There was a great article in Business Week about real estate trends and looking at patterns in appreciation following artists moving into neighborhoods. Basically, it asserts that artists can act as the forerunner for re-development of neighborhoods and are a pre-condition in many cases setting the foundation for the run-up in appreciation of an area. The article mentions specific cities where this is the case and Austin's own eastside is among these. Below is the link to the article.
http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/sep2008/bw20080923_944330.htm
There are numerous ways to spot this trend in action, most of it just simply by driving around and being in transitional neighborhoods. In East Austin in particular, the early signs of this change were when the East Austin Studio Tour http://www.eastaustinstudiotour.com/ got underway - which has been around for over 5 years now. The seminal event in this case was the need for large spaces where artist could expand into (and ply their trades) with low overhead.
I'll try to expand on this topic in a future post.
Sam
