The Astonishing Transformation of Austin

Look at Boulder for an example of what happens when you institute strict limits on growth.

I think it is individualism more than straight-up narcissism, but the two go closely hand-in-hand. But I do think there is a difference between people who have been enculturated to not need (or think they need) community and people who would only participate in community if they could be the leader.

Especially since Pete's child was in the ICU - it is not like he was on vacation in Hawaii or something.

The vibe from Austin has always been weird to me. "Thanks for visiting, don't move here" or whatever their saying is to that effect. Yet, so few people are from Austin. To me, Austin has always been that poser city trying so hard to be cool and noticed by the other cool cities, but when you try to get to know the city it's just a facade of cool and the rest is just empty and hollow

I'm a person of color living in Austin and I always notice that groups of friends hanging out in Austin are often diverse. I didn't see this in the bay or in NYC. I did see it in DC.

I mean honestly infrasructurally the bay area sucks too, unless you happen to live in certain parts of the city or on the Caltrain (in which case transit is good but eye wateringly expensive). Try living in Alameda, Burlingame, San Leandro, etc.

Even so. Like nobody goes from the marina to the mission, or sunset to the mission. People never go to east bay.

As for meaningful entertainment I actually think Austin has about as much to offer as sf, but that could just be due to the circles I frequent.

Legit the thing I miss is altitude hiking (go climb a huge hill like mt. Tam, or string together four parks around my house and do a six km loop, mostly in parks). Barton creek is amazing though, and it's fantastic that you can forget you're inside a city for about 20km

I lived there for a while twice, not much in the burbs either, but there was a lot to like as far as music, bars and interesting food. But yeah, getting around wasn't convenient, all of texas is like that, first time I visited I was like "why are there so many toll roads?" plus the frontage roads feel like a carryover from when the population was 1/5 what it is now, the whole city feels like a failure of city planning, but especially the roads.

This was my take (multiple trips there for business). Fake music quarter. Too many cars. Felt like a giant cowtown. Flat. Expensive! The fact that they are considering a 20 lane highway through town definitely doesn't give you hope that they get it.

https://slate.com/business/2021/10/austin-texas-interstate-3...

Uber’s really cheap there.

> Of course it is getting more expensive and crowded. How anyone would expect otherwise is baffling to me - more people entering any city is going to increase prices and congestion.

Zone everything multi-family, remove set-back restrictions, remove parking requirements, staff up city permitting departments so they can approve within weeks, and house prices don't go up.

People flocked to the coastal cities like NYC and SF because of cheap plentiful housing and lots of job opportunities. Sure the housing sucked, but it got better as people worked those jobs and demanded better.

Housing in cities being a zero sum game (or more like negative sum...) is a new problem that we have invented for ourselves.

Austin is a generally friendly place. I lived there for a bit during the COVID times for fun. It's a cheerful vibe where people will greet you on the street and there's a few fun places to go to. I thought it was quite pleasant for the bit I was there.

I should warn you, though. It is not a city by any measure. More like a small town with a couple of streets of action. And the politics are not dissimilar in Austin proper from the Bay Area (perhaps because of the large number of people who've moved there from here).

However, because of the low cost of land in the associated area you can have things like Wonderspaces, etc. Also, there's things that are hard to do in the Bay like shooting.

Ultimately, I chose not to live there because I wanted a more urban life. And I wanted less extreme weather than the place has.

Would not recommend. It's a great city if you like paying almost as much as SF for housing and getting:

- High heat and humidity for 8 months out of the year

- Mosquitos that make the few nice days out much less nice

- Surprising ice/snow storms in the middle of the few months of nice weather

- Having to drive everywhere in heavy and hostile traffic

- Risking your life if you want to walk or bike somewhere

- Being surrounded by an expanse of suburban sprawl that's very ugly

- Having surprisingly few cultural institutions / resources close by

- Property taxes are eye-poppingly high so if you plan to buy a place be warned that you can afford less than you think

That said if you love strip malls and want to live in a place where people equate quality of life to quantity of stuff, then you'll love it!

Spend a week or two in ATX and see how you like it! Downtown did lose quite a bit of daytime vibrancy during the pandemic (the night life is still active as ever, however). But I think it's coming back.

where did you end up going? I love Austin but its a little too hot during the summer.

