I've spent a great deal of time in Austin, and a great deal of time in the SFBA. Yes the fires are terrible, and the homeless encampments are out of control, bu

I've spent a great deal of time in Austin, and a great deal of time in the SFBA. Yes the fires are terrible, and the homeless encampments are out of control, but still, my view is you get what you pay for. Case in point, drive a bit outside San Francisco, and you get Napa and Sonoma! Drive a bit out of Austin, and you get that gaudy Mexican restaurant with lousy food overlooking Lake Travis. In all seriousness, Austin has its charms, but the city has done a terrible job keeping up with infrastructure (especially compared to the DFW Metroplex.) It's also very isolated and its hipster (+ tech-bro) culture can be quite suffocating, especially as there is little else nearby to escape to save San Antonio (which, granted, is a great town.) The airport, while it's been expanding, is also problematic in that it's a hub for no airline, while two of the largest airlines have hubs just 200-300 miles away. This means that flying to/from Austin takes an unusual amount of connecting (unless you can time your schedule to make the smaller number of non-stops.) It's especially problematic flying to/from NYC, where there are a gazillion flights to/from Houston or Dallas, but only 2-3 from Austin. And while Texas can be pretty in places, Texas-style sprawl (marked by non-stop big box stores and car dealerships lining the freeways for miles and miles and miles on end--as far as the eye can see) is inescapable even in Austin. The downtown is pretty to look at, especially from across the river, but nothing special once there (except for 6 street, which is tourist central.) Then there is North Austin, and the monstrosity known as the Domain (a complete failure of scale, design, and well--basic wayfinding.) The Less said about that (except that it looks and feels just like every other life style center that sprouted up in America in the last 15 years,) the better. The population boom in Austin is not new, and Austin's biggest problem is it's inability to build infrastructure to keep up. For years, traffic has been snarled on 35, 183, and Mopac. In the time it has taken for the DFW Metroplex to build two rail-lines to its airport + a whole network of express lanes on it's highways (including the wonderful sunken portion of I-635,) Austin adds a single lane express lane on 7 miles of Loop-1. Oh, there is SR-140, but it's so far out of the way, the 85 mph speed limit rarely if ever makes up for the time getting to or from the road. (And if I recall, the private company that funded and built the road as part of Texas's favorite public-private-partnership system went bankrupt.) So yeah, SFBA > ATX.