[Ditter]

Yes Austin is liberal. The suburbs are more conservative. Houston is booming. The construction going on is astounding, road building, strip centers, highrise buildings, houses of all price ranges. New stores and business everywhere you look. Amazing!

[af_vet_rr]

The suburbs are more conservative. Houston is booming. The construction going on is astounding, road building, strip centers, highrise buildings, houses of all price ranges. New stores and business everywhere you look. Amazing!

I can't speak for the other large cities, but Austin is definitely booming - 80-90% hotel occupancy rate year-round, constructions business is going crazy, real estate business is going crazy. A major event or two basically every weekend. I keep thinking everything is a bubble, but well over a thousand people are moving into the area every week. I'm not complaining too much, the houses I own keep going up in value, and realtors are constantly bugging me to sell them (with their assistance of course).

And it helps that we just had a $400 million racetrack for auto and motorcycle racing put in, which has an impact of well over $300 million every year.

The only thing I don't like is they are turning Central Texas into another Houston/Dallas, with lots of the same old strip malls and boring highrises, and horrible traffic.

[piytar]

Really? Wow. Didn’t know that about Houston. Last time I was there about 10 years ago it was a dump.

[bgill]

"Houston is booming. The construction going on is astounding, road building, strip centers, highrise buildings, houses of all price ranges. New stores and business everywhere you look. Amazing!"

Same with Austin. There's urban sprawl everywhere. New subdivisions going in every day. They just poured a 0.9 mile sidewalk, um, "urban trail" is the fancy dancy nice eco-friendly green name, that cost the taxpayers $1.4 million dollars -

To the untrained eye it may look like a big, long sidewalk. But no, this is a nearly mile long "urban trail," one worthy of speeches at a podium, a ceremonial ribbon cutting and -- of course -- a hefty price tag. Linda Watson, CEO of Capital Metro says, "With engineering, design, construction, landscaping, the grant we received was $1.4 million and we got this beautiful 10-foot-wide sidewalk and the canopy of trees that we're going to have."

http://www.keyetv.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/cap-metro-unveils-14-million-urban-trail-10941.shtml

[Grams A]

Houston is booming.”

You left out the part about the traffic mess 24/7, smaller older homes on narrow city side streets being torn down and replaced by multi-family dwellings, etc. The growth is good in one respect but it is driving up the cost of living for people, increasing taxes and fees which the Gay Democrat Mayor just loves and causing an increase in crime.

Will be interesting to see who wins the battle between the preservationists in the Heights and the Mayor considering that the Village area residents couldn’t keep the City’s greedy hands out of their area.