Austin at Large: Brightness on the Edge of Town

Last week's column left off with us speeding up Texas 130 to Hutto and then picking up good ol' U.S. 79 to Taylor, the northeast corner of the fastest-growing metro area in the country, which has until recently been deprived, or perhaps spared, the reverberating impacts of The Boom That Never Ends. That is changing quickly in the wake of Sam­sung's announcement last month that it would build its next semiconductor manufacturing facility in what is now a bunch of farmland on the outskirts of Taylor, with Gov. Greg Abbott in tow to take credit for a deal he had little to do with.

While the Korean conglomerate says it considered multiple sites in the U.S. for its investment of up to $17 billion, it semi-confirmed in its official announcement that Central Texas always had the edge, citing "multiple factors, including the local semiconductor ecosystem, infrastructure stability, local government support and community development opportunities. In particular, the proximity to Samsung's current manufacturing site in Austin, about 25 kilometers southwest of Taylor, allows the two locations to share the necessary infrastructure and resources." Note that none of that – literally, none of it – owes its existence to Greg Abbott or the state he "leads," which does next to nothing to help local industries, local government, or community development. Even the power to grant big incentive packages that Abbott and his predecessor Rick Perry fought to keep in the governor's hands for precisely these photo ops is made possible by the local economic development agreements – Chapter 380 (cities), 381 (counties), or 313 (school districts) deals – that cause heartburn to community stakeholders and drain money from local coffers, and which the Texas GOP right wing considers abhorrent corporate welfare and is trying to eliminate.

Why not simply expand their Austin facility? Our intel, both from local growth watchers and from folks with knowledge of the Taylor-based side of the discussions, says Samsung's reference to "infrastructure stability" is shade being thrown at the city and Austin Energy for their failures during Winter Storm Uri. Samsung Austin Semi­con­ductor is the city's largest utility customer, has been a vocal advocate for the needs of major employers and for their Eastern Crescent neighbors for nearly 25 years, and going dark for days along with nearly half of the city was one disappointment too many. In Williamson County, Samsung and Oncor, an investor-owned electric utility, will have a different kind of relationship, and ERCOT – the no-longer­-obscure Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state power grid – is itself located in Taylor.

A Home, and Also a House

Taylor ISD accepted Samsung's Chapter 313 application back in July, so even with a decision not finalized until months later, the town has been feeling the warm glow of a winning hand and is preparing accordingly. There are reportedly 3,000 housing units in the Taylor zoning and permitting pipeline (some, like Samsung itself, outside the current city limits), so this city of 16,000 is already planning to grow by 50%, even before Samsung creates a single job. The deal estimates 2,000 direct jobs – people working for Samsung itself, for wages a lot higher than found in most of eastern WilCo – and up to 18,000 indirect jobs to supply parts and services to the facility, or to teach the kids and feed the families and cut the hair and everything else that one finds in a community – the front-line workforces that can't do their jobs remotely. Taylor's 3,000 new units will not house them all.

I pointed us on the road to Taylor last week as the next destination in our quest to provide decent housing for all 1 million-ish Austinites and their 1 million-plus Central Texas neighbors where it's needed. Because, as I would hope should be obvious by now, most Central Texans don't live in Austin, and many don't need to. There are lots of different data points that go into those decisions of where to live. Some of them are unpleasant realities that are forced upon people and families, mostly related to their income and identity and unrelated to their dignity as humans or the real value of their contributions to community. It's why we have this place called the Eastern Crescent, the fuzzy-edged but quite real swath of cities and neighborhoods that defines Austin and Central Texas' eastern edge and concentrates its regional poverty and inequities and is still growing like mad all the time.

At the regional level, Taylor is the top of the crescent. Like most communities out east, it still wants to attract jobs and investment and economic vitality and prosperity, because it has many unmet needs, but also worries about displacement and gentrification and losing its soul. How it navigates the next decade is a case study all of us, and really all the nation, will be watching. And there will be others like it: Tesla, of course, but also Oracle, and legacy big boys like AMD that still have a little gas left in their tank, and the overlords of the Googleplex and Metaverse as they finally trickle into their towering Downtown starchitecture, and other future major employers who don't exist yet. The FM 973 corridor that connects Taylor, via Manor and the ambitious vision for Whisper Valley, to Del Valle and Tesla, is heating up because, just as we talked about last week, people want a piece of Austin's new hot zone before it's all gone. Shaping those animal spirits into investments that can permanently alleviate some woes of the Eastern Crescent, and provide welcoming homes to working families who deserve to enjoy Central Texas' bounty as much as anyone else, is really a more important task – one of many – than sweatily wrangling over meaningless distinctions in Austin's Land Development Code.