18 ms·

What’s up with Austin?

83 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

pnut 4y ago
Looking forward to the follow-up piece 10 years from now when the allergy shots no longer work, the nearest point of interest is an 8+ hour drive away, and that feeling of dread hits on April 1 as the thermometer his 90f and stays there until November.
- platz 4y ago
  do you live there?
  - pnut 4y ago
    Did for ten years, then stopped kidding myself and left. Made good money off real estate appreciation though.
    - fundad 4y ago
      You made the most of underutilized assets because you are progressive and believe in the free market
- sec400 4y ago
  That constant questioning around whether you've picked up covid or it's just cedar fever is fun
- asciimov 4y ago
  I can tell you how it will go. "All these people have irrevocably destroyed [my] Austin. Costs are up, too many people, what I liked about it isn't the way it is anymore."
  - jnovek 4y ago
    From subjective experience, it seems like the natural turnaround for “this isn’t my Austin anymore!” is about 10 years. I lived there for 10 years. I left because I couldn’t afford it any more. :-/
    - asciimov 4y ago
      10 years sounds about right. Been that way for decades too. I remember people in the early 90's complaining how Austin had changed since the 70's. It's the one constant to that town.
  - dvtrn 4y ago
    People have been saying that since I left Austin 5 years ago after living there for 15 years (as a San Antonio native). "Don't Dallas my Austin" (and its sibling from the 80's "Don't build and they wont come") is the kind of mentality that put Austin exactly where it is wrt affordability and infrastructure
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Sitting in Houston right now, I know that you're claim of "nearest point of interest is 8 hours away" is so fking wrong. Houston is like 2 hours away from Austin and is a metropolis.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Some might question whether Houston is a point of interest ;-)
    - Der_Einzige 4y ago
      If you think the 4th largest US city is not a POI you're arguing in bad faith
      - bart_spoon 4y ago
        Not really. Just because somewhere is a good place to live doesn't mean its a good place to visit.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Chill. Yes, I'm being snarky. But I did spend quite a bit of time there for work at one point--albeit quite a while ago. And it's sort of a sprawling mess for the most part. If I lived in Austin, I'd probably go to Houston now and then for cultural activities but, no, by and large Houston is not a city I'd go out of my way to visit. Sorry.
      - jemfinch 4y ago
        If you think a concrete jungle is a point of interest, your interests are definitely different than mine.
        jen20 4y ago
        Have you actually ever been there? This is the most ridiculous sentiment I’ve ever seen on Hacker News, including the crypto people.
      - 4y ago
nus07 4y ago
Yes great city and used to be very livable . But despite everything I cannot justify paying that recent increased cost of living to still be governed by Texas laws of no abortion, guns, capital punishment and pretty much every wacky right wing law possible. Great city to visit though.
- platz 4y ago
  you're worried about capital punishment? What are you planning?
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    Capital punishment is just secular human sacrifice. Be as open minded as you please but I could see not wanting to live somewhere with that.
    - nivenkos 4y ago
      What's the alternative though? Paying to keep people in prison forever? Prison labour is bad as it undercuts workers and unions outside prison. Perhaps organ donation and medical trials is the most utilitarian?
      - jkalp 4y ago
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        > What's the alternative though? Paying to keep people in prison forever? Unironically yes. The cost of executing someone is higher than keeping them in jail for life[1]. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more_expensive_than_life_in_prison https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...
  - 4y ago
sputknick 4y ago
Considered Austin when I decided to leave Seattle. Ultimately decided on Raleigh instead. the biggest detractor to Austin for me is that you have to drive everywhere. Unless you are significantly wealthier than I am you will be living in a suburban development where you will have to drive to anything. Here in Raleigh I can (and do) ride my bike or easily walk to bars, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Raleigh is surprisingly good. Greenville, SC and Durham, NC are both excellent, too. Been a hot minute since I lived in Durham, but I highly recommend checking out “Reality Ministry’s” talent show. It packs the largest arena in Durham every year (or did pre-COVID, anyway). Also, if Rose’s Meats and Sweets is still a thing, it’s a must visit. Welcome to the balmy south!
- ghaff 4y ago
  I guess downtownish Raleigh is cheaper than Austin. But pretty much everyone I know who works in Raleigh lives in Cary or suburban Raleigh someplace. Raleigh does have a pretty nice downtown but the nice downtown is pretty small. (Which is a pretty common pattern with medium-size cities--often old mill towns--which have somewhat gentrified downtowns in the Northeast as well.)
  - sputknick 4y ago
    Yeah, thats a fair point, I probably should have been more specific, I'm actually in Apex. The comparable part of Austin I looked at was Cedar Park/Round Rock.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I used to take a lot of trips to Apex because Data General had a plant there (and a software development facility in RTP). They may still be Dell facilities by way of EMC. But this was decades ago and they were always in and out trips so I can't say I'm really familiar with the immediate area. These days it's always downtown Raleigh I'm going to and staying in.
mrits 4y ago
Author believes the chefs that moved from NYC and SF suddenly lost the ability to cook good food. Clown article
- addicted 4y ago
  This article is just weird at best (no pun intended) but like many other industries that benefit from agglomeration this can very well be true. 1) Chefs rarely do any cooking. At best they are conductors. And restaurants are famously highly unprofitable businesses. So you need a combination of a large number of workers, willing to work for cheap (relative to cost of living for the area) and are still highly skilled. 2) Ingredients matter. NYC food used to be crap. It’s the farm to table movement that took advantage of the many local farms within the true state area that revolutionized food in NYC. And SF is in California. 3) Tastes matter. It’s hard for a place which identifies with a certain food to build a great overall cuisine. So New Orleans is great for Cajun/sea food, but it’s hard to see other cuisines flourishing as much (most places in the US tend to have a couple of international cuisines that do wel due to clusters of immigrants, but I’m talking about building a general food culture). That may be one reason why food in SF tends to be better than food in LA, which identifies very much with “healthy” eating even though LA has pretty much every advantage over SF to be a food city. 4) Competition matters. It takes time to build a competitive food scene that can weed out bad restaurants, or even restaurants that haven’t adapted to the modern world. NYC is an extreme, potentially going a little too far, example of this. So yeah, there are many reasons why great chefs can become not so great chefs after moving somewhere else, at least in a restaurant setting. The top chefs will probably be fine since they will get the cream of the crop and fly in ingredients and workers. But it’s the middle to top-middle layer where these factors show up the most.
ghaff 4y ago
Not to get into the specifics in this particular article but there's a broader point here. Good cities to live in overlap with but aren't necessarily the same list as the best cities to visit. There are a lot of tourist attractions in destination cities like museums that aren't necessarily of a lot of interest to residents on a day to day basis. You may not be into world-class opera at $200+ a ticket. (And all the tourists may actually be a negative.) Whereas there are a lot of medium to large cities without much in the way of reasons to make a special trip there that still offer reasonable urban amenities for people who want them.
- pm90 4y ago
  This is why I sincerely believe that you can’t really judge a city without living there. Some cities are geared towards tourists, others towards residents and it shows.
- dcolkitt 4y ago
  Would be interested to hear people's opinions on which cities are mostly heavily loaded on the "better place to live than visit" factor.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In the US at least, probably medium-sized cities for the most part. Raleigh (and really the whole Triangle) has been mentioned in this thread. I know some co-workers in Columbus (think they all went to Ohio State). Both coastal Portlands. (Portland OR probably comes closest to a destination but I probably wouldn't travel there just to visit the city.) Portsmouth NH. Probably college "towns" generally. (Some are obviously pretty small but others like Ithaca NY are substantial.)
