By taking supreme advantage of its nightlife, Austin, Texas, has been able to create a nighttime economy that sees its streets as crowded in the wee hours as they are in the working hours.
While high tech dominates the day for the Texas capital, the thriving nightlife accentuated by abundant live music in eight distinctly different districts has created an economic engine that not only drives the city's notoriety around the world, but it pads the city coffers. Leaders in Lexington are pushing for a similar method to capture nighttime dollars that are being spent in other cities, if at all. A major portion of this year's Commerce Lexington Leadership visit to Austin focused on that city's success once the sun goes down.
"Austin has an extraordinary, vibrant nightlife," Mayor Jim Newberry said following the trip to the Lone Star State. "The thing that impressed me about it was not only the fact that it created a fun environment for a lot of young people, but it also created a real economic engine in the community.
"It helps attract a certain kind of creative thinker to the community, and a lot of those musicians and performing artists have day jobs in which they contribute mightily to the economy. So the music scene adds a lot both from an entertainment perspective but also an economic perspective," the mayor said.
Around 130 of the Commerce Lexington trip's 275 attendees participated in a Thursday night pub crawl in the city's Warehouse District. While there was a specialty beer at each of the participating bars, the pub crawl was aimed at being more of a learning experience for the Lexingtonians than just a chance to try a brew in a new city.
"Austin has done a great job of providing a variety of venues for people; you have your different kinds of music in different parts of the town," said Amy Carrington, director of the Global Scholars Program at Georgetown College.
Carrington visited a number of the Warehouse District offerings, ranging from pubs to clubs and music venues, during the night of the pub crawl and ventured to Austin's 6th Street district the following night.
Carrington said she liked the vast amount of options available to Austin's residents and visitors of all ages. "We heard stories of high school bands going out and playing at the venues, and that is really great to hear. We should do that as well," she said.
Not only do pre-and-early-college crowds get to take part in the Austin music scene, but trip participant and Preston-Osborne account executive Stephanie Apple, who graduated from UK in the late 1990s, appreciated that there were areas aimed at the 30s, 40s and 50s-plus crowds as well. "We saw more ages out. It wasn't just the college crowd; it was anywhere from 18 to all ages."
On top of the multi-age friendly environments, there were also more types of venues that appealed to the senses. "There were a lot of rooftop bars, which was really fun. (It provided) a nice outdoor environment, and one bar we went to even had a large screen (outdoors) that I was thinking ... would be great for UK games, basketball and football. You could get a big crowd up there on the roof and watch the game," Apple said.
Not long ago, according to Jim Butler, creative industries development manager for the city of Austin, the biggest tourism draw to the city was similar to Lexington, though instead of coming for Wildcat basketball, Austin got its biggest boon from Texas football.
Though 90,000 Longhorn faithful continue to pack the stadium every football Saturday, a two-week festival spun off from the 6th Street experience called South by Southwest has overtaken the 2005 national champions as the city's biggest draw. Encompassing music, film and interactive technology, the festival uses the city's existing venues to house a festival that is music's equivalent to Cannes. And that's not to mention the crowds that show up on any given night of the week at many of the same music venues year-round.
Austin didn't accomplish this by happenstance, and Lexington officials have taken note.
"I found Austin to be utilizing their creative industries for economic benefit. There's a substantial part of the Austin economy that's devoted to their arts and culture; in addition to that, I think Austin is an example of a community that made some conscious decisions 25 years or so ago to try to become a high-tech center, and they've worked that plan and had great results. Those are good lessons for Lexington to learn," Newberry said.
Some of those lessons Austinites had to learn for themselves are being brought into the fold in Lexington already.
"I was commander of central sector for almost three years, and I thought we were doing things really good," Lexington Police Commander Mark Barnard told the Commerce Lexington crowd during one of the Austin seminars.
"In the daytime, you see the bike patrol and you see the Segway officers. You see the walking beats, you see the horse patrol. We have officers stopping in the banks, in the businesses; they all know their names. But guess what? At 5 o'clock, we kind of clocked out. We had officers running around downtown, but they were in a car. They weren't getting out, talking to business owners. There's a lot of economy coming from the business owners after 5 o'clock Ö I told the chief 'that's my fault,' I didn't have the officers out there Ö (doing) what's called concierge policing, where you help the economy. And that's one of the things we're looking at right now: what can we do, what should we do? We should be supporting parking zones to let bands unload, load; that's simple for us to do," he said in reference to the 2004 addition to the 6th Street corridor in Austin, which reserves the right lane for musician loading and unloading from 6 p.m. until 3 a.m. to keep them from resorting to double parking, as had previously been the case.
The major point about Austin's nightlife is economics, according to Vice Mayor Jim Gray. "It's all about economic development. It's all about creating an active nighttime economy. It's all about competitive advantage, recognizing that our assets are our people, and the importance of retaining authenticity and special culture," Gray told the Commerce Lexington group in reference to what they can do back in Lexington.