AUSTIN, Texas — Austin has been bestowed a not-so-nice title by one of the state's most-renowned magazines.
Each year, Texas Monthly awards the dishonor of its "Bum Steer Awards" to the "dopes, villains, and terrible ideas that bedeviled our beloved state over the past twelve months." This year's awards went to U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert; former Dallas Cowboys running back Herschel Walker; Gilberto Hinojosa, chair of the Texas Democratic Party; "Floperation Lone Star"; and ... Austin.
That's right: the magazine had a few scathing things to say about the ever-changing Capital City. Texas Monthly published a takedown detailing "how a funky little college town became the unbearable-traffic, unaffordable-real-estate, insufferable-tech-bro, inanely-precious-restaurant, expensive-BBQ capital of the world!"
The magazine notes that while complaining about newcomers and change is "something of a local cliché," a pastime of native and veteran Austinites for decades, the change in Austin has gone beyond the publication's own optimism.
In reference to a 2016 Texas Monthly cover story that crowned Austin the "City of the Eternal Boom," the magazine wrote, "Bless our hearts, we had no idea how much worse it was going to get."
One particularly blistering paragraph reads:
"The Austin of 2022 isn’t just different, it’s unrecognizable. Not only is it a surf-park town, it’s a prohibitively expensive one, ranking among the priciest metropolitan areas in the nation. The bang you get for your buck is terrible traffic, doubled property taxes, annual rent hikes, chain restaurants from Denver and Portland, Oregon, sidewalks littered with electric scooters lying flat on their sides, and a 'culture' owned primarily by Live Nation."
The Texas Monthly piece goes on to cite many of the issues KVUE has reported on as part of our Boomtown series, from skyrocketing rent prices and traffic congestion to homelessness and the city's diminishing status as the "Live Music Capital of the World."
While the magazine notes that "Austin was never as laid-back or 'weird' as it claimed to be," it was "appropriately grungy, and relaxing, and you could flourish here even if you didn't have a ton of money". That is not the case anymore, the article argues.
Ultimately, Texas Monthly writes, "Austin is too expensive to be as bland as it has become."
For more of Texas Monthly's thoughts on Austin, read the full "Bum Steer of the Year" report.
Boomtown is KVUE's series covering the explosive growth in Central Texas. For more Boomtown stories, head to KVUE.com/Boomtown.