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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

It's not an important detail, particularly. The narrative is always "when we arrived, things were good, but these newcomers..."

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The typical reasons why people moved to cities in 1980 are way different than the reasons why people are flocking to cities in 2018.

What Austin is experiencing is a severe case of what's happening to cities all over the country. For many this is uniformly good thing but for a place like Austin, with a strong identity and cultural history (and, since the 60s, a liberal enclave in a deeply conservative state), it has very specific costs.

It has very specific costs to exclude people who would benefit from being in an area, as well.

Far more specific than a vague sense of 'things changing'.

This is nonsense. The world changes. You can't possibly keep it the way it was. Austin still has a very strong identity and cultural history -- it's just different now than it was 5 years ago when it was different from what it had been 5 years before that when it was different from...

A lot of what's happening in Austin is a result of public policy too, and it's been so for at least two decades. The city has actively pursued its transformations. Though even if it hadn't, Austin would still have been a huge draw for refugees from California and the East Coast.

I tend to think it is an important detail. 1980 was nearly 40 years ago! It's hard to tag someone who's lived in a place for 40 years as a carpetbagger with a straight face. People put down a lot of roots over four decades.

I bet you could have found someone in 1980 decrying how much Austin had changed by then from 1940.

This is a game anyone can play.

What about NYC? Think it hasn't changed? It's changed a ton. Why not complain about that? How about L.A.? The whole world has changed, and will continue to change, and you can be as certain of this as of anything else.

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