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I talked to several Tesla and former Tesla folks that will probably relocate because of this, and the say is that since Austin in less NIMBY than the Bay Area n
by pvarangot 5y ago
I talked to several Tesla and former Tesla folks that will probably relocate because of this, and the say is that since Austin in less NIMBY than the Bay Area new housing will get built and prices will go down. It's a more complex bet than just "we move there because houses are affordable now".
- conductr 5y agoPrices will only go down in Texas when people quit moving here because they think the RE is cheap. Construction never stops here and prices still go up.
- Robotbeat 5y agoPrices would go up a lot faster without more construction.
- etchalon 5y agoI'm not sure why they think Austin is less NIMBY. That hasn't been my experience.
- ameister14 5y agoIn 2019, San Francisco housing grew in total by 4,850 units, which was an increase of 81%! over 2018. By comparison, Austin permitted 8600 multi-family units in 2018 alone. That doesn't include single family detached, which averages another 2800 a year.
- bradknowles 5y agoSan Francisco != the whole of the Bay Area. They’re right proper nutcase looney tunes in San Francisco, when it comes to new building. Almost as bad as they are here. Well, that is unless you’re building high rises on the river for the millionaires and billionaires. Then you can build as many of those as you want.
- handmodel 5y agoIt may be as NIMBY in some ways but the effects haven't kicked in yet (and probably won't given size, competition, and property tax laws). Look at the options available for a family making 80k in these two cities. They aren't even the same magnitude. https://www.trulia.com/TX/Austin/ https://www.trulia.com/TX/Austin/ https://www.trulia.com/CA/Palo_Alto/ https://www.trulia.com/CA/Palo_Alto/ Texas also doesnt have prop 13 so it is unlikely to ever reach the levels of a California city
- pvarangot 5y agoThat comparison is ridiculous, have you been to Palo Alto? It's a mansion neighborhood like Atherton. A better comparison would be with San Jose or San Mateo that are like, normal cities. Still way more expensive than Austin but it's nowhere near the price of Palo Alto or Atherton.
- exdsq 5y agoI live in Palo Alto and love zillowing random houses on my walk to Starbucks. Record for most expensive town house on a normal residential street is $19m. It’s insane.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoZillow and Redfin and trulia estimated values are clickbait. Only look at recent sale prices and comp sales.
- bradknowles 5y agoYou have to go well east of San Jose in order to find what I would call a “normal” city in the Bay Area.
- handmodel 5y agohttps://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San_Mateo,CA/ https://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San_Mateo,CA/ I think that's fair but the nonetheless the only houses on here in San Mateo for under 600k are about 600sq ft. Even 1200sqft homes are 1M+ Where do you think married mid-level engineers are going to live? For 500k in Austin you can choose between brand new 1300 sqft homes or older 2500 sqft homes.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoMore conservative areas -- and Austin is more conservative than the bay area, even if it's relatively blue for Texas -- tend to at least allow building more housing outward, even if they don't allow building more densely in already-developed areas.
- posguy 5y agoApple took this bet years ago, it has not panned out. Austin's housing and rental prices just keep increasing year after year.
- 8note 5y agoI'd assume that apple leadership buys all the land cheap and sells it for a heft profit to the peons. Then, they can rinse and repeat at a new location.
- newaccount2021 5y ago? Apple's soon-to-be-second-largest office location is being built in Austin right now...apparently they haven't "given up" on Austin
- Apocryphon 5y agoBeyond housing, isn't traffic a problem? Lots of people will be commuting from Round Rock.
- pvarangot 5y agoAccording to a friend that moved to Austin last year, yeah traffic is a problem but in downtown Austin in new buildings it's even worse. Sewage is a problem.
- muzz 5y agoThat sounds really bad. What are the specific problems with sewage there?
- travelton 5y ago> According to a friend I wouldn't trust this. Speaking as a resident of Austin, there's several OG Austinites that are mad about all the change. Sounds like FUD to me. Point to a source please!
- pvarangot 5y agoI won't repeat what he said as it's as sourceless as what I said before, but it's a problem, builders complain about it, the infrastructure for the city is not well run. Here's two sources for problems like in the past month: This two are the same problem: http://www.austintexas.gov/news/sanitary-sewer-overflow-reported-fm-620 http://www.austintexas.gov/news/sanitary-sewer-overflow-repo... https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/sewer-overflow-sends-100000-gallons-of-wastewater-into-storm-drain-in-nw-austin/ https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/sewer-overflow-sends-... https://www.kxan.com/investigations/93-of-austins-stormwater-pipes-in-unknown-condition/ https://www.kxan.com/investigations/93-of-austins-stormwater...
- etchalon 5y agoI moved from Chicago, so my definition of bad traffic is fairly skewed. It hasn't been that bad here, but I'm sure some of that is the transition to WFH for a lot of the people who would traditionally have driven into downtown.
