Michael Shear Pitches Distributed Office Networks to Tame Austin’s Commute Crisis

This recent episode of The Building Texas Show, titled ‘The Future of Work in Texas: Distributed Offices, Fiber Networks & Ending Commutes,’ was published on March 9th, 2026. It features host Justin McKenzie in Central Texas with strategist Michael Shear, leader of Strategic Office Networks. The conversation challenges the downtown high-rise model, exploring how regional growth, housing affordability, and I-35 congestion can be addressed with a regional fiber backbone, edge computing, and a strategically distributed workforce. The newsworthy claim: the infrastructure decisions Texas planners make in the next 12 to 24 months will define commuting, housing, and resilience for the next 100 years.

Across the hour, Shear and McKenzie unpack a specific vision he calls Project ION and a set of practical topic threads listeners can expect:

• Replacing one 60-floor downtown tower with ten six-floor office buildings sited in suburbs and exurbs like Cedar Park and Luling.
• Architecting dedicated, secure communications networks for hospitals, universities, chip manufacturers, and emergency dispatch, not just generic broadband.
• Pairing edge computing with the Texas data center boom to harden communities against climate events, accidents, and geopolitical risk on a high-value I-35 corridor.

Shear describes this as a structural transition, not just a remote-work debate. Referencing the 2026 book ‘Overbuilt: The High Cost and Low Rewards of US Highways,’ he notes that 22% of land in 316 U.S. metro areas is paved, echoing the Texas Transportation Institute’s warning that regions cannot build their way out of growth.

The deeper discussion connects workforce strategy to public safety and economic resilience. Shear describes meetings with fire and police chiefs about deployment readiness during evacuations, references Nobel-recognized economic research by Joel Mokyr on how hardened institutions stall innovation, and points to Central Texas assets, including the seat of state government, major R&D universities, military complexes, and semiconductor fabs, as both a competitive advantage and a high-value target. He also flags generational economics: where a 30-year career once matched a 30-year mortgage, today’s three-to-five-year job tenures put homebuying at risk unless networked hubs let workers change employers without changing communities. He highlights a recent Christmas-parade live portal linking a Texas town to Ireland as a preview of XR, spatial acoustics, and haptic tools becoming mainstream within three to five years. He also confirms that Google Fiber crews were laying new lines outside his home during the week of taping.

About The Building Texas Show

Hosted by Justin McKenzie, The Building Texas Show travels the state to interview the builders, strategists, and civic leaders shaping what Texas will look like over the next 50 years. Each episode connects infrastructure, technology, workforce, and community with the practical realities of explosive growth. The episode with Michael Shear is available now wherever podcasts are heard, and on YouTube; listeners are encouraged to like and subscribe.

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