What’s up with Austin?
perell.com
perell.com
Have you been downtown of any major american city?
The one person I've met who lived in the Domain was a rich tech guy from another continent who "moved" to Austin but never actually spent much time here. He rented an apartment in the Domain that was mostly vacant because he was always in other countries, acquired a girlfriend in Austin, was rarely here, and eventually stopped coming to Austin altogether. He treated Austin basically the same way I treat a restaurant. He came once, got really excited about his experience, came a few times more and then felt less excited, and then never came back because there was always another city somewhere else that he was a little bit more jazzed about. He was so wealthy that this level of interest in a city involved him renting an apartment for a couple of years and considering purchasing a condo. I wouldn't be surprised if he did purchase a condo, and it's been sitting empty for years because he likes having it and the cost of maintaining it pales next to the effort of finding somebody to manage it as a rental property for him.
That's what the Domain is, a world built for those people.
TCO only favors EVs if you drive enough to offset fuel, oil changes, and maintenance. All bets are off if you replace the battery.
You can definitely find a used EV for under 20k.
You probably won't get something with all the features one would want, but it'll be a safe and reliable ride
If TCO matters, buy a cheap used car for ~$5K and nothing can beat the TCO.
Good ebikes (this is a car replacement, after all) are closer to $5k. $8-10k for a high end cargo ebike.
Financially, I would be further ahead if I just spend a little extra on the fuel and invest the amount I would have used to buy a new car.
https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/boomtown-yesterday-d...
The reason Silicon Valley sucks is that Wall Street started sending its failures into tech to boss nerds around, and they drove out the real people, the ones who actually cared about technology and steering its role in society to the good. Now, tech is full of FAANG bros who don't mind open-plan offices and daily interviews for their own job, because they're all going to be CEOs in three years (in their minds).
The Paradox of Tolerance is how Burning Man got infested by networking billionaires. California's death is the Paradox of Tolerance in action, and Austin is in the same danger.
Such a universal sentiment, everywhere. I've never heard anyone who lived anywhere for more than a few years say "it's become so much better". I would suspect age effects rather than actually reality. Or maybe everything just does get worse over time, in which case the same thing is happening in Austin as is happening everywhere else.
They might be related, though. The ruling class has deliberately destroyed local communities and forced people to become an on-demand proletariat that will move (often at personal expense!) "where the jobs are". If you want to have a career in tech, for example, you pretty much to live in one of 5 or 6 highly expensive cities, because you won't be taken seriously if you live anywhere else. It's not necessarily pathological that Americans move so much; what is pathological is that they have to do so, just to survive.
That is complete BS. Certainly it is among the tech people I know. Furthermore, even those tech offices that are in the orbit of certain cities often aren't in those cities and are located in, not cheap, but pretty reasonably priced areas outside.
Tech has enabled us to live anywhere and do our jobs.
Bosses definitely pick their successors based on the "one of us" metric, much more than actual merit or job performance, and this usually means one has to live in the same expensive neighborhoods and send one's kids to the same expensive schools as theirs. Is it possible to succeed, without playing that game? Yes, of course. However, it's unlikely, and so I wouldn't bet my life on it.
This is often stated on HN and Reddit, but simply not true. At no time in US history has there been less internal migration. It's actually one of the major problems we have with inequality - people are demonstratively not moving to where the economic opportunity is compared to generations past.
> This is often stated on HN and Reddit, but simply not true. At no time in US history has there been less internal migration.
That's a pretty big claim. Do you have any data to support that? This [0] seems to tell a different story.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/net-domestic-...
I'm not talking about 2019 to 2020/21 pandemic migration that your article covers. Those years will obviously be an outlier. I'm talking about long-term demographic trends over the past 100+ years.
Edit: A very quick google before a series of calls today: https://www.brookings.edu/research/despite-the-pandemic-narr...
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.173
It's more difficult to find stats going back 150 years quickly, but the visualized data I've seen on that is pretty striking.
EDIT: And here come the down votes when I bring in facts the progressives don't like.
I think we are seeing a global trend of mankind rediscovering urban life.
In the US at least, pre-pandemic the trend was primarily an uptick in the number of young college-educated professionals specifically wanting to live in (certain) cities. By comparison, when I finished grad school in the mid-80s, and took a job at a computer company in suburban Boston like quite a few classmates, pretty much no one elected to live in the city.
:)
I'd also say NYC--for all the complaints about Disneyfication. As a visitor, I'd much rather have today's 42nd Street, Lower East Side, Chelsea, etc. than I would the 1980s version. People have certainly been priced out but, then, it's not like Manhattan was cheap even in the 80s.
Next reason would probably be general cleanliness and drastic increase in homeless.
I’ve lived in the area all my life, and it’s essentially birthright for folks born around here to think Cincinnati is just okay at best and you only stick around because you couldn’t make it elsewhere.
