Homesickness is also possible here. For those that have lived in California for over 10 years, you can get very attached to this state even given its high costs and other problems. There is a lot of diversity, good restaurants, good weather, beaches, and a sense of belonging in Silicon Valley. Giving up those things is not easy even if it comes with other benefits.
One quote, and one bit of 5-month USPS change-of-address data not specific to techies or those who'd recently moved-to-Austin? Not much to hang a trend story on. This kind of story is just pandering to some readers' desired headlines.
This could basically have been written by ChatGPT with the prompt "write a story about USPS change of address data showing movement out of X as it relates to the tech industry"
California partly took the tech industry from the old tech centers (Texas, Massachusetts, etc) due to regressive (or progressive, on California's part, if you choose to see it that way) policies regarding Non-Competes and other executive/corporate limits. It's become so entrenched in the economy now, with so many protective policies and huge VC centrality, that it's unlikely WFH and housing prices are going to dismantle that monopoly in a couple years.
That's not to say it's a permanent monopoly, but if those other states want to actually take any of that influence, they need to morph their policies to at least match the kind of privileges California offers. There are other places that have actually been working to do this for a decade or two that have grown permanent economies in the tech realm (Boston rebuilding their tech economy, Colorado, Utah, Oregon). Texas is simply not one of them, despite Austin doing its best.
Yet. You can't expect the electricity resellers to absorb wholesale market shocks forever without passing it on to consumers. The ERCOT spot market has hit the ceiling of $5000/MWh every single day all summer long.
Is that the spot price or price for all electricity consumed in the state? Depending on how the market is structured it's very possible that there's different prices paid depending on the type of contract. For instance the utility might be paying one generator a fixed price for base load, and gets the remainder on the spot market. On hot days the spot market might be $5000, but that's not the price the utility pays for all electricity at that moment, because it also has electricity supplied from lower priced contracts.
It balances out for all those hours in the year where prices go negative and all those hours where it's not $50/kWh.
Plus, youre talking spot markets, not day ahead. Most electricity is sold in the day ahead markets, which isn't anywhere near those prices.
But hey, continue suggesting people are actually paying $50/kWh without sharing any additional context. Being truly genuine, I see.
I did the math based on my usage last month. I pay $0.06/kWh for electricity cost (not including delivery, just energy). Most of my usage is after those peak hours, as my car charges and pool pumps run and we do our laundry and dishwasher and what not over the evening or early morning. Even at that rate my REP probably made money off me, as they would have still been ahead assuming they were properly buying in the day ahead markets. And in the fall when rates often go negative they'll make a lot of my usage getting paid both ways on the transaction. What do you pay for electricity?
Oh yeah, and my plan is 100% renewable purchase. What mix is yours?
1991-2020 normals are great if you intend to move to Austin in 1991, which I fully recommend because it was dirt cheap and quirky and the lines at the restaurants were much shorter.
If you have to move to 2023 Austin then you have to be ready for highs over 100 for 36 of the last 37 days, and the remaining day it was 99.
It's 86F there right now. At midnight. Most coastal Californians think 86 is a fatal atmospheric condition.
I moved away from Austin in the late 80s partly to get away from the heat, and it's gotten steadily worse since: The heat island is more profound now that Austin is so much bigger, climate change is happening, and El Nino made the summer of 2023 in Texas unbearable. Keep in mind these temperatures are accompanied by very high humidity.
And if you think the heat is uncomfortable in Austin, in Houston it's moreso.
They can't because it's not true. You're absolutely right, it legally can't go above $5,000/MWh meaning $5/kWh. It was lowered to that value after the winter storm where it hit is previous max of $9,000/MWh.
Looked at a (non-tech-sector) job in Houston, we weren't especially bothered by the heat, and the people I would have worked with would have been great, but we just couldn't see ourselves there culturally. My wife also found hurricane season personally alarming.
There is no information in the linked article. I would like to opinion of regular techies not some investor, not some vp or CEO or CTO or Mr Musk. Likes of Mr. Musk, lives in stratosphere. Regular techies at best live in rental apartment, paying 30-40% of his monthly income as rent, with no viable path to home ownership.
This article isn't a shining beacon of journalism but as a "tech worker" not having lived in either city but considering it I'd be interested in "transplants" anecdotes.
Texas makes a big deal about not having income tax. What they don't tell you is how high the property taxes are.
I live in a state with income tax, and if I lived in this same house in Austin (as if I could afford such a house in Austin) my total, overall tax bill in Texas would probably be $20k per year higher than I pay now.
If you think flat is fair, then yes. If you are coming from California it's quite shocking. People like Elon Musk and his enablers in the media talk about the marginal tax rates in California, but the median Californian owes no or trivial state income taxes. If you transplant that median household to Texas their tax burden is higher, and they are more exposed to housing market shocks than they would be in California where the state constitution limits tax assessment increases to 2% per year.
A property tax isn't a flat tax, as the people who own the highest value assets--and are thereby able to use them to extract the highest rents from other people--are paying higher taxes for that continuing privilege. The reality is that homeowners can feel poor but they are ridiculously richer and more powerful than people at the same income level who are merely renting.
