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Originally Posted by N90
Disagree on several points.
The first point is that the residential buildings being the tallest in Austin suggests that there is pent up demand for high rise living and this is further evidenced by how tall and large these projects in Austin are. High rise living isn't as widespread in most US cities the way it is in Austin. This is more in line with Australian or Canadian cities than it is the US cities. Only NYC, Miami, and Honolulu have this much residential high rises in their cores. Other cities, yeah they have highrises for living but those are a small share of the highrises in those cities and not by any means a majority. In 98% of the US cities, the tallest building is an office building or a mixed use building that includes some office, which are well known to have larger floor to ceiling heights than residential and hotels. I mean to have a supertall proposed and moving forward in its permitting process during the pandemic is a very big deal.
The second point that I disagree with is the suggestion that Austin's economy is not sufficient enough to get tall buildings. That's a crazy opinion. Austin has been in the Top 3 for job growth and GDP growth for the entire last decade, the other two places on that level are San Jose and San Francisco. Austin is poised to soon be one of the first major cities out of the pandemic recession and into job growth, along with SLC. And the vacancy rate in Downtown Austin is 8% compared to 20% in Houston and above 15% in most major US cities, considering what the office market has had to go through since the pandemic, Austin is still a very tight office market.
Austin also leads the US in office space construction the last 3 years straight, it's Austin and Nashville as the top two for that. Even in the pandemic, there are large companies looking for large amounts of office space. Facebook is in the market for 1 million square feet in DT Austin and TikTok is said to be looking for a big chunk of space in DT Austin as well.
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While I don’t think lack of tall office buildings means there’s a lack of economic activity, Austin is just different.
Downtown Austin has been more Vancouver-ish than a traditional American downtown in terms of what’s being built. The state government is upgrading and building a lot of mid sized office buildings. Tech is now building a few large office buildings. It will look a lot different in a few years but most of the office is being built not in downtown like everywhere else.
I live near the Domain and North Austin is just now starting to look like West Houston or North Dallas in terms of height.