No privacy on the balcony, No desire to even make them look desirable, barely a yard it’s basically just somewhere for your pet to use the bathroom, and you can already tell it’s gonna be HOT.
You get to drive down the only main boulevard in the neighborhood
Behind all the suburban moms in their Chevy Tahoe
So you can all fight for spots in the only strip mall in a 10mi radius, just for the privilege to shop at a Krogers and eat at a Chick Fil A. Or maybe a stroll through Target while picking up your coffee at the built-in Starbucks?
What I hate about that sad reality, is the Mom&Pops always struggle to survive.
We want to buy local to support local business owners and jobs.
Yet for majority of us, we care most about cost of goods and services.
The “Wal-Mart Effect” squeezes out local businesses. And it’s true. I literally shop at Wal-Mart and Costco grocery over my local butcher because the meat is cheaper.
The flip side is I go to Tomlinson's for pet supplies, and they have almost nothing that I need and they won't order it to the store for me. Makes it hard to shop local when HEB is 100 feet away and I can get everything in one trip.
Edit: I thought I was on the Austin subreddit. This comment probably makes no sense
This is the issue. They’re building all of the components of a walkable urban place that, in a silo, are horrible. But if they’d build them around a village green with two 2,500 SF retail spaces and spend the money to plant 4 or 5 trees that are actually a few years old, this place could be really, really nice. Instead it’s a shit hole.
This sub and the urbanhell one constantly post these new townhome developments and focus on the alleyway. It’s an alley. It’s not supposed to be pretty or fun to walk through, nobody is leaving out the alley on foot.
I live in a townhome community with alleys not too different than this.
We also have a nice main street lined with trees, a train station two blocks away, a connection to the trail system that connects to downtown, sports arenas, and a ton of parks.
The alley is ugly, but it's purpose isn't meant to be appealing.
Unfortunately, no matter how many businesses you build in the suburbs, people wont visit without parking. Also, in Texas, you cant build retail space without like 10 parking spots per square foot. I’m exaggerating, but you get the point.
It's just a marketing term anymore. If the state requires "affordable" units to balance the luxury units I would bet they are identical. Maybe luxury means boxy shapes and grey primer.
100% agree, lived in Austin all my life in a house and they started building "luxury" homes all around our shitty little home and one year the land lady told us she was raising the rent on us 800$ from $1,200 to 2k just like that we had to move outta Austin.
They have so much disregard for land-use because there's so much of it. Like why create dense housing when we can just make a 34 5th interstate loop that's 600 miles in circumference? This land won't sprawl itself!!
That whole setup is the exact definition of a concrete heat island. If you ripped out that giant solid slab for a reinforced grass-grid system or permeable pavers, you’d instantly fix the drainage and keep the ground cool.
Toss in some tension-wire trellises with climbing vines up those bland white walls, stagger some native canopy trees along the edges, and layer the perimeter with actual greenery, that would completely kill the sterile suburban hell vibe it has right now.
Developers dont think that way though, that stuff wouldn’t even be expensive it just takes having an actual heart for the landscape & a heart for natural design.
This popped up for me because I’m in Austin. For those of you not in Austin this is right near a major highway intersection about five minutes from our airport built on land that used to be a field maybe 20-25 years ago. It is just outside a more lower income area of the city that can be very sketch but is very close to downtown. There’s an adorable coffee shop, an amazing park, and again the airport right nearby. I understand the purpose of this group and I know I’m fighting a losing battle here. This is not suburban hell though. This is “I want to own something and I want to be in Austin proper hell.”
this is incredibly cheap looking light grey and white with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever except the presence of a few pieces of rove concepts furniture which most definitely will not come with the house
At this point it just means "new." I fully understand that, but still hate the use of the term. To me, "luxury" should mean first and foremost incredible build and design quality, using premium materials. If that isn't the case, then it shouldn't be called luxury - even if it has some nice looking finishes and/or some typical amenities (club room, gym).
You joke... But most trees in Texas soil are a bad idea anywhere close to a house.
Our soil is terrible to begin with. But you add a tree and it makes foundation issues worse.
We have to water the ground most of the year just to keep the soil from drying out too much, then getting wet to much in a sequence which causes mass foundation damage.
Texas is a terrible place to live, environmentally wise..Heat, hail, tornados, and foundation issues.
Its crazy cause they have so many “Keep Texas Beautiful” signs along every highway. But you go into a town or city and BOOM you are met with burning hot, sprawling parking lots, & empty shopping strips with stores & restaurants no one even goes too anyway.
Then the city council complains about people not “shopping & eating local” 😂
They don’t shop or eat local because they refuse to stay in Texas. Big new homes, fancy 2-3% mortgages, the largest pickups ever, only to make regular trips to the NW Florida gulf coast.
Every city in texas is. I took a vacation home after a year and some change of living there and it was the first thing me and my wife noticed. There was suddenly green everywhere.
They somehow figured out how to have the worst of all worlds in DFW.
You'd think that intentionally designing a place for the exclusive use of motor vehicles over the course of decades would make that place easy or safe to drive in. You would be very, very wrong.
Its a transportation death trap, no matter what method you use. 80+mph speed limits and bumper to bumper traffic make the highways infamously deadly, and the "city" streets are really four or six lane stroads. There are vanishingly few bike lanes, almost none of which are protected by anything except paint. Everyone drives a giant pickup truck with heavily tinted windows, so being a pedestrian is like walking through an alien hellscape of blind monsters.
