August 31, 2007
The Austonian Throws Itself A Little Party
The Austonian threw itself a ground breaking party this morning in the parking lot on the corner of 2nd and Congress, where the shiny building designed by Houston-based Zeigler Cooper Architects will one day stand. The festivities, complete with mimosas and mini-quiches, celebrated the future ‘landmark’, and featured a whole lot of loving between the City and Benchmark Development.
Senator Kirk Watson and Mayor Will Wynn showed up, and praised Benchmark’s contributions to Austin’s skyline and to all of its tax payers, not just downtown residents. According to Mayor Wynn, “The Austonian is a significant step in helping us reduce energy use, water use and vehicle miles traveled per capita, all while increasing the vibrancy and vitality of Congress Avenue. Urbane, mixed-use density has dramatic benefits economically, environmentally and socially."
Benchmark thanked the city for being so easy to work with, and patted itself on the back for providing just what this city needs, more ground floor retail and million dollar condos. We get that all the economic activity generated by people who can afford to buy these things is going to increase the city’s tax revenue, but if it’s just going to be given back to national retail chains at the Domain as tax breaks, what’s the point?
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The Domain thing isn't that simple, and it's distressing to see a site like austinist fall for the paleoliberal tripe. If those stores are attracting shoppers from outside Austin, and they surely are, then we benefit as long as the sales tax collections far outweigh the subsidy. (Otherwise, they would have moved into La Frontera or something - at which point Round Rock would get the money).
For the area as a whole? Definitely zero-sum game (or worse). But frankly, for the city to be healthy it has to do this stuff from time to time to recapture some of the suburban money parasitized from Austin.
I would love to know how many people that live downtown actually walk and ride the bus and drive less than their counterparts in other parts of Austin. We had a partner a few years ago that lived downtown, just a couple of blocks from our office, and he still drove into work everyday. My current boss lives in Travis Heights and would not dream of taking public transportation to go anywhere. I know all these people living and working downtown are supposedly a lighter burden on the roads, but how many people that live downtown work for Dell or Motorola? How many of them actually take cars off downtown streets by walking, biking, and using Capitol Metro? Does Will Wynn himself, Mr. Walkability, ever ride his bike or a bus or walk to work or does he still drive? It seems like we've had condos downtown long enough to have some answers to these questions.
We're a big-tent blog that falls for a wide variety of tripe.
I demand a blog name change to "Austonist."
I may have mentioned this before but I like how they're selling these to people as if there isn't going to be a massive hotel across the street.
It's Austinite right? I've always called people that live in Austin Austinites. While y'all can't help the Austinist, Austonian just sounds out of place, out of town, and (dare I say?) retarded.
Comparing the Austonian to Domain is a red herring. They're two completely separate issues.
What makes downtown condo/office/retail complexes like Austonian so beneficial is they add tremendously to the city's property-tax base without a large expense in infrastructure improvement. You've got a $100+ million building on what was formerly a vacant lot. Would we see a similar benefit if these people built $1 million houses in Lago Vista, and did their shopping at the Hill Country Galleria?
In the case of Domain, it's my understanding the city simply rebates a portion of the sales taxes generated. That's a tougher call, because you have to ask yourself, would the shopping center have been built anyway without city subsidies (like the Arboretum)? But at least in doing so, the city is ensuring that development takes place in the desired zone (north of 183) instead of over the Edwards recharge/contributing zone.
I agree with Guest 2, you cannot rely too heavily on people just giving up their cars...even if they 'live, work and play' downtown.
"we benefit as long as the sales tax collections far outweigh the subsidy"
You're absolutely right, but it's unclear whether the sales tax collections outweigh the subsidy at all. Opponents are claiming the the subsidy could rise as high as $65 million dollars, while the Domain is only going to bring in $40 million in sales taxes.
See: http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A531746
guest @ #2, for what seems like the hundredth time, even IF every single downtown resident drives out to Dell/Motorola, we're still better off than if they live in the suburbs (reverse commute direction still underutilized). And they CAN use transit someday if they ever get the opportunity.
