Texas is significantly worse than SF for anyone who doesn't have a car. There aren't good alternatives to driving to get around there.

The traffic principally affects you if you drive, hence why Texas is often worse even now than SF.

Dallas is terribad. At least it was in 1999 when I lived there. I can't believe that there are fewer people on the road and less traffic now than then.

Fun trivia tip: the opening scene of "Office Space" with the old person and walker going faster than traffic was filmed in Las Colinas (where I worked at the time).

>City planning here is a joke.

Virtually all city planning is a joke, and even if one can conjure up an example of a currently "well planned" city it may well be a short lived title based on a number of economic and industrial changes in the coming years and decades.

SF is unique in that it is an industrial incubator for the modern tech industry, much as Detroit once was for the auto industry. There's nothing to say that SF couldn't become the next Detroit, save for its significant tourist appeal. In which case it would become more like Venice.

It's not entirely surprising though, and I can say that on intuition alone I've been guilty of just laying the blame at the politicians doorsteps and shaking my fist at the sky while proclaiming "such incompetence!".

The fact is that it's an incredibly difficult thing to get right, is extremely expensive and carries huge risk if one is hoping to get such planning done right in a pro-active manner, than in the reactive manner which we're accustomed to. The potential downsides to getting such an effort wrong are catastrophic.

Even that seems better than dealing with SF's bullshit for the next 5-10 years.

Austin has been attempting to create a plan for an extensive zoning rewrite for the last several years. It recently restarted after the previous attempt was abandoned in August 2018 (after spending $8.5 million on consultants) because "it became a political lightning rod for preservationists and neighborhood groups who warned the effort would upend longtime neighborhoods."

https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/10/04/the-next-...

Austin really is a small town, tho. You can see all of downtown from your hotel room, and the rest is just suburbs.

Seattle has become an extreme. DC at its worst i only slightly worse than the constant hell that is Seattle. And friday night near pikes? Yikes.

I think the appropriate measure is median sales price, not price per square foot. Cities show that most people can consume much smaller homes than the median new construction in America, but small homes isn’t as much of an option in this part of Texas.

Unless you're a retiree, the lack of a state income tax makes up for it. Texas' policies are pro-worker and anti-landowner.

Don't forget the joy of parcel taxes, city and county sale taxes, and other ways of bleeding you out to make up for the people who aren't paying their fair share because of Prop 13; which you still have to pay even if prop 13 doesn't help you because you were born in the wrong decade.

Except property taxes for landlords are lower. Multi-family residences have a much lower property tax rate. A neighbor left the extra front door on his home as he remodeled just to keep that massiv discount.

Edit: This is just another example of supposedly progressive rules that create a nice safe wall between upper middles and don't have to works.

If high property taxes are liberal - why wouldn’t high taxes on other forms of wealth be beneficial?

Prop 13 basically just limits increases in taxes from purchase time. So it benefits existing land owners at the expense of future land owners.

And it also benefits speculators - makes it cheaper to hold onto property for longer.

It really is best to come experience it in person. Yes, there's always stupid people doing stupid things anywhere and it's certainly a conservative state, but people are generally much more tolerant and intelligent than the stereotypes.

The stereotypes are hilarious. I'm a computer scientist and spent 9 months at IBM's TJ Watson facility up in New York outside the city. Every person I contacted to rent a room from made a point to tell me that I'd have to leave my horse at home because they didn't have a stable. They uniformly were shocked in disbelief when I explained I owned no horses, no cowboy hat, no boots. The horror...

People here trend conservative. This cuts both ways, it means that they don't want to make a scene when they see something that offends their norms, but it also means that you have to try a little harder to open minds.

The other ruling ethos here seems to be 'good fences, make good neighbors'.

I lived in Dallas and it is the only place I've lived where people would scream homophobic slurs at me in the street. I wouldn't say I'd never move back, but the situation would have to be dire for me to consider it. Definitely cut your hair if you visit.

People can be friendly to your face and still vote for and support laws and political leaders who want you out of their area or worse.

Look at how they fought gay marriage or how they treat Mexican-American's. There are pockets of safety in that state (Houston/Austin) but as a whole it's not that great.

I lived a number of years in Idaho which has the same problem. I'm "OK" in Boise (even there things can happen) but I'm genuinely concerned for my safety when I have to drive anywhere else in that state.

based off the experience of soem of the LGBT people from there who've talked about it on Discord servers I'm in. Some areas are better than others but even someone from Dallas in this thread experienced issues.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment was flamebait, but this comment is the bursting into flames that we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because that's the purpose of zoning laws, to prevent accidents from occurring at all, right? :rolleyes: