Smith: 15 years later, does Columbia still want to be like Austin?

In May of 2000, 90 leaders from the Columbia region visited Austin, Texas, where the unemployment rate was under 2 percent and high-tech companies were rushing in. With the Colorado River running through it, Austin is dominated by the University of Texas. The cost of living in Austin was the highest in the state. Still is. Austin was booming and touted as a “snapshot of Columbia’s future.”

Columbia was talking about opening a convention center like the one in Austin, but at a fraction of the size. “Everything is bigger in Texas,” Columbia Mayor Bob Coble explained at the time.

Greater Columbia Chamber executive Ike McLeese expressed hope that “this trip to Austin will provide some additional thoughts on regional transit and help us recruit high-tech companies.”

University of South Carolina President John Palms said, “I would like to be more like Austin as it relates to high-tech development that has surrounded” the University of Texas. Intel, with operations in Austin, quietly came to Columbia in 1998 as Columbia Design Center. That was a start.

In May of 2015, Columbia has a bustling convention center and entrepreneurial high-tech companies. We are developing a regional transit system. We haven’t seen well-known names such as Apple, Microsoft or Dell here — yet. But we do have a Google data center down the road in Berkeley County.

Do we still want to be a reflection of Austin?

Since 2000, Austin’s population has grown 14.5 percent to nearly 800,000.Columbia’s has grown only 2 percent to 129,757. Austin’s overall cost of living is 7 percent higher than in Columbia. Housing is 29 percent higher: The median home price is $162,300 in Columbia, $229,700 in Austin.

Several weeks ago, my wife, Kathy, and I visited friends who live in downtown Austin, in a small, expensive condominium in a high-rise built atop a parking garage. They can walk to work and to any of the city’s festivals, Whole Foods’ original store and Tex-Mex restaurants.

But with high-cost housing, many of the teachers, workers in restaurants, hotels and bars, retail salespeople, clerks, nurses and others who work in Austin cannot afford to live in the city. They must drive or take the regional transit to homes well north of Austin city limits.

In Austin, you don’t dream of owning a home in the city; you dream of renting an apartment in the city. According to a 2012 article in the Austin Chronicle, “employees need to earn $19.02 an hour to pay about $990 a month for utilities and a two-bedroom” apartment.

We realized from seeing Austin today that Columbia must provide affordable housing not only for students but also for our working poor, those who earn less than $15 an hour. Austin is being gentrified, pushing the poor onto rapid-transit buses and trains, into housing well outside of town. That segregation of the well-to-do and the less-well-paid detracts from Austin’s image as a family friendly city.

We also recognized from the 2000 and 2015 visits that in order for the Columbia metro region to prosper, move toward paying a living wage to all workers, attract well-paid, high-tech jobs and bring more tax dollars into the region, we have to operate not as counties, cities, towns and neighborhoods but as a region that includes but goes beyond Richland and Lexington counties.

We need a clear, specific regional plan and a close economic bond among the University of South Carolina, business and political leaders, the governor and legislators to provide the university with accountable funding to attract and nurture high-tech businesses to partner with companies such as BMW, Boeing, Volvo, Daimler, Michelin and suppliers to those industries. These and other fully wired companies all need innovative high-tech solutions.

Austin’s official slogan is “Keep Austin Weird,” referring to residents’ support of the many small, off-beat, owner-operated businesses in the city. Columbia’s slogan has been “Where Friendliness Flows” and is now “Famously Hot.” Let’s move forward together and modify our region’s slogan to say “Famously Hot, Fully Wired.”

This story was originally published May 16, 2015 at 7:19 PM.