One thing that strikes me about North Austin is how young it is. The housing stock isn't very old, and most of the development that's there didn't exist before the 60s. It's not that I think either side of the river is better or more or less deserving of something, but I always feel like I'm in a different city in North Austin since I find myself in places that simply weren't there a number of years before.
And yeah, I'm a lifetime South Austin resident. My mom grew up in a 3-story house built in the 30s a couple of blocks east of Congress in Travis Heights. My grandma worked on Burnet Road in the 70s and 80s. She remembered it back when it was mostly farmland.
This is a really neat link to a historic satellite imagery website. They have images for Austin going back to 1952. I dropped in the address "11101 Burnet Road austin, texas" - which, today, is a Freebirds location.. Most of the area around The Domain was sparsely developed and mostly farmland as late as 1967.
https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer
To me, McKalla Place is the logical place for stuff like this. It's going to be more difficult to locate wide open land in Central Austin or downtown or even in parts of South Austin. The industrial spaces getting replaced aren't really of any historic value, and they themselves are only in those North Austin locations because they began to vacate the warehouse district in downtown half a century earlier.