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(Andrea Guzmán/Austonia)
Austin’s boom over the past couple of years has seen a flood of tech workers making up about a fifth of all jobs and software engineers earning an average salary of more than $128,000. The city has also won the headquarters of giants like Tesla and Oracle and expansions from others.
But lately, it’s hard to ignore that even the giants are feeling worked up over market sentiment. Meta is reportedly slashing hiring plans and Tesla has talked of layoffs. Startup founders are being told to plan for the worst and venture capitalists are becoming more risk-averse.
Could all the momentum the city has gained as a tech hub come to a halt with a possible economic slump?
Scott Francis, the board chair of the Austin Technology Council, has been in Austin since the 90s, so he’s seen the downturn in 2001 and then again in 2008 when he says Austin was affected quite a bit. But he thinks the scale of the investment in Austin is so much bigger now, making him less worried about it than he would have been 10 or 20 years ago.
The Chamber of Commerce has backed the idea that the diversity of the local economy would make a recession less destructive here. And at least for some tech giants in Austin, job security is less of a concern.
“When a company puts their headquarters in Austin, like Tesla has, then likely the ups and downs of their hiring and staffing changes are less likely to impact us negatively than they would be when their headquarters are somewhere else,” Francis said.
(Scott Francis)
Still, there might be specific pockets of trouble in the economy, Francis notes. He said passive client risk should be something tech companies keep an eye on. For example, there could be companies that aren’t in crypto but serve companies in crypto, and that could be a risk to their status amid the crypto crash.
Christa "CS" Freeland, founding executive director of the Austin Venture Association, told Austonia that in anticipation of a downturn they reached out to Austin’s venture community for their perspective on what we might expect here locally.
“The general consensus is that Austin will still continue to be a great place to start a family, enjoy the region with better work/life balance, and also get a house that would have been too expensive to even consider elsewhere in the Bay Area or NYC,” Freeland said.
(CS Freeland)
Austin's desirability to live here is an important asset that will help it weather the storm. It's a beautiful city with great food, tons of outdoor activities and no shortage of festivals.
“As long as we can make Austin an amazing place to live, there's going to be a great tech ecosystem in Austin, because techies are going to live here,” Francis said.
The growing number of tech workers with their high salaries has made it a place fewer people outside of the tech sphere can afford to live.
It's a different tune than in the past. Ultimately, Austin began competing with other tech hubs because of its relative affordability compared to other regions, Francis said. In the early 2000s and for some time after that, people had to be sold on Austin, feeling hesitant because they worried the market might be too small.
“That equation has changed so much. It's kind of amazing,” Francis said.
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(Bob Daemmrich)
“You start with the signage,” he said. “You know exactly where the entrance is, and that’s for first responders too. We really want to make sure we keep up with visitor patterns. If they come in, they go through a system. Driver’s license, background check, which takes about a minute. We have a software system.”
AISD Director of Operations Matias Segura explains the overall school construction and what the entry vestibule looks like. (Rich Oppel)
The vestibule has two sets of locked doors. The exterior set has an audio-visual intercom, operated by a desk officer who has a view of visitor parking, the building approach and the vestibule. If allowed in, a visitor is buzzed through and then faces questioning and clearance by the desk officer. The visitor is given a card-reader pass. If a second person attempts to “trail in” behind another visitor, he is trapped in the vestibule until his status is determined. The second set of doors, into the main school building, remains locked and shut. It is open when students arrive in the morning.
Thus, the days of walking into the school, maybe waving at the principal’s executive assistant and strolling off to the cafeteria for lunch with your daughter are gone, a relic of a more bucolic time when “active shooters” were never imagined. But one must ask, what do we give up for greater safety?
Austinites remembered the Uvalde shooting victims in a vigil at the Texas Capitol in May. (Tony Fuentes)
Some critics argue that we are at risk of losing traditional values in the redesign of schools, courthouses, hospitals, churches and shopping centers. Writing in The Washington Post, architecture critic Philip Kennicott said the nation’s gun culture “threatens an essential precondition for democracy: its public space… Ideals of openness, flow, transparency and access will no longer be sustainable.”
Segura contemplates the question. At 41, he has held his job as AISD director of operations for four and a half years. Prior to that he was a consultant who led the team to build Austin’s new courthouse. His Austin and Texas roots are deep. He was born here, graduated from Bowie High, and went off to Lubbock to earn a degree in civil engineering from Texas Tech. He returned to secure an MBA at the University of Texas at Austin. He and his wife Joy Burson-Segura have two daughters who attend AISD schools. Segura said he and his operations team love AISD, care deeply about their work, and want citizens “to see us as partners.”
Back to what we lose in hardening the schools.
Segura says, “We think about students’ health. Having daylight, bringing light into a hardened facility, being able to access outdoor learning areas, (which is) hypercritical, especially in what we have learned in the pandemic.” Segura doesn’t like the idea of moats around schools (exotic, expensive) nor of classroom bomb shelters (what would teachers and students think about their looming presence?), efforts that are being tried elsewhere.
Healthcare workers receive the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the AISD Performing Arts Center in Mueller in 2021. (Jordan Vonderhaar)
AISD must juggle school security with the historic use of our schools for other purposes, such as voting, PTA-PTO meetings, community fairs, and, more recently, COVID-19 testing, vaccinations and food distribution. AISD does not want to end those uses, so the challenge is to design schools with separate rooms or places for those uses.
Clearly, Segura has thought about balancing conflicting equities. For him, it’s not all locked doors and blank brick or concrete walls. He stresses the importance of building a culture that includes shared responsibility of all school employees where, for example, a custodian could ask a stranger whether they have a visitor’s badge. All staffers should be well-trained in security measures, knowledgeable about new technology, and committed to working as a team to protect students, teachers and others. “We are working very, very hard on the culture,” he says. “Also, we need (financial) investment if we are going to move the needle.”
(Laura Figi)
Kennicott, the Washington Post critic, quotes the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist and New York Democrat, who said, “Architecture is inescapably a political art, and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular era were. Surely, ours must be openness and fearlessness in the face of those who hide in darkness.”
But that was in 2001. What messages will Austin’s new public schools convey to future generations about our 2021 political values?
“First and foremost, these are education spaces that belong to our community. Our objective is to create incredible learning experiences for our students and at the same time ensure that the students and staff are safe.” He said he wants people to view schools as “inspired,” places where they would want to send their children. “Great things are happening in that space,” and that teachers see a place where they want to work and where they feel safe.
Voters in AISD will decide Nov. 8 on a $2.44 billion bond package to provide “funding for improvements to enhance safety, centers on equity, benefits every campus, and addresses affordability,” according to AISD officials.
