven measures to preserve it in some form.

The second thread of thought I have about your post is that culture is also fluid and necessarily must change over time, and those who seek to preserve the status quo indefinitely are fighting a misguided battle. Obviously this is at odds with my point above but fits in nicely with your emergent qualities point. However, I think you're putting a rosy shine on the practical details of how this plays out in the day to day lives of people actually participating in the market.

I think its best summed up by saying you're not entirely wrong: attempts to limit "market expansion" as a means of preserving some aspects of cultural heritage are a statement of values. However, refusal to do so is also a statement of values. In the latter case, you're saying that unrestrained trade is a thing to hold valuable in and of itself, which is a notion that I think many people are coming to see not as a virtue but a vice which needs reasonable constraints. Does that mean the city should subsidize money-losing businesses just because they're part of a cultural legacy in this town? Probably not, at least not with wild abandon. However, since we have no apparent problem with subsidizing big businesses through tax incentives, I don't think its out of the question to find ways of doing the same with small businesses that provide some cultural conscience to our town.

This is a wonderfully thought out and articulated counter-position. I applaud the thoughtfulness of your comment.

I agree with your statement that "cultural heritage is worth preserving, it needs non-market-driven measures to preserve it in some form". However, I think that given situations in which the choice between access to the market and the preservation of culture are fundamentally at odds with one another, access to the market must dominate. I think the downstream effects of the preservation choice are devastating and counterproductive. Let's take an extreme example, if 50% of a given, highly productive, landmass is marked as culture heritage, that would mean that suddenly the available supply to meet housing/commercial demands is now artificially constrained to the remaining half. If the supply does not adequately increase in density to meet this demand, prices shall no doubt increase and people will be priced out of that area. I think this is what is happening across a whole slew of cities across the US and is contributing to homelessness, increase in crime, loss of access to high quality education, etc.

I don't think that this is a zero-sum situation, nor that the example I just gave is the canonical experience. I'm just saying that if I was forced to make a tradeoff, I think the preservation of cultural heritage must be placed as a secondary (albeit very important) value.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, but I do disagree with the premise: market forces should not always have the dominant hand, if only because it will always be the dominant hand. A more fluid balance can and should be established. Sometimes the market needs should prevail, but I would argue that the balance we have today is far too imbalanced.

Your example is a good one of the extreme of that position; I think SF is the canonical example of what can happen if you do a poor job of prioritizing which parts of the local culture you're going to preserve, and market forces act on the rest. That points to one of things that I think the market is pretty ok at: pricing goods by demand. However, creating new supply to fill that demand in an unrestrained way would see many of the things I imagine SF residents love about the city like its extensive parklands fall to new development.

I do think a happy medium can be struck a lot of the time. In Austin we certainly have voices that want nothing to change, which are countered by voices who think the market is an all-powerful god who will lead us to the promised land of perfect pricing. But most of us fall into the middle. We like a few historical homes to be preserved, a neighborhood or two with a few extra zoning restrictions about how and what you can build that affects the character of the neighborhood, and looser restrictions in most other places. (We also have an advantage in that we're not surrounded on 3 sides by water, so its relatively easy to increase supply at the tradeoff of a commute.) But what we're not doing a good job of right now is working to ensure that those getting the wrong end of the gentrification stick aren't economically depressed and primarily communities of color. I think there's a lot of things that can soften that but right now the city is mostly paying lip service to the idea, and that has to change. Doing so would move us a lot closer to what I think is more of a balanced game between market forces and non-market-based values.

So, I alluded in my reply to OP that I suspect wealth/income inequality is hugely at play in many of these scenarios. Do you think that a more equal wealth distribution would allow citizens to use the market to balance their desire for culture with the needs of current residents and newcomers?

> access to the market must dominate

The market itself is dependent on certain conditions for it to function. As a good example, take environmental efforts: solutions "price in" the externalities of pollution and "close off" the loopholes that were previously used to skirt around the pollution cleanup.

On the other hand, wind power is resisted by property owners who insist the energy company "price in" the intangible loss to their view, their property value, and they try to "close off" the loopholes the energy companies would use to skirt around a debate such as eminent domain or state mandates.

The entire conversation gets ratcheted up to 11 because neither side listens very much to the other. Small neighborhoods listen to each other -- it's easy to become acquainted with a few people -- but big cities are blind to those around them because we get overwhelmed by the number of people.

All I wanted to point out was that:

Markets rely on good communication to find an agreement everyone can be happy with. Save the environment? Build wind power? More people moving to Austin? These are more indications of miscommunication and misunderstanding than anything else (in my opinion).

This has further application to a lot of the news that appears on HN's front page each day.

I'm not naive: full rapport of all parties is unlikely. But I find this paradigm often can explain what would otherwise appear to be senseless destruction by well-meaning people.

Preservation of what culture anyway?

You can't prevent people from buying existing housing, as one example, so what happens if you try and preserve the form by not constructing any new housing, is that wealthier people win that particular game of musical chairs...

... and you've changed the culture anyway, if not the form, because you have a new set of people there.

I'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.

It 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.

I 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

> 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...

The 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.

There'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.

Is 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.

The 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.

Eh I can understand it. In our society it really seems that nothing is sacred and it's really easy to empathize with someone who just wants one thing to go untainted by capitalism

It sounds like this person wanted the public to maintain a resource (trail and green space) but also maintain near-private access.

It's possible that improvements to this public good are capitalism in action, destroying something beautiful and wonderful. But, some might see this scenario as someone attempting to capture public resources (the trail and its maintenance) for their own gain, which is one of the worst expressions of capitalism.

