This blog has something of an obsession with West Campus. It's the neighborhood that lives by upside-down, inside-out rules and it's a window into the Austin that could be. So when we got a hold of data about West Campus' growth, we pretty much had no choice but to put it in charts. Part 1: Understanding the scale and speed of West Campus' growth West Campus has grown ...
Zoning
6 things to like in California’s proposed transit housing law, illustrated by surfing
On January 4, California felt two earthquakes. The first was a conventional and thankfully weak earthquake in Berkeley: https://twitter.com/USGS/status/948920703125938177 The second was a political earthquake, emanating from across the bay in San Francisco: https://twitter.com/Scott_Wiener/status/948935146991841280 So, here are six things to like about the ...
Five Things to Like and Five to Improve for the North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan
Susan Somers is a north Austin resident near the North Shoal Creek area, President of urbanist organization AURA, and the genius gif editor who made this blog's most famous piece pounce. The city recently released a draft version of the North Shoal Creek Neighborhood Plan. North Shoal Creek is on the far edge of what you might consider north central Austin - bounded by ...
The one little rule that decides where Austin’s towers build parking
Not every tower in downtown Austin looks exactly the same, but there is one defining characteristic that describes almost all of them: parking. Most towers rest on top of what they call in the industry a parking plinth, the tower base where folks store their cars. (Plinth is a Swedish word meaning ugly thing.) Here's a typical example, the Seaholm Tower in southwest ...
Welcome to Bizarro Austin
There's a neighborhood in central Austin that everybody knows but only its true students really understand. It's a place where the normal laws of neighborhoods (or zoning ordinances at least) don't apply. A place where up is down, zig is zag, and 40-minutes cursing at bumper-to-bumper traffic on MoPac is 15 minutes humming with your headphones on the walk home. This ...
