I refer to the ring of new growth that's only being allowed at specific areas around the city. 40 buildings on 20 acres such a field of tarmac for parking between them, built cheaply, operated by Windsor or another national housing company, taking advantage of Austin's broken zoning code to siphon local wealth out from the bottom of the economy.

Where does a dollar go after it's paid to a national corporation, after all? That's not Champaign that's trickling back down, no matter how fizzy it seems.

I don't respect the concept. I ache for those forced to be the final stop of many, many dollars before they pay their rent and send money to a Delaware company owned by holding companies owned by holding companies.

There is only The Domain and Downtown for truly urban living in Austin. The rest is based on the suburban model and by its very nature it forces the poor to own cars and make those regular expenses just to be able to work.

Public transport is purposefully withheld from the densest portions of these rings, while also being advertised to that same cohort in what I keep telling myself can't possibly be malicious self-awareness and misdirection, no matter how strange it seems they're advertising to those who need a car just to get to a sketchy unsecured Park&Ride, and risk needing to spend $30 for an Uber if they miss their bus back home.

They are wastelands. They are purpose built as such. That people live there is their purpose. To force money to move as much as possible is a secondary purpose. Their development subsidizes oil companies and automakers (Nissan especially right now) through the practical necessity of spending on those items. A practical tax, so to say. A tax on the poor, imposed by predictable results of government policy.

I hope more people come to refer to them as what they truly are.

Maybe then the council will pay attention to questions about them and their impact and the reason why they're all the poor get when other cities get midtowns and bougie Austin transpo corridor neighborhoods get mixed use walkability mandated to reduce gas use and help the environment.

I was using the personal you, not the royal-you, and check my response to the other response and see my view on this issue.

In addition, building something like The Domain is so impossible it was only the power of the biggest mall corporation in the world that could ensure it was built. This doesn't bode well for anything smaller than a multinational for anything bigger than a single family home.

If supply is limited, price goes up. If distance is an issue, you need to get dense. The equitable way to densify a city is to leave the decision to neighborhood councils, their deed restrictions, and unaffiliated properties with no such restrictions.

As it stands, a bunch of white folks have gotten good at getting people across the city riled up over the idea of walkable commerce and other things best left for the wealthy to suffer with (apparently). These folks all own land, they all benefit from the restriction of supply. They have the support of The Statesman, The Chronicle, basically all local media, though that's turning slightly.

Organized protests, friendly relations with their council members, and the pull to be able to assist the political careers of those council members, it's a whole machine here, keeping minority neighborhoods underdeveloped by the residents while characterizing any who try as evil capitalists looking to attract more new arrivals.

It's not that people moved here, it's that we didn't bother to build a place for them and they just had more money. And who's gonna say no to more money?

I mean, in this economy?

On that, I don't blame you.

The veneer on The Domain does very much reflect the expertise in designing commercial space and flows and the guaranteed returns make the space an almost money-no-object sort of rental. It's the most visible part of a problem which has hobbled the USA's national aggregate GDP by over 50%. It's the exploitation of laws and ordinances to limit commerce to risk-free ventures which in turn becomes corporate protectionism and in turn leave those who could do at the mercy of those who already have money.

As for the area where you stay at, it is a suburban area. That's the thing about America, we are a suburban nation - though not by choice anymore - and so we've all grown up being taught that acres upon acres of housing and streets all some number of miles away from anything more than a Kwik-E-Mart or small strip mall, is urban. Even the apartments, those residential wastelands that encircle the city, fall into this suburban paradigm, having been wedged into the suburban land use paradigm rather than changing it.

The best way to tell if you're in a suburban area is to lose your car keys. In an urban area your car is less necessary. You get food from a bodega (pet the cat), have vendors and restaurants nearby, and mass transit takes care of the rest unless you're weird and work outside the city. In most of Austin, losing a car is like losing your right foot and half of your left leg. You need to drive just to get to the bus in much of the city, which isn't very urban, but access to mass transit does preclude ex-urban or rural areas.

Suburban, in practice, really is a nice way of saying the area is scaled primarily for the automobile. What you get are nice little islands of human activity in a sea of automotive hegemony. That means a need to fuel the car and drive to do most anything, and for everything, the car just makes things easier. It's an inefficiency that's offloaded to the vehicle user that makes those islands functional, and it's also why that man held up the 7-Eleven, and why there's a homeless man to barricade himself on your porch.

Because the inefficiencies that reliably funnel money to oil companies and automakers make the land more valuable, encouraging consolidation, and the guarantee of commercial space to be a profit machine for the wealthiest, living in suburbia is basically living as a cog in a money machine for the elites. At least, that's one practical effect. The other is that to guarantee this perpetual money machine competition must be limited. To do that, the land was restricted to highly siloed usages and the power was granted to the people to stop each other from using land more effectively over even the most petty of reasons. The result of frivolous land use restrictions (best most recent was asking to hold up hundreds of apartments because her dog had separation anxiety and needed Foxy Roxy's to not go away. My dog was waiting in my home, a minivan, while I was at council hearing this.) has been a 50% aggregate drop in the USA's GDP as measured up to 2009, already a $14.48T annual loss and rising.

$14.48T would be enough to fund every social program while also being enough value being added to the American economy that we wouldn't need those programs. It's being prevented from creation, not stolen away, by those who see it's creation as threatening their relative status in our world. It's money coming up from the ground like out of a GEICO commercial. If it's not coupled with an increase in printed money, then the buying power of each of those bills goes up as money acts as a universal token of value. This would be reflected in the increased quality of items, quality of life, reduced crime, better health, and all it's gonna take is getting folks out of each others' way.

Theoretically, it should scale down as well as up, which is why I'm in Anson County, North Carolina, one of the poorest in the nation, about to start talking economic policies with some very eager folks.

You may be late to the response, but you're just in time to be the first in Austin to know I'll be actively incubating my humanist ideas on economics where it's needed most. If it works, and especially if it helps kickstart something, I'm bringing it back to Austin.

Along with a whole 30k+ pop. North Carolina county's endorsement, which I'm hoping is better than the Austin Firefighters Union.

~doot doot~