In my early 30s now, I love Cincinnati, with no plans on leaving, and no desire to live anywhere else in the US (at least not without a significant change in CoL or income).
That said, so many folks seem to be thinking similarly and are moving here, and I really hope all the things I love about this place either stay the same or continue to get better. I don’t know how similar we are now to Austin in 2007/8, but hopefully we’re set up better to absorb the influx without changing much about (the good parts of) our identity.
Maybe don’t praise Cincinnati on HN…
There are plenty of neighborhood parks with people grilling and having birthday parties on the weekend? I think this might be a case of your choices creating your experiences, because if you go to Fiesta Gardens or the smaller neighborhood parks it's a much more family-oriented scene. (Zilker is mostly beautiful young people, but some of us are doing our part to inject an older and less sculpted element.)
It's true that Austin skews really young, and the later waves of migration have skewed much higher socio-economically. On the bright side, these new rich arrivals are tending to be much more friendly to policies that will allow less-rich people to live in Austin, such as density and affordable housing. Say what you want about the old chill progressive Austin hippies, but those folks helped create the affordability crisis by being and in most cases remaining to this day staunchly opposed to new multifamily housing. And say what you want about the rich young arrivals, but they're helping turn Austin around in that regard.
Over what period did the changes you reference happen? Am I longing for a City that no longer exists as I remember it?
Street View + Zillow show that a large two bedroom house I once rented for $1600/month in the heart of 78704 was demolished a few years ago. In its stead is a nice-looking but characterless house that just sold for $4 million. Fortunately, cost of living is not a significant concern at this point in my life, but I don’t want to move to 100 degree days, 100+ days a year, just to find that the city I left is no longer there.
Then again, I'm older. I have a kid. I don't day drink and I don't want to go tubing down the river. Austin is a drunk town, even if the author isn't. It's neat and quirky and the night life is often like New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I can see the appeal for someone in their 20s and 30s but I'm out.
Oh and Cedar Fever! Holy crap. I didn't know I had allergies at all until I got to Texas. What an eye opening experience. If I leave the house before I've given my double dose of allergy meds time to kick in, it's unrecoverable. And on Windy days, just forget it. I've had a bloody nose for two months now and that's "under control."
Agree on the weather. I've been to Austin a number of times. A number of years back, I had back to back events during the summer and spent the weekend rather than going home. I enjoyed myself well enough but remember it was very much an exercise in managing activities so that I wasn't too active in the heat of the day. Remember going to some nearby caves, and to hill country, and then watching the bats in the evening.
Also lived in New Orleans for a few years and recall summer days were mostly spent going from AC to AC.
My main disagreement is that there's great Mexican food to be found if you skip the TexMex places and stick to interior Mexican places and small family-run taquerias.
I was struck how the author kept describing +100° as a "warm city". Is that part of that old Texas oversizing trope? "We call drop dead on the sidewalk heat 'warm'".
Csa (koppen) is apparently held by many to be the ideal human climate (yet cities in that climate regularly clip 105)
I always wonder if it might come down to ancestry. Perhaps northern and southern family trees subtly adapted to their climate, diverging on their ideal climate in the process.
Tex-Mex is imo Americanised mexican food which doesn’t suck lol. Again, good restaurants will serve you excellent food.
Austin definitely has the best Breakfast tacos, and just tacos in general. SF has terrible tacos (burritos are different).
Every time someone mentions City X has terrible food without mentioning what restaurants they tried, Im immediately suspicious.
Press X to doubt.
I lived in Austin and dined at dozens of highly rated/reco'ed restaurants from food trucks to high end. My conclusion is that Austin does not have great food (though I do agree with your conclusion on breakfast tacos). This is not a uniform conclusion of course–Uchi and Barley Swine are in fact legit.
Agreed the food was legitimately not-good at most places. There are some good ones ( Clarks Oyster Bar, Habesha Ethiopian, Evangelines ) , but mostly it was bland and the home cooking is downright disastrous.
I don't claim they are. I mention them, because, in my experience, those are emblematic of the restaurants that top the recommendation lists year after year and are actually good.
Which restaurants top your list?
Personally, I find Fukumoto, Ebisu, and Komé, pretty good overall, and my personal favourite is Bon, actually in Bee Cave. I don't think any of them would be considered "fine cuisine", but that I also like.
Same with the weather. Too hot and humid most of the year, and recently we have been having really cold winters.
But the thing that gets me is what to _do_ here. Whatever half good thing you want to go, is already crowded or sucks or both, and there are not many in town anyway. Children really don't have many options here either. Hell, I grew up in a smaller town, and we had a science museum and an aquarium there.
I guess that Austin is just a college town trying to be a tech hub, which fits somehow if you are in your late 20s and early 30s. For the rest of us, it's just another city with plenty of jobs.
It used to be you moved to Austin and got acclimated to the area, you learned how other people lived here. Then people started moving in so fast, they didn't take the time to learn 'the ways of the people', and then turned around and started teaching new people their version of Austin, and after a while, it got to be unrecognizable.
