The Scout
Austin and Central Texas
Twenty-two counties, from the Hill Country to the Brazos, read every weekday. One region, not a metro with a fence around it — because the interesting land is almost never inside the city limits.
The counties
Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, Caldwell, Bell, Coryell, Lampasas, McLennan, Falls, Milam, Robertson, Lee, Burnet, Llano, San Saba, Mills, Blanco, Comal, Guadalupe, Kendall, and north Bexar to the downtown San Antonio line.
Each county files things its own way. A plat approved in Williamson is recorded under a different term than the same event in Hays, and we use each county’s own word rather than flattening them into one vocabulary. The county is the smallest unit we work in. Nothing is split into sub-markets or quadrants.
What is anchoring the region
Power and data centres
Gigawatt-scale campuses in Milam, Caldwell, Bell and Guadalupe, and a state review of grid interconnection requests that is reshaping which sites are viable.
Samsung Taylor
The megafab in Williamson, and the supplier and industrial demand landing around it.
Industrial on the eastern edge
Speculative shells going into the ground in Georgetown, Hutto, Taylor and Pflugerville before anyone has signed a lease.
The Hill Country land shift
Long-held ranch land changing hands, then dividing. The earliest signal of all, and the hardest to see without reading deeds.
The daily
Every weekday morning, what moved. Each item links through to its Project Dossier.
Issues appear here as they publish.
The Scout — Austin
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