Hello.
Hi, Harvey. This is Audrey and Austin.
How are you?
Hi, Audrey. Let me get my system
ready.
This is the last episode of our podcast.
And to end this whole thing, I thought
I'd go back to the beginning, to the
root of it.
So my name is Harvey Molotch.
I'm now retired, but I
was a professor for many years at
New York University, London
School of Economics and Sociology
at UC Santa Barbara.
I mentioned Harvey in Episode five
that Bill wrote about tech, but I didn't
mention him by name.
I called him some sociologist.
Sorry, Harvey, what.
Else can I tell you about me?
Harvey studied cities for decades,
and one of the things he wondered was.
Who run cities?
How do the political factions
shape up?
And given who wins
and who's in charge, what
are their goals and how do
they function?
In the 1970s, Harvey came up
with a theory, and it was basically that
the people who run a city are anyone
who might benefit from population growth,
from more businesses, more people
moving to their city.
That generally makes money for people
in real estate and business, from
developers to car dealers and
the politicians they support.
If you want to find out what
a city is all about
in the sense of the important
people having something they
share in common, it's
to use the city to
grow the city even
more.
The leaders of Austin have been really
good at this historically.
They've used the city's low cost of
living. It's great natural resources,
Barton Springs.
It's music to market the city
and attract more and more people.
More people need more homes and places
to shop, benefiting homebuilders,
landlords, business owners.
Harvey argues These people are different
than the people who simply use the city
as a place to live and work.
They have a great interest
in exactly what goes on.
How many people will be brought in,
where will the traffic lights be?
And they operate
through organizations that they create
and they influence politicians
and they stay on
topic.
All of these things working together to
grow and grow and grow a place.
And one day these ideas came together
for Harvey and he could boil it down
to two words.
I was walking down the street, and I
think it might have been just like that.
And I thought, Oh, I got
it. It's a growth machine.
That's what all of this is.
It's a growth machine.
Harvey was the one who coined this term,
and Austin isn't the only place with
a growth machine.
Harvey lived and worked in Santa Barbara
for years.
It's a city on the California coast.
Beautiful weather, palm trees.
Its population is about a 10th of
Austin's.
But Harvey says, like every U.S.
city, the growth machine does its job
and growth wins out.
There was a visible politics
of people who were trying
to restrain growth in development
piece by piece. No, please don't.
I'm against widening the freeway and
your arguments that it will
bring us more business.
It's not working for me.
I'm just here for the palm trees.
And then even though
most people are want the palm trees
and not the freeway, a compromise
is struck in which the freeway
gets its wind.
And it made visible
to me that the instrumentation
of the city, even in this
most beautiful of towns,
there is a operation
that can say no to
growth and development.
As we heard in episode five, Austin's
growth machine got tech companies to move
here starting in the 1950s.
It started with Texas Instruments and IBM
and then research centers like MCI and
Semtech, then Google and Facebook
or Meta, whatever.
And at some point the machine started
fueling itself.
The machine has done its job
and extremely well.
And then after that happens,
classical economics sets in as
well as in way anthropology.
People come because their friends live
there and everybody talks about
Austin is wonderful and
the music scene and all that and the
university and.
And more and more and more.
For the man who came up with the term
growth machine.
I had one question.
Can you turn the whole thing off?
Should you?
You can't just turn the spigot
off. All you can do is influence
the degree of the flow.
The deed is done.
What do we do now?
I'm Audra McGlinchey.
You're listening to Growth Machine How
Austin Engineered its housing Market.
Episode seven Grow
or Die.
In 2021, news broke that
this big international chip making
company, Samsung, was looking to
build another factory and it was looking
in offices in Austin.
Bloomberg reports Samsung Electronics
is thinking about spending more than $10
billion to build a Chipmaking
plant in the capital city.
The growth machine was at work,
according to documents filed with the
state. Samsung was hoping to get the city
of Austin to agree to a deal,
a deal where the company would only pay
half of its city property taxes,
meaning Austin would waive almost $90
million in taxes over five
years.
Once the maximum rebate on
property taxes in exchange for creating
18-hundred six-figure jobs.
Austin didn't end up winning that deal.
It's not clear why whether the city
was unwilling to offer those tax rebates
or whether Samsung found someone willing
to offer more.
