The City of the Eternal Boom | Hacker News Reader

The City of the Eternal Boom

texasmonthly.com

71 pointsarcanus47 comments

Contrast this article with the techcrunch one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11190942). It's just like Seattle really. It almost makes me want to move there from Seattle :-) How hot is it there in the summer, really bad, right? Seattle is where people come to die, don't move here either.

Are we just going to centralize ourselves in entrepreneurial Athenian city-states, while the rest of America groans under job loss and decay? I want to believe it's not true, but it seems like we are heading that way.

Native Texan here: the "average" is in the high 90s but July and August regularly hit--and stay at--100-and-above afternoon temperatures. The hot weather starts around late May and doesn't really wrap up until September. Temperature swings can also be brutal, 101 at 2pm, 50 at 10pm.

Yes, there's air conditioning but you will pay handsomely and but you have to be inside to "enjoy" it. My two-month bill from Seattle City Light last August was 1/3rd what my last one-month August bill was in Texas.

One of the big reasons I left Texas for Seattle was the weather.

I'm not sure that's worse than living in Seattle and for 8 months a year going two week stretches without seeing any blue sky.

I'm sure. :) I detest hot weather and after 30+ years of living with it I was ready for a change. "Hot" in Seattle is a handful of days above 90. "Hot" where I'm from is the local news declaring that this is the 10th-consecutive day of highs over 100. Besides, the two-weeks-no-sun thing seems to be more local myth than actual reality in Seattle. Even in the dead of winter there are still sunny days. The days are really short in November and December, but the sun exists.

I can work around cloudy days--which I genuinely love--by sitting in front of a Happy Light for an hour or so. That's an acceptable tradeoff, for me, to escape not being able to be outside for more than a few minutes without being drenched in sweat.

I don't know about Austin, but 90 in LA is more like 80 somewhere else, due to our lack of humidity, so there's that to consider.

The humidity in Austin is absolutely ridiculous. It's not Houston by any means, but it's not okay.

I used to think San Diego got a bit humid around May gray, I was fucking wrong.

The hot summer isn't bad because of the ubiquity of air conditioning in Texas. A lot of folks bring jackets to work in the summer because office temperatures are so low!

Everybody adapts to their environment, and in Texas, that means swimming when it's hot. As long as we get rain, the swimming holes are just absolutely fantastic. One summer, I went 3 or 4 times a week. Pack a bag with a few beers, bike to a trail, hike down to the water. The hotter, the better. You get super sweaty on the trek down, but getting in the water is so. damn. refreshing.

However, if you like hiking, Austin really sucks compared to Seattle. Washington has soooo many great hikes in close proximity to Seattle (less than 2hr). The best hikes around Austin feel like nerf trekking. Your best option is to drive 6 hours to Big Bend. Some folks recommend Pedernales or Enchanted Rock, but both are very popular and not at all challenging.

I love Austin, but dammit, we don't have mountains.

Which is why my bet is that Denver is the new Austin.

Denver is a farm more livable place than Austin. Other than live music, not much goes on here. It is a terrible place if you like the outdoors.

Yes, by all means, don't move to Austin ;)

Note the swinging needle of urbanization, sub-urbanization, back to urbanization...

That's not an answer to your question, as the city-states end up including their suburbs, but I think whatever causes that swing could inform - or perhaps be used - to combat that effect.

> Are we just going to centralize ourselves in entrepreneurial Athenian city-states, while the rest of America groans under job loss and decay?

This would work better if your cities hadn't stopped moving in the 70s. (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6287.html)

Could you flesh your idea a bit more? I don't relish digging through that meandering blog post from a random author.

I was actually looking for this http://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-t... and we had an interesting discussion going at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10798352

Both might still be a bit too rumbling. If you want the least rambling, the Economist is almost always the way to go:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/04/land-val...

Instead of linking, could you just say what you intend to say?

Land Value Tax good. NIMBYs bad.

