Downtown Austin Areas: Significant Changes In The United States

The downtown Austin area is an example of how many downtowns have changed in the United States. There has been a loss of residential, wholesale, and industry land use in Austin’s downtown, along with a rise in retail, service, office, and parking land use. These changes of the land uses in city centers created new role for downtowns to play. This change of role can be explained by effects that suburbanization and globalization had on American cities throughout history.

If you look at downtown Austin during various points in history you will notice there has been a loss of residential space from 1885 to today. In 1885 the “residential space observed consist of single-family dwellings as well hotels and tenements” (Team 2 report). During this

An example of this is a park in Austin located on block 124, which is surrounded by Congress, Mesquite, and 10th street (Bauder 2015 map). This movement of the natural environment into the urban jungle was carried by the Public Parks Movement. Frederick Olmsted was one of the best known people working on this movement. He wanted to reconnect people to the nature that they were set apart from as a way to heal the citizens both physically and socially. Today parks are an important part of cities. Austin has a park and trail that is a major part of the downtown area it can be seen by along Cesar Chavez and the Colorado River. Olmsted wanted these parks to places were people from various classes and promote a sense of neighborliness, which I believe Austin’s parks does a good job

The residential space thst remained went through ghettoization, giving the land low value, and later because of gentrification the residential land became luxury and high cost living, causing a loss of affordable housing in Austin. This can be seen on block 41 which is surrounded by the streets San Jacinto, 4th , and Trinity. This block had residential space in 1885, 1935, and now in 2015 (Kumar 1885, 1935, 2015 map). Other time residential space was lost during the reconstruction of downtowns and was later brought back as luxury living. An example of this can be seen on block 19 which is enclosed by the streets Colorado, Congress, and 2nd (Mefferd 2015 map). This block contains the Austonian which are luxury living condos. When you look at this block in 1935 there was no residential land use only industry, retail, and service land uses (Mefferd 1935 map). Many of these types of housing can be seen in the downtown area and more are being built. Although there was a loss of affordable housing, there is now a push to de-gentrify cities and trying to bring back more affordable living close to the city center. Downtowns now are not only a place of business and entertainment but also a place to live where people can easily get to work, buy goods, and find