Redgie Ewoldt specializes in selling Canyon Lake Texas Real Estate. Whatever your needs, I can assist in finding the right property for you. This website will help you in learning about the natural beauty of this unique lake and it's tributary, the Guadalupe River. Use the Canyon Lake Subdivision, Local Area Links, and the Mapspages for pertinent and useful information, as well as searching the MLS with no obligation. Canyon Lake is centrally located between San Antonio and Austin TX, in the beautiful Texas Hill Country. Within a 45 minute drive of the San Antonio Riverwalk, and within a 1 hour drive of Austin, the live music capital of Texas.

CANYON LAKE, TEXAS HISTORY

Canyon Lake, formerly known as Canyon Reservoir, is on the Guadalupe River twelve miles northwest of New Braunfels in northern Comal County. The project is owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. The lake, formed by a rolled earthfill dam 6,830 feet long, is used for flood control, water conservation, and recreation.

Construction of the dam was started on June 27, 1958, and impoundment of water began on June 16, 1964. The crest of the spillway is 943 feet above mean sea level, and the conservation storage capacity is 382,000 acre-feet with a surface area of 8,240 acres and a sixty-mile shoreline at 909 feet above mean sea level. Stored water is used for municipal, industrial, and irrigation purposes and for the development of hydroelectric power downstream. The drainage area above the dam is 1,432 square miles.

The construction of the dam and subsequent growth of the area surrounding the lake are among the most significant developments in twentieth-century Comal County history. Inundating a portion of the Guadalupe River valley cost the area productive farm and ranch land as well as two rural communities-Cranes Mill and Hancock-but it also stimulated development that transformed the economy and demography of the county. After the lake was filled north central Comal County became one of the largest population centers in Central Texas and the focus of a resort and tourist industry that rivaled manufacturing and agriculture in importance to the county economy. The dam made possible land development along the lake shore and in the area downstream, which for the first time was protected from periodic flooding.

Residents and tourists support a variety of businesses and service industries that transformed the former farm and ranch communities of Sattler and Startzville into thriving commercial centers and occasioned the new town of Canyon City. The Canyon Lake community, forty-eight miles from San Antonio and fifty-six from Austin, continued to attract new commuter, retired, and weekend residents.

Information courtesy of "The Handbook of Texas Online

Lone Star
Why Texas is doing so much better economically than the rest of the nation.

By Daniel Gross
www.slate.com/id/2250999

Once a separate nation, Texas has recently been behaving more like an independent economic republic than a regular state. While it hasn't been immune to the problems plaguing the nation, the Texas housing market, employment rate, and overall economic growth are relatively strong. Chalk some of this up to accidents of geology and geography. But Texan prosperity also reflects the conscious efforts of a once-parochial place to embrace globalization.

On several measures of economic stress, Texas is doing quite well. The state unemployment rate is 8.2 percent—high, but still one many states would envy. (California's is 12.5 percent; Michigan's is 14.1 percent.) It entered recession later than the rest of the country—Texas was adding jobs through August 2008—and started slowly adding jobs again last fall, thanks mostly to its great position in the largely recession-proof energy industry.

The Texas housing market also has fared better than many. The mortgage delinquency rate (the portion of borrowers three months behind on payments) is 5.78 percent, compared with 8.78 nationwide, according to First American CoreLogic. That's partly because relaxed zoning codes and abundant land kept both price appreciation and speculation down. "House prices didn't experience a bubble in the same way as the rest of the nation," said Anil Kumar, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. But it's also because of two attributes not commonly associated with the Longhorn State: financial restraint and comparatively strong regulation. Unlike many of its neighbors, Texas has state laws that prohibited consumers from using home-equity lines of credit to increase borrowing to more than 80 percent of the value of their homes. The upshot: Dallas housing prices have fallen only 7 percent from their 2007 peak, according to the Case-Shiller index.

As it has for decades, energy is driving Texas' economy. But it's not because the state's wells are gushing crude. In November 2009, Texas wells produced 1.08 million barrels per day, about half as much as they did in the late 1980s. In recent years, natural gas has been undergoing a renaissance. The state's production rose about 35 percent between 2004 and 2008. And Texas has received a big boost from a different, renewable source of energy: wind.

In this area, Texas' size and history of independence has enabled it to jump-start a new industry. The state has its own electricity grid, which is not connected to neighboring states. That has allowed it to move swiftly and decisively in deregulating power markets, building new transmission lines, and pursuing alternative sources. "We can build transmission lines without federal jurisdiction and without consulting other states," said Paul Sadler, executive director of the Austin-based Wind Coalition. Ramping up wind power nationally would require connecting energy fields—the windswept, sparsely populated plains—to population centers on the coasts and in the Midwest. Texas' grid already connects the plains of West Texas with consumers in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. Texas recently surpassed 10,000 megawatts of capacity, the most by far of any state and enough to power 3 million homes, Sadler says. Wind energy is also powering employment—creating more than 10,000 jobs so far. And it has attracted foreign companies, including Danish turbine maker Vestas, Spanish renewable-energy giant Iberdrola, and Shell.

Texas today is more suburban engineer than urban cowboy, more Michael Dell than J.R. Ewing. Austin, home to the University of Texas, the state government, and Dell Computer, has a 7 percent unemployment rate. Yes, ExxonMobil is based in Irving. But the state's energy complex is increasingly focused more on services and technology than on intuition and wildcatting. And it is selling those services into the global oil patch. Russian, Persian Gulf, and African oil developers now come to Houston for equipment, engineering, and software.

While its political leaders may occasionally flirt with secession, Texas thrives on connection. It surpassed California several years ago as the nation's largest exporting state. Manufactured goods like electronics, chemicals, and machinery account for a bigger chunk of Texas' exports than petroleum does. In the first two months of 2010, exports of stuff made in Texas rose 24.3 percent, to $29 billion, from 2009. That's about 10 percent of the nation's total exports. There are more than 700,000 Texan jobs geared to manufacturing goods for export, according to Patrick Jankowski, vice president of research at the Greater Houston Partnership. "A lot of it is capital goods that the Asian, Latin American, and African [countries] are using to build their economies."

Thanks to that embrace of globalization, the Texas turnaround may help lead the nation in its economic turnaround. Texans have always had the ability to think big. Now that their state has become a player in the global economy, we can expect a new kind of swagger.

Information Courtesy from Slate - www.slate.com/id/2250999