If you’ve lived in Austin for any length of time, you've heard the story before: Austin has one of the hottest housing markets and is no longer affordable — even if it has cooled a bit.
Austin's population has doubled since the mid-1990s and we're now at more than a million people inside the city limits, putting the squeeze on available housing therefore pushing prices higher.
But the story of Austin’s housing market doesn’t start five, 10 or 20 years ago. No, this engine started cranking decades ago with hundreds of little decisions accumulating over time – resulting in an Austin that's not only unaffordable, but heavily segregated (ever heard of Austin’s 1928 master plan?).
So how did Austin go from a sleepy college town to one of the hottest housing markets in the country?
Over the past year, KUT News housing reporter Audrey McGlinchy and a team of KUT News reporters has been looking into a century of choices that got us here. Our new podcast, “Growth Machine: How Austin Engineered its Housing Market,” tells the story of how we got here.
Launching June 22 from KUT & KUTX Studios.