middleclick 4y ago
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Article seems kind of naive, many cities are like this pre-gentrification. Austin won't be any different. Probably worse because of what surrounds you in every direction for 1,000 miles.
muglug 4y ago
The article doesn't mention the climate impact, but there's a cost to people moving from a big walkable coastal city with decent public transport and dense housing (e.g. NYC, Boston, Philadelphia) to a city where you're driving everywhere and the AC's on for six months out of the year. I understand the author's politics are basically "that stuff is for wussy liberals" but it should concern us all.
biggieshellz 4y ago
Austinite here, looking to move. There's a lot of political stuff that this guy glosses over because it doesn't affect him as a white male Christian. The "traditional gender roles" thing, for one. With our governor and the 5th Circuit eager to send anything and everything regressive up to our 6-3 SCOTUS, my lesbian neighbors are worried about things as basic as their marriage. The University of Austin he cites approvingly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin) is a right-wing project set up explicitly to be "anti-woke". And the heartbeat bill he cites as something that people can just disagree about has no exception for rape or incest, something that 75+ percent of people in Texas support. The government has moved to the right of the median Texan, and with the gerrymandered districts and no ballot initiative, it is not really democratically accountable to the voters. And Texas is 45th in percentage of public land, definitely not a 7/10. With the growth in the Austin area, the hikes and water features that are nearby are always crowded, and you have to reserve campsites months out at state parks. If this dude went hunting, he more than likely paid to hunt on somebody else's land, something I never had to do when I lived in NC or VA.
- fundad 4y ago
  The key is why people don’t want to talk politics. Well, not wanting to discuss politics usually signals that the status quo works for you and rule of law will always protect your interests.
- heynowheynow 4y ago
- igetspam 4y ago
  Well if we're gonna dive into that... Texas is anti-human, unless you happen to wealthy, white, male or the first two and a woman who agrees that "her place" is in the home. My wife is always on edge here. It's violent and people are becoming more cruel as the politics more and more support our worst inclinations.
  - MathCodeLove 4y ago
heynowheynow 4y ago
igetspam 4y ago
I had to stop after reading the food is good. The here is almost uniformly mediocre, on a good day. I've never had such consistently terrible Mexican food (apparently that's how you define the "Tex" part of "TexMex"). An the weather, much of the year is unbearable. I like hot but 40-60% humidity and a lot of 100F+ days means you're not outside unless you're in a body of water in the shade. Then again, I'm older. I have a kid. I don't day drink and I don't want to go tubing down the river. Austin is a drunk town, even if the author isn't. It's neat and quirky and the night life is often like New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I can see the appeal for someone in their 20s and 30s but I'm out. Oh and Cedar Fever! Holy crap. I didn't know I had allergies at all until I got to Texas. What an eye opening experience. If I leave the house before I've given my double dose of allergy meds time to kick in, it's unrecoverable. And on Windy days, just forget it. I've had a bloody nose for two months now and that's "under control."
- fundad 4y ago
  The mild weather of the Bay Area is $
  - deleted 4y ago
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- ghaff 4y ago
  The BBQ is good IMO. Agree on the weather. I've been to Austin a number of times. A number of years back, I had back to back events during the summer and spent the weekend rather than going home. I enjoyed myself well enough but remember it was very much an exercise in managing activities so that I wasn't too active in the heat of the day. Remember going to some nearby caves, and to hill country, and then watching the bats in the evening. Also lived in New Orleans for a few years and recall summer days were mostly spent going from AC to AC.
- mrclaus12 4y ago
  Austin TexMex <<<< San Antonio Tex Mex << RGV tex mex.
- nemo 4y ago
csours 4y ago
Whew! Austinites love being told about Austin! Local comics and podcasters didn't exist until Joe Rogan showed up! Anyway, Austin has been growing for all of living memory. That's what's special about Austin. There are high paying tech jobs and interesting people. There are interesting things to do. There are bizarre street layouts that no one would have ever designed, as far as we can tell someone paved a bunch of cow paths. You can find any kind of food you like in Austin. It may not be the absolute best, but I can eat from each continent every week if I want to. I can take a trip around the Pacific Rim. Austin is STILL under construction, and as long as the tech jobs are here, Austin will ALWAYS be under construction.
- bart_spoon 4y ago
  > You can find any kind of food you like in Austin. It may not be the absolute best, but I can eat from each continent every week if I want to. I can take a trip around the Pacific Rim. This has stopped being a "pro" to me. Its pretty much ubiquitous for any major metropolitan area in the US at this point. Everyone seems to assume its a rare feature of their city, and maybe it once was, but at this point I think the list of top-50 cities in the US for which this wasn't the case would be shorter than the list of those where it was.
- fundad 4y ago
  Could it be considered a comedy scene without the host the Man Show? Let's be serious here.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Google and Tesla and the "laptop class" can keep Austin, lost cause at this point. San Antonio always had the better breakfast tacos anyway. And Houston always had the better cultural spots.
skeeter2020 4y ago
>> The grindset is frowned upon. Some of the coffee shops don’t allow computers on Sundays, and people will scoff at you for skipping weekend social events to work. Austin entrepreneurs also care more about profit than growth. These are all definite pluses in my book!
- jen20 4y ago
  This is the first time I’ve seen the word “grindset” and I cannot think of a word that work more easily summarize the kind of people I absolutely despise. It’s just an excuse for being ineffective and making it up in volume.
deleted 4y ago
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jason-phillips 4y ago
I like David's writings and I say this not as a criticism, but this article has been written by every newcomer to Austin since Texians and Mexicans first arrived to the chagrin of some very onery Comanche. Having moved to Austin in 1994 (when rent was only $250) to start my studies at UT, I discovered the town of Linklater's Slacker. I could bore you with tales of once-was Austin, like when SXSW wristbands were $35; every former Austinite has similar stories relative to the period of time in which they lived there. Underlying all these stories that seemingly describe some mythical land of milk and honey is one common thread: opportunity. Austin allows you to be anyone you want to be and affords you the opportunity to do whatever makes your heart full. Austin allowed me to serendipitously become a very successful software engineer and I will never be able to answer the question whether it was me or my environment that played the larger role in making me who I am today. I no longer live in Austin proper, rather the Texas Hill Country, just to the west. I am quite sure that from my vantage point, I can still see new Austinites like David experiencing the same wonderment I did almost thirty years ago.
- thebigspacefuck 4y ago
  Slacker is one of my favorite movies. Is the Austin of today still anything like that?
  - singlow 4y ago
    Austin was never "like that". It was a movie. Austin is a lot of things, but we still have bohemians and misfits, but they are outnumbered by tech entrepeneurs and crypto-bros. We still have conspiracy theorists but it turns out they are assholes. The characters in that movie were marginalized so if you come here expecting them to be the mainstream you didn't get the movie.
    - jason-phillips 4y ago
      > Austin was never "like that". Sure it was. I wandered around Austin and ran into people exactly like that all day long in the early 1990s.
lazypenguin 4y ago
I left Austin so I’d like to share a counter perspective. I still think it’s one of the best big cities in the country but that’s the problem, it’s a big city now. Austin went from 500k people to well over a million now during my time there. It’s impossible for a place not to change with that many people moving. Everything the author likes used to be even nicer before. Used to be more casual, more affordable, better music scene, less traffic, etc. I also don’t believe it’s a great place to raise kids anymore: epidemic of homelessness, more crime, crowded streets, too hot for extended outdoor play during the summer, etc. I used to meet a lot more people with “normal” jobs in Austin, e.g. mailman, teachers, nurses, etc. but over time they couldn’t afford to live close by and everyone I met had tech/finance/startup jobs. The establishments definitely got gentrified and cater to no-kid professionals now. Parks are now full of beautifully sculpted people playing frisbee where it used to be tie-dye wearing teenie boppeers or big Mexican families grilling. Ultimately, Austin grew to be a mono-culture of socioeconomic status in my opinion. No hate, Austin is a great city but just grew up into something that didn’t suit me anymore. It’s a weird thing when the place you live changes so quickly around you that you don’t feel you belong there anymore.
