Keep Austin

Austin is an opinion. Everything is divided up and allegiances are formed, over everything. When I was growing up my head was filled with pro-south rhetoric. Not the rebel pride kind, but the variety that announced itself as "south austin white trash and proud of it," though nothing but the pride was evident. I wasn't the only one though. Eventually I met other people from south austin who shared similar feelings of loyalty to their greater neighborhood, and even later I met people who lived central, which I thought was really neat, and they liked their neighborhoods just as much as we did in the south. Now grown up and living on the east side I, and many other people around here, like the neighborhood a lot.

But everybody hates north Austin. There aren't any pro-north austin slogans, and if people are saying them, no one hangs out with them because they love north austin and that's stupid.

It's gross up there--the mess of highways, all of the dead architecture. Who cares if there are good restaurants when you have to navigate the labyrinth of strip malls to get to them. I've heard it said quite strongly that that place shouldn't be considered a part of the city. Break off and go float up to dallas, assholes.

But that's not really the way we should be acting. Like it or not, that place is a part of the city. And us cool, more southerly austinites are really letting ourselves down by snubbing our noses and trying to ignore it like some kind of clean spot on the carpet.

That's why I'm starting a coalition: Keep Austin Homogenous

I think we all really need to do our duty and go up to north austin and start weirding it up. Make it habitable. Open up a coffee shop. Turn one of those giant car lots into an independent movie theatre. Comic book shops, book stores, community centers, ugly cars, and Mardi Gras beads hanging off of the traffic lights. Then we build stages in the dive bars, then turn them into gay bars and then the art galleries will start showing up. This works like clockwork if you just do it right.

But we have to face the fact that Austin is going to keep sprawling, and the urban revitalization is really only for people that have more money than anyone I will ever know. There will be suburbs piling up on the suburbs of north austin, and if we don't get in there and change opinions and show people that it can be an awkward, pretentious, dirty, friendly fun kind of place, then it'll never be anything but bad taste, big cars and boring living sitting on top of Austin like a grown out mohawk combed over for an interview at a day job.

So who's with me? Lets move to north austin!