When I first got this job, a culture writer named Cat Cardenas had some strong instructions for me. Born and raised in San Antonio and an Austin resident since enrolling at the University of Texas in 2014, she was excited for my new position but worried about an Austin writer joining MySA.

“Don’t Austin my San Antonio!” she pleaded.

It was in jest, but there is a kernel of truth in every joke, or so the bromide goes.

The phrase has morphed. Austinities worry about the city getting California’d (too late). While reporting a story in Lockhart recently, I saw a sticker that read “Don’t Austin my Lockhart.” That sense of provincialism has proliferated throughout the state.

In this edition of our series on the mega-metro, we’re focusing on culture. Mainly, what would smushing these towns and cities together do to benefit each one? And how could annexing Austin and San Antonio flatten the culture in either city?

In a mega-metro, San Antonio benefits from tech jobs and dollars, UT Austin talent, and more. But from a cultural perspective, Austin has more to gain from San Antonio than vice versa.

Yes, Austin has the money and the flagship university and the shiny new arena built with that money at that university and which hogs Drake and Olivia Rodrigo and all the other musicians who skip San Antonio on their tours. And Austin has the Texas State Capitol and the political capital that comes with it.

But there is, beyond the Alamo and the other missions, a strong cultural identity that has either been lost here, or, if you’re a black-pilled Austin cynic, never really existed.

“San Antonio kind of represents the past, whereas Austin represents the future,” says Texas Public Radio’s David Martin Davies. “And I think that people will see that as a negative, but there’s a lot to be said for the history and the culture of San Antonio.”

It’s certainly a shift from the pretty recent past. If you’ll remember Austin used to be — or has been characterized as such, endlessly — as a sleepy town where musicians paid for sandwiches with a song.

In 2010, Josh Long published Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas, on the precipice of major capital and cultural shifts in the city. The book categorized and anticipated threats to the underlying cultural landscape that made Austin special. Those threats weren’t so far off. Thirteen years later, Long would write a completely different book.

“For years,” Long says, he heard San Antonians complaining about Austin hogging all the glory. Not so much anymore. “I have friends in San Antonio who are like, ‘You know what? Never mind. We don’t want it. Austin sucks now,’” he says.

It’s a popular refrain in 2023 for Austin residents to self-hate, but to hear it from the city just down I-35 is new. It’s bearing out in the real estate market.

During a housing market boom in 2021, Austin saw residents priced out of the city, settling in nearby Elgin, Pflugerville, or Kyle. But more recently, folks are trading one major metropolis for another. 

San Antonio added 19,000 new residents in 2022 — and 20% of those imports came from Austin. A more recent report shows that 56% of pageviews on Zillow for San Antonio housing come from people in Austin, with many young, first-time homebuyers skipping over the suburbs on the I-35 corridor and picking the Alamo City.

Could we see a mass exodus from Austin to the “suddenly hip” city down I-35, an impossibility just a decade ago?

“If you’d told me when I was in my 20s that people would be talking about the coolest cities in Texas being San Antonio and Houston,” Long says, “I’d be like, ‘Get the f**k out of here.’”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the silver-and-black elephant in the room. Ever since the San Antonio Spurs played two meaningless, late-season games at the Moody Center last season, Spurs fans have been apoplectic about losing one of its crown jewels to Austin.

But wouldn’t that be just so Austin? 

San Antonio sports fans are still not over the fact that the city 75 miles to the north swooped in and grabbed an expansion MLS team in 2018 even after Austin unsuccessfully tried to poach the Columbus Crew a few years earlier. The city, not known for caring about much in the way of athletics beyond Longhorns football, had been rewarded for its brashness while San Antonio, with an existing USL Championship squad and proof of fervent soccer fandom, was left in the lurch.

Consider that this happened after San Antonio and Bexar County ponied up $9 million to purchase Toyota Field in order to create a stadium that was attractive to the MLS and got the Spurs to join the bid. And consider that the guy who brought soccer to Austin, then-Crew owner Anthony Precourt, also sat on the MLS committee in charge of awarding new franchises.

“Putting the guy that wants to move to Austin on it, knowing full well if Austin got a franchise we were not going to get one, because we’re only about 75 miles away or so … all of our suspicions became true,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff told Texas Public Radio last year. “The Spurs didn’t think that was going to happen – but [if] you’ve been around politics long enough how to smell out a rat – I figured that was a rat. And turned out to be a big rat.”

Put aside the fact that the team just invested half a billion dollars in a campus and practice facility in northwest San Antonio and that Austin doesn’t have — and can’t build, realistically — an arena large enough to handle an NBA team. Forget, even, about the five banners hanging from the rafters at the AT&T Center.

Branding exercise though it may be, two games out of 82 is still a stab in the heart for every diehard who has gladly exchanged their hard-earned money for the opportunity to watch a rebuilding team flounder at the bottom of the Western Conference.

“The Spurs are sacred in that city,” Long says. “I shudder to think … it’d be riots in the streets.”

There are already mega-metro dual citizens, says David Martin Davies, who, by the way, likes to call the forming region the Combo-Loco Metro.

He’s heard stories of folks getting on buses in San Antonio to work at Giga Texas in Austin every day, just as they do in Killeen, just in the other direction.

As we’ve covered in an earlier story in this series, transportation is at the heart of this project, and I-35 could wind up as the clogged artery in the mega-metro. Increased traffic and stalled rail plans are indicators that the mega-metro could be speeding along too quickly, to the detriment of San Antonio in particular.

“We don’t want it to grow like a cancer — that’s the problem with uncontrolled growth,” he says. “You just have this big tumor of these two cities coming together. And we don’t want that.”

Louis Singh, owner of St. Mary’s restaurant Singh’s Vietnamese, grew up in San Antonio but has lived in Austin before, saying that he’s already seeing the Austin influence on the San Antonio culinary scene in the proliferation of food trucks in the city. Austin-based chains have also invaded San Antonio in recent years, from Torchy’s and P. Terry’s to Via 313 and Kerbey Lane Cafe.

Singh says he’s fine with growth and more food options as San Antonio grows as a food city, and that competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In some cases, it can bring more ideas to the (pun intended) table. But it can’t be unchecked growth.

“I’m a little afraid of getting oversaturated, kind of like how Austin is,” Singh says. “The bigger picture is that it’s going to take somebody or some great teams to help facilitate that kind of communication.”

In order to share a food scene, in a mega-metro scenario, some thought is going to have to go into exactly how to make sure legacy businesses don’t get shoved out as Austin comes parading down the highway.

Davies, who, anecdotally and in his work as a reporter, sees the mega-metro as an inevitability, is also worried for San Antonio if Austin decides to impose its will. There are economic advantages San Antonio could see, through higher paying jobs and through pooling talent with Austin and the rest of the corridor. But the drawbacks will be particularly stark in the way of culture.

“My main concern about a San Antonio-Austin, Combo-Loco Metro, is how San Antonio will be the Oakland to Austin’s San Francisco, or the Fort Worth to their Dallas,” Davies says. “We’ll be the second city, the second banana. And, you know, it’s hard to argue that it would be any other way.”