Tech Bros Have Stolen Austin’s Soul

It looms, all glamour and glass, like a strange Wellsian monster. Floor by floor it comes, casting the Colorado River in shadow as it goes. By the time it’s finished, sometime next year, it’ll be the tallest building in Texas, at 74 storeys beating Houston’s JP Morgan Chase Tower by almost 20 feet. Yet even more than its scale, it’s the amenities at the Waterline Apartments that really impress.

This, after all, is a place that promises a new Austin, one, its marketers say, that offers “serenity in the sky”. There’ll be restaurants, and retail, and a hotel complete with swimming pool and spa. Far from a repeat of The War of the Worlds, then, the Waterline speaks to another H.G. Wells fantasy, one the writer envisaged as “a great gallery” where people could meet and live in harmony. Nor is it alone. There are 13 similar high-rises coming right across Austin, as its population rises and GDP soars.

This emerging urban Austin, a place of towers and cocktail bars, is fundamentally different from the established centres of the East and Midwest. In beehives like Wall Street or The Loop, office workers historically came in to work, then retreated back to the suburbs each night. Downtown Austin, though, puts residents at its hearts, focusing less on offices and more on lifestyles. Yet if that means amenities galore, this tidy vision risks redefining American cities for the worse — even as the old problems of urban dysfunction always loom.

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