I spent my 20s and 30s in Austin and loved every minute of it. I would not trade it. I left this year after getting nearly double what I paid for my property. It was an amazing ride, but it's something else now, I hope the spirit stays alive.
The food is pretty decent if you avoid the suburban strip malls. I can think of several world class restaurants within walking distance of me.
It’s definitely not Houston in terms of the range of options, but then again has a quarter of the population, so that is to be expected.
And as someone who grew up in dreary London weather, the heat just doesn’t bother me at all. Definitely have to stock up on the Zyrtec though, but this is the first year having even here for many.
But Austin's heat in the summer is more tolerable (generally drier) than what we have, so it's a tradeoff.
This is not an informed take AT ALL. Where have you encountered better Mexican food in the US than at Fonda San Miguel? There is a long list of great Mexican places in Austin with Fonda at the top. IF you have never been, Sunday brunch is the place to start.
There is a longer list of garbage tex-mex joints, that is true, but they are easy to avoid.
>> An[d] the weather, much of the year is unbearable.
This is 1000% correct, or if anything an understatement.
This is so ignorant, and drives me crazy every time I hear it. TexMex isn't Mexican food... let me repeat that: the Mexican food you're thinking of, was never the food in Texas. Texas has always been a region. TexMex is an authentic regional cuisine and is the product of 200 years of blending cultures.
Unlike California and Arizona, Texas was never cleared if it's Hispanic population through war, the Spanish American War. If you go to, say San Francisco, most of the Hispanic residents immigrated in the last 80 years or so. Three and a half generations back. That isn't the case in Texas. In Texas, many if not most of the Tejano population has been here since the days of Santa Anna. The food in Texas was last upended in the late 1800s when a gigantic influx of German/Czech Immigrants brought polka, sausages, brisket, and kolaches... sound familiar to Austin?
TexMex has always been in Texas. Flour instead of corn was due to crop growing conditions and availability. It's just through a quirk of history (again, the Spanish American War leads to everyone thinking native Tejanos are Mexican immigrants) that everyone comes to think that it's wrong. We even had a name for the food you are talking about when i was growing up, "Interior Mexican food." It's a completely different cuisine.
As time goes by, food changes... that's normal. TexMex in Austin has changed a lot since i was growing up in central Texas, just like BBQ has changed a lot, but it can be traced back to the Germans and Tejanos exchanging chili con carne for sausages, and pan dulce for kolache.
If you don't like it, that's fine, but don't compare it to retro-modern fare made by more contemporary Mexican-American immigrants, based on the various regions in Mexico during the mid-to-late-1900s.
Having moved to Austin in 1994 (when rent was only $250) to start my studies at UT, I discovered the town of Linklater's Slacker. I could bore you with tales of once-was Austin, like when SXSW wristbands were $35; every former Austinite has similar stories relative to the period of time in which they lived there.
Underlying all these stories that seemingly describe some mythical land of milk and honey is one common thread: opportunity. Austin allows you to be anyone you want to be and affords you the opportunity to do whatever makes your heart full. Austin allowed me to serendipitously become a very successful software engineer and I will never be able to answer the question whether it was me or my environment that played the larger role in making me who I am today.
I no longer live in Austin proper, rather the Texas Hill Country, just to the west. I am quite sure that from my vantage point, I can still see new Austinites like David experiencing the same wonderment I did almost thirty years ago.
The characters in that movie were marginalized so if you come here expecting them to be the mainstream you didn't get the movie.
Sure it was. I wandered around Austin and ran into people exactly like that all day long in the early 1990s.
Yeah but no one in their right mind would do that. That's verging on a straw man argument.
edit: I stand corrected. People are stupid.
No, but some things are the same. Austin still has this very friendly and curious vibe that encourages inquisitive exploration. The environment is still the same (the lakes, the greenbelts, the creeks and rivers) but they are more overrun with people now.
Some of the old Austin still exists but these places are slowly being replaced by condos, typically. For example, I just read that Dirty Martin's hamburgers is going to close.
The trick to finding Austin is not going to places like Uchi and Barley Swine and whatever dolled-up glam joint opens next week. No offense, but those places can fuck right off and you'll never find the real Austin there.
You have to go to places like Pollo Regio, or maybe talk to the waitress at the last Magnolia Cafe who's worked there for 25 years. Go to the G&S Lounge, try to have a conversation with Jimmy and not get kicked out. If he likes you then you're OK. Go to the Cloak Room bar across from the Texas capitol and ask the grizzled bartender to tell you wild stories about what goes on across the street.
Pre-internet Austin was cheap and an intellectually stimulating zoo, nestled within an extraordinarily beautiful natural environment. The low cost of living allowed the Slacker culture to thrive. That doesn't exist anymore, rent is too high which means everyone has to hustle constantly, but the friendly, curious vibe still exists.