We'll get back to that at the end of this
episode.
But Samsung not moving to Austin
made me wonder, could this
be turning off the spigot?
This is an idea that I've heard a lot of
people talk about in Austin that
we can lower housing costs by stopping
people from moving here.
People have joked about.
Though I'm not sure that they were joking
building a fence around the city,
there used to be these T-shirts you could
buy that said, Don't move here.
Don't give any more incentives.
Why would you incentivize someone to move
here when we don't?
They're all saying we have no place to
put them. We have a lot of people coming.
In from other states and they're moving
here to Austin.
And they're trying to push people out.
And to me is not fair.
This is not a supply issue.
It's a demand issue.
And the libertarian tech
bros who want to blame it
on central city people
when they are causing the problem by
stampeding the city with hypergrowth
and super-high paying jobs.
It's true. If we could pull a lever
and reduce demand to
Austin or greater Austin, there certainly
would be a calming effect on the housing
market.
Jake Wegmann's a professor of real estate
at UT Austin.
What he's talking about is the concept
of degrowth or limiting growth.
It's the idea that, hey, what if as
a city, our one goal wasn't just
to grow, grow, grow.
A lot of people I talked to cautioned
against this idea of degrowth.
They worried that the result could be
cities that have seen huge economic
downturns, Rust Belt cities like
Detroit, where in the mid-twentieth
century, companies left the city and
left people without jobs.
It's a critique of
growth as this
thing that must always be pursued
and in a capitalist economy.
And the argument would be that
to achieve true
ecological sustainability,
we just simply have to build an economy
that's not dependent on constant growth.
And so if you took that idea and applied
it to a city, then,
you know, then it might be more of an
argument about the housing, just as much
of an argument about stabilizing the
housing market as it as it is about a
sustainable ecology.
I tried to imagine what degrowth could
look like in a city.
Jake struggled to come up with an
example, a time when a city adopted
a policy to stop its population
growth or slow it down.
It's not really what cities do.
But then he told me about this effort in
San Francisco in the mid 1980s.
At the time, San Francisco was
experiencing this enormous growth in its
white collar economy.
The city's economy was changing.
Its traditional industrial activities
were withering away and leaving the city.
But the city was really growing as
a sort of financial hub, you know,
insurance, banking,
those types of industries
that want to locate in downtown
office towers.
And so there was a big boom in office
building construction.
People in San Francisco decided they
wanted to control this growth.
In 1986, voters there approved
Proposition M, a law limiting
how many new office buildings could be
built downtown each year.
The bugaboo at the time was
so-called Manhattan optimization.
People were worried that the essential
character of the city as a small
scale, human scaled city would be eroded
by these big towers, you know, sort
of taking over, encroaching
on residential neighborhoods.
In one article I read, supporters of
Proposition M argue that limiting new
offices would give the city time to focus
on building more housing, housing
for all the people moving to San
Francisco.
But that didn't really happen, at
least not at the scale it needed to.
Decades later, the city has some of the
most expensive housing in the country.
I keep coming up against something Harvey
said.
You can't just turn the spigot
off.
Austin's growth machine was so good at
what it did. We don't really need to
market this place anymore.
I always like to point out that in
the United States of America,
you can move anywhere you want.
And second, companies can
add jobs
as they please, and
people can sell their houses to whomever
they want.
So as long as those three things are
true.
A city is just like awesome is just
really limited in
what it can do on its own to
destroy demand for housing.
Austin used to have to beg companies
to move here. Remember Vic Mathias
weaving a bedsheet across a vacant piece
of land?
And in the 1980s, when Lady Bird Johnson
served quail for breakfast and Ross Perot
offered up his jet to get M.C.
to move here.
We're long past the time when the city of
Austin has to worry about trying
to attract new businesses here.
According to the city's own data, the
last time it gave incentives to a company
was in 2020.
The city gave an electronics company
$25,000 in exchange for
providing 65 jobs.
Mayor Kirk Watson wasn't in office when
that happened.
But I did want to talk to him about
growth.
Do we just grow or die?
Are those the only options?
His office said he wasn't available for
an interview.
Instead, they sent me a four paragraph
response.
