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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Gee. Mediocre COVID response. Mediocre treatment of women. Mediocre treatment of non-white folks. Mediocre view of the democratic process. Hot as blazes. Mediocre electrical grid. Some risk of catastrophic weather events.

Some people might find these as undesirable aspects of living in Texas.

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I just moved to Texas from California where there is: horrific levels of crime, homelessness, and drug use in my area, outrageous cost-of-living, bad public schools, bad housing, and people are generally just incredibly unfriendly to each other. I also worry the lack of water and annual fires will tank the biggest industry in the state (agriculture), and who is going to pick up the tab?

Texas has problems, but they're not as bad for me. Personally it's the lack of nature that's been the worst drawback so far. Most of them can be mitigated by purchasing a nice house with good A/C and a standby generator—which is affordable.

> standby generator-which is adorable

From Austin here. It’s about $16k for a natural gas, 22kW (hey gotta run that decent, Texas sized a/c, right?) generator. That’s all up, installed with all the permits for electric and gas and city included and it will take about 4 months to install.

PS: I’d rather live in San Diego any day

Compared to my cost of living in the bay that's absolutely pennies. And good luck getting anything installed permits or otherwise because finding contractors (especially decent ones) is nearly impossible without a healthy population of tradesmen.

I was also affected by blackouts in CA so it wasn't like I had power there either. Only difference is the weather is very livable without HVAC.

Yeah some famous tv guy in LA waited years to get his solar panels installed. I feel like I’d be earning way more in California for the crap I do though.

You can work remote, I left San Diego in January but kept my CA level pay while moving to a significantly lower CoL area.

Also San Diego is nice, but damn has traffic gotten horrible in the last 20 years. And the house prices. Don’t even get me started.

Bill Maher

Shop for labor in Austin right now. If it's work requiring a permit, the backlogs are long. If it's not, prices are inflated AND backlogs are long. I've been trying to find contactors to finish my outbuilding for over a year. I ended up doing a lot of it myself or paying friends because not being new construction in a subdivision puts me at the back of every line and at rates I'm not willing to pay. If you want to build a new house in a subdivision, picked from a catalog and you're willing to pay top dollar though, you're fine. (I can't even call in ga it's from GCs I know because they're just too busy building the thousands of new houses already delayed in Austin metro.)

I tried to get someone to lay down a few bags of mulch in SF and he wanted to charge me $7000. No, I did not miss a digit. I did it myself in about 2 hours including driving to Home Depot.

I was quoted an AC install for $36k. We already had central heat so this was a relatively easy install. I did manage to find someone that did it for $15k but even that took a lot of searching.

As far as permitted work? We didn't even attempt any of that except a rather big electrical job. It was prohibitively expensive, took months, and they didn't finish a ton of the work as we found out selling the home. This was after I got 7 estimates and went with who I thought was the "best".

I didn't move to Austin and I'm sure it's bad there, but I can't imagine it's worse than the bay. Actually this specific problem is the biggest reason we decided not to pick Austin.

The manor difference is that you can find people to do the work. I stared at a cement pad for six months, waiting for a building to start going up. Then it was another four months for framing. You can't find anyone to do the work out here any more, they're all building new for CA expats. When I sold my house in th not h bay, it needed a new deck. $18k and a week later it was done and the house sold before there was a sign in the front. Over a year to get a fancy shed (that's how you classify it to avoid permits) and it's still not done. Trade-offs.

To be fair a 22kW generator is massive overkill for anyone not living in a 8000 square foot home.

I took some some measurements and did the math a while back, my "Texas sized AC" draws 4KW when continuously running.

Ok, so apparently one needs to account for inrush current (aka "locked rotor current"), the head space needed for that put me over the second smallest generator power output. The next one up from that isn't made any more and the one up from that one (16kW) has a 12 month lead time. Popular choice apparently. That's how I ended up with 22kW. On the plus side, it's plenty to run everything simultaneously with room for adding a freezer later and some other thing later. Admittedly that's pretty comfy, but I needed something quick and decent to run family member's life support systems.

since it's mostly labor and installation cost (presumably those are about the same cost no matter the size), I feel it makes a lot of sense to go a little bit bigger than you need

You could have moved to a different part of California. Texas has areas that meet the exact description you have for California.

With my income state income tax becomes a massive consideration. I also don't think there are any LCOL areas of CA with decent schools.

The desirable aspects:

0 state income tax. Low housing cost, and low cost of living in general. Culturally diverse (Asians, Hispanics), with large urban centers (Dallas, Houston, Austin).

To each their own.

0 state income tax, but property taxes are 3% vs 1% or so in California.

Average property tax in Texas is 1.69%. It seems in my area the nice areas are around 2%. I'm not sure where you're getting 3% from.

Also, our house in TX is almost half the price of our house in CA (and much nicer), so even though the rate is double the actual tax amount is the same.

I was looking at Austin on Zillow and property taxes were really high, maybe it's just the areas I looked at.

NW Austin resident checking in. 1500 sq ft house = $7700 property taxes (2020). Yeeesh.

Socal, at least, covers the cultural diversity and large urban as specified. Gobs of people and a mixture containing both Asians and Hispanics along with other things. Fully agree on the $$ issue.

Biggest difference from socal is it's way too hot for the homeless.

I don't live in Texas currently, and don't plan on ever returning, but did live in Austin for a few years. I can see the appeal.

It's been near or above 100F s lot this summer and we're making it nearly impossible to br homeless here. Makes sense to though. When low earners are losing jobs in retail and service industries and people from CA are driving up housing prices, forcing poor people to live in tents, making this place even less hospitable is the only neighborly thing to do.

New Mexico only has 4.9% and all the rest

Better food, too. But shh.

I'm selling a 3400 sqft house for $750k, just outside Austin. My property taxes are insane and I have to fight every year to not let the county reassess my home value the maximum legal amount. I've seen a black person in my neighborhood enough times to know he's a resident and there are two Indian families but the place white as hell. Crime is going up, we're nationally ranked near or at the top for DWI (except during the first half of COVID, where we traded in for spousal abuse... also drunk, probably). Every 21+ can now open carry, as long as they have a pulse and no recent violent convictions. The power grid is constantly teetering on the edge of collapse (generator sales are way up this year though, so that's cool). There are so many new subdivisions going up that we can't build enough schools fast enough to fit all the kids and the roads have slowed to a crawl. The state government seems to actively be trying to kill people, while disenfranchising minorities and stripping rights from women, while effectively turning every slack jawed bubba into a part time bounty hunter.

To each their own. Personally, I'm giving TX the finger and taking my cash elsewhere. Abbot can roll of a cliff, for all I care.

Our COVID response has been fantastic, no curb-stomping of human rights.

What kind of mediocre treatment of women? Banning the murder of babies?

No idea what you mean by the treatment of non-white folks, everyone here is pretty friendly.

Voter ID is a basic requirement for any functional democratic system, so honestly we respect the process more than many states.

Our electrical grid works just fine, the February storm was a once in a lifetime event, and most of the issues were with things like power lines simply never having been built with prolonged sub-zero degree conditions in mind - which, given your comment about it being "hot as blazes" is a pretty reasonable assumption to make when constructing the grid.

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