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Soon we'll hear about how Austin is offering tax incentives to soda companies to make up for the lack of lemonade stands. As someone who lives in Austin, many
by wyager 10y ago
Soon we'll hear about how Austin is offering tax incentives to soda companies to make up for the lack of lemonade stands.
As someone who lives in Austin, many people here are absolutely delusional about Austin's attractiveness and future. Austin's once-interesting college/hippie culture is rapidly dying and being replaced by a suburban megalopolis culture (San Austonio, here we come). Historically low cost of living is going up (in no small part due to Californification of Austin politics (and I used to live in CA, so I know what this looks like)). Austin's already crumbling infrastructure cannot handle more people. Commutes are already atrocious and are getting worse.
Everything that made Austin attractive to tech workers is going away. Unless the Austin government gets out of the way, Austin's budding tech industry will die.
- scarecrowbob 10y agoI live in Fredericksburg. They all look like too many cars for me (even FBG is not what it was when I dot here) :D For what it's worth, I like SA a lot more than Austin. The culture isn't dying, it looks dead to me, but you can still get way out in the sticks and find parts of it still alive.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoGovernment is the greatest asset and liability to any business. On one hand, it took sweet, juicy government grants and contracts to lay the economic and knowledge foundation that was needed for Austin to grow into a tech hub. On the other hand - and this is a particularly American tendency - people want a perfect society and a free society. What they often get is neither, and only sometimes both. There is still plenty for government to do. No private actor has the will or power to solve the traffic problem alone. Condofication and breakneck sprawl need government intervention or else things will keep going the way they are: worse. And then you've got the perpetual rejections of mass transit plans and of course Prop 1. But sadly I think you're most right about the Californication of politics, which will only cement the old guard against the newcomers, encourage bullying over discussion, and make it ever harder to fix the problems that grow by the day.
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoUber and Lyft are a nice, private sector solution to excessive car ownership. But Austin got rid of them.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoLike I said, perfect society, free society. Austinites wanted more assurance that they would be safe in Uber/Lyft drivers' cars, and rightly so. There have been enough of cases of Uber drivers committing violent acts against passengers to make people afraid and want more security. They made their opinions clear via referendum, a shining example of democracy in action. But democracy != capitalism; China proved that. They swung the pendulum too far, and now nobody's happy.
- fapjacks 10y agoRight! Absolutely right. I am from a town in Kansas that could have been a sister city to Austin in the 80s. I lived in Austin for a while more than a couple of years ago. Even back then, the "Austin" people talked about was long gone. The real Austinites have left or are leaving (even for places like Fredericksburg or Elgin or other nearby small towns). Austin is an east coast city in Texas. All the non-Austinites brought their shitty hometowns and shitty attitudes to Austin, and killed it.
- cylinder 10y agoI've been resisting everyone telling me to move to Austin. I never really understood the hype even when all my friends went to UT. It doesn't seem to have the bones to become a major liveable city. Certainly a young professional prifessional can have a good lifestyle downtown but as far as raising a family ... meh. Too hot, limited economy and tech sector there has been untested by a downturn, not that cheap anymore, and Texas politics. Now, where do all the open minded slackers go in America now? Austin, Portland, Venice ... these places aren't really giving that vibe anymore