In it, the mayor wrote that city
incentives are important,
but it's about what kinds of companies
and jobs we bring to Austin.
I want to note that when Watson was first
mayor in the late nineties, he brought a
lot of tech companies here.
But he said now he's quote unquote,
relentlessly focused on making
sure any new jobs get filled by people
already living here
regardless. Almost 50,000
people moved to the Austin area last
year. How we respond to this population
growth is the other part of the equation,
because how we respond determines who can
afford to live here.
We can't put the growth machine back in
the box.
Maybe we can slow it down, but we can't
turn it off.
So what do we do?
As much as I hear people talk about
limiting demand, how can we get people
to stop moving here?
I also hear people question supply
question the idea that building more
homes will do anything or much
to make housing more affordable.
You keep saying that simply building more
creates affordability.
But you never give us the numbers to
prove it. If you tell a lie big enough
and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it.
That saying that has been floating around
was coined by Joseph Goebbels.
I don't think it's my responsibility to
find people moving into the city
from California by breaking up my
lot and putting a to use on my light
too. That is not my responsibility.
And I didn't work 31 years for what I've
got today to let that happen.
Okay. My name's Daryl Slusher.
I moved to Austin in 1976
from Houston, a native of Roanoke,
Virginia.
Daryl worked as a journalist and then
later won a seat on the Austin City
Council in the 1990s.
He actually served with Kirk Watson
during his first term as mayor.
Daryl is one of many people in the city
who say increasing supply or building
more housing won't do much to
bring down the price of housing.
I'd say there needs to be a little
skepticism to that
and there seems to be a lot of people
just follow this narrative, but don't
answer those questions like that for me
to provide any examples
of where this strategy has actually
worked to bring affordability.
Daryl says he's skeptical because he just
hasn't seen it happen in Austin.
We were leading the nation in apartment
building there.
Why did that bring affordability?
Daryl's right. Developers are building a
ton of apartments in the Austin area,
in the city and the surrounding suburbs.
One firm estimates there are about 44,000
new apartments being built right now,
according to people who analyze these
numbers. This is the most we've ever
built at once.
But here's the thing.
Rent is going down at least
a little bit.
Okay. Good news. If you rent in Austin,
Price is starting to cool off a little
slowly, but it's happening.
The average price of rent dropped nearly
4% this summer.
Put another way, rents are about $50
a month cheaper than this time last
year.
But the skepticism about housing supply
remains.
It seems to be just that an ideology or
a theory. But nobody can tell me where
this work.
Before I a rate
I'm certain of some market could.
Show that turnover so far really
haven't seen any examples.
So what we find is that
an overwhelming number
of Americans don't think
that an increase to
the region's housing supply will have
any effect on housing prices.
Stan Oklobdzija is a professor of public
policy in New Orleans.
Last year, he and researchers in
California wanted to figure out if
something he had noticed was true,
that Americans believe supply and demand
when it comes to really any commodity,
anything you can buy.
But don't believe it when it comes to
housing.
Yeah, So we were we're curious about that
as well. So we thought maybe people just
aren't really good about reasoning about
markets.
So we decided to ask a bunch of other
questions in the survey
about how they believe markets
for.
Stan and his colleagues surveyed a bunch
of people asking them about various
scenarios where supply and demand might
affect the price of something.
So we asked questions that people
are pretty familiar with.
Consider something that happened at the
beginning of the pandemic.
Remember when supply chains got all
messed up and people who make new cars
couldn't get parts?
Suddenly used cars got really expensive.
Good morning, Tom. COVID 19 is driving
the prices of used cars up, and that
means your used car is rising in value
instead of the other way around.
People correctly reasoned
that a halt in the production
of new cars would cause used car prices
to increase.
Okay, what else?
So we ask questions about a new
fertilizer increasing
grain production yields rate, and what
effect that would have on food prices.
Grain prices go down, people said
it's basic economics.
When more people want something, the
price of that thing goes up unless
someone makes more of that thing.
We ask about a program of job
training for plumbers, for high school
students, right? That's going to increase
the number of plumbers.
And what that will do to the average wage
of a plumber.
More plumbers, less pay.
But then when they get to housing, some
sort of mental switch flips
and all of a sudden
housing supply has no effect
on housing price.