- biggieshellz 4y ago
  I feel you. I drove my old pickup truck to the Domain last year to pick up some Christmas gifts, wearing jeans and a button-down flannel shirt, and I felt completely out of place. So much ostentatious wealth here now.
  - pm90 4y ago
    With all due respect: you drove up to the an area that was mostly built up from nothing in the past 2 decades, is being developed as a “second downtown” and you feel sad to be out of place? Have you been downtown of any major american city?
    - biggieshellz 4y ago
      I play jazz, and I go to downtown Austin fairly frequently, and never felt that way there. The Domain is just... weird, and not in an Austin way.
plasticsoprano 4y ago
> Rogan’s presence is also turning Austin into a podcasting hub, with hosts like Tim Ferriss, Lex Fridman, Aubrey Marcus, Sam Parr, Chris Williamson, Ryan Holiday, and Andrew Huberman. Tim and Ryan were here long before Joe. Regardless, I've been in Austin for 31 years and if it weren't for split custody with my kids I would have bounced out the second my divorce happened. It's hot, it lacks culture, the food, as has been mentioned, is mediocre, and the political climate is precarious and only getting worse. If you're considering it, do yourself a favor and don't.
- deleted 4y ago
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dvtrn 4y ago
This article very much reads like every other article I used to read about Austin from people who just moved there 5 minutes ago and think they have it already figured out but actually don’t.
bestcoder69 4y ago
> there are a rising number of Urbit obsessives in town too Yeah any long-time Austin resident has noticed this trend as well. It's the talk of the town!
mrclaus12 4y ago
The summary is pretty good. I used to live there. The problem is Austin is becoming very hostile cost of living wise to regular people (read: non 200k+ tech workers). That in turn has an effect on lifeguards and EMS. Finally the city is good, but the city is extremely overhyped. It's very similar to Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas but for some reason gets 5x the praise. Let's be honest why: it has the most progressives and also satisfies tech workers desires to appear diverse but mostly be around other white yuppies.
crikeyjoe 4y ago
pastor_bob 4y ago
Can't take anyone seriously after they rate Austin's 'nature' to be 7/10. Texas is one of the worst states in the country for being outdoors. 2/3 for some ok local hiking trails 1/5 for public land 1/2 for floral and fauna variety 4/10 being generous
lordleft 4y ago
I just want to say that whatever one thinks of Austin, I appreciated the author's thoroughness. I wish more essays like this existed for major cities.
jleyank 4y ago
Like Montreal in Quebec, Austin is in Texas and the larger polity “wins” out when setting the political tone. Both have extreme weather, and are great spots for young folks particularly when single. You have to be comfortable with the stats/provincial politics, though, to remain there.
susanasj 4y ago
locals have been making fun of this article for the past day as tremendously out of touch, and it is: https://twitter.com/megankimble/status/1540041020192292865 https://twitter.com/megankimble/status/1540041020192292865
pm90 4y ago
The Author is using some motivated reasoning to justify some prior hypothesis. The paragraph about people not talking about National politics/culture wars is especially BS. I was in Austin in 2016, there were watch parties in bars for presidential debates and everyone I met at bars were talking about whether they would vote for Clinton (this was before the Trump takeover of the GOP, so his campaign was considered a joke gone too far by most people). Likewise the part about the City not being beautiful… what the fuck? The sunsets were absolutely legendary and I would love hanging out around Zilker park watching them. This is just a really bad article.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  > Likewise the part about the City not being beautiful… what the fuck? The sunsets were absolutely legendary and I would love hanging out around Zilker park watching them. I mean, I live in Austin, and I don't see anything special about sitting on a large lawn and watching the sun go down. It's like the bats under the bridge thing, it gets old very fast, but given that Austin really doesn't have many other significant staples, here we are. Austin really isn't beautiful. I don't think it tries to be, though.
jancsika 4y ago
Music in Austin is 7/10? Compared to what?
- thebigspacefuck 4y ago
  New York City?
- biggieshellz 4y ago
  NYC and Boston have better jazz. NYC / Chicago / SF have better symphony orchestras. It used to be an 8/10 or a 9/10 when I moved here, but professional musicians have been priced out. Now it's people with day gigs, music students at UT, and people who bought while it was more affordable and locked in their cost of living.
  - jen20 4y ago
    Boston does not have better jazz in an easily accessible form. NYC does on average. The only place with a marginally better average standard of musicians in the US that I’ve encountered is Nashville.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Austin, and a few other places, has a chance to handle tech growth better than SF did, and set an example. I don't expect miracles, but SF sets a low bar to clear, and some place will do it.
adam_arthur 4y ago
Austin's great, but cost of living has far outpaced the value of the city. The average home in a central area is about $7k/month now. Though housing inventory is skyrocketing, so will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years. Almost certainly will see big declines without rapid disinflation/soft landing The draw for being an accessible family oriented place has evaporated for non wealthy folk. Austin is too small to warrant LA/NYC level pricing. If you're young and dating, you'll hit every decent restaurant within a few months. There are some cuisines without a single good restaurant in the metro area. And your only options for weekend trips outside of Austin proper area, are Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. Much less diversity in short trips compared to the coasts.
corytheboyd 4y ago
It's funny how our perception of "this is how this place is" is really just based on our preferences, which change over time. You will probably find any amount of "culture war fighting" or "those who prefer sports to drinking" depending on what you look for, regardless of the location. Find the good and avoid the bad, whatever those words mean to you. Or whatever, move if you want, but you're still taking YOU with you wherever you end up. I don't have much to say about Austin, I visited in the 2010s a few times and liked it.
jeffbee 4y ago
As soon as a person who views bored ape billboards as a good indicator moves in, your city is toast. Run for the exits.
great_tankard 4y ago
Lol
mdorazio 4y ago
Counter-perspective as someone who moved from LA to Austin earlier this year and also worked in Austin back in the late 2000s. Good things: - To me, the city is about right-sized. It feels like an actual city, but isn't a sprawling mess like LA, Miami, NYC, etc. - Despite what other people in this thread are saying, the city is very walkable/bikeable if you actually live in the city and not in Pflugerville or something. - As a growing city attracting companies and new residents from all over, there are tons of opportunities and new people to meet. - Austin has a good amount of attractions and just general things to do / things happening. Bad things: - The weather sucks. I think we got about 3 weeks of spring this year before a record-hot May and now it's in the hundreds for the rest of summer. - The food is really not great (aside from BBQ). I've made a point of trying a bunch of different restaurants and food trucks with different food types and they've mostly been very unremarkable for very not-cheap food. - As someone who enjoys hiking, central Texas is pretty awful for outdoor activities. Sure there are various lakes, but "hill country" is kind of a joke and most of the nearby land is privately owned. - The city has been making an effort (which I appreciate and think they are doing a hell of a lot better than west coast cities) to fix its homeless problem, but it's still fairly bad. - The music scene is nowhere near what it was like ~15 years ago. You're now far more likely to see a cool band in a random bar in Nashville than you are here in Austin, where it seems I have to kind of go out of my way to find live music. - It's probably a result of having moved to a yuppie area dominated by transplants from other cities, but the people in my neighborhood are just not friendly. At least half don't even say "hi" back to me if I greet them in passing. Point is, Austin is a mixed bag just like every American city these days. Be wary of people who gush about it (or anywhere else) without recognizing the downsides.