If you want to limit property tax, but you don't have really really strict rent control laws (which California does not: some areas--including, notably, San Francisco--do have some minimal mechanisms, but they pale in comparison to the power of prop 13 for property owners) you end up with an extremely unfair tax system...
...which, though, does favor people with more money, and so this actually furthers the narrative of how the people who moved away from California because they wanted to not have so much tax on their income are now realizing they have a lot of assets and want to capitalize on that in California.
It's plausible; a $40k new gas-powered car in California would owe about $600 in annual registration fees in San Francisco.
Texas's electricity rates are about half of those in California, so 3 summer months' AC costs in Dallas could be notably less, especially for a small/single-person residence.
(And, Calfornia's gas costs about 40% more per gallon than in Texas, due to both taxes & other supply-limiting regulations - which one might reasonably consider an extra tax on having a car in California.)
You know I really don’t care if you believe me or not. I’ll sleep just fine. But since you asked oh so nicely… I had a Corolla and it cost me just under $800, and I’m just over $200/mo in electric
The extra heat from this summertime is adding like $100/mo to my bill for a 2,400sqft house for like 3.5 months. This is a hotter than average summer, usually its like $75 or so more a month. So if my two cars cost more than like $350 for registration fees, then yeah I'd be paying more for registration fees than I do on AC. Given the fact others here suggest its several hundred dollars for a single car, then yeah I'd probably be paying way more for car registration fees than what I'm spending cooling my home. How much are motorcycle registration fees? We should probably tack on at least one motorcycle being registered as well.
And that's before the fact gas and electricity is routinely 2x more expensive in CA than TX, which energy costs are a large part of the costs of operating a car. If we were to really compare car ownership costs in CA vs TX to the idea of how much I spend on AC, it wouldn't even be close.
> Texas makes a big deal about not having income tax.
It's a misleading claim every time it's made.
The people of Texas need to pay for things somehow; they must contribute tax revenue roughly equal to government expenses. If it's not personal income tax, then it's some other tax.
I prefer income tax when it's progressive (higher rates for higher earnings), because it helps equal out the sacrifice: 10% of $10,000 income is much more of a sacrifice than 10% of $1,000,000 income.
It's hard to see how any other tax is preferable. Why would I prefer sales tax?
Income tax doesn't really tax the very rich. They earn their money from assets and generally either don't pay taxes at all, or if they do pay taxes, it's based on long term capital gain rate, which is lower.
High property tax on the other hand, is helpful in two ways:
1. It directly tax the rich who hold more property.
The problem with CGT is that it allows people to defer their tax obligations indefinitely while amassing wealth using untaxed “unrealised” gains. This can be a very effective tax-avoidance strategy.
This makes sense kind of, though. If you haven't realized any of your gains, what are you paying the tax with?
This feels like if you're a normal person who happens to own a painting that becomes super desirable and worth millions. If you sell it then tax away, but otherwise it's literally just the same painting you've always had.
Yup, but an unrealised gain is still a gain. A million dollar in shares or paintings or classic cars can be borrowed against, and you don't need to pay taxes on borrowing.
(And when you die, the capital gains base resets, which is the real travesty -- the heirs pay the loan with some of the capital at zero capital gains tax cost, and start borrowing again with the same strategy whenever they need to.)
How so though? If you're not selling or collateralizing something, you're not gaining any money from possessing it (unless you're counting the spreadsheet number going up as gains by itself).
> And when you die, the capital gains base resets
Yeah, this seems pretty ludicrous. I can understand why inheritance wouldn't cause a taxable event (e.g. you inherit the painting), but it seems pretty wild to allow that while also resetting the basis.
I could be missing something, but I don't know of a super reasonable defense for this part (other than potentially disincentivizing inter-generational hoarding of assets? Honestly not sure)
> you're not gaining any money from possessing it.
You aren’t gaining money, but you’re gaining wealth. And the compounding effects are exaggerated if you don’t pay tax until you sell.
For certain asset classes, especially liquid assets like shares/stocks this is dead simple. The value is easily and accurately determinable. If you don’t have the money to pay the tax, you sell assets to make the money. Property, especially residential, is basically on the same level. Ah, but what if investors don’t have the cash and are forced to sell their properties? God forbid these leeches stop treating housing as speculative assets and sell their portfolios onto owner-occupiers.
For other assets, yeah, I don’t know. But I don’t have a single iota of sympathy for millionaires/billionaires who may struggle to pay tax because their wealth isn’t generated via personal income.
> This makes sense kind of, though. If you haven't realized any of your gains, what are you paying the tax with?
True, but only in a philosophical sense. It's an issue of pricing, and pricing securities assets to original purchase value is a falsehood.
People are very happy when their stock price increases dramatically, or their home value increases; they don't say 'well, those aren't my assets; all I have is the $100 price I bought it at X years ago.' People are happy when it's securities for which they only have future options to buy.
i'm mostly learning about this just recently, but i still downvoted you because i don't think that's true. property tax, for all intents and purposes, seems to just get passed down to the renters both commercial and residential.
i used to knee jerk think that raising property taxes to the market rate was a great equalizer. in california that bill got killed, but actually i'm more informed now and i don't think it's that easy.
