It absolutely is not. It used to be, I guess. Yes, people there, generally, are less overtly racist and bigoted, and there is some cool infrastructure, but it

It absolutely is not. It used to be, I guess. Yes, people there, generally, are less overtly racist and bigoted, and there is some cool infrastructure, but it trades in rural isolationist prejudice for tech-tainted delusional world building, at the cost of its once beautiful community and culture. Austin is scary, I have never lived in a city that so clearly feels like it has a mind of its own, that changes so much and so explicitly that when you go back to visit your old home, it is literally unrecognizable, everything it once was just poofs away in a year. After living in a number of cities since, I understand just how weird Austin is, but not in the way it was "weird", wants to be weird. Its now like if a Stepford wife was a city: some totally flawless shell wrapped around a void. Its like if a Tesla car was city, which is perhaps a more apt similie, where it rides off its popular sentiment alone while the internals are shoestring, or at least questionable. It trades in explicit Texas politics for extreme and swift gentrification, and a, at this point, willful neglect of social services for the communities they've, in part, helped displace. There is little love in Austin now, no matter how many granola eating hippies can still afford the rent. Most of that place is gone, or quickly dissapearing. Give me Houston, which has comparable politics in the inner city, and the best museums and food in the state. Give me San Antonio, even, which is a more humble, but at least human place, and that does have better breakfast tacos than Austin. But Austin is gone. I dont think the enthusiasm and attention it gets is going away anytime soon, and people will continue to move in, and it will get "cooler" in the eyes of every google employee that resides there. And property investment will continue to churn, like crude oil in a Kitchenaide. But it has gone crazy, and I see no hope in it going back, its too big to fail, and that is maybe the whole problem.