Austin, Now and Coming Soon

We may be in the midst of a huge real estate and credit crisis in most of the country but here in Austin things tend to be a wee bit counter-cyclical. As evidence, I give you the Austin skyline now:



And in the near future (by about 2010):



This is mostly good news. It's certainly good news that planning is focused both on residential and commercial space downtown, because there's no way the highway infrastructure in Austin will support this kind growth if you've got more people coming in from the suburbs. The city planners here have always had a mindset that cars are simply bad and therefore that planning for more people using more of them is equally bad. This had led to things like the two western loop roads (Loop 360 and the ironically named Ranch Road 620) still having lights on them, with no major improvements schedule for another ten years.