Got it narrowed down! :-)

[Aquitaine]

Boulder isn't Austin with anything. It's not comparable.

Originally Posted by Idlewile

"Built out?" What does that mean?

Sounds like I touched a nerved there!

I mean the median housing cost is double Austin's, so you don't have that whole problem of "where to put people who can't afford the super special areas" since they just leave.

Do you mean the city ordinance where you're not allowed to erect a building over a certain height? Do you mean it's "built out" because there's no tract housing going up a mile a minute like in the far-flung vanilla suburbs

At least you're honest about your liberal elitism. Yes, stop development, constrict supply, keep out anybody who can't afford a $500k house. Not all of it is policy, of course, you've got the mountains right there doing half the work for you.

I love Boulder, by the way, and I'd happily live there, but then I have resources to do that.

The public schools there have a MUCH better handle on marrying high performance academics to a well-rounded social and athletic experience than either of the top public high schools here, one of which I'm zoned to.

I'm sure they do, because that's pretty much all they have. You don't applaud the tenor for clearing his throat, as they say. My comment about the over-abundance of over-achieving kids comes right from the mouth of a CEO of a multi-million dollar company whose fellow executives' kids were dealing with the pressure cooker. That's fine for a lot of people (and I'd send my kid to a public school there long before I would send them to one in Austin) but like everything else, you can't even compare them. Austin has poor folks and a huge, bloated school district. Boulder, population circa 103,000, doesn't. It's idyllic in many respects for exactly that reason.

Yes, there are smart people there but no one is singled out for being average,

I didn't say anybody was singled out for being average. I've never met anybody from Boulder who wasn't tremendously nice and intelligent and pleasant to talk to. But if you have more PhDs in your parent population per capita than anywhere else, what you have a is a pressure cooker, no matter how 'nice' anybody is. I would like that just fine. Plenty of people wouldn't pay for the privilege.

Your comments make me think of a lot of folks here in Circle C who oppose any new development or road building. What they really oppose is higher population. They want everything to stay the same as it was 15-20 years ago, because with fewer people around filling up the roads and sucking up the resources, it's quite obviously more enjoyable for those who are here. But you can't do in Austin what Boulder did, both because we don't have the natural barrier to do part of the job for us, and because the city council in the 90s did their best to try and stop growth with "if we don't build it, they won't come" but they can't zone as aggressively as Boulder can so instead Austin has a booming economy with tremendous growth and all the problems that come with it.

But you can live 10 minutes a way -- like most do -- and now pay just a tad more than you'd pay here thanks the current Austin housing market.

You must have lived in Boulder a while for two hundred grand to be 'a tad.' Next stop for Idlewile: San Francisco!

[austin-steve]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

Boulder is beautiful but completely built out, heinously expensive, and so overloaded with super-smart folks from UC Boulder that having a normal kid in their school system will drive them (and you) crazy because they'll seem dumber than they would most anywhere else.

It's not really a fair comparison. Boulder is certainly a lot closer to paradise in many respects...but the barrier to entry is so high that even Austin at its worst is still accessible to more folks than Boulder ever will be.

I was speaking to the aesthetics only, of what a truly "pretty" location looks like. The point being, Austin isn't really "prettier" than Dallas or Houston when you get right down to it. 90% of each city looks like Anywhere USA.

Steve

[Aquitaine]

The point being, Austin isn't really "prettier" than Dallas or Houston

I agree. Austin ain't 'truly pretty' by the best the US has to offer. Neither is Houston or Dallas. Shoot, most of Anywhere, Colorado would beat Anywhere, Texas on that score.

[hornraider]

Originally Posted by Novacek

In what way is transit in San Antonio any more "meaningful" than Austin?

This... I don't think anyone can say that S.A. has superior public transportation to Austin. Cap Metro actually has a decent bus system.