People just don't think housing
is a market like other
commodity markets.
Right. So somehow
housing is different.
The laws of supply and demand don't
apply to housing and housing.
Price inflation is either the result
of. Various actors
off in the market or some
sort of government interference or
something to that effect.
Stan and his fellow researchers weren't
able to figure out why people don't think
supply and demand pertains to housing.
But he said it might be because of how we
see housing prices go up in
our own neighborhoods.
They see new condo
going up. They see prices
on Zillow also going up.
And they pair the two together.
Right. It's like people thinking
that an evacuation causes
hurricanes because they see people
packing up their cars and heading
for higher ground and then a hurricane
comes. Right.
So sort of one causes the other.
Lots of studies have shown that a greater
supply of housing either slows the rise
of housing prices or brings them down.
I'll take one example.
In 2021, a researcher looked at housing
in San Francisco.
She found that when new apartments were
built in a neighborhood, the monthly rent
on nearby apartments went down anywhere
from 1 to 2%,
1 to 2%.
Look, that's not a lot.
If you pay 1600 dollars a month in
rent, which is the average in Austin,
that's a drop of about $32
a month, which is significant
when we consider that just last year,
rents in Austin went up nearly 25%.
But yeah, $30 a month,
not great.
Which brings me to this last point.
That building and building and building
will likely only get us so far.
Here's Jake Wegman again.
The unsatisfying point is
that, Mark reconstruction
is probably a lot better at reducing
the rate of growth than it is and
actually bringing prices down, because if
you bring prices down, then you take
away the incentive for people to to build
things.
Most of the housing in Austin and across
the country is private.
It's built for profit.
You're living in it and someone is making
money off of it.
Maybe that's a landlord, a bank.
You the homeowner.
Capitalism, baby.
And so if housing gets too cheap,
there's less profit to make and less
incentive to build more of it.
So what do we do?
More after the break.
Late last year, I went to this gathering
in East Austin.
It was outdoors.
There were tents, a stage,
bunch of politicians, coffee pastries,
breakfast tacos.
Kind of your typical bureaucratic press
conference.
So tell me where we are right now and why
we're here today.
So today we are
at the Pathways at Rosewood Courts,
at Chicon and Cornell
Streets in East Austin.
And we are here celebrating
the long anticipated, long
awaited groundbreaking for
the Pathways of Rosewood Courts Project.
Rosewood Courts is one of the oldest
public housing complexes, not just
in Austin, but in the country.
And on this day in December, a bunch of
politicians had gathered to make a big
announcement.
Here's former Mayor Steve Adler.
Let me let me first begin by
thanking the residents of Rosewood
courts for inviting the community to
your home today
to be part of this celebration.
Just beyond the tent where the
politicians were speaking were these
barrack style brick homes built just
before World War Two.
At the time, this housing was segregated.
Black people lived here at Rosewood
Courts, Hispanic and white people
in other public housing in other parts
of Austin.
But these crumbling brick buildings were
set to be torn down and replaced.
That's what everyone was there to
celebrate.
On the outside, the facades will be
returned to how they looked in the late
1930s the flat roofs, the restored
windows, the original brick
restored to recapture, to really
recapture the beautiful, the beauty of
house architecture.
Then the politicians and bureaucrats,
that thing they do where they take these
fancy shovels and they pretend to shovel
dirt to kick off the building of
something new.
We'll do the ceremonial shoveling of the
first group of dirt.
Public housing is subsidized housing.
The government in this case, typically
the federal government pays or waives
part of someone's rent.
Now, not everyone can get public housing.
You have to earn a pretty low income.
But whatever income you do make, you pay
about a third of it towards your rent.
So if you earn $3,000 a month,
900 of that goes to housing.
Like I said at this press conference,
there were local politicians, people
who work for the housing authority.
And then there was Lucy Baines Johnson,
the daughter of former President Lyndon
Johnson.
I remember those wonderful words
of hope that came
from Martin Luther King when
he said, I have a dream.
Before he was vice president and before
he was president, LBJ represented Austin
in Congress.
He worked to get money for public housing
and he brought that money to Austin.
Well, after Lyndon Johnson
walked these grounds
some nearly 80 years ago as a young
congressman, he
had a dream.
He had a purpose.
