Taking Austin for a moment, the real estate market has doubled since 2012, and zillow calls the market 'hot'. While obviously not Bay Area prices, real estate growth is high.
I'm pretty skeptical of 'in the world' claim, but I have heard that the north-south arterial axis of the city build out makes getting around challenging at times.
My overall point is, 'fast growing tech hubs' have growth related problems. Only in an extreme anti-tax state like TX, you may never have any infrastructure build up, except for maybe more interstates.
Ultimately, municipal elections draw only the most engaged voters, and outside of those times, officials have broad authority to control how things are built. Getting re-elected is always a concern, so we end up with a general slow-to-change civic pattern that appears to be repeating all across the US. Even in much-lauded NYC, people complain about (a) underinvestment in subways (b) many manhattan buildings are illegal under current planning code. Building code is a primary challenge to reducing change, and I hardly see anyone, except CA state authorities, attacking overly restrictive planning code.
In NoVa there is no overly restrictive planning code to begin with. It results in fairly fugly developments sometimes like parts of Tysons, but would take that any day over SV cost of living.
Austin has minimal mass transit - some train, some bus. For Texas in general, it's better than average. However, this popped up: https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/austin-named-one-of-the-mos...
I'm pretty skeptical of 'in the world' claim, but I have heard that the north-south arterial axis of the city build out makes getting around challenging at times.
My overall point is, 'fast growing tech hubs' have growth related problems. Only in an extreme anti-tax state like TX, you may never have any infrastructure build up, except for maybe more interstates.
Ultimately, municipal elections draw only the most engaged voters, and outside of those times, officials have broad authority to control how things are built. Getting re-elected is always a concern, so we end up with a general slow-to-change civic pattern that appears to be repeating all across the US. Even in much-lauded NYC, people complain about (a) underinvestment in subways (b) many manhattan buildings are illegal under current planning code. Building code is a primary challenge to reducing change, and I hardly see anyone, except CA state authorities, attacking overly restrictive planning code.
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