We got mail: chicken wings and rent spikes
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Here's some recent correspondence in the Axios Austin mailbag.
What they're saying: After we reported on spikes in rent, Nick T. wrote that he's moving to Massachusetts at the expiration of his lease, which hopped up by 12.5%, because "Austin is just too ridiculous."
Just ahead of the Super Bowl, we broke down the rising cost of chicken wings.
- Salwa Khan, who hosts the "Mothering Earth" podcast, drew our attention to plant-based chicken wings: "Check this out …Bet there are lots of locals who are vegetarian/vegan."
Our story about mortgage denial rates for Black Texans recalled for Tom L. a job he landed with a lender in 1969, when he was home from a deployment with the Army and waiting for school to start.
- "There was a point score rating system to qualify an applicant, and one of the items to get points was race-based," he wrote. " There were 10 categories. I do not remember all of them but white was # 1 (obviously) and # 8-10 were Hispanic, black, and Greek. Nobody disputed the unfairness even back then."
In our special weekend getaways Saturday newsletter, we referred to Enchanted Rock as a "mini-Ayers Rock."
- "This Australian is very proud that you gave 'Ayers Rock' a shout-out!," Leigh P. wrote. "A cultural development you may not be aware of over the last couple of decades: most Aussies now refer to this landmark as 'Uluru,' considered more respectful to the land’s traditional owners. On a map, the official government designated name is 'Ayers Rock / Uluru.'"
Finally, we received this note from Axios' celebrity Dallas correspondent Michael Mooney about a planned "Keep Austin Weird" sculpture that we wrote about this month:
"That's a totally Dallas-feeling thing, except here it'd be a mediocre slogan concocted in a boardroom of overpriced tourism bureaucrats instead of an earnest sentiment that's been corrupted by unnecessary municipal cronies."