And all I can tell you is
when the roll is called up yonder
over on the other shore,
I hope you remember
how much he cared,
how hard he tried.
The government began funding public
housing in the 1930s because
there was a shortage of housing for
families who didn't earn a ton of money.
More and more, they couldn't afford
private housing.
The origins of public housing are
complex. Again, it was originally
segregated.
And oftentimes governments would bulldoze
the homes of low income people
in order to build this government
housing.
But public housing has persisted as one
of the largest and most stable kinds
of housing for people who otherwise could
not afford to rent an apartment.
The model of public housing isn't for
profit. It's to house people,
which is one tenet of this concept of
de-growth or post growth that
I didn't mention earlier.
Instead of focusing on growing our
cities, population and economy,
bringing jobs and growing people's
wealth, what have we focused on?
A culture of care, of taking care
of people?
This isn't a new idea.
Plenty of cultures prioritize people
over profits.
But cities in the U.S.
don't. People who run them don't.
Growth machines don't.
Which brings me back to East Austin,
a mile from Rosewood Courts and that
press conference last year over
here.
Over on my left, Jessie.
He's a neighbor.
He grew up and he said also down the
street over here.
This is Steve Quiroz.
He had just gotten off of his work shift.
He works for the Texas Facilities
Commission doing maintenance on state
owned buildings.
And then over there, where the yellow
door is,
that was my cousin's daughter.
As we stood in his driveway around 6
p.m., sweating our faces off, he
pointed at each house on the block,
drawing me a map of his street.
And then the yellow house.
There's another cousin's daughter,
you know. And then I got another cousin
that lives, like, not in a corner, but
three houses from the corner.
Steve lives in East Austin's Holly
neighborhood, just a couple of blocks
from where he grew up in the 1960s.
I lived with my grandparents at their
house.
That's where I was raised.
Steve lived in his grandparents house
until about ten years ago, when the rest
of the family decided to sell it.
Steve and his wife later got lucky
and found a house to rent owned by a
local nonprofit.
And then one day, that same nonprofit
asked him if he wanted to buy a house.
Me and my wife, we've been together for
over 30 years and,
you know, and we never really
dreamed of owning our own home.
But but in reality, now
we know that it is our home.
Working a government job.
Steve never thought he'd make enough
money to buy a house in Austin, and
he wasn't wrong on the private market.
Steve probably never could have afforded
a house in Austin.
But this nonprofit, it's called Guadalupe
Neighborhood Development Corporation,
has this housing model that makes it a
lot easier to buy a house and to
stay in that house.
It's a thing called a community land
trust.
Mark Rogers runs the nonprofit.
A simple way to describe it in the
traditional sense of community land
trust. The land gets
held by a nonprofit or public entity,
and it's leased usually long term.
Typically 99 years to a home buyer.
In Austin, land is so expensive,
a piece of land in the central city with
nothing on it.
So no house just vacant
will sell for $200,000
at least.
That's because there's so much demand for
land. So when you buy a house now,
you're mostly paying for the land
with the community land trust.
The land under the house is owned by
the government or nonprofit.
It's taken off the market.
The home buyer buys the house and
rents the land.
Mark stands on the corner and starts
listing the price of homes on this
street.
We were able to sell these for a hundred
thousand, a hundred thousand,
a hundred thousand and 125.
$100,000.
You cannot buy a house for that in
Austin.
These homes are set aside for people
earning low incomes and who have ties
to this part of East Austin.
And going back to this idea of post
growth of no longer using a city
as a tool for population growth and
wealth.
These homes don't function like so many
homes do in America.
The price of these homes won't go up as
much over time.
You can't buy at one year, turn around
a decade later and sell it to get rich.
So it's not a wealth building tool.
If that's the goal, then that's this is
not really the way to go.
But if you want to stay, you know,
in central east Austin,
you know, close to jobs opportunities,
close to friends, relatives, family,
church, all those things, there's
a great opportunity.
So that's and that's what people see,
basically, you know, it's why these folks
are here.
Back in his living room, sitting on his
couch, Steve says it's the only
reason he can be here.
I don't think I would be in Austin
because it's so expensive.