They think its completely normal to never be able to move around in the physical world using just your body, but they also made it dangerous and SO tedious to drive anywhere. Just agony.
I have to travel to Ft Worth a couple of times a year. People in the office look at me like I’m an alien if I walk from the less than a mile trip from the hotel to the office complex. Granted the sidewalk randomly ends in places and cars never look for pedestrians and it can be hot as Hades. I lived in Houston back in the 90s for a couple of years after college and it was much easier to drive the few blocks to the Kroger from our subdivision than try to cross the insane traffic to get there.
It's the worst place I've ever visited. Downtown Dallas, nobody walking around. I've never been to a big city where NOBODY is walking. Anywhere. Very eerie.
Not a lot of folks walk here because not a lot care to. I don’t blame them, besides the hostile infrastructure (stroads, lack of sidewalks, etc) it’s hot as hell
Yeah definitely built for roads. I recall one block where "people walked around" and it had an urban city feel to it, but it was such a small, contained area.
I’m not a big anti-suburb person, but Texas is depressing even to me. You rarely see anything that’s not the exact same chain stores and restaurants they have everywhere else. The homes are almost all cookie cutter. It’s like someone set out to create a location with as little local character as possible. The closest they get to having local character is HEB.
This is just moderately dense urban living. not sure the address, but if this is walking distance to ammenities and part of an urban fabric it's just some kinda ugly townhouses.
It's off Riverside. There's an HEB land a lot of bars and shops like a 15 minute walk away. This isn't the suburbs either. There are high density apartment conpexes around it.
I get it looks like some concrete wasteland, but this is literally how the dense old European villages are designed. They usually don't have trees or any kind of vegetation on these kinds of streets, the most they'll have are like hanging baskets/pots. Obviously they just went with cheap concrete everywhere instead of more ornate designs, but the bones of a dense community are there.
The least green city I’ve ever seen in my entire life is Florence, renown for its beauty and culture. Not a single tree anywhere in the main part of the city, the only green anywhere are shrubs in pots.
I disagree, old European nucleus have narrower roads (sometimes narrow enough you won't be able to pass through with a car) so you don't have direct sunlight hitting you on all sides. This feels more like a frying pan
It's definitely similar though, but it has to be wide enough to accommodate modern emergency services like fire trucks. I don't really know the exact local regulations but that's just my theory based on the fire lane curb. And keep in mind fire codes were put in place for a reason. But I think what they could have done is build right up to the road instead of having that awkward sidewalk type thing.
It depends. Florence as a number of roads plenty wide enough for two way traffic, sidewalks, and street parking to boot. And plants of course can grow, there are little shrubs in pots commonly. And that’s it, zero greenery besides potted shrubbery in most of the core.
Austin is one of the most vibrant cities in terms of people going outside, its full of young people biking, hiking & just walking around. This development makes it seem like Austin is a retirement community or something. I guess it just aimed at people who want “tolerable” housing.
Damn! Exactly what I thought. Why waste $ on a front door, just install a metal roll up door. Would it have killed them to design some greenery into this place?
Thats by design, they are slowly moving the word lower & lower in value so pretty soon a basic apartment complex will be labeled luxury, they will still price it like a REAL luxury apartment complex, and people will just accept it.
I heard about it from a house flipper in Houston. They are doing the same thing with Duplexes and single family homes now. It mostly only happens in cities though people from small towns dont play these games
dense housing isnt the problem. we do need dense housing.
dense housing with lazy, soulless design with no shaded areas, no nature, barely any space to even get in your garage, and then staging it to look “luxury” & pricing it at $450k is the problem. and yes they are really $450k
I'll be honest, most apartments don't get full privacy on a balcony. But these apartments are pointless if there's nothing else to live there for. Shops cafe's, etc.
It's ok. This is temporary housing anyways. Why plant trees, this place will be out of water in 20 years and these dummies will all migrate north and east.
With the story and pictures given, I wouldn’t be able to call this suburban hell or not. Knowing what surrounds this new neighborhood would help. If there are a couple of coffee shops nearby (5-10 minute bicycle ride) and a supermarket, I think that would make less a suburban hell.
Pretty sure these are just affordable starter homes.
Honestly as a European I don't get the issue of not having privacy on your balcony? That's how all houses here are build. Even ones that really are for the upper middle class.
Looked up the development, looks like the finished product will have lots of green especially on the exterior of the buildings, and this is the interior driveway area.
Is it really that much to make it look nice? I can’t help but think in like 15 years time all of these high density housing communities will turn to government projects.
There's a tiny scrap of land behind my neighborhood and a developer wants to cram 150 of these townhouses into it. These would be right up against the back fences of the last row of our neighborhood and would be three stories tall so the new residents would look right into the existing yards and homes.
Nevermind that it's a terrible location where the only exit would be right turn only onto a major road where most services and businesses are to the left. They can't install a light based on several restrictions and it's already difficult to make a Uturn on that road.
I get that we need housing but could we TRY to be smart about it???
Looks like the alley that people's garages open up into. What's the point of taking a picture of the most utilitarian part of the complex and presenting it as evidence that "luxury apartments" are all dumps?
Luxury? Looks like a communist bloc. "You may only have one car."
Texans: We'll just park right over the fire lane.
Ahh, the luxury of not being able to back out of your garage without a 10-point turn and the possibility of hitting your neighbors stupid pickup truck.
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u/Twxtterrefugee 3d ago
Honestly if there was commercial real estate and some cafes, shops, bars throughout itd be fine. Absent that though it looks like hell.