If you look at a property in the Bay Area, it seems mortgages are significantly more expensive than rent. So people can't be buying for the purpose of making money off renting it out, or for the purpose of saving money by not paying rent. People must be buying for the purpose of making money from the price going up in the future. Property tax prevents it from going up in the future too much, thus it will prevent prices from getting so high.
appreciate the nuance. what about all cash offers though? i understand high interest rates change these equations, but influx of egregious capital from China for example, all-cash offers is a problem no? they break the equation if they need places to store capital. they aren't affected by interest rates and so sit on property and weather any storms.
If the tax rate is high, then property won't be a good investment. They'll be paying high tax on a small value property. The high tax will discourage people from buying property as an investment.
>in the Bay Area, it seems mortgages are significantly more expensive than rent.
It wasn’t that way when mortgages were 2-4% —- getting a mortgage is harder and requires a large down payment. It’s more of a commitment. Rent will always be more.
>So people can't be buying for the purpose of making money off renting it out, or for the purpose of saving money by not paying rent.
They can and they did.
> People must be buying for the purpose of making money from the price going up in the future.
It does that too, and for many boomers who bought in the 60s-80s, it went up about 10x for them.
> Property tax prevents it from going up in the future too much, thus it will prevent prices from getting so high.
Look up “California Prop 13”. People who buy basically get a freeze on tax rates at the price they paid for the house. If you bought in 1978, you’d pay the property tax based on the 1975 assessed value, and it can only go up 2% per year up to 1% of that assessed value MAX. That means if you bought a house back then for $100k, the max tax is $1k. Now your neighbor moved out and cashes in on their lottery ticket-like winnings, selling their home right next door for the $2m properties on that street are now worth. Guess how much the new owner pays in taxes? $20k. Even though the house paying $1k could sell tomorrow for the same $2m, they paid a ridiculously low property tax for decades, and the new owners of the exact same property will pay $20k each time property tax season rolls along. This garbage law is a big part of why owning in the Bay Area is so hard for folks trying to get their first home. Meanwhile, tons of owners rent their paid-off cheap tax home for ridiculous market rates. $5-7k/mo for a clapped out 60s POS is very typical. The folks who really played their cards right and have multiple properties for which there paying 1/10th or so of what their property tax SHOULD be then renting those all out while they live like kings are the real winners in this scenario, as are all the businesses that enjoy the same anti-competitive benefits. Ever wonder how all those crappy taquerias in San Jose stay open after all these decades while newer much better restaurants struggle and go under in a year? It’s this. Ever wonder how much tax Disney pays on all their property? It’s criminally low. Yet this issue is such a political third rail because all the boomer voters love love love their sweet sweet 90%+ tax discount, they’ll do anything to keep it. Another fun fact is this benefit can be passed down within the family, and with some clever lawyers, be passed between companies as well (IIRC the trick is to sell a property in 3 parts so no part exceeds 50% of tbe whole). Yay, loopholes. This is also a big part of why we have some schools that are surrounded by $2m+ houses and yet the school is way under-funded: those old neighborhoods don’t pay jack for property tax.
Landlords are price takers because supply is fixed in the short to medium term. Demand is what sets prices in the rental market as landlords look to find the tenant that will pay the most for their unit. Because of this property taxes are not passed to tenants, unless you think about second order effects that change the supply of housing available for rent.
> Landlords are price takers because supply is fixed in the short to medium term.
Quantity supplied is not fixed in even the short term, landlords choose whether to let vacant units or remove them from the market, e.g., for upgrades that might improve their relative position in the market when re-let but prevent letting them immediately, based on market conditions including adequacy of price.
There's a limit to how high quantity supplied can be in the short term, but underneath that cap it has the usual slope direction of a supply curve.
Sure but at least in my area vacancy rate is sub 4%. The structural minimum is 3% so there really aren't any landlords just leaving units vacant. Surely some will choose to sell when taxes increase but rental supply is pretty stable after property taxes are up a solid 50% so that seems to be minor.
Capital gains can be considered income depending on how the tax is structured.
States without income tax are nearly always states with more regressive tax structures as a whole[0]. States with income tax are typically less regressive. Property tax can target wealth, yes; but states without income tax nearly always rely on sales and excise taxes to bridge the gap, not on property taxes.
Until they do stuff like CA Prop 13 so the folks who have been rich for a while continue to pay very little property taxes, while the burden rests with anyone trying to buy a home in the past 10-20 years.
> If you make over $66k, your income tax is 9.3%, going up to 13.3% if you make FANG money.
The marginal rate is 9.3% above 66k. If your AGI is $67k your taxes are ~$3000. There is no 13.3% bracket. There is a 12.3% bracket for marginal income above $677k, which fewer than 1% of Californians earn.
You pay surcharges not included in the base tax rate as income goes up. There's a 1% surcharge over $1M income that's from a passed proposition. I've never hit it, doubt that I will, but it's there.
