HI - Austin
With a wall of windows overlooking beautiful Town Lake, HI-Austin gets great reviews by its guests of all ages from around the world. The hostel also features a great hosteller's kitchen, plenty of free car parking, and a laundry on site. For the outdoor enthusiast, the hostel sits on a dedicated hike and bike trail around Town Lake, and offers inexpensive rental bikes, canoes and kayaks for hostel
guests ...
Goodall Wooten Dorm
The WOO offers both the convenience of being on "The Drag" and a small friendly alternative to on-campus
dormitories ...
University of Texas - ICC Student Co-ops
ICC is a non-profit organization that owns and operates low-cost housing for college students in Austin, Texas. We have nine large houses, each serving 14-32 members. We've been doing this since 1970 although ICC goes back to 1932. Here's more about our history, written by a former
member ...
Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas and the county seat of Travis County. Situated in the region of Central Texas, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 16th-largest in the United States. As of the 2005 U.S. Census estimate, Austin had a population of
690,252. The city is the core cultural and economic center of the Austin–Round Rock metropolitan area with a population of 1.4 million.
The first documented settlement of current-day Austin occurred in 1835, and the site was named Waterloo in 1837. In 1839, Mirabeau B. Lamar renamed the city in honor of Stephen F. Austin. Its original name is honored by local businesses such as Waterloo Ice House and Waterloo Records. Austin is situated on the Colorado River and on the Balcones Fault, which in much of Austin runs roughly the same route as the MoPac expressway.
Residents of Austin are known as Austinites and include a mix of university professors, students, politicians, lobbyists, musicians, state employees and high-tech workers. The city is home to enough large sites of major technology corporations to have earned the nickname "Silicon Hills". Austin's official slogan is The Live Music Capital of the World, and many try to follow one of its unofficial mottoes of "Keep Austin Weird". ATX is a popular abbreviation for the city of Austin.
Other attractions in Austin include the Blanton Museum of Art, opened in 2006, and the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum across the street, opened in 2000. The capitol building itself is also a major tourist attraction. Sixth Street is a musical hub for the city but also includes annual festivals such as the Pecan Street Festival and Halloween night. Tourists frequently gather on the Congress Avenue bridge at sunset during the summer months to witness Austin's Mexican free-tailed bat population emerge from under the bridge for the night.
