Quote:
Originally Posted by austlar1
Austin did not just become an appealing place where people wanted to live in the late 1990s. Generation after generation of UT students have been falling in love with this place since before I was born (1946). Back in the mid 1960s a very common refrain was something along the lines of "I would love to live here or stay here, but there is no way to earn a living." In short, Austin was long on charm and short on economic opportunities unless you were an academic or wanted to be an underpaid (at the time certainly) state bureaucrat. Austin started to evolve economically in the 1970s, and it was suddenly a place filled with opportunity. It was also from the 1960s on perceived as a great place to drop out and do your thing. The music scene slowly evolved, but it got started back in the late 60s or early 70s during the era of the Armadillo World Headquarters. The movie "Slackers" (filmed 1989 and released 1991) captured a bit of that alternative Austin, and it kind of tipped off the rest of the world to something that Texans knew long ago. Austin was weird long before the slogan got popularized. There is a great novel called "The Gay Place" by Billy Lee Brammer that is set in Austin and was written in the late 1950s or early 1960s. It really describes a lot of what was going on here at that time. It is a great novel, a political novel supposedly, but really a book about a place that is recognizably Austin. No, it is not about gay life. The word gay meant something different to most folks at the time the book was written.
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Certainly that was one wave of increased popularity. That's when my parents came here and stayed here, after college. Or, in my mom's case, after she dropped out and did her thing. (She ended up with a good-paying job anyway.) But I'm talking about the
current wave of popularity, which vastly surpasses that of my parents' generation. This city never could have/would have been given the nickname "Live Music Capital of the World" without my parents' generation and Armadillo World Headquarters, etc. When Millennials (aka the Echo Boomers, i.e. the children of the Baby Boomers) came of age and started exploring this country they found a kindred spirit in Austin and really for the first time large numbers of people started coming/settling here who had no connection to UT or the capitol. That element existed in the previous wave but not to this extent. Most people who come here now have no connection to UT or the capitol. I think that's a pretty good way to categorize the immigration waves. And, also, of course, there's the undocumented immigrant factor these days, as well.
Point is, until the late 90's, like most cities in America, Austin's downtown was a no-man's land full of blight that only a mother (i.e. locals) could love, so to speak. Then, Frost Bank Tower came along, and the Silicon Labs buildings, so slowly but surely the city started looking more respectable and living up to the hype.