You also have to remember that in CA the assessed value of your home (on which your property tax is based) will never go up more than 2% per year. So while the property tax rate may be higher than some other places, if you stay in your home for more than a few years, the actual amount of property tax you pay will quickly be lower than it would be elsewhere.
In the US, you pay state tax and federal tax separately, so those are only the state taxes. If you're paying the maximum marginal rate in CA, you're also paying 37% federal rate and a 3.8% surcharge on investment income on top of that.
Sales taxes are not progressive and therefore unfair. Bezos and the janitor pay the same tax for the same thing (though in fairness, Bezos does buy more things).
No tax is fair unless it is insignificant enough to be universally paid willingly and joyfully. Plus every attempt at "progressive" taxation has been circumvented to a reversed outcome.
A tax almost always ends up curtailing what it taxes.
Taxing property curtails private property ownership, taxing income curtails productivity at the source, taxing expenditures curtails consumption.
Which of these is more sustainable with less compromise to overall economic opportunity?
>in fairness, Bezos does buy more things
Probably not the kind of things or fairness that does him or anyone else as much good with the money compared to what the average person would do.
It's not misleading, it's incomplete. You have to fight to keep your property value reasonable so you're not murdered in taxes. My sub 2000 sqft house in TX was valued at a million dollars. I couldn't sell it for 800k last year. I lost most of the debate with the county. Things have to be paid for but the uncontrollable valuations are just nonsense and have forced people out of their homes.
You must have an incredibly fancy house. My property taxes aren't even $20k (far from it, more like $12k) for a 2400sqft 4 bedroom house with a pool with pretty good DART access just down the street from a nice city park.
Just paying $20k would place the assessed home value after exemptions at >$970k. Standard homestead exemption is $40k, so $1.1M for actual assessed value. But you're saying $20k above whatever you're paying already, I'm guessing you're probably paying close to $20k since you're looking at >$1M homes, so in reality you're looking at like >$1.5M homes. That's an incredibly fancy house, far more than normal. That's more than twice the average price of a house in Plano, a pretty nice place to live if you're gonna live in Texas.
+1 If OP has a big yard, a well-maintained house, and decent schools nearby, that almost immediately puts you over $1m in Austin. If their house actually has some serious square footage or acreage, $1.5-2m isn't ridiculous.
You can take hits on one or more of those requirements to get the price down but it's not apples-to-apples anymore.
What's the price for a big yard, well-maintained, 2,000+sqft, with decent schools house cost in San Franciso or LA? And not in a suburb far away, but in the city? What are the property taxes on such a place?
Yeah but it seems you're then trying to paint that as a brush for all of Texas. Austin real estate values are stupid. You shouldn't spend that much to live in a house that small in Texas. It's like looking at a large house in actual downtown San Francisco and acting like that's the housing price for all of California.
I'm just trying to point out the majority of the state doesn't pay well over $20k in property taxes. Only very wealthy people do.
In 2021 the average single family home in Texas was like $260k. Values have gone way up, let's say $320k for example. Minus $40k for homestead, $280k assessed. Living in a city you're going to see like 2% property tax, so $5,600. So your $30-40k tax bill is probably six times the average tax of a house in Texas.
Six times the average tax bill.
See how that's just not a normal price most people actually pay?
US democracy and free market capitalism is so extreme that can even choose which government you buy your services from. (Though not at the federal level.)
To be fair, some level of “government-shopping” is also part of the design and purpose of the EU. But it’s harder for ordinary people to take advantage of it because the language barriers and culture differences are larger than in the US.
That’s not an impediment for corporations though. Ireland and Luxembourg have done very well attracting rich companies that can choose whose taxes to pay within the EU.
It's not a part of the design or purpose. It's a part of the current status quo but the EU is a very different construct to the USA both legally and culturally.
The USA has the Constitution which at least in theory places hard limits on what the federal government can do, and the Constitution is strongly supported across US culture and society. The Supreme Court for example has recently started returning powers to the states.
The EU's equivalent is the treaties, which begin by saying the goal of the EU is "ever closer union". So the EU's stated goal at the very beginning of its foundational documents is to homogenize the continent's systems of government. Nothing in the EU's institutional philosophy or culture recognizes that it should be limited in scope and that countries should always have local control over some matters. For example the ECJ almost always rules in favor of more EU control, even when the treaties clearly say otherwise. Due to the widespread nature of this cultural mileu amongst the European political class, the EU routinely takes control of policy areas that it was never granted by treaty whilst facing minimal or no resistance.
For example, you talk about government-shopping by companies who set up their HQ in Ireland. The EU hates the possibility of government-shopping because it thinks the entire concept is illegitimate, so they have been attacking Ireland for years to try and force it to stop being so competitive. You can see that culture at work in the language they use:
"Ireland has been criticised for the way in which its tax system has been used by multinationals to set up aggressive tax planning structures and exploit mismatches and gaps in the international tax framework"
Low taxes are "aggressive" and a "mismatch" which gets "exploited". They think of a country competing against others using low taxes as some sort of hack that needs to be shut down, not a natural part of the competition between jurisdictions. In theory the EU has no control over corporation tax, but in practice the treaties let the EU regulate subsidies, so they redefined subsidy to not just mean direct payments from governments but also just charging lower taxes than France/Germany. And then told Ireland to change.
