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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't expect it to remain affordable for long.

It really depends on how the city chooses to restrict housing supply; we have the technology to ensure that housing is affordable, but most American cities make deploying said technology illegal: https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B....

This is a fact of policy, not nature: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi...

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Austin isn't exactly pulling a SF with it's housing and the cost of living is rising rapidly.

There is an undeniable correlation between more people with more money to spend and increased cost. Go look at tourism economies for an example.

Well Austin has a major transit problem. The traffic is unsustainable and there's no good plan to rectify it. So there is affordable housing near Austin (in Round Rock and San Marcos) but due to traffic you can lose a lot of time to commuting.

Affordable is relative. You can find a good place downtown for ~ $1500 and the quality you get for the price would be mindblowing to NYC or SF residents while still being pricey for Texans. For most people in tech 1500/mo is very very affordable.

Yeah I think rent is pretty reasonable in Austin, coming from South FL where salaries are relatively low and rent/housing is just as high as here. But I think a lot of Austinites remember 5 years ago when you could buy a house almost anywhere in the city for $250K. Now those prices are $100K higher or more.

I think it depends on what you mean by "people in tech", I don't think the actual median income of people "in tech" is anywhere CLOSE to what the bay area economy involved HN reader might think.

But even leaving that aside, guess what's not going to be at all reassuring to current residents of whatever city is gonna be the "next Silicon Valey" or even "next Austin"? "Oh, don't worry, rents gonna go up a LOT, but it's still gonna be affordable for MOST PEOPLE IN TECH. Just not most of y'all that lived here before all the techies got here."

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