[austlar1]

In case nobody noticed, every downtown office building that has gone up in Austin in the past 15 years is built on top of a significant parking podium. I am not sure how this came to be, but I don't know a lot about parking requirements and development codes downtown. All of the tall buildings that went up in the late 1980s were built in a traditional manner with no parking podiums at the base. I guess some of them have parking structures attached, but not all of them do. What happened downtown to require these ugly podiums to be built?