Now in practice the picture is complicated by the fact that the EU treaties do supposedly limit the EU's powers, because the people who signed them recognized the danger of the EU's unlimited ambition and sought to restrict it. And the US federal government has always grown, often working around or just ignoring the constitution in various ways. But this stuff is all downstream of culture. The Americans have the Republicans and its associated culture, which tries to decentralize government at least sometimes, in some ways. Even in cases like military spending where they don't reduce the size of the federal government they do try to spread it around, hence "porkbelly politics".
Mainland Europe doesn't have many similar parties or cultures. They're all very pro EU "integration" (read: passing control to Brussels). The UK had a smaller equivalent in the form of euroskepticism until they succeeded and Brexit rendered it irrelevant. And now Germany has something a bit like that in the form of the AfD, which despite being constantly smeared as Nazis has a relatively decentralized and conservative manifesto that wouldn't look out of place at a Republican convention. But you can tell how different the cultures are by the reaction: there's a very real and serious discussion in Germany about flat-out banning the AfD despite that it polls at about 20%. Nobody is talking about banning the Republicans.
So in practice I'd argue that the EU doesn't have the same design or purpose with respect to government-shopping as the USA does.
The EU isn’t the result of a single intent by a single group of people at a single moment in time. There’s a constant push and pull between the statists and the market liberals, for example.
Thatcher was pro-EU (despite the rhetoric) because she saw it as an opportunity both for British exports and to attract businesses. And it did work! Britain practically wrote large sections of the EU free market rules. The massive growth in London’s financial sector since the 1980s is one example of the benefits.
> “the AfD, which despite being constantly smeared as Nazis has a relatively decentralized and conservative manifesto that wouldn't look out of place at a Republican convention”
Honestly, a substantial minority of today’s Republican Party wouldn’t look out of place at a 1930 German National Socialist convention.
At least Germany is having a discussion about whether forces that are against democracy and human rights belong in a democracy. Most Americans, including old-school Republicans, appear to be just closing their eyes and hoping the problem goes away on its own once the nearly 80-year-old populist leader exits the arena.
> Honestly, a substantial minority of today’s Republican Party wouldn’t look out of place at a 1930 German National Socialist convention.
This is so much FUD and can be said even more strongly about the Democrat Party. Both have authoritarian tendencies, but only the DNC’s platform has veered all the way to super strong federal government, ignore all constitutional protections and rights in favor of what we think is right. Obama started it really with his “I have a pen and can remake the government with my executive orders, congress be damned”. Biden continues it, abusing the HEROs act to forgive student debt, attempting to enforce mask mandates, passing voting bills that the federal gov has literally no right to mandate as per the constitution.
And again comparing Trump to any dictator is laughable, so I’m not gonna even bother really addressing that except to say that you expose and embarrass yourself when you say that. If you’d spend any time outside of your news bubble you’d see how hilariously out of touch you are with reality.
Looking at total executive orders is misleading (and dishonest), EO’s historically were often used for very inconsequential things, like declaring some nation a friend or thanking someone for something. Without looking at the actual order it’s hard to know the impact and any given EO. Please try to argue in good faith.
You literally said Obama started the problem with executive orders. How would you judge these in a way that is impartial?
For instance George W Bush signed an executive order establishing the homeland security department. He established Afghanistan as a combat zone via executive order. He declared war on the Taliban via EO. He changed classification rules and military pay based on EO. He removed Congressionally approved union protections via executive order.
This is an oversimplification bordering on outright deception. She was pro EU in 1975 when it was being advertised as a free trade zone. As it changed to become more of a universal government she recognized the dangers and came to oppose it. That opposition was one of the factors that ended her career as PM, so to describe her as pro-EU is to seriously distort her views.
> The massive growth in London’s financial sector since the 1980s is one example of the benefits.
This has nothing to do with the EU. The EU never created a single market in financial services and the EU has a long history of attacking the City. The UK was constantly fighting rearguard actions to stop Brussels passing laws forcing City business out of the UK. The moment the UK left, the EU immediately tried to do what they'd always wanted, albeit without much success because, to repeat, the success of the UK at finance was in spite of the EU not because of it.
As for "the republicans are actually nazis", I won't even bother addressing that.
This just in: some very well compensated workers discover that affordability isn’t the biggest motivator in their lives.
Maybe I’m too much of a cynic but when everyone was hyping up moving to Texas (or Miami before that) the only pitched seemed to be affordability. But more or less everywhere is more affordable, the question is why move to [destination state/city] specifically. And I never saw a hugely compelling reason.
Off topic perhaps but personally I’m much more interested to know the future for things like the arts in the face of inaffordability. Like, if aspiring actors can’t afford to stay in LA long term waiting tables and going on auditions what might that mean for the film industry? Could we see other cities get some of that cultural cache?
