Texas is HOT!!!

The Census Bureau says that Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio were among the top ten fastest growing metro areas in the country. But I don't think the Texas state demographer's explanation is very complete, because it's very Texas-centric. He was quoted:

"People are running away from unaffordable housing, from the economic slowdown," said Karl Eschbach, a state demographer in Texas. "I would expect Texas to stay at the top of a slowing game."

I bet that people are actually coming because Texas promises the escape from two inevitabilities: death and taxes. I'd like to know how many migrants are baby boom retirees who are being pulled to the Sunbelt, rather than pushed by poor economies. The other big attraction of Texas, of course, is that there's no state income tax, so all your investment income won't be taxed. All the other states containing the top ten metro areas have state income taxes, but no other states had more than one metro area. Jake Bernstein at the Texas Observer has clued in to the demographic changes on the way in Texas, mainly increases in young Hispanics who need to be educated and provided health care, and how services are woefully underfunded.

How amenable do you think a political bloc of tax-escaping retirees is likely to be to a state income tax?

First Day of Spring

Yes, it's spring here in Maine, the first day of it, anyway. I can hear the wind howling through the walls, and Google says its 27 degrees. Huge piles of dirty snow are tucked about -- inland places have many feet on the ground still.

I'm about to get on my bike and ride downtown. Why ride? Well, because it's spring.

Mercury Hall Under Development Gun

People Who Got Married at Mercury Hall Narrowly Miss Serious Bummer.

What's interesting is that the church was hauled to Austin and restored by Richard Linklater's producer, Anne Walker-McBay, and her husband, Clark Walker. I don't know if they still own it or run it. Yet it would make another fine chapter of Austin's autophagy to have people involved in making one of the iconic Austin films sell their property to developers. Another PowerPoint slide in a demonstration about how to transform the human scale of a place to the scale of capital.

Round Rock Donuts

at the corner of Briarcliff & Westminster, says the neighborhood listserv. Open 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.

Coffee Rumor

There's still a rumor floating around that down the strip from The Nomad someone's putting in a drive-through coffee shop, no seating. Can someone give details on this?

Oh, So That's What This Is

A placeblog:

They're about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people.

I've written more here (and at our move blog) than at my home blog, and that this writing has been more satisfying, because it's been about a certain lived experience of a particular place. A lot of blogs are like this: an assertion of the inside of the lived experience of the ordinary. (Two lovely blogs I read share this quality: Little and Big, and Iron Steph Cooks.) And you thought I was vituperative and contumacious by nature.

The description of placeblogs also puts two things into opposition, the everyday and the newsworthy, which I used to feel very acutely, back when I dated a journalist who was too contumacious by nature to grasp the back-and-forth (or the antistrophe) I experienced between the public and private spheres. That experience would have made for a great blog. "After she interviewed John McCain, she called and I was making cookies." That would be stuff for another blog. One thing I like about my marriage is the resolute line between the public and the private: I don't think I'll ever write about the inside of this, even on a blog.

WP gets...a bar

If you've come looking for my review of The Nomad, the WP's newest hang-out joint, I've got to get there first, but when I do, it will be reviewed. Word filtered to the north that last night's opening was packed but loud, and it's...a bar. If I ever get around to opening a coffee shop, I'll swing open the doors on a Sunday morning, because folks will be looking for...coffee. Until then, and/or when we come back to the WP, you'll be able to find me at the Nomad, drinking...a beer. (Even when I have a coffee shop, that's where you'll find me.)

In my current neighborhood, the coffee shop just moved from a cozy shack-like addition (you've heard of a shotgun; this was a BB) across the street to a larger space next to the fine grocery, Fat Baxter's. Haven't been to the new space yet but I'm excited to see it.

time = money

A new language experiment: Try to clean out the time = money locutions from your speech, among them wasting time, spending time, investing time.

Report back here in 12 months.