Book Review: Austin to ATX

Quite where the boundary is between love for your hometown and simple narcissism is I don't know, but while the majority of the market for this book is probably limited to hardcore Austin navel-gazers like myself, since it does not attempt to provide a Grand Unified Theory of why Austin made the transition from small/poor/weird to big/rich/cool while other cities did not, it's certainly the best general cultural history of Austin that I've read. Patoski has really done his homework, digging deep into the archives for informed historical context and then leavening that research with revealing interviews of luminaries like Lance Armstrong, Richard Linklater, Liz Lambert, and a bunch more. Austin has always seemed to me like a large small town where everyone was only a few degrees away from everyone else, so I got a lot of pleasure out of learning more about the incredible web of connections between the people who turned Austin into a hotspot in food, music, film, tech, and so on. If you live here, even if you only showed up yesterday, you're participating in one of the fastest demographic and economic transitions in modern American history, and while I freely admit that there's almost no Austin-themed book that's too self-indulgent for my tastes, I think even a non-Austinite could enjoy this, if only for Patoski's real affection for the city. That, and the fact that you could construct quite a few great playlists out of the musicians he discusses.

Each chapter is immensely absorbing and offers a lot to ponder, but several recurring themes finally converged in my mind during the antepenultimate chapter "Keeping Austin Weird (The Looky-Loos)", which discusses how tourism has become an essential part of Austin's economy, and the complex reactions that that shift has engendered among us locals in an era when it seems like the city has been changing faster than ever. Everywhere that draws large numbers of tourists, or "looky-loos", has a basic dilemma: visitors bring in a great deal of revenue for businesses, often far more than locals do, and so selling Austin-ness to willing non-Austinites is not only a perfectly valid economic strategy for many entrepreneurs, tourism might as well be synonymous with being a "real city". The more people have a good time in Austin, the better off Austin is for it. This also cements Austin's place as a tastemaker, and one of the best places in the country to be a fan, broadly defined (Alamo is a movie fan's theater, bands of the world flock to our music festivals, Whole Foods redefines grocery stores, etc). However, even if the concentrated benefits to businesses handily outweigh the cumulative congestion and infrastructure costs to the city at large as our enterprises rake in hundreds of million of dollars, the distribution can be sufficiently out of whack to breed resentment and anger among the natives.

These concerns about growth and equity are also tied into the diversity paradox, which Patoski doesn't explicitly identify but which I think longtime residents feel implicitly, and which is also probably inevitable in any city that makes the parochial-cosmopolitan transition. Put simply, cultural exchange with other cities makes Austin more diverse yet less special at the same time. As Austin gets more diverse by exchanging stuff with other cities, we also start to resemble those places ever more closely, until the things that made us distinct are now universal because diversity increases on a local level at the same time as it decreases on a local level. We import NYC pizza, Hawaiian poke joints, and San Diego burritos, and export breakfast tacos, barbecue, and outlaw country artists right back. We're just not quite as special anymore, to the extent that we ever were, and yet people continue to arrive, because as an economist will point out, specialization increases with the extent of the market, and so size and variety combine in a virtuous cycle even as there are seemingly ever fewer "authentic" local experiences, however you want to define that. It also goes without saying that much of this bounty hasn't trickled down to the less fortunate sectors of the city either, who find their influence shrinking as the rest of the city seemingly leaves them behind.

Austin is hardly the first city to experience these dynamics, and one can only imagine a resident of Venice, New Orleans, or Paris rolling their eyes at our quaint complaints that there's an inherent difficulty in keeping yourself unique while the world wanders slowly up the sidewalk in front of you trying to take too many selfies. But even if the irritation someone feels at a tourist treating their city like a big Instagram backdrop is only natural (the chapter opens with a discussion of the infamous "I love you so much" graffiti wall at Jo's, which frequently causes traffic backups that I have personally had to endure), that peeving is ultimately self-defeating. A steady stream of people is enlarging Austin from a small pond to a big pond, and what kind of awful fish tries to build a dam upstream just to monopolize a particular riparium? Who would be helped if someone had discouraged you, or your parents, from moving here? If, as Patoski so copiously documents, the "good old days" of Austin consistently seem to have been just about 20 years ago, then right now is as good as time as any to live here. "Weird" might not be glamorous to everyone, particularly in bumper sticker form, but evidently the spirit that the word represents continues to charm.

Lame marketing slogans aside, the city we live in was built by a parade of self-described misfits coming to Austin, finding that they were home, and then doing something cool that even people outside of Austin liked. Creativity is the only thing that has a permanent place here. To the extent that Austin continues to enable that same ability to flourish and grow it will have preserved its spirit, and likewise it will have failed to the extent that the modern slacker finds that here is no place to dream. Seen in that light, while Austin has in no way been perfect in its past, the explosive growth that surrounds us is just a continuation of the trend that began with our founding, and while we might not be heaven on earth, we're pretty damn great, and the the more like-minded people who fall in love with the hills, the springs, and the river that provide our habitat, the better the future will be for us all. Austin is the kind of city that inspires this kind of passionate prolixity that strikes outsiders as so tedious yet so bewitching, and while far be it from me to tell anyone else the "right way" to be an Austinite, a failure to welcome the future is one of the surest ways to be wrong.