- manuelabeledo 4y ago
  > Despite what other people in this thread are saying, the city is very walkable/bikeable if you actually live in the city and not in Pflugerville or something. I guess you mean if you live in downtown and surroundings. Even in many centric neighbourhoods, sidewalks quit on you at a whim, and downtown is absolutely not reachable from most suburbs. > Austin has a good amount of attractions and just general things to do / things happening. Curious about this. I have always considered Austin as a city where you have to be young-ish, to find interesting things to do.
ruined 4y ago
Austin isn't unique, you just finally found some friends you like i feel like some newbie techie writes this exact same article about any city just before it hits bottom. i was reading these words about SF and Seattle not too long ago Austin, however, has a particularly nasty problem. just wait til the legislature passes a law about something you care about
next_xibalba 4y ago
(I lived in Austin for 7 years and permanently moved away a few months ago) I predict Austin will never approach Silicon Valley's success. Austin's tech scene is 80:20 Product Manager:Engineer, whereas SV was quite the opposite. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of engineers about, but the culture of the new arrivals feels very much defined by the PM/MBA type. Why does this matter? Because SV was built by engineers–idiosyncratic, independent thinking engineers. Of course, they were supercharged by VC, but ultimately, the engineers defined the culture. The iconoclastic engineer is unlikely to move somewhere on the basis of a "Top 10 Cities" list.
- jjav 4y ago
  > Why does this matter? Because SV was built by engineers–idiosyncratic, independent thinking engineers. Interesting point, agreed. I moved to SV in the 90s and PMs wasn't a thing (perhaps they existed, but never heard of or met one). It was all engineering-driven, which made it what it was. PMs have been arrving and colonizing (so to speak) SV though, so it's not the engineering center it used to be. Still here, but engineering-centric companies are getting hard to find.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Having lived in Austin for decades now, I believe that, unfortunately, articles like this one have turned Austin into the equivalent of a meme stock. From basically the early 90s to somewhere 2015ish or so, by far Austin's biggest draw was its affordability. Austin had a lot of desirable amenities: a rising industry in tech, the largest university in the state and an educated population to boot, geography that invites lots of things to do outside with its several lakes and Hill Country. However, and I say this as somebody who has loved Austin enough to live here the majority of my life, Austin has always underperformed major cities in nearly every category. Our cultural institutions (theater, music, dance, museums, etc.) are all second-rate compared to major coastal cities. We just got our first major sports team with an MLS team. Our infrastructure, especially around transportation, is notoriously bad. The one thing I really agreed with in the article relates to our architecture - it really does generally suck, especially compared to places like SF or NY or Boston or Chicago. But, since it was so much more affordable than these other cities, on balance it was worth it, and then some. Now, though, that affordability is pretty much gone (dinky suburban houses easily top a million bucks), and with the influx of folks like Musk and Joe Rogan you just feel like the hype around this town has far outstripped its reality. So you have folks writing missives like this about the elusive "soul" of Austin, where I have a feeling they're trying to convince themselves it's as "cool" as their dreams. Also, there are some glaring inaccuracies in this article: > A friend tells me that downtown Austin doesn’t have any building restrictions, which means there’s going to be an explosion of high-rise growth That's BS, as Austin famously has "Capitol View Corridors" that greatly restrict height on tons of downtown lots.
jmyeet 4y ago
I have mixed thoughts on Austin. I think there's some truth to Austin being the Portland (OR) of the South but I didn't find it quite as eclectic. It is a small island of blue in a sea of red (which of course has been gerrymandered to hell) but a Texas blue voter isn't a Coastal Democrat. It's really a Southern Democrat. You see hints of this in the author's post with the talk about the "culture wars". When I've seen that kind of language before what it generally means is social conservatism with a thin veneer of liberal aesthetics (side note: liberalism is aesthetics so that kind of fits anyway). Think Bill Maher. Think people who actually believe there's a "far left" in America ("far left" is code for "trans rights"). When reading that I couldn't help but think of the saying "privilege is invisible to those who have it", which I agree with. A way to interpret that here is that the author is largely surrounded by people like him so that basis is normalized and I suspect it's not as diverse (and certainly not as progressive) as one might otherwise take away from reading this. Food? I mean the BBQ is excellent. Superb in fact. It's not New York however. I imagine living in Austin is pretty great if you can live on or near a lake. Around Lake Austin however that is super expensive. Other than that, there's a lot of high cost high rises downtown and a little more south of the river and a little around UT but really it's just another set of Texas suburbs of SFHs. It is incredibly car dependent. Compare this to Portland where in many places you can live without a car just fine (admittedly, my knowledge of Portland is pre-pandemic so I'm unsure how downtown and surrounds have changed; I hear a lot). Summers are brutally hot. I've been there when it's hitting 100F in late October. All in all, there were thing sI liked but it just didn't vibe with me.
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  I live in Portland now, centrally near NW 23rd, while I used to live in Austin from 2007-2015 (and still visit often). I agree with all your points. Portland is far more walkable as I walk to everything here, including grocery and furniture stores, not just cafes and restaurants and convenience stores. It also has much better variety of cultural attractions, architecture, and I prefer the climate and nature of this area.
spacemanmatt 4y ago
I have lived my whole weird life's story in Austin. People who move here then openly complain or constantly compare Austin to some other place are better than anyone you'll see at Capital City. 10/10 will laugh again.
nunez 4y ago
I've lived in Dallas and Houston, and originally came from NYC. Haven't lived in Austin but have spent a lot of time there. Personally, I think Houston is the best big city in Texas. It has everything: diversity (in race, politics, and religions), amazing food, good-enough public transportation (in downtown), huge *and affordable* suburban sprawl (for families that want houses), and a great road system (though Dallas is better in this department). It doesn't look as glitzy, and the tech scene isn't as large as it is in Austin (oil-gas rules the roost here). Individual responses: > You don’t have old-money tycoons in Austin like you do in Houston and Dallas, where most of the Texas oil billionaires live. There are fewer of them there, but this is wrong. Texas has oil-gas old money _everywhere_. > Partially because of that, a diversity of opinions is welcome (although I know some people have left because they were frustrated with the lack of racial diversity). If Austin has a lack of racial diversity (which they do [1]), then are opinions really as diverse or well-informed as you think they are? Generally, when I'm in the center of a town and most of the people I see are white, I immediately think "How did it get that way?" When I've looked it up, the answer is aggressive racism that ended (at least overtly) one or two generations ago. Austin gives me those vibes every time I go there, especially when I go to any nice places in the city. (I'm a Black Latino who lives in Houston and goes to Austin several times per year.) It's similar to how I felt when I was in Portland (the Austin of the PNW, IMO), but not as bad as how I feel when I'm in New Orleans or any major city in the Bible Belt. > Here’s a pet theory too. Economically, the Austin airport also support a local food scene because the vast majority of passengers are starting or ending their travels in Austin. AUS has a good food scene because it's a small(er) airport in a hip town, similar to PDX (again, Austin of the PNW). LGA is going that direction too. It's difficult to have lots of good food at big superhubs because of their size and transfer traffic (not to say that they don't; DFW, CLT, and DTW have some amazing restaurants, for example) > The lack of direct flights has kept many frequent travelers away. Rumor has it that Delta Airlines is considering a hub here though. That would be smart on DAL's part, as AAL owns DFW, UAL owns IAH, and SWA owns the minor airports in both cities. DAL did have DFW as a hub for many years but closed it down in 2006; wonder if that will have an effect on their decision.

