by Mike Clark-Madison
I don’t know about
your
parents, but mine are part of all the hottest trends. They’re moving to
Georgetown.
Actually, they’re moving past Georgetown, on the way to Andice, near
Sun City but not, emphatically, to Sun City. The Madisons are not yet
old enough to get neighborly with Del Webb, and both hold high-impact jobs with
well-known Austin corporate citizens. So they’ll be joining the masses who
cross the San Gabriel Rivers, north and south, and the Travis County line each
workday. Their estimate of how long this commute will take differs from mine —
I clocked myself from Barton Springs to their nearly completed new home, via
MoPac, FM1325, I-35, and FM2338, and it took a few seconds shy of an hour.
Does this bother me? I doubt I’d be ‘fessing up to that in the paper (hi,
mom). But it has given me further impetus to free my mind, if not my actual
body, to follow them to Williamson County. Right now, the Madisons live in
Allandale, in a house they’ve owned for a while but have only occupied since
last November, when I took time off to caravan with my parents across the
desert from My Hometown in the California citrus groves.
I had just joined up with them for this road trip following a visit to
Portland, where one of those Oregon-planner types waxed to me about how her
goal was to keep Californians from screwing up the Northwest with their
transplanted California values. Suffused with the compact-city, slow-growth,
plan-it-in-advance gospel, I whisked my poor parents away from the former
California Promised Land, reduced to hell and rubble by unbridled and
unnecessary growth, and brought them to Austin which is — or was — so
different.
And now they’re moving
to Georgetown. Into a brand-new subdivision, where the big homes are sprouting
like rain lilies along streets bearing the names of significant women in the
developers’ lives. With deed restrictions. Without a sewer. (Which might
actually be a good thing, if you believe, as many do, that septic systems are
cleaner than sewerage.) No gas lines, either — all-electric co-op power. Water
provided by the drought-ridden Chisholm Trail Water District, part of whose
stores are going to fuel the decorative fountain spurting at the mouth of the
development. With Lake Georgetown at their back, the taxes low, and a herd of,
well, not the loveliest cattle y’all have ever seen holding their own across
Jim Hogg Road.
So my license to dis the ‘burbs and the ‘burbians, the Yankees and the
Angelenos who’ve taken over Greater Austin, has been permanently revoked, since
I am now the child of their loins. (At least I’ve abandoned any hope of
influencing the world by my own urban-homesteader example.) And far be it from
me to rain on the fact that, in Central Texas, the newcomers have a freedom to
create lifeways that are no longer possible or affordable in California. We’re
all well into dealing with the transformation of A-Town from a burg to a
metropole, where not everybody feels the same connection to a single set of
traditions and institutions. People moving an hour out of town to live, not on
a farm or in a glam Lake Travis view home, but in a (albeit very nice and
well-suited to their needs) subdivision — well, that’s part of the New
Austin.
But is it a part of a new Georgetown? What will happen to the Georgetown we
know, heretofore the first town past the suburbs, immune to the
travesties wreaked on Round Rock and Pflugerville, Leander, and Cedar Park?
While its Williamson County brethren grew during the last boom like zucchini in
a rainy summer, Georgetown dug in its heels, its loyalists exacting historic
preservation and economic-development initiatives for the town’s core as
compensation for allowing a modest level of growth. (Giving the lie, one
supposes, to notions of Williamson County as the last refuge of let-‘er-rip
Reaganauts.) And so Georgetown still has what the locals call Old Town, the
courthouse square with its businesses a-thriving, the old residential districts
where prospects wrestle to buy 100-year-old houses in fine form, even outposts
of an avant-garde.
This is not where the growth is happening. New construction can be found along
any trajectory from the courthouse, near and past the city limit. But the boom
is most visible on what Georgetowners call the West Side, across I-35. This
lies within the 78628 ZIP code, in which (according to the Greater Austin city
directory ) there are just under 4,400 residential listings, 1,015 of which are
new. That’s not just people who changed their address within Georgetown,
nor is it all new houses — you look at the entries for individual streets, in
developments like Serenada and Riverview that date back to the 1970s, and more
than half the homeowners have been there less than three years. Half of those
are brand new to Georgetown.
The most spectacular boom tracks in Georgetown can be seen north of the North
San Gabriel River, along Williams Drive, aka Andice Road, FM2338 and the
Lake Georgetown exit. Sun City is out there, a terraformed landmass that looks
about the size of Manhattan Island (it’s nearly two miles from the front gate
to the model homes, and it’s so big and unique it deserves, and shall get, its
own story). Mom and Dad’s new home is in one of five new subdivisions within
five minutes of Sun City, though once you pass their decorative fountain, it
pretty much reverts to cows and split-rail and cedars and Boer goats all the
way to Andice.