- vmception 5y agoI don't think we really need to localize this conversation as nowhere can economically manage a large exodus of people from California's 40,000,000 population. The only thing to remember is that Californians can afford the new area's current housing prices and a decade's worth of price increases.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoInflux of Californians raises the local housing prices because they can pay a lot more after selling in California. This has happened and continues to happen in metro Denver and Boise.
- vmception 5y agoYes, correct. Or just having already budgeted for the existing rental prices, or have savings from when their annual compensation was high whether they get to keep that compensation or not in the new place.
- muzz 5y agoThere is no "large exodus" of people moving out of California. The number of people moving from San Francisco to Austin in a year is something like 240 households. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leaving-S-F-but-not-for-Austin-or-15955527.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/People-are-leavi...
- vmception 5y agobut there is always the potential for one. get California moving and those emigrants could turn every single state blue starting with every swing county, worth mentioning as the opposite is not true for the opposition party, from a math and distinctly unpartisan perspective.
- rcpt 5y agoCalifornia has exploded to the world's 5th largest economy. Surpassing even the UK. Zero growth isn't the right baseline. The fact that the population hasn't boomed means something is definitely wrong.
- paxys 5y agoThat is a massive assumption. Plus with continuous growth in home value their tax bill will also keep ballooning, unlike in California where prop 13 shields homeowners from this.
- unwiredben 5y agoThe east part of Austin where Tesla is located is still underpopulated compared to most of Travis county, so there's room for a lot of housing to be built out that way. Connectivity from there to central Austin isn't too bad, since that's the direction of the airport and Houston.
- pvarangot 5y agoYeah that's what they said! I am not saying it's not a sound bet, honestly I hope it goes well. The thing is that nothing indicates that the new housing built there will not be sold at prices that flatten the curve. Yeah supply and demand and all that, but there will be more demand and the real estate market is good a limiting itself to the supply that keeps the prices increasing just about right for them to make a quick buck selling to a captive audience.
- xbmcuser 5y agoYeah but the house buyers will mostly be blue collar workers not making 150-200k a month is the prices won't go as high.
- bradknowles 5y agoThe curve is a cliff. Prices have already doubled and tripled at least once or twice, and that’s just within the last couple of years. There’s no new inventory being built, and there won’t be a significant amount of new inventory built any time soon, because Texas is the most terrified state in the country of all the Mexicans coming across the border to take all the jobs. They’ll spend billions of dollars to protect that border, but nothing to build new housing for people moving to the state.
- muzz 5y agoEveryone I've talked to is staying put. Friends, families, social roots, etc are deep I guess.
- oceanplexian 5y agoIt’s a no brainer, my company offered to let me move out of CA a few years ago. My utilities are 50% cheaper and more reliable, crime is lower, the air quality is better, and I bought a new construction with 10G Fiber Internet (You will never get this in California due to failing infrastructure). I miss is the arts, culture, and nightlife, but that was wiped out by government-enacted COVID restrictions so there are few redeeming reasons to stay. Tesla should be a good lesson that when you put political idealism above the basic needs of your residents (Safety, infrastructure, housing), people leave.
- api 5y agoNIMBY housing cartels aren’t political idealism, and they are the main reason people are leaving. Also I’m not sure the utilities are better in Texas. Cheaper, sure, but is that gas infrastructure winterized yet?
- bradknowles 5y agoNope. ERCOT a got told what they have to do, but then they got told what they had to do last time, too. Nothing happened then, and I don’t expect anything to happen this time.
- jdavis703 5y agoI don’t know where in CA you were… But here in Oakland I have the option for 10G fiber (albeit the landlord only wired my actual apartment for 1G ethernet, but the fiber is like 50 feet from my door). Utilities are extremely low… Far lower than I had to deal with winter and summers in the US South. And at least so far, this year air quality hasn’t yet entered in to the toxic level.
- bradknowles 5y agoIn Austin, you’re lucky to get 1G anywhere. If Google Fiber has already laid down cable news provided service, then you will not be surprised to find that Spectrum and AT&T both are surprisingly competitive it’s each other. Otherwise, you get what little you can get and you just have to be happy with DSL because it’s still better than what you can effectively get with Spectrum, since you’re sharing that with all your 500 closest neighbors and you still have to put up with outages and throttling and being treated like trash from the “cable guy” installers who wouldn’t understand concepts like bend radius if you broke their arm at the right distances and showed them how the glass fiber also breaks when it is bent too tightly. Yes, this is an old pet peeve.
- more_corn 5y agoThat's funny. Yesterday on Marketplace there was a piece about the city of Austin trying to build a $300k low income home in an empty lot in a rich neighborhood. The neighbors freaked out and sued to stop it. It is now a half finished foundation buried in weeds. Sounds pretty NIMBY to me.
- bradknowles 5y agoI wonder what they’ll do during the next power outage that lasts several days? Or is Tesla going to give each of them 25kw solar arrays plus three Powerwalls, and a backup natural gas generator for when the sun doesn’t come out in January or February and ERCOT decides they’re going to just go into rolling blackout mode because they are unable to sniff their own butts?