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It's true there is some new housing availability in the form of condos in central Austin, but my experience was that the majority of new Austinites moved into h
by minimax 13y ago
It's true there is some new housing availability in the form of condos in central Austin, but my experience was that the majority of new Austinites moved into houses in the suburbs -- Round Rock, Pflugerville, Cedar Park, Buda, Kyle, etc. Suburban Austin is starting to look a lot like suburban Houston, and all that sprawl comes with its attendant problems. It's also not clear what Austin is going to do in the long term about it's water problems.
Austin is a great town, but you can't just sit there and say "Hey SF, why can't you be more like Austin?"
- reeses 13y agoMost comparisons I hear involving Austin run along the lines of "the San Francisco of Texas," or "next to San Francisco..." Except surfing. No one ever talks about surfing in the Austin area.
- drivingmenuts 13y agoBubba don't surf.
- BryantD 13y agoBut on the flip side, nobody ever talks about barbecue in San Francisco, so it balances out. (Hill Country Barbecue in Menlo Park is pretty solid, wouldn't be laughed out of Austin.)
- nilkn 13y agoSuburbia is not always sexy, but it is very cost-effective for residents and it provides options for people that want or need them. Houston gets flak for its miles of suburbs, but if you want to live in a nice wooded neighborhood right in the middle there are a number to choose from: Bellaire, West University Place, Memorial, Hunter's Creek Village, and of course River Oaks. Just be prepared to shell out 3-4x as much as you'd need to out in a suburb. Make that 4-10x for River Oaks. Suburbia exists in places like Houston for two reasons: (1) there's space for it; (2) the vast majority of people don't believe in paying upwards of a million dollars (or more) for a house even if they can afford it. They'd prefer to commute than blow that kind of money just to not commute. The interesting problem that places like San Francisco and NYC face is that there simply aren't cheap suburbs. You've got a lot of people making a whole heck of a lot of money, but they have to be geographically located right in that particular place to continue making that money. There are so many of them that the prices skyrocket even outside the city proper. In the end, almost ironically, that money ends up losing a lot of its value because through competition with one another they all end up pushing housing prices to their limits.