At some point Austin history will stop looping upon itself. Until next time …
The Austin metro area's population total and growth rate from 1988 through 2023 and then as projected through 2037a whilebefore and then came back, so who can say what will happen. If you were one of those people who thought it was God's plan that I returned to thein 2018 so I could document my friend Kirk Watson's return to City Hall in 2023, sorry about that.
But, but, but, institutional memory and understanding nuance and all that. Just remember that I learned what I know about Austin policy and politics by the daily work of being a news reporter, so anybody who wants to takework on can look forward to the reward of Knowing Things in subsequent decades and then helping the endless throngs of new Austinites orient themselves to the city.When I moved to Austin in 1988 the metro area had around 550,000 people.
There really is no contemporary American city, not even in Texas, that has grown as much, as fast, for as long as Austin. Indeed, I'm using metro-area rather than city-limits population because Austin proper is maxed out and full up and expensive AF with its massive housing shortage, barely growing at all since 2020 and stuck under 1 million residents, at No. 11 in the largest-U.S.-cities table; the new 50K-75K Central Texans each year are now going straight to the suburbs.
The immorality comes in many forms. It is the height of irresponsibility to say that we should grow more slowly, and in a way that intensely harms the planet, because we have run out of places where we can build big apartment buildings far from affluent homeowners who have exquisitely rationalized their desire to discriminate, and to live in homogenous environs, into the horrors of the Austin Land Development Code.
To align the policies with the brand, official Austin needs to do about 50 times more hard work than it ever has to create a Vatican II-level program of change – not just rewriting the land use code or doling out a fixed stream of subsidy funds, but hardcore moves like seizing surface parking lots and one-story strip malls via eminent domain so we can build apartments there.
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