Austin & Calgary: Sister Cities?
By the numbers, there are some amazing similarities between Austin and Calgary. Both are young highly educated cities – Austin’s average age is 31 with 46% of Austinites having a postsecondary degree. Calgary’s average age is 36, with 60% having postsecondary education.
Austin’s is a rapidly growing city. Its current population of 912,791 is growing by 150+ people a day. Calgary with a population of 1,200,000 was the fastest growing city in Canada according to Stats Canada – growing 13% (from 2006 to 2011).
Like Calgary, Austin is young and active. This is the pedestrian bridge over the Lady Bird Lake, aka Colorado River with Austin's 2nd Avenue condos in the background that look very much like Calgary's East Village.
Like Calgary, Austin has a downtown skatepark, not as large as Calgary's but it definitely attracts some talented athletes.
Calgary's Peace Bridge, designed by world famous bridge architect Santiago Calatrava is a popular playground for Calgary's young and restless.
Love Their Rivers
Both Austinites and Calgarians love their rivers - the Colorado River and Barton Creek in Austin and the Bow and Elbow Rivers in Calgary. Both cities have very busy river pathway systems packed with walkers, cyclists and runners when weather permits (not too cold in Calgary and not too hot in Austin).
Austin's river pathways are very popular on weekends.
It is very common in Austin to see boats of all types in Lady Bird Lake...in the distance is a fishing boat.
Calgarians love their green beaches like this one in Stanley Park.
Fishing on the Bow River in Calgary.
River surfing on the Bow River.
In the summer, thousands of Calgarians raft on the Elbow and Bow Rivers in Calgary.
Party Towns
Austin’s infamous SXSW, a huge 10-day film, music, interactive media technology festival / trade show / conference generates $411 CDN million into the city’s economy in 2015 and attracted 140,000 participants.
By comparison, the 10-day Calgary Stampede annually attracts over 1 million (350,000 being out-of-town visitors) for concerts, rodeo, chuckwagon races, grandstand show, midway rides and agricultural exhibition. Its annual economic impact is estimated at $350 CDN million.
Austin's Kite festival is an amazing site and a fun family party.
Look carefully and you will see that most of the people are dressed up as they have just participated in Calgary's POW - Parade of Wonder as part of Calgary Expo aka Comic-Con.
Music Cities
Austin bills itself as the “Live Music Capital of the World,” with 100+ live music venues and its world famous Austin City Lights music program. Everybody gets into hosting live music in Austin from grocery stores to the airport.
The City’s historic music district is downtown along East 6th St. a grungy street resembles Calgary’s Electric Avenue (11th Ave) back in the ‘80s. Home to numerous loud and seedy bars, as well as the 1929 Ritz theatre, it is more a tacky tourist street than a serious music district. Today, the best music venues are in neighbourhoods outside of downtown.
Calgary is in its infancy as an emerging international music city boasting an International Folk Festival, SLED Island as well as numerous smaller emerging music festivals. Calgary has only a handful of live music venues and only a few that offer live music 7 days a week. (Some of Austin’s venues offer 3 acts a day - happy hour, headliner and midnight band.) The opening of the National Music Centre will definitely enhance our city’s reputation internationally.
Stephen Avenue is Calgary’s equivalent to Austin’s East 6th Avenue as downtown’s primary pedestrian oriented street. However, Stephen Avenue is a more attractive and diverse street with its mix of shops, restaurants, concert and performance theatres, art house cinema and restored historical buildings.
Just one of hundreds of live music venues in Austin offering a plethora of genres of music.
Calgary's Tim Williams at the Blues Can. Williams won the International Blues Competition in 2014.
Urban Living
Urban living in Austin is booming. Although the current downtown population is only 12,000 it has been growing rapidly with 6,832 condos and apartments built since 2000 and another 2,000 currently under construction.
However, this pales in comparison to Calgary’s 36,000 urban dwellers. Urban living is also booming in Calgary with almost 15,000 new residential units since 2000 and 2,200 under construction.
Austin’s budding 2nd Street urban village, looks amazingly similar to Calgary’s East Village with several shinny new high-rise white condo towers, a new library and City Hall and sprinkling of shops, Whole Foods and Trader Joes grocery stores and a signature pedestrian bridge over the river.
Austin’s 82,000 downtown employees work in 9 million square feet of office space (1.3 million square ft. under construction), 7,800 hotel rooms (2,140 under construction) and hundreds of restaurants, retailers and bars in 1.9 million square feet of commercial space.