But, of course, plenty of people living downtown don't drive. Just open your eyes to all the people walking, busing, and biking - they're all over the place.
I see people walking, biking and busing, but maybe 3 out of 50 of them look like they can afford to live downtown.
I do not get at all how someone who lives close to McNeil and Parmer and works at Motorola and shops locally is causing more pollution and traffic congestion and deaths and all the bad shit cars cause more than someone who lives downtown and has to drive to Parmer / McNeil to go to work at Motorola everyday.
When's the last time you took the bus, mdahmus?
oooh yeah! What's 'reverse communte'? Is that your way of saying that one side of I-35 flows faster than the other? In my experience, that's just because I-35 through downtown was built by elephants and Mo-Pac was designed by 3 year olds.
guest #11: Because they drive more overall, because they require more road capacity in a part of town where the per-capita cost is very high, and because some day their job will move to the suburb on the other side of the town, and then they'll have to drive all the way through the city (or around) just to get there. And I see plenty of people walking downtown who can obviously afford to live there - you're perhaps looking at the wrong end of town (like I-35 @ 6th).
guest #12: I work at home and have for about two years, but I took my 3 and 13-year-olds down to the Flugtag on Saturday on the #5. Thanks for asking. I also reverse-commuted regularly on the #3 and the #983 when I worked up at 183/Braker (bus up in the morning, bike home in the night, 2-3 days per week).
guest #13: Downtown->suburb is "reverse commute". And I did that on the days I didn't take the bike/bus combo.
Are you guys all pod people or what?
I don't think there will be that many people living downtown and working in Round Rock or wherever outside of downtown. I think the vast majority of people living downtown will also work downtown and spend most of their time downtown. Right now, there are way more jobs downtown than residences. That will get closer to even with all the condo construction going on now, but we're still a ways off.
Guest 11 - the goal (at least my goal) is to get people to live near where they work, wherever it is. The biggest percentage of people that don't do that are people that live in the sprawling, single family suburbs on the edges of the city. Some live near where they work, but plenty work downtown, or on the other side of the city. I don't want to subsidize that lifestyle by building them more highways. I don't have any problem with people who live near McNeil and Parmer and work at Motorola and shop locally. I have a problem with people who live in Dripping Springs and work at Motorola and think it is their right to have the government build them an interchange at 290/71 and widen MoPac.
shilli, one advantage of the old "work in the city, live in the burbs" paradigm is that it's much more likely to be transit-supportive. They can live "near" where they work in NW Austin all they want, but they're never going to be able to take the bus there, even if gas is $10/gallon - suburb-to-suburb bus service will never ever be feasible in cul-de-sac land. Even in the driving-only case, you can do things like HOV/managed/contraflow lanes.
PS: I drove more miles when I lived on Metric and worked at IBM than I did when I moved down to Clarksville and kept working at IBM.
shili: While there may be more jobs than residences downtown, how many of them pay enough to be able to afford to live downtown?
Not many. Very few people (relatively speaking) working downtown are earning that much. Most of the downtown workers are service industries and lower level corporate functionaries, hardly high rise condo purchasers...
There may be more well paid bankers and lawyers working downtown than you think (I know a few), not to mention government types, developers, etc. I think those are going to be the primary condo-buyers (at least some subset of them - obviously there are plenty that will continue to commute from various other places). It would be interesting to see a breakdown of income by job location, but I have a hard time imagining that anywhere would be higher than downtown (the stretch of office parks along the east side of MoPac across from Barton Square Mall is the only place I can think of).
There's a substantial amount of research on how density effects vehicle miles traveled (VMT):
http://pedshed.net/?p=42 has a good summary and links to some of the papers.
The bottom line seems to be that higher denisty means less per-capita VMT. Not dramatically less (30% or so), but siginificantly less. That 30% number is probably in line with the arguments made by both sides in this thread.
And Shilli, a lot of the people who work downtown are state employees and the average wage for state employees is $43,600/yr. My guess is that the median is less than that. Those folks aren't going to be Austonians. Maybe when the market for ultra-luxury condos is used up, developers will start building middle class housing downtown.