It's perhaps less easy to empathize with that.

Yeah ... I don't think someone who celebrates a bit of mostly untouched nature in the city they live in represents "one of the worst expressions of capitalism".

I follow your line of thinking, but I think it's a bit out of context.

I understand how you feel. Untouched nature isn't one of the excesses of capitalism!

Yet, perhaps a government-maintained trail that someone feels entitled to treat as their private property is something less than a shining example of virtue.

I get perhaps a feeling of "wistfulness" for how things used to be, but getting angry or hateful that other people now enjoy something too seems like an unhealthy attitude.

Life is obviously about collecting positive externalities. ;)

Everyone is a newcomer. What it comes down to is if you add to the zeitgeist or detract from it.

Yup. We are the problem. We shouldn't have moved in. But we did, so we transformed the place. Deal with it.

you left out one little detail...

> When we arrived in Austin [in 1980]

It's not an important detail, particularly. The narrative is always "when we arrived, things were good, but these newcomers..."

The typical reasons why people moved to cities in 1980 are way different than the reasons why people are flocking to cities in 2018.

What Austin is experiencing is a severe case of what's happening to cities all over the country. For many this is uniformly good thing but for a place like Austin, with a strong identity and cultural history (and, since the 60s, a liberal enclave in a deeply conservative state), it has very specific costs.

This is nonsense. The world changes. You can't possibly keep it the way it was. Austin still has a very strong identity and cultural history -- it's just different now than it was 5 years ago when it was different from what it had been 5 years before that when it was different from...

A lot of what's happening in Austin is a result of public policy too, and it's been so for at least two decades. The city has actively pursued its transformations. Though even if it hadn't, Austin would still have been a huge draw for refugees from California and the East Coast.

It has very specific costs to exclude people who would benefit from being in an area, as well.

Far more specific than a vague sense of 'things changing'.

I tend to think it is an important detail. 1980 was nearly 40 years ago! It's hard to tag someone who's lived in a place for 40 years as a carpetbagger with a straight face. People put down a lot of roots over four decades.

I bet you could have found someone in 1980 decrying how much Austin had changed by then from 1940.

This is a game anyone can play.

What about NYC? Think it hasn't changed? It's changed a ton. Why not complain about that? How about L.A.? The whole world has changed, and will continue to change, and you can be as certain of this as of anything else.

San 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.

Resistance 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

All 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.

My 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.

Requiring sewers is hardly "planning". You can't really plan growth. Planning is political, and local politics is all about protectionism. Austin's growth politics is a bunch of NIMBYism ("keep the neighborhoods as they are!") combined with / resulting in terrible traffic planning because it's not possible to improve the main thoroughfares when they're all going through neighborhoods that must be left as they are.

Austin's zoning/planning is all about protecting neighborhoods property values (in a place where they only go up anyways!). It's a mess.

>Requiring sewers is hardly "planning". You can't really plan growth.

Of course you can! "Gee, we're growing like a weed so now we need to annex the areas surrounding us." "Hey developers, you're required to hook up to city sewerage, which we'll supply because that's what responsible cities do." Done.

If you want another good example of failure to plan look at all the development in Addicks Reservoir in Houston. It was trivial to plan for growth by banning development in the 100 year flood plain. We chose not to. Now 40 years too late we're trying to kinda sorta but not really regulate in the 500 year flood plain. Having the political wherewithal to just say "You know what? No building houses in the flood plain!" would have saved the taxpayers billions. But nobody had the stones to tell developers no. So those developers got to build in a risky spot and walk away with the profits while shifting the risk to taxpayers.

Manhattan was planned North of Canal anyways. It's a mess.

You can't plan growth, sorry. You can't see 40 years into the future, let alone 100.

Sure, don't build on flood plains. Got it. But that's not planning failure. That's our government bailing people out all the time, so no one is afraid of building where they should know better.

I’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.

Austin 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.

I 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.

I'm a little surprised to hear this point of view from a (former?) resident. Getting a technology job is pretty easy here, if you're flexible. If you want your perfect job that pays double six figures and lets you work from home and provides free snack delivery, yeah ok, hard to find that gig.

But dev jobs in general? there's a WIDE variety of companies to work for.

I graduated with a CS degree and the offers in my peer group were pitiful. TXDOT, USAA, Defense Contractors etc.

The best companies were Visa and Intel, back in 2013.

It’s definitely not a place where you can hop around every 2 years working for big brand names on the coolest tech (read: Java). A higher-end salary is 70-90k with maybe an ESPP vs a 300k package on the West Coast.

I’m definitely eager to go back but damn every time I check whoshiring it’s deflating.

I 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.

Still 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.

People 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.

> 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.

> "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.

A good/recent example is the Graffiti Park. 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-f...

Don't forget Rainey Street.

Graffiti park is gone? :(

What cities will see the kind of growth Austin has experienced in the next twenty years? Perhaps Raleigh, Denver?

I'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.

This has been my question lately too.

I love Austin, but the recent growth spurt has me wondering how the city will support it.

My bet has been on Nashville, but I think that's been exploding already as well.

Minneapolis 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.

Reporting 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.

My 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.

Yeah, after living in a house for so long I absolutely could not see myself moving back into a condo/apartment again, for any job.

>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?

It is not really about gentrification. It is more about music and culture. It ends with a beautiful story about Willie Nelson.

> .

Stand by your words. Editing a comment to remove it after seeing downvotes undermines your credibility as a whole.

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.

> 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.

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