83 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

pnut 4y ago

Looking forward to the follow-up piece 10 years from now when the allergy shots no longer work, the nearest point of interest is an 8+ hour drive away, and that feeling of dread hits on April 1 as the thermometer his 90f and stays there until November.

platz 4y ago
do you live there?
- pnut 4y ago
  Did for ten years, then stopped kidding myself and left. Made good money off real estate appreciation though.
  - fundad 4y ago
    You made the most of underutilized assets because you are progressive and believe in the free market
sec400 4y ago
That constant questioning around whether you've picked up covid or it's just cedar fever is fun
asciimov 4y ago
I can tell you how it will go. "All these people have irrevocably destroyed [my] Austin. Costs are up, too many people, what I liked about it isn't the way it is anymore."
- jnovek 4y ago
  From subjective experience, it seems like the natural turnaround for “this isn’t my Austin anymore!” is about 10 years. I lived there for 10 years. I left because I couldn’t afford it any more. :-/
  - asciimov 4y ago
    10 years sounds about right. Been that way for decades too. I remember people in the early 90's complaining how Austin had changed since the 70's. It's the one constant to that town.
- dvtrn 4y ago
  People have been saying that since I left Austin 5 years ago after living there for 15 years (as a San Antonio native). "Don't Dallas my Austin" (and its sibling from the 80's "Don't build and they wont come") is the kind of mentality that put Austin exactly where it is wrt affordability and infrastructure
Der_Einzige 4y ago
Sitting in Houston right now, I know that you're claim of "nearest point of interest is 8 hours away" is so fking wrong. Houston is like 2 hours away from Austin and is a metropolis.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Some might question whether Houston is a point of interest ;-)
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    If you think the 4th largest US city is not a POI you're arguing in bad faith
    - bart_spoon 4y ago
      Not really. Just because somewhere is a good place to live doesn't mean its a good place to visit.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Chill. Yes, I'm being snarky. But I did spend quite a bit of time there for work at one point--albeit quite a while ago. And it's sort of a sprawling mess for the most part. If I lived in Austin, I'd probably go to Houston now and then for cultural activities but, no, by and large Houston is not a city I'd go out of my way to visit. Sorry.
    - jemfinch 4y ago
      If you think a concrete jungle is a point of interest, your interests are definitely different than mine.
      - jen20 4y ago
        Have you actually ever been there? This is the most ridiculous sentiment I’ve ever seen on Hacker News, including the crypto people.
    - 4y ago

nus07 4y ago

Yes great city and used to be very livable . But despite everything I cannot justify paying that recent increased cost of living to still be governed by Texas laws of no abortion, guns, capital punishment and pretty much every wacky right wing law possible. Great city to visit though.

platz 4y ago
you're worried about capital punishment? What are you planning?
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Capital punishment is just secular human sacrifice. Be as open minded as you please but I could see not wanting to live somewhere with that.
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    What's the alternative though? Paying to keep people in prison forever? Prison labour is bad as it undercuts workers and unions outside prison. Perhaps organ donation and medical trials is the most utilitarian?
    - jkalp 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      > What's the alternative though? Paying to keep people in prison forever? Unironically yes. The cost of executing someone is higher than keeping them in jail for life[1]. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more_expensive_than_life_in_prison https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...
- 4y ago

sputknick 4y ago

Considered Austin when I decided to leave Seattle. Ultimately decided on Raleigh instead. the biggest detractor to Austin for me is that you have to drive everywhere. Unless you are significantly wealthier than I am you will be living in a suburban development where you will have to drive to anything. Here in Raleigh I can (and do) ride my bike or easily walk to bars, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores.

christophilus 4y ago
Raleigh is surprisingly good. Greenville, SC and Durham, NC are both excellent, too. Been a hot minute since I lived in Durham, but I highly recommend checking out “Reality Ministry’s” talent show. It packs the largest arena in Durham every year (or did pre-COVID, anyway). Also, if Rose’s Meats and Sweets is still a thing, it’s a must visit. Welcome to the balmy south!
ghaff 4y ago
I guess downtownish Raleigh is cheaper than Austin. But pretty much everyone I know who works in Raleigh lives in Cary or suburban Raleigh someplace. Raleigh does have a pretty nice downtown but the nice downtown is pretty small. (Which is a pretty common pattern with medium-size cities--often old mill towns--which have somewhat gentrified downtowns in the Northeast as well.)
- sputknick 4y ago
  Yeah, thats a fair point, I probably should have been more specific, I'm actually in Apex. The comparable part of Austin I looked at was Cedar Park/Round Rock.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I used to take a lot of trips to Apex because Data General had a plant there (and a software development facility in RTP). They may still be Dell facilities by way of EMC. But this was decades ago and they were always in and out trips so I can't say I'm really familiar with the immediate area. These days it's always downtown Raleigh I'm going to and staying in.

mrits 4y ago

Author believes the chefs that moved from NYC and SF suddenly lost the ability to cook good food. Clown article

addicted 4y ago
This article is just weird at best (no pun intended) but like many other industries that benefit from agglomeration this can very well be true. 1) Chefs rarely do any cooking. At best they are conductors. And restaurants are famously highly unprofitable businesses. So you need a combination of a large number of workers, willing to work for cheap (relative to cost of living for the area) and are still highly skilled. 2) Ingredients matter. NYC food used to be crap. It’s the farm to table movement that took advantage of the many local farms within the true state area that revolutionized food in NYC. And SF is in California. 3) Tastes matter. It’s hard for a place which identifies with a certain food to build a great overall cuisine. So New Orleans is great for Cajun/sea food, but it’s hard to see other cuisines flourishing as much (most places in the US tend to have a couple of international cuisines that do wel due to clusters of immigrants, but I’m talking about building a general food culture). That may be one reason why food in SF tends to be better than food in LA, which identifies very much with “healthy” eating even though LA has pretty much every advantage over SF to be a food city. 4) Competition matters. It takes time to build a competitive food scene that can weed out bad restaurants, or even restaurants that haven’t adapted to the modern world. NYC is an extreme, potentially going a little too far, example of this. So yeah, there are many reasons why great chefs can become not so great chefs after moving somewhere else, at least in a restaurant setting. The top chefs will probably be fine since they will get the cream of the crop and fly in ingredients and workers. But it’s the middle to top-middle layer where these factors show up the most.

ghaff 4y ago

Not to get into the specifics in this particular article but there's a broader point here. Good cities to live in overlap with but aren't necessarily the same list as the best cities to visit. There are a lot of tourist attractions in destination cities like museums that aren't necessarily of a lot of interest to residents on a day to day basis. You may not be into world-class opera at $200+ a ticket. (And all the tourists may actually be a negative.) Whereas there are a lot of medium to large cities without much in the way of reasons to make a special trip there that still offer reasonable urban amenities for people who want them.

pm90 4y ago
This is why I sincerely believe that you can’t really judge a city without living there. Some cities are geared towards tourists, others towards residents and it shows.
dcolkitt 4y ago
Would be interested to hear people's opinions on which cities are mostly heavily loaded on the "better place to live than visit" factor.
- ghaff 4y ago
  In the US at least, probably medium-sized cities for the most part. Raleigh (and really the whole Triangle) has been mentioned in this thread. I know some co-workers in Columbus (think they all went to Ohio State). Both coastal Portlands. (Portland OR probably comes closest to a destination but I probably wouldn't travel there just to visit the city.) Portsmouth NH. Probably college "towns" generally. (Some are obviously pretty small but others like Ithaca NY are substantial.)

