Background

My husband and I grew up in small town Mississippi. I lived in a town that was population 10,000 give or take, and he was from a place about double the size. After we got married and he had to move out of state to find a job in his career field, we ended up moving to Austin TX, which was totally big time metropolitan city to us. When we moved here in the year 2000, the size of metro Austin was 1.25 million. The latest population estimate for Austin metro in 2016 was well over 2 million. By the next census, we should be in the neighborhood of 3 million.

Funny enough we've been here for the better part of 16 years if you don't count the year in Dallas - (and we don't!) or the 10 months in North Carolina, and we have never lived inside the city limits of Austin. We lived in Pflugerville a while and Round Rock for a few years. Both of those are in Williamson County, where all government is corrupt from top to bottom. Seriously, you can Google it. We were excited when we got the chance to move into Travis County, where Austin is the county seat. However, our current home is in the unincorporated part of Travis County, just outside of the Austin city limits. We get city services for the most part, except that we are served by the county Sheriff and not Austin PD. Oh and we cannot vote in Austin elections.

So here we are, 6 years into our stint living in the master planned community known as Steiner Ranch. You can Google it - it's known for being the place where California transplants prefer to migrate, and for being a hotbed of swinging adults. It's also a community of about 25,000 people that has 1 road into the subdivision. We are essentially enclosed on 3 sides by the Lower Colorado River. If we want to leave our subdivision, we have to drive 3-4 miles north, just to drive back south toward Austin. It adds SO much time onto any commute, no matter what time of the day.

There's also a horrendous traffic problem. See that little intersection up in the top right corner? FM 620 and RM 2222? Yeah, it's probably the most congested intersection in all of Austin. I've done extensive studies. (not really). We live about 8 miles from the high school (really about 3 miles as the crow flies - but remember that thing about having to drive north to go back south? yeah, that), and my high schoolers have to leave for school at 7:30am. School starts at 9am. They spend hours and hours and hours and HOURS in traffic. And that's no exaggeration. I've done extensive studies. (not really).

Not only that, but back in 2011 there was a wildfire that broke out in the north part of Steiner Ranch. It happened to flare up during the same time that all of Bastrop TX was essentially burning to the ground, so there was very little in the way of outside help for a giant wildfire. Somehow, our amazing little Lake Travis Fire and Rescue unit managed to single handedly save the neighborhood. The whole area was dried up to kindling and could have spread like, you know - wildfire. In the end, something like 25 houses were destroyed, but it could have been so much worse. There are over 5,000 homes here. We were evacuated for 3 days. The initial evacuation was AWFUL. Just imagine that many families (x however many vehicles each had) trying to leave at the same time. On one road. It took hours just to get up to FM 620. And when we were allowed to go back home, it took hours to get back in. It was all awful. If it happens again and the fire is worse, it will be a total disaster. 

There are other factors that are at play too, but as you can see - traffic is a HUGE issue.

We've been tossing around what we call our "exit plan" for getting OUT OF STEINER RANCH. Can you tell that we are ready? We initially talked about enacting it when the middle child graduates in 2 years. But we weren't able to talk the youngest into attending a different high school, so we put it on the back burner. Then about a month ago, my husband started looking for commercial space to open a brewery (that's a whole other story for a whole other blog), and I got the real estate bug. I started looking into places we could move OUTSIDE of Steiner and still be in our high school attendance zone. Trust me, there are VERY FEW of them. Somehow between apartment complexes taking up lots of space and the federally protected Balcones Canyonland Preserve (save the salamanders!) taking up the rest, there are a handful of streets left that are inside our attendance zone. 

Getting on the east side of the FM 620/RM 2222 intersection won't magically get us away from all traffic. This is Austin, after all. But it will get us out of the total gridlock that is caused by the geographical traffic constraints of Steiner Ranch. I think I just invented a new branch of civil engineering there. 

So we found a house and took the plunge.