Posted Dec 19, 2022, 12:11 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Austin -> Tyler, TX
Posts: 2,317
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Texas Monthly 2023 Bum Steer of the Year Award goes to Austin
How a funky little college town became the unbearable-traffic, unaffordable-real-estate, insufferable-tech-bro, inanely-precious-restaurant, expensive-BBQ capital of the world!
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The Austin of 2022 isn’t just different, it’s unrecognizable. Not only is it a surf-park town, it’s a prohibitively expensive one, ranking among the priciest metropolitan areas in the nation. The bang you get for your buck is terrible traffic, doubled property taxes, annual rent hikes, chain restaurants from Denver and Portland, Oregon, sidewalks littered with electric scooters lying flat on their sides, and a “culture” owned primarily by Live Nation.
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[SNIP]
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New Austinites may bristle at the age-old lament that things were better before they got here. There are even some old-timers who like the way the city feels now: taller and wealthier, more cosmopolitan and sophisticated. But there’s something broken in this place’s soul. Austin has always attracted people from outside the state, indoctrinating them as soon as possible, teaching them to love Frito pie and to make fun of the Aggies. It was a deeply flawed place—a liberal oasis that was also shamefully segregated—but it was still a defined place, an organic product of Central Texas, with limestone and granite architecture instead of the flimsy modernism that now defines the most newly developed neighborhoods.
We wish we could be as optimistic now as we were in 2016, but, frankly, we held on to that attitude for too long. Austin is too expensive to be as bland as it has become. The tide has turned. Head over to the surf park and see for yourself.
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(There's more in the article)
There was also a nearly 5-minute segment on KVUE about this where Emily McCullar, a senior editor with Texas Monthly, joined KVUE's Bryan Mays to talk about Austin's new, not-so-nice title.
• Video Link
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My mom and I visited Anna's Toy Depot at Brodie Oaks the other day, and a KVUE camera man popped in for interviews. Several other customers bolted not wanting to be on camera. One woman even turned around and walked back out after seeing him in there. lol Anyway, I'm the guy in the white hat. I was buying LEGO. She's had 5 locations over the years, and I've been to all of them. The first one was in 1992 when I was just a kid. 
Now we’re all going to want your autograph. 
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