Austin Round-Up

by: Karl-Thomas Musselman

Fri May 29, 2009 at 01:48 PM CDT

• This is from a couple weeks back, but the Austin Contrarian had an interesting post that takes a little deeper look into the downtown Night Parking issue that bubbled up as a campaign issue in the recent mayor's race. Worth a read.


• One of the undertones that went unsaid but most certainly not unnoticed during the Place 1 race this spring was that Councilman-elect Riley was one of the wealthy downtown elite. A fellow Austin blogger did a little digging and put up a post recently that looked at the home appraisal value for the incoming members of the council. And while that may be a rough indicator of personal "wealth" I think that more than one reader might be interested to know that of those members he found records for (minus McCracken and Martinez), Riley actually had the lowest appraised home value.

  While his $358,000 valuation is most certainly above average, it pales in comparison to Councilwoman Cole's $944,000 and Councilwoman Morrison's stunning $1.4 million home.

• The City of Austin scrapped it's plans to go with a California company's bid to redo the city website. Instead, it's going to put out a new request for proposals that will include some tweaks that will make it more attractive to a broader range of companies. And of course, the work of OpenAustin.org is out there to gin up interest on what direction that new process and proposals might take.


• One idea that would be great to see in a new city website, or over at CapMetro's site, is an online tool like this created for New York City's subway system.


• And lastly, I'm curious as to the thoughts of our broader readership as to their responses to this statement by a former roommate of mine about Austin. He now lives in Chicago and to be fair, grew up in Pflugerville which I think greatly distorts one's image of Austin, but do others share this opinion?

  I hate Austin because it's a suburb without a city, sprawling across 300 square miles but containing easily less than one square mile of actually worthwhile things. It's modernist office parks, one-story houses with huge overgrown or dead yards on trashy streets, and miles and miles and miles of tire stores, gas stations, abandoned malls with fried chicken restaurants in the parking lots, and insurance shops targeted at people without Social Security numbers. There is so much pavement. You're always squinting from the chartreuse light reflected off of it. You can drive - and you have to drive, or take a 75¢ ride on an after-thought of a bus - from one corner to the other without encountering a single intriguing person or thing. There's a small downtown area, Congress Avenue and 6th Street mostly, that visitors see and rave about, but that's not Austin. Austin is reading road signs and exiting the highway.