I've never lived out of subtropical climates... basically New Orleans and Dallas. The changes in seasons is always miserable for me. I've got seasonal allergies and also seasonal asthma. Back home in New Orleans, I was always fine from May until early October. And for the next half of the year, it's been a constant struggle with shortness of breath and sinus infections ever since I can remember.

I just can't with these humidity comments. Austin is not humid. It is hot as f*ck but not humid. Houston on the other hand is the most miserable place on earth when it comes to humidity.

Would you recommend Bartlesville/Tulsa?

Lived there until around 2021 and visited often before the hype. It is the same as the rest of Texas, but offers employability in the technology sector. People have this notion that there's a "different vibe", but really it feels like political posturing and wanting to feel hip.

There's nothing really wrong with Austin, and it has a cool lake. But that's really it.

I live in Austin and know the author to boot. I haven't had the time to sit down and read this one yet, but knowing him I can pretty well guess his take. He is my pick for the best writer in the state.

My read of Austin:

- I was born here in 1995. Except for a few years, I've seen double-digit growth in most measurables every year of my life. Growth is the only thing I have ever known so I am comfortable with it, and I can also see why previous generations (I.e. my parents) are not.

- Change is painful. Especially at this clip and for this long. But man, it is beautiful.

- The City Council here is undoubtedly the worst part of the problem. They consistently buckle to NIMBYs, and allocate money in just unreasonably idiotic ways. ("No one riding the train that cost $1.1 billion? Easy fix! Spend $7 billion more!") They are making the change much more painful.

- Natives were largely fine with the first wave of California refugees in 2008. This COVID wave is different though. The new movers kept their jobs and are working remote from Austin – meaning that they still have their Cali / NY inflated paychecks. It feels like a money fight, and we keep losing.

I can't read the article because it's paywalled but I've lived in NYC and SF for several years each, and have now been in Austin for 2. I'll just say one thing which I like about it a lot.

Being a blue city in a red state, the public's approach to policy seems more reasonable than in a lot of other places where it only goes one way.

For example, a few years ago they had a ballot measure to allow homeless camping on the streets more easy to do and less punishable. In short order, the city became swamped with it. At one point city hall downtown was even entirely surrounded with tents. I mean straight lines down all four sides of the block. It looked like somebody had gone to Walmart and bought 100 of the same 3 tents. The situation wasn't very good.

So 2 years later it was put back up for vote and people voted to undo it, and now the city is much cleaner than it was before. Yes, there are still homeless, and I bet lots of people are gonna have opinions about whether undoing it actually helped homeless people as that's a hot topic today, but having lived in NYC and SF, that was something I'd almost never seen before.

Vote to try something, and then actually vote to undo it when the results are not good? It was incredible to me. In the other cities things only ever go one way, which seemed to be doubling down. I admire Austin for its ability to experiment and undo when things don't work out, it seems rational.

Other than that, well, it's a medium-sized city in Texas. That means it's very hot in the summers and it is not as connected as the continuous coastal sprawls of the east and west coasts. If you don't like heat or simpler cities, come say hi and have fun for a week, but it might not be for you for living. You don't have to throw shade on it though to decide it's not a fit for you for the long term. It's a great place to be.

I grew up in a small town just north of Austin, and lived in town after college for a few years. If you aren't a big foodie or into live music, there's really not much reason to live there. Horrible traffic, surface-of-the-sun hot, wildly overpriced, geographically uninteresting, etc.

People are generally very friendly and it's a blue city in a deeply red state, which I personally appreciate, but I'd live in inner-loop Houston before moving back to Austin, and in turn I'd live in just about any other coastal state before moving back to Texas.

Moved there in 2017 from Florida. It's grown tremendously even in that amount of time. So many more high rises than there were 5 years ago even. Austin's been able to attract flagships like the Google Wave building downtown, which is a beautiful building on Lady Bird Lake. Far more of the "east side" has also developed in that time. A lot of old ranch houses and old bars and restaurants that I briefly got to see have been razed for the 4-6 story mixed use buildings that now run almost the entire length of east 6th. It's gone from an eclectic, artsy, hipster vibe on that side of town to trendy and modern. Although, there's still plenty of great bars to enjoy over there.

One thing I feel about Austin, is that people are super friendly. A lot of people are transplants, and they're usually more than willing to make new friends. Sometimes you'll meet some Austin veterans or natives there. They'll tell you that the east side used to be very crime-ridden (I'm guessing in the 90s and early 00s). They'll bemoan all the growth, but a lot of them will also say that they haven't grown tired of the city because of the constant change.