middleclick 4y ago

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Article seems kind of naive, many cities are like this pre-gentrification. Austin won't be any different. Probably worse because of what surrounds you in every direction for 1,000 miles.

muglug 4y ago

The article doesn't mention the climate impact, but there's a cost to people moving from a big walkable coastal city with decent public transport and dense housing (e.g. NYC, Boston, Philadelphia) to a city where you're driving everywhere and the AC's on for six months out of the year. I understand the author's politics are basically "that stuff is for wussy liberals" but it should concern us all.

biggieshellz 4y ago

Austinite here, looking to move. There's a lot of political stuff that this guy glosses over because it doesn't affect him as a white male Christian. The "traditional gender roles" thing, for one. With our governor and the 5th Circuit eager to send anything and everything regressive up to our 6-3 SCOTUS, my lesbian neighbors are worried about things as basic as their marriage. The University of Austin he cites approvingly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin) is a right-wing project set up explicitly to be "anti-woke". And the heartbeat bill he cites as something that people can just disagree about has no exception for rape or incest, something that 75+ percent of people in Texas support. The government has moved to the right of the median Texan, and with the gerrymandered districts and no ballot initiative, it is not really democratically accountable to the voters. And Texas is 45th in percentage of public land, definitely not a 7/10. With the growth in the Austin area, the hikes and water features that are nearby are always crowded, and you have to reserve campsites months out at state parks. If this dude went hunting, he more than likely paid to hunt on somebody else's land, something I never had to do when I lived in NC or VA.

fundad 4y ago
The key is why people don’t want to talk politics. Well, not wanting to discuss politics usually signals that the status quo works for you and rule of law will always protect your interests.
heynowheynow 4y ago
igetspam 4y ago
Well if we're gonna dive into that... Texas is anti-human, unless you happen to wealthy, white, male or the first two and a woman who agrees that "her place" is in the home. My wife is always on edge here. It's violent and people are becoming more cruel as the politics more and more support our worst inclinations.
- MathCodeLove 4y ago

heynowheynow 4y ago

igetspam 4y ago

I had to stop after reading the food is good. The here is almost uniformly mediocre, on a good day. I've never had such consistently terrible Mexican food (apparently that's how you define the "Tex" part of "TexMex"). An the weather, much of the year is unbearable. I like hot but 40-60% humidity and a lot of 100F+ days means you're not outside unless you're in a body of water in the shade. Then again, I'm older. I have a kid. I don't day drink and I don't want to go tubing down the river. Austin is a drunk town, even if the author isn't. It's neat and quirky and the night life is often like New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I can see the appeal for someone in their 20s and 30s but I'm out. Oh and Cedar Fever! Holy crap. I didn't know I had allergies at all until I got to Texas. What an eye opening experience. If I leave the house before I've given my double dose of allergy meds time to kick in, it's unrecoverable. And on Windy days, just forget it. I've had a bloody nose for two months now and that's "under control."

fundad 4y ago
The mild weather of the Bay Area is $
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ghaff 4y ago
The BBQ is good IMO. Agree on the weather. I've been to Austin a number of times. A number of years back, I had back to back events during the summer and spent the weekend rather than going home. I enjoyed myself well enough but remember it was very much an exercise in managing activities so that I wasn't too active in the heat of the day. Remember going to some nearby caves, and to hill country, and then watching the bats in the evening. Also lived in New Orleans for a few years and recall summer days were mostly spent going from AC to AC.
mrclaus12 4y ago
Austin TexMex <<<< San Antonio Tex Mex << RGV tex mex.
nemo 4y ago

csours 4y ago

Whew! Austinites love being told about Austin! Local comics and podcasters didn't exist until Joe Rogan showed up! Anyway, Austin has been growing for all of living memory. That's what's special about Austin. There are high paying tech jobs and interesting people. There are interesting things to do. There are bizarre street layouts that no one would have ever designed, as far as we can tell someone paved a bunch of cow paths. You can find any kind of food you like in Austin. It may not be the absolute best, but I can eat from each continent every week if I want to. I can take a trip around the Pacific Rim. Austin is STILL under construction, and as long as the tech jobs are here, Austin will ALWAYS be under construction.

bart_spoon 4y ago
> You can find any kind of food you like in Austin. It may not be the absolute best, but I can eat from each continent every week if I want to. I can take a trip around the Pacific Rim. This has stopped being a "pro" to me. Its pretty much ubiquitous for any major metropolitan area in the US at this point. Everyone seems to assume its a rare feature of their city, and maybe it once was, but at this point I think the list of top-50 cities in the US for which this wasn't the case would be shorter than the list of those where it was.
fundad 4y ago
Could it be considered a comedy scene without the host the Man Show? Let's be serious here.

beepbooptheory 4y ago

Google and Tesla and the "laptop class" can keep Austin, lost cause at this point. San Antonio always had the better breakfast tacos anyway. And Houston always had the better cultural spots.

skeeter2020 4y ago

>> The grindset is frowned upon. Some of the coffee shops don’t allow computers on Sundays, and people will scoff at you for skipping weekend social events to work. Austin entrepreneurs also care more about profit than growth. These are all definite pluses in my book!

jen20 4y ago
This is the first time I’ve seen the word “grindset” and I cannot think of a word that work more easily summarize the kind of people I absolutely despise. It’s just an excuse for being ineffective and making it up in volume.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jason-phillips 4y ago

I like David's writings and I say this not as a criticism, but this article has been written by every newcomer to Austin since Texians and Mexicans first arrived to the chagrin of some very onery Comanche. Having moved to Austin in 1994 (when rent was only $250) to start my studies at UT, I discovered the town of Linklater's Slacker. I could bore you with tales of once-was Austin, like when SXSW wristbands were $35; every former Austinite has similar stories relative to the period of time in which they lived there. Underlying all these stories that seemingly describe some mythical land of milk and honey is one common thread: opportunity. Austin allows you to be anyone you want to be and affords you the opportunity to do whatever makes your heart full. Austin allowed me to serendipitously become a very successful software engineer and I will never be able to answer the question whether it was me or my environment that played the larger role in making me who I am today. I no longer live in Austin proper, rather the Texas Hill Country, just to the west. I am quite sure that from my vantage point, I can still see new Austinites like David experiencing the same wonderment I did almost thirty years ago.

thebigspacefuck 4y ago
Slacker is one of my favorite movies. Is the Austin of today still anything like that?
- singlow 4y ago
  Austin was never "like that". It was a movie. Austin is a lot of things, but we still have bohemians and misfits, but they are outnumbered by tech entrepeneurs and crypto-bros. We still have conspiracy theorists but it turns out they are assholes. The characters in that movie were marginalized so if you come here expecting them to be the mainstream you didn't get the movie.
  - jason-phillips 4y ago
    > Austin was never "like that". Sure it was. I wandered around Austin and ran into people exactly like that all day long in the early 1990s.

lazypenguin 4y ago

I left Austin so I’d like to share a counter perspective. I still think it’s one of the best big cities in the country but that’s the problem, it’s a big city now. Austin went from 500k people to well over a million now during my time there. It’s impossible for a place not to change with that many people moving. Everything the author likes used to be even nicer before. Used to be more casual, more affordable, better music scene, less traffic, etc. I also don’t believe it’s a great place to raise kids anymore: epidemic of homelessness, more crime, crowded streets, too hot for extended outdoor play during the summer, etc. I used to meet a lot more people with “normal” jobs in Austin, e.g. mailman, teachers, nurses, etc. but over time they couldn’t afford to live close by and everyone I met had tech/finance/startup jobs. The establishments definitely got gentrified and cater to no-kid professionals now. Parks are now full of beautifully sculpted people playing frisbee where it used to be tie-dye wearing teenie boppeers or big Mexican families grilling. Ultimately, Austin grew to be a mono-culture of socioeconomic status in my opinion. No hate, Austin is a great city but just grew up into something that didn’t suit me anymore. It’s a weird thing when the place you live changes so quickly around you that you don’t feel you belong there anymore.

