Elevated Is Not a Square Footage

The banner is zip-tied to a construction fence off Woodrow, and it has eleven zip ties holding it on. I counted. Ten of them are doing nothing. One of them is doing everything. That turns out to be the best metaphor for the copy printed on it, which reads, in full:

KESTREL ROW — Elevated. Curated. Intentional. Three boutique residences, thoughtfully designed for walkable, light-filled living. Attainably priced from the low $800s.

Behind it stand three narrow gray boxes with the posture of filing cabinets. They have black window frames, a horizontal-slat fence made of a wood I'd guess has never seen weather, and one baby live oak propped up with two stakes and a strap.

Before you email me, I'll say this up front. I'm not against the boxes. The city loosened the rules a couple of years back so more than one house could sit on a regular lot, and I think that was overdue. My grandparents raised four kids in a duplex. Three households on a lot where one used to be is just arithmetic, and the arithmetic is fine.

My problem is with the adjectives. Kestrel Row (a fictional composite, though give it a month and some developer will register the name) brings in a lot of words to do very little work. So I went down the banner like a home inspector with a flashlight, one word at a time.

Elevated

Nobody can tell me what this one means, and it shows up on every banner in town. In practice, "elevated" means the front door is four concrete steps up from where it would have been. Those four steps are the entire elevation. You are elevated the way a man on a step stool is elevated, which is technically true and a little sad.

The bungalow that used to be here was elevated too. It sat on pier-and-beam, about two feet off the dirt, and the space underneath belonged to a cat nobody owned. That house never put it on a banner.

Curated

A curator chooses things from a larger collection. A museum can do this because it owns ten thousand objects and shows two hundred. Kestrel Row offers two countertop options. One is called "Bianco" and the other is called "Nuvola," and both are white. That's a choice between two whites with different first names, which isn't curation.

Intentional

I'd like to meet the unintentional townhome. I picture an architect waking up in a sweat: "Oh no. I accidentally designed a building." Every building is intentional. The Motel 6 is intentional.

When a brochure says "intentional," it's warning you there will be less of something and asking you to feel spiritual about it. Here it means no coat closet. The closet has been intentionally replaced by three brass hooks, which are also, I'm told, curated.

Boutique

"Boutique" is the most expensive word in Austin real estate. It turns "small" into "special" and adds about a hundred grand. A boutique hotel is a hotel with fewer rooms and a bartender with an opinion about mezcal. A boutique residence is a residence with fewer rooms.

Each unit has a footprint that, by my pacing along the sidewalk, could also be described as "a parking space and a half, stacked three times." I don't say that to insult anybody who'll live there. Plenty of us have lived in less, happily, with a box fan and a good landlord, or at least a forgetful one. I just wish the banner would say small out loud. Small is a fine word. Small paid my rent for most of the nineties.

Thoughtfully Designed

Thought did go into this, I'll grant them that. Someone thought about how to fit three units, three driveways' worth of concrete, and the setback rules onto one lot, and that's real work. I respect a good puzzle.

The thought I can't find is the one about August. All three units face due west with floor-to-ceiling glass. By five o'clock that glass will be a broiler, and the people inside will learn what a slab of dark gray siding does when a heat dome parks over it.

Light-Filled

See above. Light will fill it, then heat will fill it, then a $340 electric bill will fill the mailbox. The bungalow had a deep front porch and a pecan tree, so it was shade-filled. Nobody puts that on a banner either, even though it's the most valuable adjective in Central Texas from June through September.

The pecan is gone, by the way. In its place is the baby live oak on its two stakes and a strap. In twenty years it will be magnificent. I'll be cheering for it from wherever they've put me.

Walkable

From the front steps of Kestrel Row you can walk to a bus stop, a dry cleaner, a taco trailer that's open three days a week on a schedule known only to God, and Burnet Road. That's honestly decent, and I won't fight them on it.

The catch is that the marketing renderings show a woman walking a dog toward a farmers market that doesn't exist, under a canopy of trees that also doesn't exist, on a sidewalk that, at this moment, ends abruptly at the next lot and becomes a drainage ditch. The walk is real. The rendering is a dream the walk had about itself.

Attainably Priced

This is the last word on the banner and the one I came for.

"Attainable" means "possible to attain." By that definition the moon is attainable, and so is a seat on the city's budget committee. The low $800s is attainable for somebody. So is a yacht.

I sat in my truck with the calculator on my phone and ran the math the way a normal person would. Put twenty percent down on $815,000 and you need $163,000 in cash before you've bought a single brass hook. With a mortgage at today's rates, plus property taxes, plus insurance, you're looking at a monthly number that a teacher and a nurse, married to each other and both working, would have to stare at for a long time.

So here's my translation. "Attainable" means it's cheaper than the house on the next lot that went for $1.4 million. Attainable relative to the absurd isn't the same thing as attainable, and everyone who wrote that banner knows it.

The missing middle was supposed to be the middle. Somewhere between the slogan and the closing table, the middle went missing again.

What the Banner Should Have Said

I don't want to only complain. I'm a grouch, but I'm a constructive one on Wednesdays. Here's a banner I'd sign off on, with eleven zip ties, all of them earning their keep:

THREE HOUSES WHERE THERE WAS ONE. Small. Hot in the afternoon. Near a bus. Two kinds of white countertop. Priced a lot higher than we'd like, because land costs what it costs and we would like a profit. The tree will be great in 2046. Sorry about the cat.

I'd tour that. I might even sit on those four elevated steps and drink a Topo Chico with whoever moves in, because they'll be my neighbors, and none of this is their fault. They're just people who needed somewhere to live and found a place that let them in.

The words did this. The words always do. Somebody in an office far from Woodrow decided "small, west-facing, and expensive" wouldn't sell, so they hung a thesaurus on a chain-link fence and hoped nobody would read it slowly.

I read it slowly. That's about all I'm good for anymore.