Nobody Asked the Dog

"Amazon's the dog," Dell said over the fence yesterday, reading off his phone with the screen tilted away from the sun. "No, wait. Amazon's the head of the dog."

Dell is my neighbor. He gets his news in fragments and delivers them like a man reading tea leaves. We had both retreated to the shady side of our yards after the thermostat treaty fell apart, and he had found the one story that could make two old men forget the heat for a minute.

Here's what actually happened, minus Dell's punctuation. At a city work session on Tuesday, July 21, officials revealed that Amazon is the anchor of the Dog's Head project. That's a 2,600-acre industrial development in East Austin. Community Impact's headline calls it an Amazon robotics facility, and it says leaders are ready for a financing vote. The project also reportedly includes a Tesla site. Community Impact has the details, and I'd recommend reading them before you read me. They have reporters. I have a box fan.

That's the news. What follows is my opinion, and much of it is wrong on purpose.

A brief note on the name

Somebody looked at a map of this land years ago, saw a dog's head, and wrote it down. I respect that. It's the most Austin act in the whole story. The place didn't get a name from a focus group or a branding agency in a converted cotton gin. Someone squinted at a map, saw a mutt, and moved on with their day.

I give it eighteen months before the dog gets put down. Someday a rendering will call it something like "Colorado Logistics Commons" or "Eastline Innovation District." It will have a logo shaped like a leaf, because they always use a leaf, even when the product is a robot that moves boxes.

So I'm writing the dog's obituary now, while it still has a face.

The unofficial anatomy chart

I'll be careful here, because I'm a grouch, not a surveyor. I don't know where anything will go out there. Neither does Dell, though he'll tell you he does. What follows is not a site plan. It's a cartoon of a dog with a Sharpie on it.

The Snout. This goes to the anchor tenant, because the anchor tenant always gets the snout. The snout is where the dog smells opportunity, and the incentives too. In my version, the snout is one building so big it creates its own weather, a gentle indoor drizzle of shrink wrap.

The Ears. These are reserved for the other big name in the story. Ears are for listening. In my cartoon, they pick up every frequency except a public comment period.

The Collar. This is where the financing lives. The collar is the part of the dog that a human holds onto, and it isn't the dog. Watch the collar. The vote coming up is about the collar, and the collar is the part of the dog the rest of us end up paying to keep on.

The Eyes. These hold two retention ponds, landscaped with native grasses that will be photographed once at the ribbon cutting and never watered again.

The Tongue. A frontage road. It will hang out panting from June to September.

The Tail. This part is ours. The tail is what's left for the public: a trail stub, a bench facing a fence, and a plaque that thanks a partnership for its vision. Whether the tail wags depends entirely on how the collar is tied.

What I remember out east

I drove out past the edge of town a lot in the '90s. It wasn't for any good reason. When the city got loud, east was the direction where it stopped being loud. My memory isn't a land record, so don't cite it at a zoning hearing. It's a windshield memory: flat land, grackles on the wires, a hay bale rotting into a shape like a sofa, and a sky big enough to make you feel your truck was too small to matter.

I'm not saying the Dog's Head was untouched wilderness. I genuinely don't know what's under every acre of it, and I won't pretend I do. I'm saying 2,600 acres is roughly the size of a sky. Out there you could see a thunderstorm coming from forty minutes away and have time to finish your beer.

Now you'll see the storm the same way, except it will be a fleet of delivery vans.

Condos for boxes

People will ask why this is in the condo file when nobody's going to live there. Respectfully: something is going to live there. It just won't be us.

A robotics warehouse is a condo for objects. The units are climate-controlled, which is more than I can say for my hallway. Residents get 24-hour security. Nobody gets priced out of it, because the residents don't have rent. They have SKUs. I have spent this entire summer negotiating with my wife over 79 versus 78 degrees, with painter's tape on the thermostat like a crime scene. Meanwhile some pallet of phone chargers out east is going to sleep at a crisp 68 with nobody complaining.

That's the shame part. I don't resent the jobs. People need work, and I hope every shift out there pays enough to live within twenty miles of it. What bothers me is the order of operations. We find money, incentives, and infrastructure for a building that holds boxes. Then we form a task force to study the possibility of maybe someday providing shade at a bus stop.

The boxes got their dog. We're still filling out the form for the bench.

What I'd like before the vote

I'm not asking for much, which is good, because asking for much is how you get a nice letter thanking you for engaging.

• Read the collar out loud. Before anyone votes on the financing, explain it at a level Dell can follow over a fence. If Dell can follow it, the public can follow it. If it can't be explained over a fence, it shouldn't be tied around a dog.
• Keep the name. Put it on the sign. Dog's Head. Make the robots wear it.
• Promise the tail in writing. If there's going to be a trail, a park, or a single tree with a bench under it, put it in the same document as the incentives, in the same font size.
• Plant one live oak per hundred thousand square feet and water it. Then name it after whoever squinted at the map and saw the dog.

Dell finished reading and put his phone away. "So it's a warehouse," he said.

"It's a warehouse with a financing package," I told him. "That's like a warehouse, but it goes on your bill."

He nodded and went inside to check his thermostat, which is now taped too. We're a block united.

Somewhere out east, a dog-shaped piece of land is about to learn to fetch. I just hope someone remembers to throw something back.