I hear people that
they paid so much a month
on an apartment, a one bedroom apartment,
and I thought, Wow, you know,
and here I'm blessed with
this home that I pay
maybe twice less than what they pay for
an apartment.
So even his wife had to spend a couple of
years improving their credit scores.
But in 2018, they moved into a three
bedroom, two bathroom house with a small
backyard.
They paid just under $800 a month.
That's mortgage taxes and insurance.
Zillow reports that the average mortgage
payment in the Austin area is more
than two times that.
The thing is that I never really owned
a home and this was
my first home that I owned.
And I this really mine.
And, you know, and then things
go through my head and
maybe they'll tell me, no, you're not
qualified or whatever.
But, you know, it was already said and
done. And we had signed the papers
and we knew it was ours already.
Steve's house is lofted so you can
stand on the second floor and look down
into the living room and the kitchen.
At first we couldn't believe
it. I would go upstairs and look
down and say, Man, is this really ours?
And we got used to it.
And like I said, we love it.
Community land trusts are just one way to
house people outside of a for profit
market, and they're not perfect
for one. In most cases, people still
have to qualify for a traditional
mortgage, which is really hard
if you don't earn a big income.
But Steve says it's the reason he
can afford to stay in Austin.
We grew up here and
you know, our heart is here.
Public housing, Community Land trust.
These are all parts of a solution to our
housing affordability problem.
But these are things that in our current
system only help a few people.
Right now, about 6% of homes
in Austin are subsidized.
We can change that by funding more
government or nonprofit housing.
But the current reality is that most of
us, the vast majority of us, live
in private housing.
Maybe there's little we can do now about
all the people moving here.
But studies show that building more
housing will keep prices from going
up and up and up like
they've been doing.
For better or for worse.
Austin's growth machine did its job.
Ignoring the results doesn't seem
like it's worked very well.
Throughout the series, I kept wondering
what if Austin could go back and do it
all over again?
Is there a middle ground, a space between
growing like crazy and dying as
a city?
And can some other place figure that out?
Drive 30 minutes north of Austin and
you'll find yourself in a cornfield.
Soon you'll see something rising
in the distance.
You can see the sea of cranes out to
the southwest.
At least two dozen yellow building cranes
tower over this flat land.
If you build it, will they come?
What are the -- what's that being built out there?
That is Samsung.
All Samsung.
This is Brandt Rydell.
You see, when the big chipmaking company,
Samsung, chose not to expand its campus
in Austin, it chose to open a factory
just outside the city of Taylor.
And this place is huge.
Or it will be when they finish building
it in a year.
Next to the construction site is a
parking lot fit for an airport
full of trailers For all the contractors
working to build millions and millions of
square feet of factory.
Keep in mind, there is over 1200 acres
here that Samsung owns.
This development is less than 20%
of the overall acreage.
And so what Samsung has
filed with the state that potentially.
There would be five of these buildings
here, not just one 10 million
square foot building, but five of them.
So, 50 million square feet.
And then ten, potentially,
ten semi-conductor fabs.
I undersold Brandt a bit earlier.
He's actually the mayor of Taylor.
And a development this big is kind of
wild in the town he oversees.
It's small. About 18,000 people
live in Taylor.
The population here has doubled since
1950.
Over 70 years ago, Austin's
population doubles about every 20 years.
Brandt grew up in Taylor.
He went to Arkansas for college and then
Austin for law school, and
he never imagined he'd come back to his
hometown.
There were limited opportunities
to come back to Taylor and
to build a life and raise
a family.
And like many small towns,
we saw leakage.
We lose these kids never to return.
But Brandt came back to Taylor in the
early 2000s.
He actually works for ERCOT, the Electric
Reliability Council of Texas.
The people we were all mad at during the
2021 freeze.
Anyway, when Brandt came back to Taylor,
he didn't like what he saw.
It was very much the town that I'd left
in 1989.
Not a lot had changed, but the more
I reflected on it, that wasn't
necessarily a good thing, because so
much had changed in central Texas.
And Taylor really
seemed to have been stuck in time.
And I see
that as one way of being preserved in
amber. A lot of things were protected and
saved, but then there were certain things
that had not progressed that I thought
needed to happen in Taylor.
And it was a little disquieting
that Taylor didn't seem to
be taking steps forward.
