While transportation is the growth challenge that gets much of the talk and attention, it's not the only one Austin will face as it moves into a new decade. That process of urban inversion, where lower income families move out of cities into suburbs, will leave resources people rely on outside of their immediate areas.

“Everything from bus routes, to health care centers, to social services have to be redesigned to account for the fact that lower income to middle households are living more in the suburbs than the core city,” Oden said. “That has pretty significant implications.”

Oden is working with other UT researchers to collect and analyze demographic and other data that will be made available on a web-based platform, called the Texas Metropolitan Observatory. Reports and data can be used by all Texas cities for things like land use planning, water conservation and traffic impact analyses, among other initiatives, for smarter growth in the coming years. Texas’ population as a whole is expected to nearly double by 2050, to 47.3 million people, according to the Texas Demographic Center.

“Going forward, American cities will live or die based on how thorough a job they are doing in regional land use and planning,” Robinson said.

When Riddell moved back to Austin after college, he and his wife bought a house off U.S. 183 near Lakeline Mall, in a fast-growing neighborhood near Cedar Park. He, like many others, said he still misses “Old Austin.”

“You always mourn a little bit, just like my kids one day will talk about what it was like when it was 2020 and they were growing up,” Riddell said. “I hope when they grow up ... they get to experience something else so, if and when they come back to Austin, they can appreciate it compared to other places in the world. Because it really is a great place. I don’t think you can really appreciate it until you’ve lived someplace else. You realize why people want to come here.”