I lived there for 10 years. I left because I couldn’t afford it any more. :-/
"Don't Dallas my Austin" (and its sibling from the 80's "Don't build and they wont come") is the kind of mentality that put Austin exactly where it is wrt affordability and infrastructure
But conflating 4th largest city as a good think does not make sense.
As City of mexico is a big city and Bangladesh too ..
Food. in Houston: Go to Chinatown or 1-2 BBQ places
Beach? please don't tell me galveston is a beach....
Inside the loop? Outside loop? -> you know what I mean
Anyway, Austin has been growing for all of living memory. That's what's special about Austin. There are high paying tech jobs and interesting people. There are interesting things to do. There are bizarre street layouts that no one would have ever designed, as far as we can tell someone paved a bunch of cow paths.
You can find any kind of food you like in Austin. It may not be the absolute best, but I can eat from each continent every week if I want to. I can take a trip around the Pacific Rim.
Austin is STILL under construction, and as long as the tech jobs are here, Austin will ALWAYS be under construction.
This has stopped being a "pro" to me. Its pretty much ubiquitous for any major metropolitan area in the US at this point. Everyone seems to assume its a rare feature of their city, and maybe it once was, but at this point I think the list of top-50 cities in the US for which this wasn't the case would be shorter than the list of those where it was.
Been a hot minute since I lived in Durham, but I highly recommend checking out “Reality Ministry’s” talent show. It packs the largest arena in Durham every year (or did pre-COVID, anyway). Also, if Rose’s Meats and Sweets is still a thing, it’s a must visit.
Welcome to the balmy south!
Probably college "towns" generally. (Some are obviously pretty small but others like Ithaca NY are substantial.)
Tim and Ryan were here long before Joe.
Regardless, I've been in Austin for 31 years and if it weren't for split custody with my kids I would have bounced out the second my divorce happened. It's hot, it lacks culture, the food, as has been mentioned, is mediocre, and the political climate is precarious and only getting worse.
If you're considering it, do yourself a favor and don't.
I predict Austin will never approach Silicon Valley's success.
Austin's tech scene is 80:20 Product Manager:Engineer, whereas SV was quite the opposite. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of engineers about, but the culture of the new arrivals feels very much defined by the PM/MBA type.
Why does this matter? Because SV was built by engineers–idiosyncratic, independent thinking engineers. Of course, they were supercharged by VC, but ultimately, the engineers defined the culture.
The iconoclastic engineer is unlikely to move somewhere on the basis of a "Top 10 Cities" list.
Interesting point, agreed. I moved to SV in the 90s and PMs wasn't a thing (perhaps they existed, but never heard of or met one). It was all engineering-driven, which made it what it was.
PMs have been arrving and colonizing (so to speak) SV though, so it's not the engineering center it used to be. Still here, but engineering-centric companies are getting hard to find.
Good things:
- To me, the city is about right-sized. It feels like an actual city, but isn't a sprawling mess like LA, Miami, NYC, etc.
- Despite what other people in this thread are saying, the city is very walkable/bikeable if you actually live in the city and not in Pflugerville or something.
- As a growing city attracting companies and new residents from all over, there are tons of opportunities and new people to meet.
- Austin has a good amount of attractions and just general things to do / things happening.
Bad things:
- The weather sucks. I think we got about 3 weeks of spring this year before a record-hot May and now it's in the hundreds for the rest of summer.
- The food is really not great (aside from BBQ). I've made a point of trying a bunch of different restaurants and food trucks with different food types and they've mostly been very unremarkable for very not-cheap food.
- As someone who enjoys hiking, central Texas is pretty awful for outdoor activities. Sure there are various lakes, but "hill country" is kind of a joke and most of the nearby land is privately owned.
- The city has been making an effort (which I appreciate and think they are doing a hell of a lot better than west coast cities) to fix its homeless problem, but it's still fairly bad.
- The music scene is nowhere near what it was like ~15 years ago. You're now far more likely to see a cool band in a random bar in Nashville than you are here in Austin, where it seems I have to kind of go out of my way to find live music.
- It's probably a result of having moved to a yuppie area dominated by transplants from other cities, but the people in my neighborhood are just not friendly. At least half don't even say "hi" back to me if I greet them in passing.
Point is, Austin is a mixed bag just like every American city these days. Be wary of people who gush about it (or anywhere else) without recognizing the downsides.
I guess you mean if you live in downtown and surroundings. Even in many centric neighbourhoods, sidewalks quit on you at a whim, and downtown is absolutely not reachable from most suburbs.
> Austin has a good amount of attractions and just general things to do / things happening.
Curious about this. I have always considered Austin as a city where you have to be young-ish, to find interesting things to do.
From basically the early 90s to somewhere 2015ish or so, by far Austin's biggest draw was its affordability. Austin had a lot of desirable amenities: a rising industry in tech, the largest university in the state and an educated population to boot, geography that invites lots of things to do outside with its several lakes and Hill Country.
