Unit B Enjoys Peekaboo Views of Unit A

The listing went live at 9:02 this morning. By 9:04 my neighbor Dolores had texted me a screenshot with no words, only the price circled in red. She did it on her phone with a finger, which is how you can tell she meant it.

$949,000. Per unit. Three units. One lot.

I knew the lot. Most of North Loop knew the lot, a little 1940s pier-and-beam bungalow on a side street I'm not going to name, because naming it won't help the house now. It had a sagging porch swing and a pecan tree that dropped nuts on parked cars all October like it was collecting a toll. A window unit wheezed in the front room from May to Halloween. The chain-link fence had been surrendered to morning glories around the first Clinton administration. The owner was a quiet older man with a burgundy Buick and a radio permanently tuned to whatever game was on. I never learned his name. I learned his radio.

Last spring the house came down in about a day and a half. The pecan took another morning. Now there are three tall, narrow, white-and-black buildings standing shoulder to shoulder like guys in a urinal line, and they come with copy.

I've read it four times. Here it is, with my notes.

"Welcome to North Loop living, where vintage charm meets modern design."

The vintage charm is not on the property. The vintage charm is down the street. You walk to it.

That's the trick with this genre. The listing borrows the neighborhood's personality the way a guy borrows your truck. The vintage shops, the record bins, the dinky bars with Christmas lights in July, the yard that's been half-gravel, half-Virgin-of-Guadalupe since forever: all of it gets listed as an amenity of a building that had to remove one of those exact yards to exist.

"Vintage charm meets modern design" is a real estate meet-cute. In real life, modern design met vintage charm with an excavator, and only one of them walked away.

"Thoughtfully designed modern farmhouse"

I need everyone to sit with this one.

There has never been a farm on this lot. There was, for several summers, a tomato plant in a five-gallon bucket. It produced roughly six tomatoes a year and was guarded like Fort Knox.

"Modern farmhouse," as far as I can tell, means a white box with black window frames, one strip of board-and-batten siding, a gooseneck light over the door, and somewhere inside, an accent wall of shiplap. Shiplap is lumber in costume. It's a 2x6 that took a theater class.

A farmhouse is a building for people who have to be up at 4:30 to deal with animals. These units are for people who'll be up at 4:30 to deal with a Slack channel in London. I'll admit there's some overlap.

"Light-filled open concept with soaring ceilings"

They do soar. They had to. When you put three houses on a lot built for one, the only direction left is up, so each unit is about as wide as a bowling lane stood on its end. The "open concept" is that there's no room for walls.

The soaring part also explains the light. There's plenty of it, all of it arriving from the west at 5 p.m. in late July through a window you'd need a fire department ladder to cover. I hope the smart thermostat is very smart. I hope it has a therapist.

The old bungalow got through August on one window unit, a box fan, the pecan's shade, and the general understanding that you didn't go inside between 2 and 6 p.m. We called that a lifestyle before anybody sold it as one.

"Private low-maintenance turf yard"

Each unit has a yard. I measured Unit C's from the sidewalk, standing on my own two feet like a sad engineer. It's about the size of a parking space, if the parking space were for a Fiat.

Low-maintenance turf means plastic grass. Plastic grass in an Austin July hits roughly the temperature of a skillet, which makes it "low-maintenance" in the way a griddle is low-maintenance. Nobody's going to touch it.

The pecan was high-maintenance. It dropped limbs, stained the sidewalk, and brought in squirrels with the organized-crime energy of a whole family business. It also shaded half the block. I'd take that trade every afternoon of the year, and the people who will pay $949,000 to live in its footprint would too, once they've spent one August with it gone.

"Unit B enjoys peekaboo views"

Of Unit A.

That's not a joke. Okay, it's a little bit of a joke. But I stood there and checked, and from what has to be Unit B's primary bedroom window, the peekaboo view is of the side of Unit A's identical primary bedroom window, about eight feet away. The two of them are going to know each other's sleep schedules within a week. They'll know each other's podcast taste. One of them is going to own an under-desk treadmill, and the other one is going to hear about it, physically, through the wall cavity, for years.

"Walkable to North Loop's eclectic shops, eateries, and nightlife"

This is true, and it's the part that gets me.

The listing is right. You can walk to everything. You can walk to the vintage clothing racks, the ice cream, the dive bars, the place where somebody's always playing pinball badly. The neighborhood is good. It's good because for decades it was a place where a person without much money could rent a funky little house, open a funky little shop, and not get ironed flat by the rent. The eclecticism the listing is selling grew out of cheap, scruffy housing. Like that house. Like that porch.

So the ad's main feature is the thing its own existence makes harder to keep around.

A word on the actual policy, because I'm not a crank about everything

For the record: in December 2023 the City Council passed the first phase of the HOME amendments, which let most single-family lots in Austin hold up to three homes. I didn't hate the idea then, and I don't hate it now. We need more places to live. One lot with three households on it is, on paper, better than one lot with one.

But the pitch on paper was "missing middle." Gentle density. Starter homes. A teacher, a line cook, and a retired couple all on one lot, sharing a fence and arguing about a trash can.

What showed up on this lot is three almost-million-dollar shiplap silos with the same gooseneck lamp. The policy said "more homes." The market heard "more products," and the copywriter heard "farmhouse." Nobody in that chain of custody heard "teacher."

There's a fair question in there about who policy gets written for and who ends up cashing it. The listing doesn't ask that question. The listing has a wine fridge.

"Nominal HOA"

Nominal. I looked that up in my dog-eared, coffee-stained dictionary, the one on the shelf next to the 2020 light-rail mailer I still haven't thrown away. It means "existing in name only."

I'd like to see that HOA's name. I'd like to see the trash-can bylaws. Three households, one strip of driveway, zero room on the curb for six bins, and an HOA that exists in name only. That's the actual shared North Loop experience right there, and it's the only vintage feature the place came with.

What the listing doesn't say

It doesn't mention the porch swing, which went in a dumpster. It doesn't mention the floor furnace grate in the hallway that every child who ever visited stood on once and only once. It doesn't mention the radio, the Buick, or the man who sat on that porch through four decades of summers with a sweating glass and gave everybody walking a dog the same exact two-finger wave.

It doesn't mention the pecan, which was older than any of us.

Dolores texted me again at 9:31, a second screenshot, this one of the line "Room for a garden." She'd circled it twice.

I texted back the only thing I had, which was a photo of a five-gallon bucket.