By comparison, Calgary City Centre (downtown and Beltline) roughly the same size as Austin’s downtown) has 150,000+ employees occupying over 40 million square feet of offices, 4,000 hotel rooms (500 under construction) and 1,000+ retailers and restaurants in whopping 6.4 million square feet.
Downtown Austin has no department store, indoor mall or shopping street; shopping is scattered all over the place. Austin has nothing to match Calgary’s historic Bay Store, Holt Renfrew or the stunning The CORE shopping centre.
Austin also lacks a contiguous historic district like Stephen Avenue or Inglewood. However, Austin does a much better job of animating its downtown corners with outdoor patios, rather than the banks and office lobbies dominating Calgary’s corners.
A view of downtown Austin from South Congress aka SoCo. SoCo is a an eclectic pedestrian street (despite being a major road) with shops, restaurants, music venues, great patios and numerous permanent food trucks on empty lots.
Austin's 2nd Avenue District is blooming as an urban village with new condos, two grocery stores and shops.
Austin's condo skyline.
The Core in downtown Calgary is a three block long indoor shopping mall with 1 hectare indoor garden.
Stephen Avenue is Calgary's downtown Main Street and a National Historic District linking the Olympic Plaza Cultural District with the Financial District. Austin has nothing like Calgary's iconic Hudson Bay department store.
Urban Street Life
Austin’s hip street is SoCo (South Congress Avenue), which, like Calgary’s Kensington Village, is on the other side of the river from downtown. Even with South Congress Avenue’s six lanes of traffic, it supports a vibrant street life with a great mix of shops, restaurants, bars and live music venues.
What makes SoCo outstanding is its outdoor culture. Austin’s climate allows Austinites to play outdoors year-round – there are patios everywhere, live music is played on the front lawns and empty lots and food trailers occupy what would be surface parking lots in Calgary. Every weekend SoCo takes on a festival atmosphere!
Kensington’s container bar and a few outdoor patios pales in comparison. On the other hand, Kensington boasts a better café culture and more infill residential development.
While, SoCo provides Austinites with a vibrant street culture, it is the only game in town, with nothing to match Calgary’s 17th Ave, 11th Avenue or Inglewood.
On weekends Austin's SoCo takes on a festival atmosphere.
Gueros on SoCo is famous for its free live entertainment.
SoCo has numerous quirky shops.
Austinites love their Tacos.
Calgary's 17th Avenue is popular urban playground even in the winter; this photo was taken in February.
Cafe Beano on 17th Avenue is perhaps where Calgary's cafe culture began back in the '80s. It is popular with both artists and CEOs.
Analog Coffee on 17th Avenue the new kid on the block.
Calgary's Kensington Village offers lots of urban surprises given its proximity to the Alberta College of Art and Design and Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.
One of the best surprises in Kensington Village is the Container Bar.
Kensington Village is also home to Calgary's year-round flea market and summer farmers' market.
Big Differences
The biggest difference between Austin and Calgary is in transit use. We never saw Austin’s LRT and bus service is limited. Thank God for car2go, which allowed us to explore Austin’s outlying business revitalization zones by day and music venues by night.
We stayed in a lovely Airbnb in the upscale Clarksville community, which we thought would be convenient for walking. We quickly discovered sidewalks in poor condition (or non-existent), and very few streetlights making walking at night treacherous.
While there were some lovely homes, Austinites’ pride of home ownership seems much lower than in Calgary’s inner-city communities – even desirable neighbourhoods have lots of unkept properties, weed-infested lawns and gardens and crumbling sidewalks.
Calgary has one of the busiest Light Rapid Transit systems in North America.
Austinites love to dance - as soon as the music starts people get up and dance.
Austin condos have above ground parkades like this one, whereas Calgary condos and office buildings have their parking underground.
Downtown Calgary has 40 million square feet of office space, making it one of the top 10 in North America, compared to Austin's 10 million square feet.
Last Word
In my humble opinion, after visits to Austin and Portland (considered by many urbanists as two of the best emerging urban cities) Calgary offers as many - or more - urban amenities.
Unfortunately, Calgary continues to fly under the radar with planners and tourists as an emerging urban playground.
Note: An edited version of this blog was published in the Calgary Herald titled "City Scenes: Austin vs Calgary," June 11, 2018
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