However, and I say this as somebody who has loved Austin enough to live here the majority of my life, Austin has always underperformed major cities in nearly every category. Our cultural institutions (theater, music, dance, museums, etc.) are all second-rate compared to major coastal cities. We just got our first major sports team with an MLS team. Our infrastructure, especially around transportation, is notoriously bad. The one thing I really agreed with in the article relates to our architecture - it really does generally suck, especially compared to places like SF or NY or Boston or Chicago.
But, since it was so much more affordable than these other cities, on balance it was worth it, and then some. Now, though, that affordability is pretty much gone (dinky suburban houses easily top a million bucks), and with the influx of folks like Musk and Joe Rogan you just feel like the hype around this town has far outstripped its reality. So you have folks writing missives like this about the elusive "soul" of Austin, where I have a feeling they're trying to convince themselves it's as "cool" as their dreams.
Also, there are some glaring inaccuracies in this article:
> A friend tells me that downtown Austin doesn’t have any building restrictions, which means there’s going to be an explosion of high-rise growth
That's BS, as Austin famously has "Capitol View Corridors" that greatly restrict height on tons of downtown lots.
The average home in a central area is about $7k/month now. Though housing inventory is skyrocketing, so will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years. Almost certainly will see big declines without rapid disinflation/soft landing
The draw for being an accessible family oriented place has evaporated for non wealthy folk.
Austin is too small to warrant LA/NYC level pricing. If you're young and dating, you'll hit every decent restaurant within a few months. There are some cuisines without a single good restaurant in the metro area.
And your only options for weekend trips outside of Austin proper area, are Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. Much less diversity in short trips compared to the coasts.
These are all definite pluses in my book!
2/3 for some ok local hiking trails
1/5 for public land
1/2 for floral and fauna variety
4/10 being generous
Find the good and avoid the bad, whatever those words mean to you. Or whatever, move if you want, but you're still taking YOU with you wherever you end up. I don't have much to say about Austin, I visited in the 2010s a few times and liked it.
1) Chefs rarely do any cooking. At best they are conductors. And restaurants are famously highly unprofitable businesses. So you need a combination of a large number of workers, willing to work for cheap (relative to cost of living for the area) and are still highly skilled.
2) Ingredients matter. NYC food used to be crap. It’s the farm to table movement that took advantage of the many local farms within the true state area that revolutionized food in NYC. And SF is in California.
3) Tastes matter. It’s hard for a place which identifies with a certain food to build a great overall cuisine. So New Orleans is great for Cajun/sea food, but it’s hard to see other cuisines flourishing as much (most places in the US tend to have a couple of international cuisines that do wel due to clusters of immigrants, but I’m talking about building a general food culture). That may be one reason why food in SF tends to be better than food in LA, which identifies very much with “healthy” eating even though LA has pretty much every advantage over SF to be a food city.
4) Competition matters. It takes time to build a competitive food scene that can weed out bad restaurants, or even restaurants that haven’t adapted to the modern world. NYC is an extreme, potentially going a little too far, example of this.
So yeah, there are many reasons why great chefs can become not so great chefs after moving somewhere else, at least in a restaurant setting. The top chefs will probably be fine since they will get the cream of the crop and fly in ingredients and workers. But it’s the middle to top-middle layer where these factors show up the most.
The problem is Austin is becoming very hostile cost of living wise to regular people (read: non 200k+ tech workers). That in turn has an effect on lifeguards and EMS.
Finally the city is good, but the city is extremely overhyped. It's very similar to Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas but for some reason gets 5x the praise. Let's be honest why: it has the most progressives and also satisfies tech workers desires to appear diverse but mostly be around other white yuppies.
i feel like some newbie techie writes this exact same article about any city just before it hits bottom. i was reading these words about SF and Seattle not too long ago
Austin, however, has a particularly nasty problem. just wait til the legislature passes a law about something you care about
I think there's some truth to Austin being the Portland (OR) of the South but I didn't find it quite as eclectic. It is a small island of blue in a sea of red (which of course has been gerrymandered to hell) but a Texas blue voter isn't a Coastal Democrat. It's really a Southern Democrat.
You see hints of this in the author's post with the talk about the "culture wars". When I've seen that kind of language before what it generally means is social conservatism with a thin veneer of liberal aesthetics (side note: liberalism is aesthetics so that kind of fits anyway). Think Bill Maher. Think people who actually believe there's a "far left" in America ("far left" is code for "trans rights").
When reading that I couldn't help but think of the saying "privilege is invisible to those who have it", which I agree with. A way to interpret that here is that the author is largely surrounded by people like him so that basis is normalized and I suspect it's not as diverse (and certainly not as progressive) as one might otherwise take away from reading this.
Food? I mean the BBQ is excellent. Superb in fact. It's not New York however.
