The one thing he grants is truly weird about Austin was the population's hatred of ease of transit, an antipathy manifested by residents' refusal to do anything to alleviate their woes."More highways will make us just like Houston and Dallas!" is the rallying cry, and to be like those towns would not be weird.
But to people who have actually been to all three cities recently, it's apparent that they are already more alike than different. "I cannot truck people who say they don't want Austin to become Dallas or Houston, because it is," says Patoski.
John Anderson
Author Joe Nick Patoski holds a relic from the tail end of Austin's glory days: The Soap Creek Saloon was the soul of Austin's scene while the Armadillo was the heart. Today, Patoski believes that Austin has the same big-city problems of Houston and Dallas, while the two larger cities have both gotten less suffocating.
John Anderson
When South by Southwest was launched the late 1980s, its goals were to show off local and regional bands and fill downtown bar stools while the UT kids were on spring break. Now, it's morphed into three conferences spanning most of March and is a spring break destination in its own right, not to mention an international Shangri-La for techno-nerds.
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Nowhere is that more apparent than downtown, where the past ten years have been home to a crass real estate boom that would shame even Donald Trump. Austin's downtown was once home to much that was funky, family-owned and attitude-free.
That vibe has been vanishing, especially since 2006, when a strong ordinance dictating an unobstructed line of sight to the Capitol from pretty much all points was weakened to the point of near-meaninglessness. Ever since, high-rise luxury condos and hotels and glitzy shopping centers have erupted like enormous rainy-day toadstools. Austin's tall landmarks were once the Capitol and the Texas Tower — politics and academia. Now the city's skyline declares that Austin is really about flipping condos.
In a real estate developer-driven bid to weaken the Capitol Corridors ordinance, Austin mayor Will Wynn stated that he wanted to have 25,000 people living downtown by 2015. And what kind of people did they want? Rich ones, as attested by the fact that the one true grocery store in the area is the Whole Foods flagship.
Like the city of its birth, Whole Foods is a lot more corporate and ritzy than it was in the hippy-dippy '70s, and Patoski believes that store is helping solidify downtown as a paradise for wealthy Bobos, to mangle the title of David Brooks's memorable 2000 book. "It's their theme park," he says of the flagship. "I've seen people moving into high-rises down there so they can be close to Whole Foods."
The kind of people who can afford to do their regular shopping at Whole Foods are not the bohemians Austin once drew. Instead, they are the people who can afford to live in the brand-new, 683-foot Austonian condo tower, now Austin's tallest building, where studio condos start at $500,000 (with $700 monthly fees) and prices ascend to a cool $8 million for a penthouse. At the time the project was announced, one of the developers reportedly stated that these would not be first or second homes for their typical buyers, but fifth or sixth, somewhere in the portfolio amid properties in the south of France, Manhattan, Aspen, Tuscany and Malibu.
Today, downtown Austin is cramped. It's hard to park. By and large, the people you see on a night out are alternately pretentious, thuggish (on skanky East 6th Street, where gang shootings and fistfights are becoming common occurrences) or douched-out, as on West 6th Street, which now rivals or exceeds Uptown Dallas as a spawning ground for vulgarian 30k millionaires swilling bottle-service Grey Goose. (While the exact number of douchebags prowling Austin was not tracked by the census and is therefore impossible to quantify, suffice to say that a production company recently found it fertile enough ground to announce they were casting a Texas-style Jersey Shore ripoff in Austin.)
By night, the one thing much of downtown Austin has in spades is vapidity, an affluent airheadedness that reigns everywhere where it is not supplanted by its cousins: lunkheaded testosterone head-cracking or the putting on of airs, depending on whether you are east or west of Congress.
Austin Community College librarian Red Wassenich spearheaded the Keep Austin Weird campaign of the last few years. He says he's been encouraged by some recent developments in the city, but he did tip us off to one place whose mere presence would seem to toll the death knell of any city that claimed to be cool.
"There are these horrible bars downtown like Qua where they have, like, live sharks swimming under the dance floor," he said.
We thought he had to be exaggerating, but no, Qua really exists, on West 4th Street. It's got it all, including that stupid, meaningless name. It's got the velvet rope and the dress codes. It's got bottle service, and, yes, Virginia, there are in fact actual live sharks swimming under the glass dance floor. "They are fed fresh seafood (from Whole Foods) daily," notes the info page on Qua's Web site.
Downtown Austin, 2011: where even the nightclub sharks dine on Whole Foods seafood daily.
Molly Ivins wept.
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It's fitting that the supermarket chain that white people like most was born and bred in Austin, the Texas city that white people like best. Austin is easily Texas's milkiest big city, and the inner core is getting more ivory by the minute. It's curious — Austin is Texas's most progressive city, and it's hard not to imagine that its residents wouldn't speak highly of diversity as a concept. (Indeed, President Obama enjoyed his greatest Texas margin of victory in Travis County, though he took both Dallas and Harris counties, too.) And yet the stats don't lie: Austin is 8.8 percent black, Houston is 18.7 and Dallas is 20.7 percent.
