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Comment by orange_joe | Hacker News Reader

I understand the nostalgia for a youth and place that is gone, but it’s interesting to point out in one sentence — “Austin was beset by racial divisions” and in the next paragraph discuss the hope that the city would institute strict zoning to keep out newcomers or as the writing says “if we won’t build it, they won’t come”. So much of this piece is dedicated to the problem of housing, but ignored is the problem in its infancy. If you want artists, creatives and musicians you need to build them cheap places to live.

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The vibe from Austin has always been weird to me. "Thanks for visiting, don't move here" or whatever their saying is to that effect. Yet, so few people are from Austin. To me, Austin has always been that poser city trying so hard to be cool and noticed by the other cool cities, but when you try to get to know the city it's just a facade of cool and the rest is just empty and hollow

That vibe is very 2000's.

Austin used to be cool. Austin used to have a bunch of places open until 3AM. Austin used to be a raging live music scene. Austin used to have latin clubs with 12 piece bands and a dance floor the size of a postage stamp that served amazing homemade tamales. Austin used to have cool food places. SXSW used to have a whole bunch of artists you never heard of--and some of them sucked terribly--but that's how cool works. Austin used to have a biker bar that had the best milkshakes in town.

All these things disappeared about the mid 90s (it's no coincidence that Office Space was shot in Austin in 1998-1999). Nothing "cool" has risen to replace any of it.

But people also do forget that unless they were UT students they really didn't like the "cool" people very much back then. For example, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Marcia Ball, and their ilk whom everybody now lionize were considered part of the undesirables. The "hippies" were looked at with a mixture of arms length tolerance and active disgust. And as has been pointed out in the article, race relations have been fraught for a very long time.

> The vibe from Austin has always been weird to me. "Thanks for visiting, don't move here" or whatever their saying is to that effect

I guess that's the saying Oregon traded to Austin in exchange for "Keep _____ Weird": https://archive.ph/tqKyV

How does a city try to be cool? And is there a threshold? Is NYC like 89.8% cool and Asheville 67.7% cool? Austin has all kinds of cool sh*t. 17.3% of stuff in Austin is cool. But the rest is a facade.

>How does a city try to be cool?

there is no try. only posers try. that's the point

Couldn't agree more!

I'm a person of color living in Austin and I always notice that groups of friends hanging out in Austin are often diverse. I didn't see this in the bay or in NYC. I did see it in DC.

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