Between them and the interstate, if there’s a parcel along Williams Drive that
isn’t available for sale and build-out, I have failed to see it in several
sojourns — not counting the future bank, the future Scott and White clinic,
and the former country shacks available for future teardown. (The stretch of
Williams Drive actually within the Georgetown city limits — about two miles
west from the interstate — is already built out to Central Austin densities.)
The land-trade fiesta along what will surely become “the Sun City Corridor” is
unsurprising, even though other arterials heading west out of Georgetown, like
Hwy29 and Leander Road, are somewhat better, favored by their direct links to
US183.
On the flip, though, there’s also a boom goin’ on in some Georgetown
coordinates even more out-of-the-way than Sun City. Notable is the Berry Creek
Country Club, accessible via roundabout routes past the Georgetown airport or
through the sprawling and homey Serenada, culminating with trafficways not far
removed from their graded-gravel, county-road origins. It’s a good thing,
perhaps, to be so steeped in the rural Texas mise-en-scene, because once
you get to Berry Creek you will likely forget where you are. This is not all
bad, blessed as Americans are with the right to idiosyncratic tastes, but Berry
Creek looks, more than most lately minted Central Texas developments, like the
California suburbs from whence I sprang. I do not consider this a compliment,
but judge as you will.
The homes and lots in Berry Creek, and along Williams Drive, and in Churchill
Farms and other Georgetown subdivisions, are turning over faster than the
Clinton White House staff. The city’s planning department reports that it
issued 602 new single-family building permits in 1995 and will easily outstrip
that total this year, probably nearing 900. This is only the beginning, with
Sun City alone expected to increase the population within Georgetown’s planning
jurisdiction by more than a third.
My parents’ subdivision has 420 lots — almost all sold — mostly, according
to the sales agent handling the development, to Austinites “getting out of
Austin’s tax area. [That impetus might change: Last week, the county, city, and
school district all proposed tax hikes beyond the effective tax rate.] There
are some from Williamson County and some from Fort Hood, but mostly it’s
working Austinites, a lot of them wanting to get their kids into Georgetown
schools.” This profile appears typical of the Georgetown newcomers.
A while back, we were
surprised and delighted in “Corner to Corner” to report on the resurgence,
albeit embryonic, of a central-city scene in Round Rock. Should we conversely
be heartbroken about the proliferation of suburban sprawl in Georgetown? I
called a few friends up there, who in turn put me in touch with other friends
— many of whom ended up being people with power and status in Williamson
County, so they were reluctant to have their names used. Especially in
connection with this subject. It’s easy to tell, though, that the differences
between pro-growth and anti-growth, between Old Town and the West Side, and
between old-time and newcomer are pretty manifest. In the latter case,
actually, the split is between three groups — real old-timers, i.e.,
Williamson County natives; people who moved to Georgetown from Austin or
elsewhere between 10 and 20 years ago; and the current boomers. It is suggested
that this middle group, the first wave of George-town immigrants, deserve much
of the credit for preserving historic Georgetown and keeping some limits on
previous growth.
So the ramifications of the new wave aren’t as terrifying as one might
speculate. There are practical concerns, of course — what to do about water,
always in short supply in Williamson County, and about traffic, especially from
Sun City “and a whole lot of people driving slow-moving Buicks,” says one local
wag.
“We’ll have to work with our neighbors to resolve a lot of issues related to
growth,” says former Georgetown City Councilmember Doris Curl. “I think very
few cities are ever ready for rapid growth… [and] the decisions and the
planning that takes place in the next three years will determine the quality of
life, the success of the balance of business and community, the economic and
social issues that go with growth.” (As the Georgetown political taxonomy goes,
Curl would be identified as Old Town and, if not anti-growth, more cautious
than some of her former council colleagues.)
But such is the case with any community; what’s also at issue here is a sense
of self, a commitment to a unique civic identity within the region, which is
particular to Georgetown. This does not worry those who’ve seen Georgetown grow
before. Curl speaks for many when she says that “people choose to come to town
for a lot of reasons, but the charm and the history is one of the driving
forces… [The] strong pride in the community is one of the magnets that brings
people here. I think that the new people coming to Georgetown value the
traditions as much, if not more, as those who’ve lived here many years.”
Or, in the words of another well-known Georgetowner, “People who move here
tend to adopt the town and take an exceptionally strong interest in maintaining
and preserving it. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there’s a `here’ here.” Even
if there’s a whole lot more of it.
This article appears in July 5 • 1996 and July 5 • 1996 (Cover).