I do think the author's anecdote about the people being more "libertarian"-ish is kinda true. A lot of my Democrat friends in ATX tend to be very pro-gun rights, for example. I do think you get a lot of more moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans in Austin and that is a political culture you won't really find in most tech hubs.

I would say my only major complaint about ATX is that it's right smack in the middle of Texas. Nothing wrong with Texas, but it's a very large state and if you want to take a road trip to the mountains or the beach or somewhere different, it's a long haul.

I don't live in Austin but for me the town died a little when the Armadillo World Headquarters closed. [0] I hitchhiked from Michigan on college spring break to visit. The Police were playing that night. It fully lived up to the legend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_World_Headquarters

I grew up in Austin in the 90s and currently live in SF. My family still lives in Austin, so I visit fairly frequently.

I think this was well-written. The Austin that exists today is unrecognizable from the Austin of my childhood—particularly the downtown areas like South Congress. In one way, it's sad, because the changes are certainly evident of a new professional class in Austin that did not exist before. There's a wealth gap that is much more apparent. Many of my friends I grew up with live farther out than they expected—Leander, Georgetown, Round Rock.

But on the other hand, compared to San Francisco, I'm glad that Austin is encouraging growth in _some_ direction. SF seems to have tried its hardest to repel tech growth, and its downtown is now deservedly emptied out. It's actually exciting to come back to Austin and see a city that is building and changing—it makes SF feel stagnant.

> “There’s this spirit of the Texas frontier—strong people confronting challenges and doing so boldly.”

There is certainly an attitude I miss about the people I knew in Texas. There's a sense of optimism and capability I remember that doesn't seem as pervasive elsewhere.

That said, I don't think I'll return to Austin. I had enough of the hot climate, and all of the changes make me feel like it's no longer my hometown.

I lived there for 10 years, around 2007-2017 or so. It was fantastic during this time, and if you rode a bike, just genuinely the best town in Texas. The food was great, there was always something to do, the weather was better than Houston (less humid, less rain), and there's actual hills and lakes.

The traffic has always been terrible, which is why I mention riding a bike. The infrastructure was never intended to handle this many people, so sitting in dead stop traffic is just an everyday occurrence multiple times a day, pretty much anywhere in the city.

All that said, the majority of my favorite bars and restaurants on the East Side are now giant apartment complexes. I also no longer drink, so that's removed a large part of Austin life for me.

The charm of Austin was it's small town nature, offering really unique things and a chill pace of life. Now its a giant town in the foot print of a small town, offering mostly corporate owned things.

It's still probably more fun than any other city in Texas, but at this point in my life I'd never move back.

Grew up in Austin and family has been here for several generations. Mr. Wright puts it best:

If you live long enough in a place, it becomes haunted by ghosts: memories of events and friends long gone still inhabit spaces that have been levelled and covered over by the unstoppable newness.

I've moved from Austin as have most of the people I know, or they've passed away. To me it is a city of ghosts, not just those that have left, but the entire groups of people who have been priced out and excluded. Gentrification destroys neighborhoods and destroys cities. Whether this process is beneficial or harmful is a matter of perspective.

Austin as a place, and the American continent as a whole, has been over thousands of years and especially the past few hundred, a land of displacement. Numerous American Indian tribes displaced each other, and the Spanish, the Mexican, French, Anglos, and so forth. To be truly American, in the continental sense, is to be not only a displacer but to eventually be displaced yourself.

To have experienced the displacement in only one to two decades is a concentrated experience, perhaps shared in a fortunately peaceful way, but economically violent, by other groups over time: the Greeks in Anatolia after Turkish independence, the population transfer in Israel and Palestine, or between India and Pakistan at partition. Having a city stolen from you by the monied is preferable to getting forced out by a mob, but if you can't pay rent or property taxes, the sheriff is coming to pay a visit and he's armed.

The old Austin was fun while it lasted, simultaneously boring and exhilarating. But it's dead, and we natives should have a funeral for it, and either in town or out, move on. Meet me down by one of the few remaining moontowers and we'll crack open a Lone Star for one final tribute to Leslie and, with SRV playing in the background, toast to our dearly departed. Ausitn, you had a good run, here's to your memory.

Good luck saturating Chicago.