Brandt says this idea of keeping Taylor
the way it's always been goes back
more than half a century.
Go back to the old story about I-35 being
planned to potentially come
to the west side of Taylor between Taylor
and Hutto and everything that that would
bring during that time period.
And, you know, if the
stories are to be believed, the
leadership at the time didn't want that
disruption, one, to keep things the way
they were in. TAYLOR And so push that off
to Round Rock and Georgetown
and let us kind of do what we
do here in Taylor and just maintain
status quo.
So that's always been part of Taylor's
psychology. Let's just keep things the
way they are.
And if Brandt's to be believed, this is
not a good thing.
I know some people
like that notion, but it's not realistic.
Things are always going to be changing.
And so as a leader in Taylor, I have to
look, I'm not worried about
it today or next week or even
next year. I have to look out for the
best interests of the community and, you
know, in terms of decades of generations.
And so when Brandt got a call in early
2021, he thought, "here's Taylor's
future." The call was coming from the
judge who oversees Williamson County,
the county that Taylor's in.
I was already on my second bourbon of the
night by the time he called
me and he said, Mayor, I don't know
if you've heard that there's this
economic development project
that is looking
for a site.
And your economic
development director has proposed
Taylor as a potential site.
He didn't know it at the time, but the
project was Samsung's next big chip
making factory again.
Chips are the things you need for
computers to run.
It's not a tech podcast.
It's 2,000 jobs
and it's $17 billion
of investment.
And like I said, I was on my second
whiskey of the night and I thought,
I know I didn't hear this right because
he said 2,000 jobs, which
is for Taylor, that would be easily
double the largest employer in town.
I think we can all agree that Brandt is
part of Taylor's growth machine,
and the machine thinks what a great
opportunity to bring all these jobs
to Taylor.
We can really juice up the town's
economy.
So Brandt starts pitching Taylor.
"Pick us, pick us." Kind of like
that MCC thing in Austin.
Quail. The private jet.
Though Brandt's pitch is a little more
modest.
Taylor, we're really kind of a blue
collar, working class community,
historically speaking.
You know, a city of
-- you know, it was founded by, you know,
the railroad. But we're really built by,
you know, immigrants.
And and, you know, we
were a town of of of industry,
you know, with the rail here.
And one time we were characterized as
the largest inland cotton market in the
world, had the largest bedding
manufacturer in the world here just right
down the street, that that was part
of our history.
And I think I did touch on the fact that,
you know, Taylor had this glorious
past.
It's been in a
hit, a point of stasis now for
for a time. But, you know, it was ready
to kind of step forward again
and kind of be a leader in terms of
with the semiconductor industry if if
Samsung would come here.
This was his bed sheet moment.
Well, thank you, everybody, for being
here.
I'm proud to welcome
Dr. Kim to the Texas
governor's mansion.
And two days before Thanksgiving, it was
official.
After a thorough and
comprehensive search,
Samsung has chosen Taylor,
Texas, as the site of
its new state of the art semiconductor
chip fabrication plant.
The city of Taylor offered Samsung some
big tax breaks.
The company will pay just 7% of
their city taxes for the first decade,
which on a multibillion dollar project
could mean a lot of money for Taylor,
even if it's just a fraction of what the
company would normally pay.
Overall, the community is very excited
about the prospects for Taylor
with something like this project here,
but that is also tempered with, you know,
the understandable
fears and concerns about,
okay, what is this mean?
I mean, this is a big change.
When I talk to people in Taylor, the
reaction was mixed.
Some were excited that bringing more jobs
could mean more shops, more people, more
things to do in this small town.
Others worried what a big international
company would mean for their everyday
lives for the cost of housing.
But housing was getting more expensive in
Taylor before Samsung prices
started going up in 2020, as they did
across the country.
And now homes sell for 50% more
than they did just three years earlier.
Why? A lot of people moving to Williamson
County are coming from Austin.
Historically, they haven't really gone to
Taylor. They've gone to Round Rock and
Georgetown.
Brandt says that's changing.
Even without Samsung, we figured the
population of the town is going to double
by 2040, maybe earlier than that
now.
The week before Samsung was announced,
Brandt and his colleagues approved a new
vision plan for Taylor.
