Is Anybody Using This Room?

The closet off the kitchen at the rent house on 43rd smelled like pilot light and wet cardboard, and in the spring of 1996 we rented it to a drummer for eighty-five dollars a month.

He didn't live in it. He kept his kit in it, plus a futon mattress folded into a taco, plus a box fan that ran from Easter to Halloween. The arrangement started with a sentence that has built more of this city than any bond package: Is anybody using this room?

Nobody was. So he used it. We knocked a hook into the doorframe for his cymbal bag, and that was the whole capital improvement program.

I thought about that closet Thursday night when I read on KUT that the Austin Transit Partnership, the agency building our light rail, has dropped its plan for a new downtown office and is expanding into the space next door instead. The plan it walked away from carried a $47 million price tag. The space next door is cheaper.

I had to set my phone face-down on the counter and walk a lap around the kitchen.

A rare sighting

You have to understand how unusual this is. In thirty-some years of reading agendas, I've watched public bodies here discover a hundred creative ways to need a bigger building. Need a new headquarters, get a consultant to confirm you need a new headquarters, name the atrium after a sponsor. I've seen it happen to agencies, to universities, to a frozen yogurt chain that had two locations and a "campus."

What I have almost never seen is an Austin institution look at the wall it already shares with somebody and say, What if we just went through there.

That's not policy. That's a roommate move. That's the most old-Austin thing a government entity has done since somebody at the old Municipal Building ran an extension cord to a window unit and called it climate control.

The temptation, as a professional grump, is to take the cheap shot about a rail agency taking the short trip. It's sitting right there. They can't get a train across the river yet, but they got across the hallway. I'm going to take that shot and move on, because the bigger point is that the cheaper option won. In this town that counts as breaking news.

What $47 million would have bought, per my imagination

I want to be precise: I don't know what was in the scrapped plan beyond the number, and I'm not going to pretend I do. But I've lived here long enough to picture the rendering from the price alone, the same way you can smell a brisket from three blocks away and know someone's charging twenty-eight dollars a pound for it.

In my head, the rendering has a reclaimed-wood wall. It has a phone booth for "focus." It has a mural of a train that doesn't exist yet, painted by an artist who used to have a studio in a building that also no longer exists. There's a kombucha tap labeled "Transit Fuel." Somebody in a quarter-zip is pointing at a model.

None of that happened, apparently. It's not even pretend anymore. Somebody looked at the number and said no, and I'd like to shake that person's hand, then check it for a wallet.

Resolution of Grudging Commendation

Since this is an agenda-item column, and since praise from me is a controlled substance, I've drafted the appropriate paperwork. Reading it into the record:

WHEREAS the voters of Austin approved Proposition A in November 2020, funding Project Connect and, by extension, a great many meetings about Project Connect; and

WHEREAS the Austin Transit Partnership did plan a new downtown office with a cost of $47 million, a figure that in this city would buy roughly one two-bedroom near Lady Bird Lake and a single parking space you have to share with a scooter; and

WHEREAS said Partnership has instead expanded into adjacent, cheaper space, thereby performing the municipal equivalent of propping the door to the next unit open with a cinder block; and

WHEREAS the Undersigned has, for decades, watched institutions treat "adjacent" as an obstacle to build over rather than a room to walk into;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Undersigned extends a commendation, revocable without notice, to whoever made this call;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the commendation is contingent on the money saved going toward the actual train, and not toward a "wayfinding refresh" for the newly combined office suite;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that if a ribbon-cutting is held for the hallway, the Undersigned will attend, but only to heckle quietly.

Motion carries, one to nothing. The drummer abstains.

The old way, and why it scares developers

There is a whole forgotten Austin skill set built on adjacent space. The bar that took over the barber shop next door when the barber retired and just cut a doorway, so for six years you could see a mirror and an old swivel chair from the pool table. The record store that annexed the vacant laundromat and kept the folding counter for the dollar bin. The band house that rented the garage apartment out back to the bass player's girlfriend, then to the bass player, then to the bass player's other band.

None of it required a site selection process. It required a landlord who answered the phone, which, granted, was its own lost civilization.

This instinct terrifies the people who make money off moving. A cheap expansion next door produces no groundbreaking photo, no gold shovel, no press release with the word "iconic" in it. It produces a slightly longer walk to the bathroom. You can't put a slightly longer walk to the bathroom on a billboard on MoPac.

That's why I'm cautiously thrilled. Somebody inside a public agency in 2026 chose the slightly longer walk to the bathroom.

Conditions of my continued good mood

I've been burned before, so a few terms.

First, I'll believe in the savings when the savings show up somewhere I can stand on. A platform. A rail. A shade structure that actually produces shade, rather than a decorative suggestion of shade the shape of a Texas wildflower.

Second, nobody gets to give the combined office a name. Not "The Annex." Not "The Junction." Definitely not "The Platform," which I can feel some marketing hire reaching for right now. It's the office and the office next door. Our drummer's closet never needed branding.

Third, if anyone in this town is inspired by the precedent, I want it to spread in the right direction. School district: is anybody using that portable? Library: is anybody using that storage room full of overhead projectors? City Hall: is anybody using that one floor where, as far as the public can tell from the lobby, nothing happens?

The part where I'm still me

I'll admit the whole thing leaves me a little disoriented. I came up in a city that ran on borrowed rooms, and I've spent fifteen years watching it decide that every problem needs a tower, a rendering, and a ceremonial shovel. Then a light-rail agency, of all things, goes and knocks on the neighbor's door like it's 1996 and the rent's due Friday.

The drummer moved out in '98, by the way. He took the futon and the box fan, and the closet went back to being the closet with the water heater in it. Nobody held a press conference. Nobody spent $47 million. We just put the vacuum back.

This is the first time in years an Austin institution has reminded me of us. I just hope the train shows up before the agency needs the closet on the other side.