I imagine living in Austin is pretty great if you can live on or near a lake. Around Lake Austin however that is super expensive. Other than that, there's a lot of high cost high rises downtown and a little more south of the river and a little around UT but really it's just another set of Texas suburbs of SFHs. It is incredibly car dependent. Compare this to Portland where in many places you can live without a car just fine (admittedly, my knowledge of Portland is pre-pandemic so I'm unsure how downtown and surrounds have changed; I hear a lot).
Summers are brutally hot. I've been there when it's hitting 100F in late October.
All in all, there were thing sI liked but it just didn't vibe with me.
I don't expect miracles, but SF sets a low bar to clear, and some place will do it.
It used to be an 8/10 or a 9/10 when I moved here, but professional musicians have been priced out. Now it's people with day gigs, music students at UT, and people who bought while it was more affordable and locked in their cost of living.
The only place with a marginally better average standard of musicians in the US that I’ve encountered is Nashville.
Yeah any long-time Austin resident has noticed this trend as well. It's the talk of the town!
The paragraph about people not talking about National politics/culture wars is especially BS. I was in Austin in 2016, there were watch parties in bars for presidential debates and everyone I met at bars were talking about whether they would vote for Clinton (this was before the Trump takeover of the GOP, so his campaign was considered a joke gone too far by most people).
Likewise the part about the City not being beautiful… what the fuck? The sunsets were absolutely legendary and I would love hanging out around Zilker park watching them.
This is just a really bad article.
I mean, I live in Austin, and I don't see anything special about sitting on a large lawn and watching the sun go down. It's like the bats under the bridge thing, it gets old very fast, but given that Austin really doesn't have many other significant staples, here we are.
Austin really isn't beautiful. I don't think it tries to be, though.
Individual responses:
> You don’t have old-money tycoons in Austin like you do in Houston and Dallas, where most of the Texas oil billionaires live.
There are fewer of them there, but this is wrong. Texas has oil-gas old money _everywhere_.
> Partially because of that, a diversity of opinions is welcome (although I know some people have left because they were frustrated with the lack of racial diversity).
If Austin has a lack of racial diversity (which they do [1]), then are opinions really as diverse or well-informed as you think they are?
Generally, when I'm in the center of a town and most of the people I see are white, I immediately think "How did it get that way?" When I've looked it up, the answer is aggressive racism that ended (at least overtly) one or two generations ago.
Austin gives me those vibes every time I go there, especially when I go to any nice places in the city. (I'm a Black Latino who lives in Houston and goes to Austin several times per year.) It's similar to how I felt when I was in Portland (the Austin of the PNW, IMO), but not as bad as how I feel when I'm in New Orleans or any major city in the Bible Belt.
> Here’s a pet theory too. Economically, the Austin airport also support a local food scene because the vast majority of passengers are starting or ending their travels in Austin.
AUS has a good food scene because it's a small(er) airport in a hip town, similar to PDX (again, Austin of the PNW). LGA is going that direction too. It's difficult to have lots of good food at big superhubs because of their size and transfer traffic (not to say that they don't; DFW, CLT, and DTW have some amazing restaurants, for example)
> The lack of direct flights has kept many frequent travelers away. Rumor has it that Delta Airlines is considering a hub here though.
That would be smart on DAL's part, as AAL owns DFW, UAL owns IAH, and SWA owns the minor airports in both cities. DAL did have DFW as a hub for many years but closed it down in 2006; wonder if that will have an effect on their decision.
I understand the author's politics are basically "that stuff is for wussy liberals" but it should concern us all.
There's a lot of political stuff that this guy glosses over because it doesn't affect him as a white male Christian. The "traditional gender roles" thing, for one. With our governor and the 5th Circuit eager to send anything and everything regressive up to our 6-3 SCOTUS, my lesbian neighbors are worried about things as basic as their marriage. The University of Austin he cites approvingly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin) is a right-wing project set up explicitly to be "anti-woke". And the heartbeat bill he cites as something that people can just disagree about has no exception for rape or incest, something that 75+ percent of people in Texas support. The government has moved to the right of the median Texan, and with the gerrymandered districts and no ballot initiative, it is not really democratically accountable to the voters.
And Texas is 45th in percentage of public land, definitely not a 7/10. With the growth in the Austin area, the hikes and water features that are nearby are always crowded, and you have to reserve campsites months out at state parks. If this dude went hunting, he more than likely paid to hunt on somebody else's land, something I never had to do when I lived in NC or VA.
Well, not wanting to discuss politics usually signals that the status quo works for you and rule of law will always protect your interests.
Texas is anti-human, unless you happen to wealthy, white, male or the first two and a woman who agrees that "her place" is in the home. My wife is always on edge here. It's violent and people are becoming more cruel as the politics more and more support our worst inclinations.
For the poor? See https://itep.org/whopays/ -- we have the second most inequitable tax system in the nation, where the poor pay the highest effective rate. We also have no expanded Medicaid, so the rate of uninsured is twice the national average. The State of Texas blocked Austin's sick leave ordinance (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/05/texas-supreme-court-...). All this affects women and minorities disproportionately -- we're above the national average for maternal mortality, and non-white women are at disproportionate risk above that.