Are we trying to be like Houston now? That's the only thing I can conclude, since The Houstonian (http://www.houstonian.com/) has been a Houston institution for *years*.
Them's would be fightin' words nary five years ago in Austin, Jooley Ann. But nowadays - nobody cares. *tear*
That's it, Jonathan Horak. I am making it my mission to stake out City Hall until I get photographic evidence of Will Wynn driving a car.
the mayor lives at austin city lofts and he drives in and out of the parking garage everyday in his black two-door infiniti. i live across the street and see him all the time - driving! get real people.
where have all the true austinites gone? they've been run out of town out by generic dorks from houston and dallas hoping to have their chain restaurants and franchised starbucks on every corner of this unique town. austin will never be the same.
How can anyone have anything negative to say about such a beautiful structure? The people that loathe such high priced condos are the same people that are lazy, have no ambition, and have nothing but contempt and envy for others that are financially successful. Would you rather see more slums and project housing?? Just shut up, enjoy the view, and try to aspire to become someone that can afford to live in luxury, even if you don't necessarily want to live in a high rise condo.
#26, what an ignorant comment. you are an ugly american for sure.
#27, you shouldn't say such things about people with special needs. It's rude.
"where have all the true austinites gone? they've been run out of town out by generic dorks from houston and dallas (cali-cali) hoping to have their chain restaurants and franchised starbucks on every corner of this unique town. austin will never be the same."
We should all go take over Vidor. Make a utopian artist's community out of the most hate-filled town in Texas. Everybody pool together and get business leaders like the owners of the Drafthouse and Epoch Coffee and radical groups to raise funds to sponsor us. We can start up chapters in the Vidor area. We're going to need arms and ammo though.
#26, is that you, Katy? How are things in Lakeway? Hope you're enjoying "Austin" after your big move from L.A. You still have my vote for the most shallow person I have ever met. Hope you've found guys that drive Escalades and Jaguars to date you.
Nah, Katy would never read a website as "eclectic" as the Austinist. Don't suspect she's ever been to the hawk or the Booty Bar.
Sen. Kirk Watson is a double taxer.
Sen. Watson and others are pushing a plan to shift Austin freeways to tollways!
Smarter options do exist.
In the short term, the $700 million tax dollars shouldn’t be spent on toll roads as Sen. Watson plans, but instead, our tax dollars intended for freeways should be spent on cost efficient non-toll solutions such as: Variable speed limits, ramp metering, HOV lanes without tolls, reversible/barriered lanes for peak periods, parkways (like fix290.org), pass through financing, more arterial lane miles, better incident management and advance computerized control of traffic signals.
In the long term we must index the gas tax. The Texas Transportation Institute report states that more tolls are simply NOT needed - that indexing the gas tax and using the revenue to pay off bonds allows freeways to be built right now.
Once placed, the tolls will NEVER be removed from our public highways. In contrast, the Ledge has the opportunity to index the gas tax every two years.
Sal Costello
Founder of People for Efficient Transportation
http://salcostello.blogspot.com/
Did you see the ad for the Austonian in the New Yorker? I wonder if it's a special Texas printing or if they're advertising it nationally.
The condos under construction are pricey, but if you take a look at existing downtown condos for sale, you will see that the prices are not as high as many portray. Downtown condos can be purchased at the same price points as homes in the suburbs, of course the square footage will be much smaller, but that is the trade off.
Regarding getting people out of their automobiles, in my opinion the best way to do this is to reduce the number of parking spaces available. Take college campuses for example, UT, it is a great example of a vibrant pedestrian environment resulting from a lack of parking.
Great logic. They cost the same but they're not the same. No wonder the 5000 sq. ft. house next to me is 3x as much as my 1500 sq. ft. home. But I guess he lives down the street to the left so that's the trade off.
"UT, it is a great example of a vibrant pedestrian environment resulting from a lack of parking."
You're kidding, right?
With all the garages they've built around UT in the past 10 years and all the traffic in that area...
You have got to be kidding.