You're not too much of a cynic. While the COL is high in the Bay Area, people still live here and come here because you get something for that money. The pleasant climate is certainly one factor, but there are certainly others.
Someone (who generally is more perceptive) said to me: I can buy a house in Austin that is X time bigger than in the Bay Area. Of course; but then why not move to South Dakota.
The higher housing prices in CA reflect much greater demand - people want to live in CA, despite all the reactionary political media campaigns - and it's for good reason. When Austin prices match SF, then things have changed.
I was surprised that so many people just followed a hot trend on such a long-term, high-impact decision.
This exactly. I tell people if they’re moving due to a desire for cheaper housing, there are many options (Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, etc.) that make much more sense than Texas.
A fair point, but the land is all developed because of the high demand. Unless we restrict ourselves to the peninsula, there's lots of land - it's just too far away.
Texas is larger than the Bay Area, but Travis County is not. It's not like you can live out in Lubbock or any of the hundreds of square miles between and get the benefits of living in Austin.
> very well compensated workers
> the only pitched seemed to be affordability
I think that is the key point, if you have money to burn, sure it's great in California, but a lot of people really are having a hard time making it work and are moving specifically for the affordability. This includes junior devs from what I'm seeing.
> Like, if aspiring actors can’t afford to stay in LA long term waiting tables and going on auditions what might that mean for the film industry?
Aren't you excited for eternal movie stars? Thanks to improved graphics/"AI" you can have Tom Cruse be the star in every movie for the next 500 years.
> some very well compensated workers discover that affordability isn’t the biggest motivator in their lives.
I'm not American and know nothing about SV, but I am quickly learning money doesn't matter that much to be compared to being around friends/family. At this point money would not be the deciding factor in any move I made.
(Seriously, when I was at the airport flying in for my on-site, I heard some of the workers behind the check-in desks talking about going to work there...)
Wisconsin summers may not be 110F but they feel like it thanks to the humidity. Visits to Grandma were spent reading old comic books in the basement between trips to the lake -- besides the heat, there were also the skeeters, horseflies, deerflies, and ticks to deal with.
I'd still probably pick Madison over Austin, though.
I’m one of those that moved my family from CA to Austin during the pandemic. We wanted cheaper housing and more space, and told ourselves Texas is the future.
We pretty quickly learned that Texas does not feel like the future. The traffic was surprisingly worse than where we moved from (Orange Co), we had an incident with some nut that harassed us at the grocery over wearing a mask, and the weather was absolutely unbearable. We don’t drink or watch sports so it felt like there was nothing to do besides sit inside our air conditioned home in a quiet neighborhood and occasionally get really good barbecue.
We made it almost 3 years, but but the bullet and moved back. California has its shortcomings too, but we have a newfound appreciation for it and will probably never leave.
We stayed 8. Moved just outside Austin in 2016. By 2018, the neighborhood doubled and traffic tripled. The pandemic absolutely destroyed the neighborly facade. Then the last few summers hit peak heat and that was it. Our 2.5 acres with a $12k playground castle was all but unusable most of the year. And the people were becoming more and more cruel. We left for New England. The weather is much better and so are the people. I won't go back to CA. I spent most of my life there but it's not the right home for my family. We're much happier here.
Trading OC for Austin seems funny to me. I’m strongly considering moving there from my cold state if things fall into place. OC is one of the nicer areas of SoCal that’s also relatively affordable.
I’ve never heard of someone refer to OC as “affordable”. It’s one of the least affordable counties in the US [0]. Travis county (Austin) homes are less than half the price [1].
I was born in TX, moved to LA for a few years, and then moved back to TX for family reasons. I can't wait to not live in TX again. As the article suggests, the government will never represent me in this state, and the things they are doing are reprehensible to me. However, I have a few obligations preventing me from just picking up for something more fitting. The first is lack of firm decision on where to land. Every place will have pros/cons. I hate hate hate moving, so the pros must significantly outweigh the cons to make moving across country (let's face it that moving out of texas is equal to across the country in sheer miles).
Took a big leap and landed in Europe from TX. Pay is lower, but is offset by being able to walk to work, reduced stress, and a sane work life balance. I still make enough and feel like I've been able to save more due to not owning a car.
Overall, my quality of life increased greatly and I hope you find your place to (not to sound cliché) live your best life. Our time is so limited and living in limbo is no fun.
We almost moved to Austin during the pandemic. Luckily my wife's potential job offer fell through so we stayed in the Bay Area. We've heard of friends of friends who sold their Bay Area house during the pandemic, moved to Austin, but now can't move back because they can't afford to sell their house and take a loss, and then come back and get a 7% mortgage on double the house price.
I think we would have been okay in Austin, but the things I've heard from close friends from Texas are:
1) Austin is not like SF Bay Area at all. People around here seemed convinced by the myths that Austin was like a liberal oasis in a Republican desert but it's not like that at all. It's more liberal than rural Texas but it's still Texas.
