[ardecila]

Originally Posted by OrdoSeclorum

Austin has a lot going for it. It's basically the only hip spot in a triangle with points at Kansas City, New Orleans and San Diego. There are numberless individuals in Oklahoma, Texas and the greater Southwest who don't want to leave the region they call home, but would like access to tech employment and urbane amenities. In other regions you could consider secondary options like Minneapolis, Providence or Sacramento and still find that, but in Texas, Austin is the only game in town. Considering how much population there is nearby, it's a tremendous advantage.

I think you're overestimating the appeal of hipness - certainly the "weirdness" is a draw for Austin, but DFW and Houston have not been hurting with regard to growth. Plenty of people want other things out of a city. I do see maybe some correlation with highrise growth specifically, the people choosing to live in Austin tend to be more cosmopolitan than those in other Texas cities, with familiarity with NYC, Miami, Chicago, or other North American highrise cities and more likely to consider highrise living.

That said, Dallas' Uptown/Victory is no slouch as a highrise residential neighborhood and both Dallas/Houston will see continued demand for office highrises, assuming Covid doesn't kill the office highrise permanently.

I've spent a lot of time in Austin and the downtown certainly has room on it's streets for bus rapid transit or streetcars. There are enough four lane, one way streets for two competing bus rapid transit or streetcar systems. But with absolutely nothing constraining sprawl and a Texas DOT that is openly hostile to anything other than new beltways, it would require a sea change for me to imagine enough transit construction that would allow Austin to have a CBD high rise district that would give the city a "skyline". But maybe I'll be surprised.

Austin's light rail proposal is one of the better ones that I've seen in North America, they seem to have learned from the planning mistakes of Dallas and Houston's systems. If it passes and it gets built as proposed, it will be a strong backbone for regional growth. It's hard to build a dense skyline if every single building has to store and send out a huge fleet of cars every day. It only works in Miami because so many of the condos in those highrises are second homes.