biggieshellz 4y ago
I feel you. I drove my old pickup truck to the Domain last year to pick up some Christmas gifts, wearing jeans and a button-down flannel shirt, and I felt completely out of place. So much ostentatious wealth here now.
- pm90 4y ago
  With all due respect: you drove up to the an area that was mostly built up from nothing in the past 2 decades, is being developed as a “second downtown” and you feel sad to be out of place? Have you been downtown of any major american city?
  - biggieshellz 4y ago
    I play jazz, and I go to downtown Austin fairly frequently, and never felt that way there. The Domain is just... weird, and not in an Austin way.

plasticsoprano 4y ago

> Rogan’s presence is also turning Austin into a podcasting hub, with hosts like Tim Ferriss, Lex Fridman, Aubrey Marcus, Sam Parr, Chris Williamson, Ryan Holiday, and Andrew Huberman. Tim and Ryan were here long before Joe. Regardless, I've been in Austin for 31 years and if it weren't for split custody with my kids I would have bounced out the second my divorce happened. It's hot, it lacks culture, the food, as has been mentioned, is mediocre, and the political climate is precarious and only getting worse. If you're considering it, do yourself a favor and don't.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dvtrn 4y ago

This article very much reads like every other article I used to read about Austin from people who just moved there 5 minutes ago and think they have it already figured out but actually don’t.

bestcoder69 4y ago

> there are a rising number of Urbit obsessives in town too Yeah any long-time Austin resident has noticed this trend as well. It's the talk of the town!

mrclaus12 4y ago

The summary is pretty good. I used to live there. The problem is Austin is becoming very hostile cost of living wise to regular people (read: non 200k+ tech workers). That in turn has an effect on lifeguards and EMS. Finally the city is good, but the city is extremely overhyped. It's very similar to Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas but for some reason gets 5x the praise. Let's be honest why: it has the most progressives and also satisfies tech workers desires to appear diverse but mostly be around other white yuppies.

crikeyjoe 4y ago

pastor_bob 4y ago

Can't take anyone seriously after they rate Austin's 'nature' to be 7/10. Texas is one of the worst states in the country for being outdoors. 2/3 for some ok local hiking trails 1/5 for public land 1/2 for floral and fauna variety 4/10 being generous

lordleft 4y ago

I just want to say that whatever one thinks of Austin, I appreciated the author's thoroughness. I wish more essays like this existed for major cities.

jleyank 4y ago

Like Montreal in Quebec, Austin is in Texas and the larger polity “wins” out when setting the political tone. Both have extreme weather, and are great spots for young folks particularly when single. You have to be comfortable with the stats/provincial politics, though, to remain there.

susanasj 4y ago

locals have been making fun of this article for the past day as tremendously out of touch, and it is: https://twitter.com/megankimble/status/1540041020192292865 https://twitter.com/megankimble/status/1540041020192292865

pm90 4y ago

The Author is using some motivated reasoning to justify some prior hypothesis. The paragraph about people not talking about National politics/culture wars is especially BS. I was in Austin in 2016, there were watch parties in bars for presidential debates and everyone I met at bars were talking about whether they would vote for Clinton (this was before the Trump takeover of the GOP, so his campaign was considered a joke gone too far by most people). Likewise the part about the City not being beautiful… what the fuck? The sunsets were absolutely legendary and I would love hanging out around Zilker park watching them. This is just a really bad article.

manuelabeledo 4y ago
> Likewise the part about the City not being beautiful… what the fuck? The sunsets were absolutely legendary and I would love hanging out around Zilker park watching them. I mean, I live in Austin, and I don't see anything special about sitting on a large lawn and watching the sun go down. It's like the bats under the bridge thing, it gets old very fast, but given that Austin really doesn't have many other significant staples, here we are. Austin really isn't beautiful. I don't think it tries to be, though.

jancsika 4y ago

Music in Austin is 7/10? Compared to what?

thebigspacefuck 4y ago
New York City?
biggieshellz 4y ago
NYC and Boston have better jazz. NYC / Chicago / SF have better symphony orchestras. It used to be an 8/10 or a 9/10 when I moved here, but professional musicians have been priced out. Now it's people with day gigs, music students at UT, and people who bought while it was more affordable and locked in their cost of living.
- jen20 4y ago
  Boston does not have better jazz in an easily accessible form. NYC does on average. The only place with a marginally better average standard of musicians in the US that I’ve encountered is Nashville.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Austin, and a few other places, has a chance to handle tech growth better than SF did, and set an example. I don't expect miracles, but SF sets a low bar to clear, and some place will do it.

adam_arthur 4y ago

Austin's great, but cost of living has far outpaced the value of the city. The average home in a central area is about $7k/month now. Though housing inventory is skyrocketing, so will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years. Almost certainly will see big declines without rapid disinflation/soft landing The draw for being an accessible family oriented place has evaporated for non wealthy folk. Austin is too small to warrant LA/NYC level pricing. If you're young and dating, you'll hit every decent restaurant within a few months. There are some cuisines without a single good restaurant in the metro area. And your only options for weekend trips outside of Austin proper area, are Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. Much less diversity in short trips compared to the coasts.

corytheboyd 4y ago

It's funny how our perception of "this is how this place is" is really just based on our preferences, which change over time. You will probably find any amount of "culture war fighting" or "those who prefer sports to drinking" depending on what you look for, regardless of the location. Find the good and avoid the bad, whatever those words mean to you. Or whatever, move if you want, but you're still taking YOU with you wherever you end up. I don't have much to say about Austin, I visited in the 2010s a few times and liked it.

jeffbee 4y ago

As soon as a person who views bored ape billboards as a good indicator moves in, your city is toast. Run for the exits.

great_tankard 4y ago

Lol

mdorazio 4y ago

Counter-perspective as someone who moved from LA to Austin earlier this year and also worked in Austin back in the late 2000s. Good things: - To me, the city is about right-sized. It feels like an actual city, but isn't a sprawling mess like LA, Miami, NYC, etc. - Despite what other people in this thread are saying, the city is very walkable/bikeable if you actually live in the city and not in Pflugerville or something. - As a growing city attracting companies and new residents from all over, there are tons of opportunities and new people to meet. - Austin has a good amount of attractions and just general things to do / things happening. Bad things: - The weather sucks. I think we got about 3 weeks of spring this year before a record-hot May and now it's in the hundreds for the rest of summer. - The food is really not great (aside from BBQ). I've made a point of trying a bunch of different restaurants and food trucks with different food types and they've mostly been very unremarkable for very not-cheap food. - As someone who enjoys hiking, central Texas is pretty awful for outdoor activities. Sure there are various lakes, but "hill country" is kind of a joke and most of the nearby land is privately owned. - The city has been making an effort (which I appreciate and think they are doing a hell of a lot better than west coast cities) to fix its homeless problem, but it's still fairly bad. - The music scene is nowhere near what it was like ~15 years ago. You're now far more likely to see a cool band in a random bar in Nashville than you are here in Austin, where it seems I have to kind of go out of my way to find live music. - It's probably a result of having moved to a yuppie area dominated by transplants from other cities, but the people in my neighborhood are just not friendly. At least half don't even say "hi" back to me if I greet them in passing. Point is, Austin is a mixed bag just like every American city these days. Be wary of people who gush about it (or anywhere else) without recognizing the downsides.