Basically, how should the city change
to accommodate all the people they expect
to move here?
You'll remember Austin did the same thing
in 2012.
Anyway, Taylor's plan calls for building
inward, not outward, so not sprawling
and building homes closer together.
More duplexes, small apartment
buildings among the single family homes.
Taylor not growing, was never
going to be an option.
Taylor was going to grow.
How was it going to grow?
Why was it never an option?
Why was not growing?
Well, I think Austin just being the
dynamic force, it is that
and the magnet
that it's become that
Taylor was going to grow.
This is it at central Texas is an
attractive area for people to want to be.
So Taylor was going to grow.
And as it grows, Brandt says, the city,
the residents can have more of a say in
how it changes.
Samsung provides some amount of leverage
for Taylor because before
a presence like Samsung in Taylor, when
I would talk to developers and we'd say,
"Hey, look, here's our expectation of
what you what you would bring to
Taylor".
The reaction would be like, "You're just
Taylor.
Who are you to tell us what you want?
You're lucky to have anything coming to
Taylor." So this is what we're telling
you we were going to do.
And you should be happy that we're even
doing this.
Brandt emailed me weeks ago to say he
like the podcast.
Guys: He's a machinehead.
Anyway, I realized I really
wanted to talk to him about Taylor,
about how he's considering this really
pivotal moment in the town's story
and how people are reacting to his
vision of Taylor.
A lot of my detractors and people aren't
fans of mine.
They say, Don't Austin my Taylor
and I think a lot of the things I'm
doing, not the least of which
is being instrumental in helping bring
Samsung to Taylor is
Austin izing Taylor.
But what I think of Don't ask me Taylor I
think look, we're adopting this covers of
plan and we're looking forward for
the growth and development of how we're
going to shepherd those forces and
mold things where to the best
of our ability, we're able to retain
the sense of community.
It's not going to be the same community,
but that feel
that we all appreciate about Taylor.
Is there anything that that you've
learned from Austin?
I look back and I know that
what's almost a stereotypical
Austin mind says, "Hey, hey, wait,
you should have been here ten years ago.
And, you know, about 20 years ago.
I was really great then." And, "hey,
we just don't want you to change.
We want to keep Austin as it is."
And I mean, and I
think of Taylor.
There's that same mindset we would want
to keep Taylor as it is.
Well, there are going to be forces
at work that are going to just run over
that that mindset.
And you can try to
resist it
and build walls and try to prevent
it as much as you can.
At some point
those are going to be breached and you're
going be overrun and you have spent so
much time focusing on stopping
those forces that you haven't thought
about how can I manage
those and shape them and route
those in a certain way that is
going to change the town, but
it will benefit us
long term where we don't
just get stuck in our ways and say
absolutely not perfect, going to fight
this fight is going to fight this,
and then you lose that fight
you.
It's easy for Brandt to criticize Austin,
to say Taylor will do better.
Taylor will figure out some middle road.
It'll figure out how to bring more jobs,
more people build his economy,
and also make sure it stays a place
where anyone who wants to can afford
to live.
Maybe our two options were never grow,
grow, grow or die.
Maybe there was a third option we failed
to see grow in a way
that was good for everyone or good
for most people.
A way that means necessary change.
Maybe that even means your own
neighborhood changes, but it's
a change that prioritizes people.
Austin has a culture of nostalgia.
You know that whole thing.
Austin was better right before you got
here. The bumper stickers that say,
Don't California, my Austin, don't
move here.
At some point, the ethos of Austin became
resisting change.
And yet the change came anyway.
And lots of it.
And now we have a new bumper sticker.
Don't Austin My Taylor.
This has been Growth Machine: How Austin
Engineered its Housing Market. Growth
Machine is a production of KUT and KUTX
Studios in Austin.
It's produced by me, Jimmy Maas, Mose
Buchele, Marisa Charpentier, Nathan
Bernier and Matt Largey.
Production help from Heather Stewart.
Technical help from Jake Perlman and Rene
Chavez.
Stephanie Federico is our digital editor.
Special thanks to Susan Paulson, Carmen
Llanes Pulido and Edgar Handle.
There's more at KUT dot org slash Growth
Machine.
I'm Audrey McGlinchy.
Thank you so much for listening.
That's all for now.