Feb 23, 2022 - Food and Drink

We got mail: chicken wings and rent spikes

Illustration of a fountain pen with a pixelated paper airplane as the nib.

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.

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."
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