2) There's only desert and rolling hills for 3+ hours around. No water, no mountains, etc unless you make a long road trip. It's not like the SF Bay Area where you have water, desert, mountains, etc all very close by.
Not really. Picking some places kind of central to both cities, Reno is at like 119.781 degrees West, LA is 118.268 West. So LA is only slightly East of Reno.
This must be an American thing but I have never in my whole life even remotely considered the political opinions of my neighbours when choosing somewhere to live. I really, really just do not care even one bit.
Getting taught creationism at school would be a big turnoff for me and that slavery had its upsides and To Kill A Mocking Bird is verboten.
Fortunately where I live there is no political meddling in the school syllabus - standards are set nationally by the Education Dept and schools boards don't get voted in on political lines.
If you don't like the good ole boys running things don't come to Texas. It's basically an authoritarian state run by a cabal of car dealers and preachers.
The biggest trick elite professionals played in America is creating the impression that their point of view is neutral and that everything else is political. They are trying to optimize for some value function just like everyone else.
Political opinions matter when they affect your daily life. For instance, after the Dobbs decision last year, Texas passed an anti-abortion law which made it illegal to terminate pregnancies even when the fetus had no chance of survival and continued pregnancy was a mortal risk to the mother. This was finally changed last month, but the situation persisted for over a year. For women at high risk of miscarriage (for instance, my sister-in-law who moved to Texas and has previously had a miscarriage), their neighbours' political opinions could actually kill them.
Perhaps it's an American thing because the American political system has resulted in a complete lack of common-sense legislation; but it's absolutely justified.
(My background here: I'm an American living in the UK. I've been consistently surprised by the number of common-sense laws and regulations that are supported by even conservatives, or if not supported, are not immediately repealed once conservatives gain power.)
OP indicated that they're disappointed that the city of Austin was not the liberal Oasis in Texas that they hoped. So they're not discussing state politics, they're concerned about the politics of the people and city. I doubt OP was expecting Austin to have different abortion laws to the rest of Texas.
I'm saying I don't understand why one would be concerned about the politics of the people in the city they live in. It wouldn't even cross my mind to consider it.
Honestly, local politics can still have a big impact. The city I grew up in cancelled weekend bus service because the local Republican party thought it was a waste of money. If you're a person of colour, it can change your day-to-day life significantly if you're around people of particular political persuasions (either way). If you're uncomfortable with people carrying guns into grocery stores, likewise.
You don’t think your neighbors’ voting habits in local elections will affect your life? There are numerous counties in Texas, for instance, that have criminalized driving a woman through their county for the purposes of getting an abortion. That behavior would make a material difference in my choice of where to live.
I can’t imagine simply not caring, unless one is so wealthy that the laws don’t matter, or the kind of person who is never affected by their neighbors’ antagonistic voting.
If I was the only one who felt that way sure, but I'm not. Most non gun owners are scared of guns in my experience. Open carry is frankly extremely disrespectful. I don't know what you're going to do with that gun, and I think it's a mistake to think of it as anything other than a threat. And threatening literally everyone you see is a dickhead move. Not really sure how you could see flashing your gun at every random person as not a dick move, the only reason to do it is to scare people.
It absolutely is a threat. "Good guy with a gun" incidents are so much rarer than "bad guy with a gun" incidents that it would be insane to see it otherwise. Nobody knows you're not the next Kyle Rittenhouse who, in the absolutely most charitable interpretation I can think of, might not have meant to kill anyone but ended up with a body count anyway. Or the next mass murderer, whose names I will not repeat. If I walked around with an unsheathed six-inch knife I'm pretty sure people would quite rightly feel threatened, and literally any gun is more dangerous than that. So yes, "dickheads" does apply.
It's not an American thing. The same issue crops up in the UK with London, for example. If you move to London you know you're going to be hit by things like ULEZ or endless ideological propaganda ads on the public transport system because of how the people there like to vote. If you move to a village in the home counties you're going to have a very different set of experiences.
In the UK this is often disguised because it gets conflated with age: people want to live in the big cities when they're young, and when they're young they're more liberal. As they got older they get less liberal and want more space, so move out of the cities, so at no point does it feel like they're selecting where they live based on politics. But it does shake out that way regardless.
The USA is big enough and California far enough to the left vs other places, that even moving from one big city to another will yield noticeably different neighbourhood politics.
More of a Californian thing, I'd think. You can live your whole life in SF or LA without seeing any promos for the opposition party. In other states, even in as Blue of a city as Austin you can still see an occasional bumper sticker on a car, or even, a plaque in somebody's front yard. And if you drive in/out of the city, you will see a whole lot of those.
It might not technically be a desert, but saying it's "far from" is incorrect too. Semi-arid climate zones are as close to deserts as you can be without actually being a desert. For recreational purposes in particular, people tend to look mostly for open water or mountains, sometimes forests or canyons. Miles and miles of "scrubby prairie" lacking any of those might as well be a desert.
Once you get past Abilene or San Angelo you're getting into the eastern reach of the Chihuahuan Desert, so around 4 hours. Some maps put it west of the Pecos but that's not the official line, to be fair different maps seem to put it in different places.