Texas doesn't even have state income tax.
The state isn't and shouldn't be responsible for ensuring everyone has medical insurance. That's an individual responsability.
Blocking the sick leave ordinance just put us in line with the majority of the country. Not exactly a radical move.
Edit:
Also citations not from a .org would be great. I don't need a write up to wade through. Your data should be able to speak for itself if it's legitimate.
You couldn’t pay me or my wife enough money to move back to Austin, let alone anywhere else in Texas, and we called it home for longer than anywhere else we’ve been since. Enjoy the hellhole.
I would never subject my wife/daughter to that kind of society, as long as I have the means not to.
Anti abortion laws impact one segment (and the sub segments within, obviously) of society: women. Before you start talking about men's rights and whatnot, please consider not doing that. Nothing grows inside you. Anyway, these laws ONLY IMPACT WOMEN. The US has a ridiculously high Maternal Mortality rate for a "developed" nation and it's worse for non-whites:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2020...
For many, abortion is the safe option but making it illegal means it's harder for the poor (which are disproportionately non-white) means they will either have to have back room abortions (remember that talking point in the 80s?) or have babies, which will increase the mortality rate for non-whites even further.
Know what we love? Forcing women to have babies. Know what we don't love? Their kids. Our social support structure in this state is abysmal. So now we're forcing people to have kids that we won't help them with, driving further into poverty, so we can talk about how minorities are The Problem.
But wait! These kids are US citizens, surely they can grow up and vote for change! Not so. We are big fans of gerrymandering. It's a Texas art form and the lines are constantly shifting in obvious ways that basically make voting more of a spectacle than a real thing. We draw lines through minority neighborhoods to split their votes with surrounding neighborhoods that are rich white folks.
And this is all just stuff I can type out on my phone because it's such a common discussion point that I don't have research it any more. We could for hours about laws that are on the books already and those that have been added recently and those that are coming up but if you read this far, I'm already surprised. Texas is tailor made for white republican men and those that that orbit them. Our state laws are giant piles of hypocritical BS. We use one argument to support a thing and the opposite to support another and they're bought and paid for by gun and Christian lobbying.
If you can't afford children, be a responsible adult and don't have them.
I wasn't talking about men's rights, but a humans right to life. How do you justify a mother opting to kill her unborn child while still condemning the killing of a born child? Again, 9 months of gestation is absolutely not more an invasion of autonomy than the following 18 years of care. To believe that its okay to kill a fetus 3 months into pregnancy but not okay to kill a newborn is pure mental gymnastics. In most abortions the aborted fetus would have developed into a healthy, functioning human being had you not prevented it. That's murder. You're taking away a humans opportunity for life.
If you truly have a good response to the things I mentioned, I'd like to hear them. Your current behaviour truly is incredibly condescending.
>99% of would be abortions are preventable by just practicing safe sex.
Non-substantial and uncited statistic. 99% of pregnancy is prevented by safe sex.
>Yes I know there's the 1%, but let's talk about the overwhelming majority here.
Unsubstantiated ratio. Assumption that safe-sex is universally possible. It’s a privilege that not all get to enjoy, and abortion is the edge-case of human behavior that addresses those situations.
>If you can't afford children, be a responsible adult and don't have them.
Assumption of full reproductive autonomy.
>Again, 9 months of gestation is absolutely not more an invasion of autonomy than the following 18 years of care.
Moral hazard.
>In most abortions the aborted fetus would have developed into a healthy, functioning human being had you not prevented it. That's murder. You're taking away a humans opportunity for life.
In law we call this “but-for” analysis. Essentially, “but for” someone aborting a fetus, the fetus “would have developed into a healthy, functioning human being.”
Everything else up to this point was fine but the last point is where the “bless your heart” materialized in my soul. Would that we could guarantee the health and functioning of humans, simply by not aborting them.
They say “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,” but in your case it’s “If you want to make God laugh, tell him his plans.”
Safe sex is absolutely universally possible. Free condoms are given out all over the place, and in places where they aren't it's probably better to practice abstinence until you're ready than kill unborn children so you can get a quick nut.
In cases except rape, which are a small minority of abortions, there is reproductive autonomy.
Elaborate on "moral hazard".
I explicitly said most. Not all. Most. Most abortions, like most births, would have resulted in a healthy adult human. You're responding to a misreading of what I said.
Free condoms: https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/sexual-health/free-condo...
Birth defects affect only 1 in 33 babies, meaning the majority would grow up healthy: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/infographic.html
What have they been doing up to this point? Texas outpaces the nation in rape and has been trending upward.
Know what else is illegal? Gun possession by violent criminals. Didn't Abbott also claim that if we made it harder for 18 year old white boys to get AR-15s then only the criminals would have guns? Why not apply the same logic in two places? (I own guns, I like shooting, I'm just no a fan of being full of shit and I believe in common sense fun laws, like most gun owners.)
