- Joined
- Sep 29, 2022
I don't think Mueller Airport would've had enough volume to actually work as a full secondary airport, plus it was close to downtown. There were rumors that no building in Austin can be taller than the capitol building (not true, just that there must be certain angles where it has to be visible) but I think the real reason was that Mueller was just too close to downtown (3 miles compared to Love's five and Hobby's nine).Austin would have probably been better off keeping the land as a secondary airport like Houston and Dallas did with Hobby Airport and Love Field, especially considering how undersized AUS is and how much land Texas has for new housing.
Yes, it's only around a kilometer walk to the grocery store from the southern houses, but that's about the same as a traditional suburb with larger houses and yards. All the downsides of density with none of the benefits.
It's just another cheap suburb meant for transplants and immigrants where maximizing land usage was the #1 priority for the developer, though with a little more variation in architecture than usual.
Yeah but that only illustrates how impractical it is to have residential near commercial the way urbanists want. Short of older, denser cities where supermarkets either don't exist (Manhattan) or are small and crappy (but more numerous) than their suburban counterparts (Philadelphia), a normal, large supermarket is going to suck the food dollars out of a given area. Convenience stores can be used as in-fill, but neighborhood stores will never get the numbers they need from getting buried in side streets. (Usually the neighborhood convenience store was on the side of the neighborhood accessible and visible from larger roads). There are only so many restaurants you can have, most of those need some sort of help from outside the neighborhood to really thrive, and most of the more useful "service" tenants would struggle under the high rent mixed-use demands (and more difficult parking). You'll never get everything you want in your little walkable bubble (even if you allowed for "no, I MUST eat the closest Mexican restaurant to me even if it tastes like actual shit"-type retardation) unless there's some unusual situation like a centralized shopping mall with some residential units built into it, and even then, most of the traffic is coming from outside anyway.
Some fifteen miles away, there's The Domain, the de facto dominant shopping mall of north Austin, where your typical higher-end mall shops (Apple, Coach, H&M) sit along parking access alleys masquerading as "streets" with apartments built above them. But in addition to being noisy from restaurants and other options, the Domain brings in people from all over Austin. It's wholly antithetical to the "city"...but then again, these people idolize universities, which have the same highly-manicured, highly-controlled (if not more so), centralized spots.
The thing that cities excel at is being able to bring other people in (primarily by car, at least in America), feeding their economic engine, and through both the out-of-towners and residents alike, create a bunch of stores, restaurants, and attractions. That is only possible through the cross-pollination of traveling in and around the city. What parts of New York is turning into is the same thing you get in third-world cities, your only retail options are shitty food stores and the occasional local restaurant because there isn't that cross-pollination happening.