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Comment by 71a54xd | Hacker News Reader

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You could just support new housing development and sane urban planning. Then maybe Austin will still be a pleasant and semi-affordable place to live in 10 or 20 years. Lots of moderately wealthy people moving in could be, in some ways, a boon for Austin, if you don't do everything exactly wrong.

(The alternative is to refuse to build new housing or do any reasonable urban planning out of resentment towards newcomers, and then watch in frustration as traffic becomes even worse, housing prices continue to skyrocket, and you have rapidly rising homelessness and crime. The same way most cities in California handled this situation.)

My comment has nothing to do with that - the city council has been a joke for decades. Their strategy up until now was literally "just slow down the process of giving building permits, that way growth will happen at a reasonable pace". We can see how well that played out haha.

As someone leaving Austin after 10 years, one limiting factor to growth here is water. All of the municipal water for the metro area comes from Lake Travis. There's a hard limit to how much growth the city can support even if infrastructure and housing was prioritized.

Not really, most of it comes from the Edwards aquifer and the CO river (which Lake Travis is a damned portion of).

If we stopped selling so much water to rice farmers in east texas at a hilarious discount per acre foot we wouldn't have a shortage. Utilities also haven't lowered water prices since they hiked them during draught conditions even though we've had a surplus of supply for years now. Rice farmers are still paying pennies on the dollar for thousands of gallons.

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