Vacancy.com Blog Schloarship

This is an official entry for the vacancy.com blog schloarship contest. To view contest or enter, go to www.vacancy.com/schloarship.

If I had stumbled to Vacancy.com before I had moved into my current apartment, I’d have elected to move into The State House on Congress. It is a luxury apartment complex in the middle of the South Congress District of Austin. The district is five blocks of Austin’s funky idiosyncrasies—a row of streamliners serving local food, a row of vintage and consignment boutiques, and plenty of tastemakers to keep the ambiance young and trendy. SoCo is Austin’s famous weirdness incarnate. The neighborhood is a great place to blow off steam, especially after a mundane workweek. It has the charm of old Texas architecture but has been renovated for the taste of modern business owners with the savvy to “Keep Austin Weird.”

I’ve always fallen for the “location, location, location!” cliché when it comes to prime real estate. The State House on Congress area is the best Austin neighborhood in which to live. It hasn’t grown into the monstrosity of Lamar Boulevard, where the sky high, floor to ceiling glass window, multi-million dollar condos snub the landscape. These apartments characterize Austin’s two emerging characteristics, which is to gentrify and modernize, the other to retain its charming identity and keep itself humble. Although my hometown Los Angeles is often regarded with awe and infatuation (some Texans joke that Dallas is striving to be Los Angeles), its constant struggle with balance is laughable. Like Austin itself, The State House seems to have mastered the art of cool all while keeping itself from losing its hospitable nature.