Unit 3B, Rio Grande Street, $385 Including Water

A kid in a burnt-orange bucket hat passed me at 10:40 this morning, carrying a forty-pack of seltzer the way you'd carry a newborn out of a fire. He said into his phone, "No, the elevator's down again, so we're pregaming on twelve."

Twelve. He said it like it was a ground floor.

I was standing on the sidewalk off Rio Grande, roughly where the front door of my old apartment used to be. It was a two-story brick box with a carport, a laundry room that smelled like wet pennies, and a property manager named Darlene. Darlene's entire maintenance philosophy was a can of Raid and the phrase "that's just the building settling." In 1994, Unit 3B ran $385 a month, water included. Electricity was on me, and it mostly powered a window unit that wheezed like a retired trombone player.

That building is gone. In its place stands a tower with a one-word name that sounds like a cologne sold at the airport. Since it was game day, and since I had nothing better to do than be correct about things, I decided to survey it properly, from the bottom up.

Elevation: zero feet

At street level, the new West Campus has the texture of a parking garage that took a creative writing class. There is a lobby with a neon sign that says something encouraging in lowercase. There's a sandwich board out front advertising rates "from" a number with a comma in it, followed by the most chilling two words in Austin real estate: per bed.

Per bed. Not per apartment, and not per room. You are leasing a mattress-shaped claim to oxygen inside a four-bedroom unit, alongside three strangers the algorithm picked because you all checked "night owl."

In 1994 I also had roommates. I picked them myself, badly, the way God intended. One played the same Toadies album for eleven months. Each of us still paid under two hundred bucks, and nobody had to sign a separate lease guaranteeing the carpet.

Elevation: 30 feet

This is about where my old window would have looked out. Back then the view was a live oak, a neighbor's porch couch, and, if you leaned left and squinted past the power lines, a sliver of the UT Tower.

That sliver mattered. After a win, the Tower lights up orange, and on a good Saturday night you could stand at the window with a warm Shiner and watch it glow like a lighthouse for people who had made poor decisions about their GPA. It cost nothing. It was included, like the water.

At 30 feet today, the view is the inside of a parking structure. Right now it holds a Range Rover with a tailgate flag and a temporary paper plate from out of state, which tells me somebody's dad drove in from Dallas this morning with a cooler and opinions.

Elevation: 90 feet

Here begins the amenity floor, which is a phrase I'm still not ready for.

These towers exist because in 2004 the city passed the University Neighborhood Overlay, which let developers build much taller in West Campus in exchange for setting aside some affordable units. On paper this was sensible. More students near campus, fewer cars, less sprawl. I even nodded along at the time, the way you nod at a dentist explaining a procedure you'll be paying off until 2031.

What actually got built was an arms race. One tower adds a pool, so the next adds a pool on the roof. Then somebody adds a tanning deck, the next one a 24-hour gym, and after that a "study lounge" with a golf simulator. Somewhere along the way a marketing team decided that nineteen-year-olds needed a dog spa, a resort-style hot tub and a coffee bar that closes before anyone in the building is awake.

At 90 feet you can see the light glinting off a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass. I was told the building designs this for "community." What it does in practice is let the next tower's residents watch you eat cereal.

Elevation: 160 feet

From up here, a student can apparently see the stadium. I know this because I've seen the leasing photos, which show the view as if a game were permanently in progress, the field lit and the sky a tasteful dusk, like a dentist's office poster of a beach.

The kids pay for that view. Their parents do, mostly, or the loans do, which means the kids pay for it later, at roughly the interest rate of a pawn shop. Nobody I saw this morning looked like they were getting a deal. They looked like people hauling seltzer up twelve flights because a building that charges like a hotel can't keep an elevator running on the busiest Saturday of the month.

This, to be clear, is not the students' fault. You can't blame a freshman for renting the only thing that exists. When the duplexes, the fourplexes, the garage apartments and the Darlenes of the world get bought and stacked into towers, the market hands you a pool on the roof and a bill you'll be paying until you're forty.

Elevation: 280 feet

The rooftop. I couldn't get up there, of course. The guest policy involves a wristband, a resident escort and probably a blood sample. But I could see it from across the street: a cabana, a row of white lounge chairs, a bass line I could feel in my fillings, and a dozen tiny orange figures waving at a drone.

Somebody up there had a speaker playing "The Eyes of Texas" in a remix that I believe constitutes a crime against brass instruments.

I'll admit the view is better than mine was. You can see the Capitol, the Tower, the stadium, the hills to the west going purple in the afternoon haze. It's a real view, and Austin deserves to be looked at from up high.

It's just that the rent for one bed for one month in that building could have covered my whole apartment, water included, from the spring I discovered Les Amis until the fall I finally replaced the window unit. And the window unit would still have been louder than the rooftop.

Elevation: back to zero

I walked down to Guadalupe around noon. The Drag was doing its game-day thing: tents, cornhole, a guy selling ponchos to people who had checked the forecast and bought one anyway out of hope. The air smelled like sunscreen, smoked meat and somebody's vape that tasted, secondhand, like a blue raspberry being audited.

A pair of students walked by arguing about whether their unit's "smart lock" counted as a roommate. One of them said, "It literally knows when I come home and it doesn't text me back."

I wanted to tell them about Darlene. About the Raid, the settling and the $385. About a city where a college kid could live near campus on a part-time job at a record store and still have money left over for a pitcher on Sixth Street.

But the light changed, the crowd moved toward the stadium, and somewhere a quarter mile up, a building with a cologne name was charging somebody by the bed to watch the Tower turn orange.

Our window in 3B showed that same Tower for free. I'd love to tell you that was a better deal, but the building settled.