Basically American cities stopped growing at a rate sufficient to handle the boom in people in the mid-late 20th century. Now there is huge demand on cities to house people affordably but the entrenched powers that be in these areas prevent the necessary development through tools like zoning or bureaucracy.

The whole system is basically fucked. Sigh.

Austin is an interesting town as an example of the flaws of law enforcement. It widely considered this liberal paradise, as noted by the article, but the abuses by the police and city government are like anywhere else. Power corrupts and the system is flawed-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Buehler

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/29/is_filming_a_police_o...

Austin is nearly a million people, and iirc the 11th largest city in the US. Does the linked event really make Austin an "example" of something?

Yes.

Whenever you fight back against a meaningless misdemeanor, the city attorney and police will vindicatively punish you. It happened to me in a small town.

Antonio is a graduate of Wespoint, Stanford and Harvard. There are better more engaging challenges in the world he could focus on but he has to fight injustice and city corruption over the right to film police.

The problem is epidemic not just to Austin but to all of America. It has to do with human nature. Don't comply? They will crush you by any means possible. Guilty or innocent? They do not care.

I live in Austin and have to agree that the headlines made by the Austin Police Department are just as depressing as anywhere else. Interestingly though, I've heard (but can't say I know for fact) that APD actually pays well, is highly competitive to get in to, and recruits nationally. If accurate, it makes it all the more unfortunate that they can't seem to be an exemplary law enforcement institution.

I think what is most disheartening is how divergent the culture of the law enforcement community and the culture of the communities they serve* have become increasingly divergent. From my own perspective, it appears that law enforcement nationally is predominantly white and conservative, while the US population is growing more diverse and culturally more liberal. I believe this divide is really what exacerbates the tensions with police and communities we're seeing a lot of right now. They're fundamentally different cultures the power relationship between the two makes conditions ripe for conflict (its not inherent, just more likely). Perhaps that's why Austin, the "liberal" outpost of Texas sees this "surprising" degree of police conflict - the cultural chasm between the law enforcers and the citizens.

* Also depressing, when it seems more like law enforcement is terrorizing the communities within their jurisdiction rather than serving them.

If a department is recruiting outside of their communities, it would seem that it might be more likely that the culture of the department and the community would diverge.

> It widely considered this liberal paradise

i was just in austin after spending a week in rural texas, and i wouldn't even call it even remotely a 'liberal paradise'. it's the capital of texas. most people i already knew or met in austin are from other places in texas.

and there's nothing wrong with that, i appreciate conservative areas as equally as liberal areas (from a 'freedom' perspective they're just picky about different things), but i think calling it a 'liberal paradise' is a little disingenuous.

Austin is by far the most liberal city in Texas. If you're of a liberal persuasion and must live in Texas, you'll be most comfortable in Austin.

In this new world of sub 3% growth, Austin is lucky to have this problem. The only thing worse than getting pushed out of an area because of it's success, is no success at all--especially for a younger generation who just wants to make a go life. There are boom towns in every generation.

Maybe, but no growth towns like Austin was in the late 80s/early 90s are pretty great for younger people who aren't all that concerned about making "a go at life."

Sounds so similar to Portland, and maybe Seattle in the 70s and 80s after Boeing shrank and before Microsoft came to town.

You would have loved East Germany in the 90s. (But seriously, it's depressing.)

Most talked about city in the world? What?

Probably sounds better than "300th most talked about city" which would probably be more accurate.

This article sure smells like it may be calling the "top" in the current Austin "unstoppable" growth phase.

The problem with Austin - I grew up there, went to school there - is, as nice as it is, it is surrounded by Texas, which is fine if you can stand the right-wing politics and the pushy religious people.

Grew up in Austin and turned out to be a hardware/software engineer - no surprise with the number of tech jobs. I recently moved away to raleigh, nc due to the heat (you never get used to it), traffic, and cost of living. Raleigh reminds me of austin 25 years ago.