manuelabeledo 4y ago
> Despite what other people in this thread are saying, the city is very walkable/bikeable if you actually live in the city and not in Pflugerville or something. I guess you mean if you live in downtown and surroundings. Even in many centric neighbourhoods, sidewalks quit on you at a whim, and downtown is absolutely not reachable from most suburbs. > Austin has a good amount of attractions and just general things to do / things happening. Curious about this. I have always considered Austin as a city where you have to be young-ish, to find interesting things to do.

ruined 4y ago

Austin isn't unique, you just finally found some friends you like i feel like some newbie techie writes this exact same article about any city just before it hits bottom. i was reading these words about SF and Seattle not too long ago Austin, however, has a particularly nasty problem. just wait til the legislature passes a law about something you care about

next_xibalba 4y ago

(I lived in Austin for 7 years and permanently moved away a few months ago) I predict Austin will never approach Silicon Valley's success. Austin's tech scene is 80:20 Product Manager:Engineer, whereas SV was quite the opposite. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of engineers about, but the culture of the new arrivals feels very much defined by the PM/MBA type. Why does this matter? Because SV was built by engineers–idiosyncratic, independent thinking engineers. Of course, they were supercharged by VC, but ultimately, the engineers defined the culture. The iconoclastic engineer is unlikely to move somewhere on the basis of a "Top 10 Cities" list.

jjav 4y ago
> Why does this matter? Because SV was built by engineers–idiosyncratic, independent thinking engineers. Interesting point, agreed. I moved to SV in the 90s and PMs wasn't a thing (perhaps they existed, but never heard of or met one). It was all engineering-driven, which made it what it was. PMs have been arrving and colonizing (so to speak) SV though, so it's not the engineering center it used to be. Still here, but engineering-centric companies are getting hard to find.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

Having lived in Austin for decades now, I believe that, unfortunately, articles like this one have turned Austin into the equivalent of a meme stock. From basically the early 90s to somewhere 2015ish or so, by far Austin's biggest draw was its affordability. Austin had a lot of desirable amenities: a rising industry in tech, the largest university in the state and an educated population to boot, geography that invites lots of things to do outside with its several lakes and Hill Country. However, and I say this as somebody who has loved Austin enough to live here the majority of my life, Austin has always underperformed major cities in nearly every category. Our cultural institutions (theater, music, dance, museums, etc.) are all second-rate compared to major coastal cities. We just got our first major sports team with an MLS team. Our infrastructure, especially around transportation, is notoriously bad. The one thing I really agreed with in the article relates to our architecture - it really does generally suck, especially compared to places like SF or NY or Boston or Chicago. But, since it was so much more affordable than these other cities, on balance it was worth it, and then some. Now, though, that affordability is pretty much gone (dinky suburban houses easily top a million bucks), and with the influx of folks like Musk and Joe Rogan you just feel like the hype around this town has far outstripped its reality. So you have folks writing missives like this about the elusive "soul" of Austin, where I have a feeling they're trying to convince themselves it's as "cool" as their dreams. Also, there are some glaring inaccuracies in this article: > A friend tells me that downtown Austin doesn’t have any building restrictions, which means there’s going to be an explosion of high-rise growth That's BS, as Austin famously has "Capitol View Corridors" that greatly restrict height on tons of downtown lots.

jmyeet 4y ago

I have mixed thoughts on Austin. I think there's some truth to Austin being the Portland (OR) of the South but I didn't find it quite as eclectic. It is a small island of blue in a sea of red (which of course has been gerrymandered to hell) but a Texas blue voter isn't a Coastal Democrat. It's really a Southern Democrat. You see hints of this in the author's post with the talk about the "culture wars". When I've seen that kind of language before what it generally means is social conservatism with a thin veneer of liberal aesthetics (side note: liberalism is aesthetics so that kind of fits anyway). Think Bill Maher. Think people who actually believe there's a "far left" in America ("far left" is code for "trans rights"). When reading that I couldn't help but think of the saying "privilege is invisible to those who have it", which I agree with. A way to interpret that here is that the author is largely surrounded by people like him so that basis is normalized and I suspect it's not as diverse (and certainly not as progressive) as one might otherwise take away from reading this. Food? I mean the BBQ is excellent. Superb in fact. It's not New York however. I imagine living in Austin is pretty great if you can live on or near a lake. Around Lake Austin however that is super expensive. Other than that, there's a lot of high cost high rises downtown and a little more south of the river and a little around UT but really it's just another set of Texas suburbs of SFHs. It is incredibly car dependent. Compare this to Portland where in many places you can live without a car just fine (admittedly, my knowledge of Portland is pre-pandemic so I'm unsure how downtown and surrounds have changed; I hear a lot). Summers are brutally hot. I've been there when it's hitting 100F in late October. All in all, there were thing sI liked but it just didn't vibe with me.

ilikehurdles 4y ago
I live in Portland now, centrally near NW 23rd, while I used to live in Austin from 2007-2015 (and still visit often). I agree with all your points. Portland is far more walkable as I walk to everything here, including grocery and furniture stores, not just cafes and restaurants and convenience stores. It also has much better variety of cultural attractions, architecture, and I prefer the climate and nature of this area.

spacemanmatt 4y ago

I have lived my whole weird life's story in Austin. People who move here then openly complain or constantly compare Austin to some other place are better than anyone you'll see at Capital City. 10/10 will laugh again.

nunez 4y ago

I've lived in Dallas and Houston, and originally came from NYC. Haven't lived in Austin but have spent a lot of time there. Personally, I think Houston is the best big city in Texas. It has everything: diversity (in race, politics, and religions), amazing food, good-enough public transportation (in downtown), huge *and affordable* suburban sprawl (for families that want houses), and a great road system (though Dallas is better in this department). It doesn't look as glitzy, and the tech scene isn't as large as it is in Austin (oil-gas rules the roost here). Individual responses: > You don’t have old-money tycoons in Austin like you do in Houston and Dallas, where most of the Texas oil billionaires live. There are fewer of them there, but this is wrong. Texas has oil-gas old money _everywhere_. > Partially because of that, a diversity of opinions is welcome (although I know some people have left because they were frustrated with the lack of racial diversity). If Austin has a lack of racial diversity (which they do [1]), then are opinions really as diverse or well-informed as you think they are? Generally, when I'm in the center of a town and most of the people I see are white, I immediately think "How did it get that way?" When I've looked it up, the answer is aggressive racism that ended (at least overtly) one or two generations ago. Austin gives me those vibes every time I go there, especially when I go to any nice places in the city. (I'm a Black Latino who lives in Houston and goes to Austin several times per year.) It's similar to how I felt when I was in Portland (the Austin of the PNW, IMO), but not as bad as how I feel when I'm in New Orleans or any major city in the Bible Belt. > Here’s a pet theory too. Economically, the Austin airport also support a local food scene because the vast majority of passengers are starting or ending their travels in Austin. AUS has a good food scene because it's a small(er) airport in a hip town, similar to PDX (again, Austin of the PNW). LGA is going that direction too. It's difficult to have lots of good food at big superhubs because of their size and transfer traffic (not to say that they don't; DFW, CLT, and DTW have some amazing restaurants, for example) > The lack of direct flights has kept many frequent travelers away. Rumor has it that Delta Airlines is considering a hub here though. That would be smart on DAL's part, as AAL owns DFW, UAL owns IAH, and SWA owns the minor airports in both cities. DAL did have DFW as a hub for many years but closed it down in 2006; wonder if that will have an effect on their decision.