Friend of mine showed me the future of Austin. It's called urban density. You get more people living closer to the urban center. We visited Crestview City Homes and Crestview Townhomes, a chic housing development that comes with a price. The two story homes are adjacent to the Capitol Metro Rail stop-- near North Lamar and Airport Boulevard. You get fancy, deluxe interior decoration with architectural flair, designed to conceal the minimum of space afforded to each unit. Welcome to the 21st century!
It's cool, I get it. We are running out of urban space and single family homes with sprawling yards don't work in a popular place like Austin. People are tired of sitting in traffic. So this is an alternative. And if you have a job downtown, you can ride the train and get to work without the internal combustion engine fouling the air. These places go for more than $400,000, so they are not very relevant to the discussion of "affordable housing." But let's face it, affordable housing has become an oxymoron. 'Cause none of it is affordable in-close to the city. Affordable housing... that's one train that already left the station.
The positive side is the lively social center extending from the north to the south, the east to the west. Austin is humming but, as Michael Barnes noted in a recent column for the Statesman, people socialize in their own part of town. Who can blame them?!
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