Austin lives up to its reputation
NY Times:
I got my undergraduate degree in three years and went to Marine Corps OCS and later made it to Vietnam. When I came back to go to law school in 69 the anti-war left had become much more dominant on campus. By the time I graduated from law school in 71 the voting age had been lowered and the local politics turned to the left. People were smoking dope at parties and Oat Willie was selling "Keep Austin Weird" t-shirts around that time. I was too busy studying and trying to graduate in two years to engage in such activity.
Today the population is over a million and traffic is difficult. The city government seems more focused on changing the names of streets than developing a transportation plan that makes sense. UT has twice as many students now and they are still impacting local elections even though they are outnumbered by the non-student population. Part of Austin's current weirdness is that it supports liberals. The local government has become a hostile environment for conservatives who dominate the state's politics outside its city limits.
Austin has managed to survive its terrible city government and its terrible traffic problems and terrible downtown parking situation. When I first arrived in Austin in the mid-1960s the city government was dominated by local business leaders and its population was around 250,000. About 20,000 of those were students at the University of Texas. It was a place where no matter how weird your politics you could probably find a few people to agree with you.With Tech Expansion, Austin is Still Weird. It’s Just More Wired Now, Too
Austin’s reputation as a Silicon Hills tech hub got a boost, in both scale and buzz, from Apple’s recently announced plans for a new $1 billion campus.
I got my undergraduate degree in three years and went to Marine Corps OCS and later made it to Vietnam. When I came back to go to law school in 69 the anti-war left had become much more dominant on campus. By the time I graduated from law school in 71 the voting age had been lowered and the local politics turned to the left. People were smoking dope at parties and Oat Willie was selling "Keep Austin Weird" t-shirts around that time. I was too busy studying and trying to graduate in two years to engage in such activity.
Today the population is over a million and traffic is difficult. The city government seems more focused on changing the names of streets than developing a transportation plan that makes sense. UT has twice as many students now and they are still impacting local elections even though they are outnumbered by the non-student population. Part of Austin's current weirdness is that it supports liberals. The local government has become a hostile environment for conservatives who dominate the state's politics outside its city limits.
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