You've said it here atleast once, I have some friends who've agreed with you/people you've talked to the last few years, that namely Austin's basically like Portland in terms of encroaching elements destroying its previous culture, perhaps a year or two or so behind but still on the same path.
Austin was the setting of Slacker, the city Portland stole its “Keep X Weird” thing from. I get the sense that from the 90s there wasn’t anything particularly\u2026 wrong with them, like “inner-city ghetto” or “Rust Belt”, it’s just changing economies and settlement patterns since the moonlight tower era left them with a disjunction between their job market and their housing supply.
Which meant that it was tough to make it big, and you might have less of things marketed and priced nationally, but you could sustain a life on undemanding part-time service work, and ultimately this favored skilled local labor and creative community as a source of value.
One subtlety is that some of the types of people moving to Portland now were all along the types to move to the metro area for the last 3 decades just now they favor the city rather than the suburbs \u2013 “favored quarter” Hillsboro to the west, “basically Florida” Gresham to the east, redneck/Sunbelt Clackamas to the south, whatever’s up north in Vancouver if you can make it across the bridges. I’m puzzling out what that means, do you think it’s similar in Austin?
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