Curbed Cup nominations are open!

It's the most wonderful time of the year! Today marks the start of Curbed Cup 2017, our annual competition to name the best neighborhood in Austin. Eight neighborhoods enter, but only one is crowned 2017’s champion.

But first, we need to figure out our contestants—and there are a whole lot more than eight neighborhoods in Austin. We need your nominations!

Some background information: Every year, Curbed Austin pits neighborhoods against one another in a friendly, winner-takes-all bracket challenge. East César Chavez took the first-ever championship in 2016, the inaugural year for Austin’s Curbed Cup, in a neck-and-neck final round with Downtown.

Want your neighborhood to win this year? Here’s the first step: Nominate your neighborhood by leaving a comment in this post or sending an email to the tipline. We'll tabulate the entries to form an Elite Eight of Austin neighborhoods. Then, we'll put it to a reader vote starting December 11. The winner gets crowned the top neighborhood in January.

And don't just namedrop. Tell us why your neighborhood deserves to win the Curbed Cup! Have you been harnessing Austin’s growth in a creative and inclusive way? Do the best new restaurants and retail choose to come to your area first? Is it easy to live there without owning a car? Does it have a unique heritage that it keeps alive? Does it have some great natural features, community gathering spots, nifty under-the-radar spaces, neighborly neighbors? (Just remember: Every section of Austin is someone's home, so focus on what’s good about your neighborhood—not what’s bad about theirs.)

Give us the inside scoop today—it could be the reason your neighborhood comes out on top in 2017.