[H2O]

Kevin, I should not have included comments on your specific neighborhood, because I do not know it like you do. However, I do know that your neighborhood is anything but walkable urban. Grocery stores (at least the large supermarkets we are most familiar with) are also not great examples of the kind of neighborhood serving retail found in walkable urban areas, as they are built on the auto-oriented suburban model. When I lived in larger, walkable urban cities, I often bought my groceries from tiny (a few thousand square feet) neighborhood green grocers that packed in just about anything you can get at HEB, with similar quality. There might have been fewer brand names of the same staple product, smaller quantities, and the varieties might have skewed differently depending on the specific ethnic enclave they were located in, but I did not suffer from access to quality food at a reasonable price.

Anyway, the original question that prompted this off topic thread had nothing to do with groceries. The question was "is Austin becoming a true urban environment in the south/southwest or do you think it already is?" and my answer is still: not yet. Maybe in another 20 years or so, with the build out of Project Connect and further development of our corridors, but we also need Land Development Code reform that will allow a variety of denser, walkable missing middle housing throughout our core neighborhoods to be able to claim a truly urban environment.