The vibes theory of city culture
Who calls Fort Worth "the new Austin"? Literally like one guy.
Lost in Panther doesn’t usually publish two days in a row but I missed quite a few days in March. So here’s a little post to make up for that. Please enjoy my little hot take on a goofy debate that no one, including me, should actually care this much about.
To me, the question of whether or not Fort Worth is “the new Austin” makes little sense. It’s like a question designed in a lab to irritate me. And yet this is the cursed local discourse of the week. The Times of London kicked over the anthill yesterday with a tourism piece that was primarily a paid-for love letter to the Bowie House but which also declared that Fort Worth had dethroned Austin as the “coolest city in Texas.” If the headline was a gambit to bait columnists and internet commenters into weighing in, it worked. (Oops.)
The central problem — the problem that makes the question essentially meaningless — is this: When people compare other cities to Austin, they rarely specify what precisely is being compared. What story about Austin are they telling? What version of the city are they trying to sell you and for what reason? What little piece are they cherrypicking to stand-in for Austin as a whole?
There’s the concrete, empirical point made last year by the Texas Monthly, which used census data to point out that Fort Worth has overtaken Austin as the state’s fastest-growing city. This is the best of the Fort Worth/Austin comparisons because it’s actually meaningful: Austin’s explosive population growth has created genuine problems, like the fact that people who aren’t Elon Musk can’t afford to live there. Despite its reputation as a relatively inexpensive place to live, Fort Worth already has an affordable housing crisis. Will it become the new Austin because a bunch of rich tech guys move here and displace the rest of us? I hope not! But at least this possibility is grounded in reality, as some Fort Worth leaders are convinced the city needs more Silicon Valley–style companies. (It does not.)
There are also what I think of as “vibes based” comparisons. These lean on the historic weirdness and crunchiness of Austin, the version of the city mythologized for its music scene and its status as a late-twentieth century counter-cultural mecca. This is basically the sentiment D Magazine channeled when it weighed in on the Fort Worth/Austin question yesterday:
I’m not sure when, exactly, Austin stopped being the coolest city in Texas, but this year, when it let the U.S. Army sponsor the South by Southwest Festival, Austin let the rest of the country know that it long ago became about as cool as Mitch McConnell wearing jorts and river sandals at a Nickelback concert. Presumably the marketing departments of Walmart and the American Concrete Pavement Association turned down SXSW’s sponsorship opportunities.
Part of why the original Times piece is so annoying is that it mixes together the empirical and vibes comparisons, shakes them up, and pours out something new that is — well, basically it’s just more vibes. After name-checking Taylor Sheridan and his television empire, the article put forward a theory about Fort Worth’s new cool factor. The population boom has lead to influx of creative people who are, presumably, reshaping the city in their image:
It’s not just the film industry, though. Creatives of all kinds are making a beeline for Fort Worth like the cattle drovers of old, bidding to make their fortunes here like Sheridan and a fellow Fort Worthian, the platinum-selling musician Leon Bridges. Rent is lower here than in rival cities, work opportunities more plentiful, and studio space more available.
They forgot that Dr. Phil is here too, though I think we can all agree that, no matter how you feel about him, Phillip Calvin McGraw, Ph.D., makes Fort Worth substantially less hip.
But that’s part of my point. Just because a bunch of people who have jobs with a vaguely creative vibe are moving to the city doesn’t mean Fort Worth will begin manifesting the authentic weirdness that people — rightly or wrongly — still associate with Austin. In fact, there’s currently far too much faux cool for my taste: The LaunchBox Collective and its hosting of holistic wellness pop-ups is not exactly the 13th Floor Elevators playing at the Vulcan Gas Company. And as much as I’d like to believe Near Southside — an area in which I spend about 90 percent of my time — is “an Austin-like enclave,” as the Times put it, it’s hard for me to take that judgement seriously.