Quote:
Originally Posted by R1070
It's definitely going through what Houston and Dallas did in the late 70s-80s. Luckily, I don't foresee a bust like the other cities went through leading to a lot of cleared lots that ended up as surface parking. Austin is definitely becoming more like Dallas and less "weird".
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Any potential bust will not affect Austin the same way Dallas and Houston emptied out. There are a bunch of macro-level factors not at play that led to their historic cores being decimated in ways that cannot and could never affect Austin:
1. Racial dynamics and white flight. Houston and Dallas suffered from decades of disinvestment in their cores, Austin does not have the same demographics and never suffered from the same thing.
2. Size of core. Austin’s truly urban historic core was always small and what abuts are single family home neighborhoods that never entered into a demographic death spiral from lack of children because we have continued to provide new supply throughout the city and never really stopped (again, see reason 1). There simply aren’t enough likely targets in a dense enough area for a hollowing out anywhere to occur on the scale that Dallas and Houston experienced.
3. Economic structure. Austin’s economy has pretty much always (the 80s savings and loan crisis excepted) been better than the state’s or the country’s partly because a larger portion of our economy is in education and government. Those things insulate us because they, especially in hard times, draw money from elsewhere and inject it into the local economy.
Besides: we should be wanting a bust. Bring things back down to reality and get rid of speculation.