"1) Austin is not like SF Bay Area at all. People around here seemed convinced by the myths that Austin was like a liberal oasis in a Republican desert but it's not like that at all. It's more liberal than rural Texas but it's still Texas."
If you actually mean the people in Austin themselves and not the entire state as a whole this is the most laughably out of touch, in a bubble thing ever, or you're time travelling from 1930 or something. Austin is more liberal than 90%+ of America and 95%+, 98%+ if not 99%+ of the world.
Austin voted 71.4% for Biden and 26.4% for Trump and every mayoral election is a race between a center left liberal progressive Democrat and a left wing progressive democrat, with shocker the progressive democrat winning the election and being Austin's mayor.
The CBRE study linked from the OP gives an idea of the scale of Bay Area tech relative to other places:
Labor force in tech:
Total Change
2017-22
SF Bay Area 407,810 23%
New York Metro 371,030 11%
Toronto 285,700 29%
Washington, D.C. 265,240 7%
L.A./Orange County 249,620 17%
Dallas/Ft. Worth 205,920 28%
...
Austin 96,610 39%
Elsewhere it says 75,020 tech professionals moved into the Bay Area in that time (net, if I understand correctly).
Avg Wage
SF Bay Area $185,425
Seattle $172,009
Boston $121,794
Baltimore $113,544
Washington, D.C. $105,808
Austin $105,495
Disclaimer: I live next to downtown by I-35. Did move during the pandemic from NorCal to TX. (Have family in TX.)
Many issues:
The charm is gone with too many highrises like San Jose downtown.
It's hot AF. 110 F for 3 months every day. 100 F every day for another 2 months on either side of that.
In winter, it can randomly freeze down to 11 F, and say "hello" to no power and no water for 2-3 weeks.
The housing is slapped together and lacks architectural design. The new apartments are tiny and expensive, and not very good.
There's just as many homeless as SF, including rampant retail theft.
The costs are just as bad as the Bay Area.
The roads are worse than those in Bay Area, and I didn't think that was possible without snow and ice.
Lots of tourists, which could be a negative for some people.
The schools are so-so.
It's Texas and abortion is illegal.
Fewer batshit insane people than LA but more than Denver. And anyone can CCW or open carry without any documentation. If you have no criminal record, you can buy a handgun over at Academy without any waiting period at all.
Property taxes are absurd. If you think Palo Alto is bad...
APD is critically underfunded, understaffed by 200-250 officers, morale is terrible, and non-life-threatening calls have a 48 hour backlog. If you have an AirTag on an item, it's stolen, and the location is known, the police won't lift a finger. There is zero routine traffic enforcement.
Crowded with 2nd- and 3rd-tier school tech bros, corporate clones, and dumb money lazy people... people who are simultaneously uncool and boring.
Don't go to Whole Foods because it screams conspicuous consumption. The HQ is unimpressive.
There isn't much of a tech scene compared to the Bay Area.
On positive notes: Even though TX-35 is a national gerrymandering joke reaching from downtown Austin to downtown San Antonio by an "umbilical cord" along I-35, Greg Casar is one of the most reasonable, ballsy, sharp, empathetic, and progressive reps in Congress.
H-E-B.
There are a few used bookstores still in operation.
Plenty of vinyl shops, although none compares to Discogs.
Absurd number of tall people compared to anywhere else in the US and the world, including Oslo.
All of the complaints listed here (hot weather, shit-tier public transit, etc) were true of Austin prior to the Great Migration.
Everyone wanted in though because Austin is the first place people think of when they think of Texas, it's the only major city in Texas with rolling hills, it's perceived as the only non-conservative city in Texas (it is not), 6th St and Barton Springs are fun, and Texas has no income tax and cheap real estate.
Now that real estate prices in Austin are significantly higher than they were in the past, a self-induced problem BTW!, and the Real Texas Heat™ has finally come, folks want to move back. (Property tax rates in Texas have always been high, and they only go up every year.)
Austin was always a small town with Texas government and a huge school with a huge American football team (UT Austin). I don't think it was designed with the explosive growth that it has seen in the last 15 years.
Its road design is proof of this. US Interstate 35 cuts right through town and it only has one partial ring road (TX-130). It also has the MoPAC (TX-1), though that expanded and, consequently, became a partial toll road.
Compare this with Houston, where I live. It has three huge interstates going through it (US I-10 east-west; US-45 north-south; Texas I-69/US Hwy 59 SW-NE), one huge and constantly problematic interstate beltway (US I-610) and two state ring roads (TX-8; TX-99). It is designed to accommodate and move a significant population (or significant freight, which it does also).
Austin has always been overrated IMO.
Houston is way bigger, more liberal and diverse (in every dimension, not just race, but it is extremely racially-integrated) than Austin has ever been and has a world-class food scene but gets 1/10th of the hype because...actually, I have no idea why?
Dallas is also way bigger than Austin and actually has a tech scene of sorts (though it is old and enterprise-y) along with more moderate (but still hot) weather but didn't boom like Austin did. Why?
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