[austlar1]

Originally Posted by Tech House

Well said. I wanted to puke when I read about how the proposed development would "change the character of the historically African-American neighborhood." I'd be shocked if more than 3 black people were involved in opposing this, other than Ora H. I'm actually surprised that she was opposed to it, although my guess is that her opposition was based more on pleasing her gentrifier constituency, who are more likely to help fund her reelection, rather than on any ostensible nod to the history of the neighborhood.

And WTF anyway, it's on a fucking FREEWAY access road --- how is that such precious, quiet, neighborhood turf? I don't get this at all. Those last couple of renderings are beautiful, and it makes me very sad to think that our city is so small-minded that it can't rid itself of insanely cumbersome and irrational rules and regulations, which have already been christened as the worst in the nation by the consulting firm that the fucking city hired. Why hire consultants if you're just going to keep doing what you were always gonna do anyway? That seems to be how Austin works --- we're constantly paying millions for consultants and then we go ahead and do whatever we would have done without the consultants. And in many cases, we don't even need consultants --- we just need to pull our heads out of our asses and see how things work in other cities. It's almost always the case that for any situation Austin faces, we can find multiple cases of that same situation in other cities, and we can learn from them. But, no, we have to reinvent everything, except that our version of reinvention is "what we've been doing for the last 3 decades." Dumb, dumb, dumb.

You pretty much said what I think about how Austin works. Thank you!