I know that last bit was a different topic but it illustrates some of the absolute mess that exists in TX politics. They can't even avoid using contradictory arguments in public statements. This is a bad state run by bad people who will say and do absolutely anything to defend the status quo, even if it means saying two opposing things in almost the same breath.
Why do you single out 18 year old white boys specifically? Was there a law that restricted 18 year old white men from purchasing guns that got shot down? If so, good. That's sexist and racist.
Re: the white boy problem
Because as a an adult white male, I am allowed to call out my own. The perpetrators of most school shootings have been young, white, men. My wife isn't allowed to say it because she'll be shouted down by "not all men" and minorities can't say it because we'll call them racist and point out the one or two times a minority did it. Not enough white men are pointing at the common denominator (aside from "gun") and it's our responsibility to do so.
Just because you've internalized self-hatred and white-guilt doesn't give your the right to project that on the rest of the population.
Know what might really help? Ending cycles of poverty. Know a way we could do that? By not forcing them into poverty. Birth control is not free (it was but you killed Planned Parenthood, remember that?). So maybe everyone should stop having sex. That's realistic, right? Oh wait...
So you're concerned about gang violence, which is generally an issue for the most impoverished, who likely don't have healthcare and may not have the money for other birth control devices and you've forced the most well know women's health organization out of business, who used to provide these things for free and you want to force them to have babies, knowing they don't have money, creating more poverty and more desperation and higher likelihoods of violence and then... Shit. Did it come right back around?
Math is hard. Let's go shopping.
ps- I don't have internalized guilt. I haven't massacred one single school. I'm just not blind to the fact that almost all the people who have look like me and I'm smart enough to know that the only people who anyone will listen to (not everyone but most) are the ones who look like me because the only response you can muster is that I just feel guilty, which is ridiculous, I feel angry and sad.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/minority-women-affected-...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma...
I can't find a "WIC doesn't cover birth control article" but I can't one that says it does. I can also find the FAQ from PP that says they'll give you free birth control but if you're in a red state, they won't exist.
Not only is there work in this area, it's a not a leap at all. A minor application of critical thinking and logic makes cause and effect pretty simple. This has always been about forcing personal feelings onto others. We make a giant show of being anti-choice and then talk down to the poor and point out the issues in poverty stricken areas to make ourselves feel better, ignoring the clear evidence that this is a self fulfilling issue.
This was fun but I'm going to go back to getting the hell out of here, literally. I have packing to do.
Here, approximately 0.5% to 1% of abortions are because of rape and/or incest. Looks like my original estimate was right :)
The most vulnerable are not the rape victims, but the unborn infants, and they're being harmed in great number.
Go expose yourself to it and you’ll see how Texas is anti-poor.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/23/texas-abortion-law-d...
Some people in our society really want to turn women into passive baby-making machines, just as some people in our society want back the legal right to own people, just as some people think capital's leverage over labor is morally legitimate. Human rights and civil rights are non-negotiable and we must give our adversaries no quarter.
Furthermore, even if it were set up to be "anti-woke," why is that a problem? Most of the woke stuff in higher ed has little basis in reality or is conceptually incoherent. It's signaling for social capital because nearly everyone is straight, white, etc.
Is that conservative places offer better quality of life?
Or is that "crazy christians" have same values that make life in society better?
I never understood why you go miles and miles to be oppressed.
In some cases you run from your country, cross several countries illegally then risk your life to be oppressed by evil white cis men?
I am a latino and the best places for me living in US was in the white cis conservative neighborhoods.
Do I agree with all their thinking? No
Do I want to change them? Hell no. They must be doing something right so I respect their laws and customs.
There is no law saying that US has to be a charity country or has to cater to everyone and anyone.
I am not seeing free work visa to US americans in Mexico or Latin america countries.
So why should we expect it from US?
And here came the downvote rain
Prison labour is bad as it undercuts workers and unions outside prison.
Perhaps organ donation and medical trials is the most utilitarian?
Unironically yes. The cost of executing someone is higher than keeping them in jail for life[1].
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution#United_Stat...
This fact alone makes capital punishment an atrocity.
Here is a recent example of how easy it is to get convicted while innocent (non-capital in this case, but highly illuminating):
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10239429/Innocent-m...
My “vote could make a difference” while stripping myself and more importantly my wife of rights we get to enjoy in every other state we’ve lived in. And while there are a dozen other unrelated reasons you couldn’t pay us enough to live in Austin again, it’s nobody’s duty to live their lives as an oppressed martyr to be a fraction of a number for your cause.
The politics are important because of the people whose lives and bodies they impact, not because of our distaste for them. We live above the real consequences of the policies you named (outside of the very unlikely chance that we catch a random bullet.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#:~:text=Wade%E2....
Then why do most European countries have more restrictions on late term abortion than the US?