-- edit should say if your life goal is launching a tech startup austin is the place to be (outside of excessively expensive silicon valley)

I've lived all over the US, but went to college in Raleigh and it is still the only place I actively miss.

Charlotte, NC has seen a similar growth over a similar time period, with the area population quadrupling over the last twenty five years. Unlike Austin, it seems like the majority of people who move to the Charlotte area are families.

It's not a "cool" city like Austin or Boulder, but it's seams to have no end of jobs, or comparatively inexpensive housing.

Does anyone have a graph of US cities growth rates over the last 25 years? Maybe these aren't outliers?

I wondered the same. Here's the Current-dollar GDP for the top 50 metro areas (2009-2014)[1]. The top 10 metro areas by 5 year CAGR are...

  7.417%	San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA MSA
  7.230%	Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington, TX MSA
  7.167%	Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX MSA
  7.062%	Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown, TX MSA
  6.310%	San Antonio–New Braunfels, TX MSA
  5.542%	Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN MSA
  5.290%	Oklahoma City, OK MSA
  5.086%	Charlotte-Gastonia-Rock Hill, NC-SC MSA
  4.928%	Raleigh-Cary, NC MSA
  4.885%	Detroit–Warren–Livonia, MI MSA

4/T5 were TX metros. Austin isn't even the top in TX.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_area...

Everyone is talking about and gravitating towards Austin but the DFW area is an absolute hotbed for jobs. It seems like every other month some large corporation is moving their HQ to Dallas or the suburbs. It's a seller's market for labor.

Dallas vs Austin is like Enterprise vs Startup. DFW is where the most growth is and by end of the decade DFW will be hitting 8 million. Texas boom may have slowed in Houston because of Oil woes, but DFW and Austin are still high-flyers. Lot of OLD MONEY in DFW though.

That's a great analogy. Definitely a lot of old money as well.

I can't wait for Austin salaries to catch up to the other tech epicenters. I graduated and left to Seattle for a 2x pay increase over many of my peers. Now in NYC riding the tech bubble and missing the rich family and social networks I have down there. I've never come across any interesting jobs in the area that didn't feel 2nd rate.

Have you adjusted for cost of living? Austin salaries are lower but probably not much lower if at all when adjusted for cost of living.

I've adjusted by paying off fixed costs (loans) and living cheaply. The savings growth is obviously greater with such a higher wage. Additionally, the growth of RSUs has exacerbated the difference. I also haven't had to own a car for the last couple years; reducing fixed costs yet again.

My quality of life is generally higher in Austin but the opportunities to save tons of money are too lucrative to pass up. Those savings have enabled me to travel and engage in a more dramatic, experience driven lifestyle.

Have you adjusted for cost of living?

Seattle's raw rent / housing costs are much higher than they used to be (i.e. see http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/home-prices... for one example), but Washington State still has no income tax and its land-use policies are somewhat more sane than tech hubs like SF or NYC (http://www.geekwire.com/2016/redfin-ceo-glenn-kelman-shares-...).

Austin is much, much less expensive than SF, but not that much less expensive than Seattle. A 2x salary or even 1.5x salary is going to make Seattle much more appealing on a purely financial basis.

NYC is costly but has interesting dating dynamics for straight guys: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics....

Awesome read. Austin has been such a large part of my life I really enjoy hearing opinions about the city's changes over the years.

"The only way to stop people from coming to Austin is to make this an unattractive place to live."

I thought this really resonated. Austin, if changed for the worse, really is a victim of how cool it is. Since Austin I've lived in Lubbock and now Dallas. There really aren't people who move to these two cities for things other than work or school. On the other hand I have countless friends who move to Austin just to be a part of the city and experience all it has to offer.

I love the navel gazing attitude that Austin is the most talked about city in the world. Um... no.

Is it just me or there has been a wave of posts about Austin on HN? Is it the pre-SXSW anxiety?

All my friends are buried there.

And, some of them are dead. [0]

[0] "That Godforsaken Hellhole I Call Home", The Austin Lounge Lizards

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