Quote:
Originally Posted by car2004
The SA population has grown, what, by 100,000 in the last 20 years, while Austin has grown much faster, beyond what anyone would think - because they are more innovative and willing to take chances, and they know that if they want a continued successful city wherein people want to live and work, they must change and adapt to new, ever-changing environments.
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I will pick apart the rest of your comments in a moment, but I had to correct you on this. SA's (city) population was 935,933 in 1990 and 1,327,407 in 2010; a difference of almost 400,000. Austins (city) population was 472,020 in 1990 and was 790,390 in 2010; a difference of about 318,000. Percentage-wise, yes, much faster; but not so much in total. If we go by percentage, Schertz outgrew Austin and therefore knows what it takes to grow "fast."
SA has a density of 3,400 sq/mi while Austin has a density of 2,653 sq/mile. I only mention city because you mentioned centralization, which would mostly consist of the central city, which is why I didn't count metro #'s or size of suburbs.
The city built the police hq's to house and to abandon the old building and make room for a new courthouse, which will be alot larger than the old one. They moved out mostly for the fact that it is cheaper to build than it is to renovate. There is space for growth on the southern side of the lot if they need to add more sq. ft. later.
I also don't get your point besides needless ranting; if a city was more central, why would it need more people sitting in the police admin building DT? Isn't the point of higher densities the fact that you need LESS services to cover the same area?
But this is all pointless in for the sake of argument of public or government offices. Having worked in the public realm 1/3 of my life, I know that you can't build "extra space" just for the heck of it, unless and until there is a justification for it. For example, BAMC, or now SAMMC; they built a new hospital which added hundreds of thousands of sq. ft. of space to the hospital which made room for a couple of thousand of new employees yet until those people actually started to work there was there a "justification" for spending millions on a parking garage to house their cars. So where did all of those new workers park? Well they had to park and shuttle from Ft. Sam to BAMC until the garage opened for use. Common sense would say "build the garage first" right? But in the world of contracts with taxpayer dollars attached to it, you can't use common sense and assumptions. As for your traffic example; you can't build 10 lanes everywhere because it will someday become congested, you have to be stuck in traffic for a long time before an extra lane is put in.
I'm guessing the same thing for UTSA; they build a garage to house cars so that they can build on a parking lot, but they still have to build a parking lot to cover the spaces that the construction will take out of commission while housing all of the equipment.
This isn't only SA, it happens like this everywhere public dollars are used. Yes SA has serious work to do DT but it isn't all hopeless; there are over 1,200 units being built right now DT and that's just part of it. SA is looking to spend many, many millions to improve DT in the near future so its not like it is just being ignored.
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