California tech transplants unhappy with exodus to Austin, report says | Hacker News Reader

California tech transplants unhappy with exodus to Austin, report says

sfgate.com

53 pointsCharlesW95 comments

The submitted URL [0] appears to be reporting on a longer article by Business Insider. [1, 2]

[0]: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/california-transplants-...

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-workers-moved-to-austin...

Sure, it's pretty easy to make fun of transplants complaining "Austin is so hot!", but as someone who has lived here for a quarter century, I think many of these complaints are valid, and, at least for me, "the bloom is off the rose" when it comes to Austin, and the past 5 years or so have seen a notable deterioration in Austin's appeal:

1. When I moved here in the late 90s, there was "the grand bargain" of Austin: it didn't have the amenities like world-class museums, theater, sports teams or architecture of big cities like NY or SF, and it didn't have mountains or beaches, but it had the sweet spot of being much more affordable so that you could actually enjoy these things a lot more. You could afford to live centrally and enjoy things like Town Lake, downtown, the good smaller museums and theaters we do have, etc. at a fraction of NY/SF prices. That bargain no longer works. Austin is expensive AF right now, especially housing, but its amenities and geography still lag what bigger cities offer.

2. Saying "Austin is where ambition goes to die" is a bit harsh, but there's also a lot of truth to it. People often move to Austin specifically because they're looking for a better work/life balance than other places. Young people move to Silicon Valley or NYC because they have big dreams and are willing to work insane amounts to try to achieve them (even if it means lots of other parts of their life suffer). I don't think Austin's focus is "bad", but it is noticeably different compared to NY or SF.

3. Obviously Austin has always been hot in the summer (I used to say we paid for our 10 months of great weather with 2 months of hell), but this summer was the worst by many objective metrics in a long, long time, and it's only going to get worse over the long run.

Obviously everything ebbs and flows, and after feeling like Austin was a "meme stock" over the past few years (tons of crypto bros, Musk fans and real estate investors moved here shortly before/during the pandemic), it's nice to see things calming down. Still, just looking objectively, I think there are a lot more cities now that offer a way better "bargain" than Austin does at the moment.

> 2. Saying "Austin is where ambition goes to die" is a bit harsh, but there's also a lot of truth to it. People often move to Austin specifically because they're looking for a better work/life balance than other places. Young people move to Silicon Valley or NYC because they have big dreams and are willing to work insane amounts to try to achieve them (even if it means lots of other parts of their life suffer). I don't think Austin's focus is "bad", but it is noticeably different compared to NY or SF.

I've noticed this too, people don't directly say it's 'where second-rates and third-rates go', but there's definitely a sentiment.

Yeahhh. If you're used to the climate of the West Coast, the South (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama...etc) is going to be absolute hell for you. If they're thinking about going hiking or doing outdoors stuff, you generally can't do that for significant portions of the year without suffering. Most of these places require you to drive everywhere too. The only real public transportation in 99% of the south are buses and you generally would only do that if you had no other options.

On the plus side. There are a lot of California transplants in my area that figured out they could sell their home for millions, build a new copy in my area on a lake with nearly zero crime, and still pocket a million dollars.

Buses are meant to take you to school. Which could even be the local college or University. They're not used for much else here in Texas.

Commuter trains exist in a couple of narrow corridors, but they have very few stops, and are meant to take you downtown.

If your office isn't downtown, then public transport isn't going to be of much help to you.

You can take buses within the cities (not something I'd recommend), but yeah. If you live in a suburb, there is no way to get anywhere without driving.

I moved to Austin post-pandemic (career move/not tech) from Chicago and I have my regrets. What I didn't realise was many of my disdains about Austin are exactly what the article says... Here ambition dies...

Now I can't unsee.

Can you explain, why does ambition die?

Did ambition die, or did founders encounter a populace that believes in work/life balance?

It’s a difference between loving tech and loving cold beer and barbecuing. Add to that calling people “tech transplants” (Texans just can’t quit doing that, even if they move to California) and worse climate than SF Bay and suddenly no technology loving person wants to waste time in Texas.

Populace that has less H1Bs and other visas holders that are modern day slaves who must work 16 hours a day, afraid from being kicked out of the country (look at X formerly known as Twitter for an example...) So it's not about what populace believes, every human being wants to live not to slave. It's all about their current precarious employment.

There are tons of H1B folks in Austin, so not sure what you're talking about.

Well, tons of H1B folks in Tulsa, OK as well.

They probably figured if they went somewhere that wasn’t big city and could just not have big city people in the way, everything would be better.

Then they realized same shit, different flavor, albeit worse in many ways, and many of their problems/issues were within themselves all along.

Tends to kill some of the enthusiasm and drive.

I moved to Austin in 2012 and left in 2020. What was great back then was that salaries were almost comparable but the COL was so much lower. Until 2016 or so, Austin had the best salary to COL ratio of tech towns in the country. But that all changed when the Californians started showing up en masse.

Austin was never truly going to compete with SF on its perks, but it was a cool town that allowed people to live comfortably.

I absolutely love that Texas has managed to convince their citizens that the states' problems are definitely most certainly all those California transplants (that they encouraged to immigrate) and not the states own self inflicted bs.

What companies were paying these comparable-to-the-Bay 2012 salaries? I left Texas around when you moved there and was not finding "almost comparable" salaries to the Bay Area in many places at all. It was a big part of why I left - very few of my costs increased anywhere near as much as my salary did, so I was able to save and invest far more money per year.

Not going to name names but I agree with the comment you are replying to. At top tech companies in Austin I found salaries were about 10% less than SV salaries, but total COL was much lower than that.

Hard to explain, but in a practical sense, the jobs are half rate in comparison. People don’t want to achieve quite as much. Your best bet for ambition is a remote job from SF or NY.

Not the worst if you value other things!

The Bay Area is full of transplants who moved there out of ambition in the first place, so moving to a city that has largely been populated until now with those who either stuck around after growing up there or moving there for less-ambitious reasons is gonna give you that as a baseline. Austin, in particular, was long a "weird" laid-back-creative-vibe place. So even moving from a small town for more opportunities to Austin is a bit "lower ceiling" expectation/ambition-wise than moving to the Bay to work for a tech company.

And then "tech transplant" is a broad bucket but one of the most common quoted reasons for going Bay Area -> Texas is cost of living. There's two ways to deal with cost of living: try to out-earn the costs, or move somewhere cheaper. One of those is decidedly less ambitious (even if more realistic, reasonable, and wise for most) and that's gonna be reflected in the resulting populations. Even at a larger scale: relocating your corporate HQ out of CA for cheaper housing and salaries.. that's less an ambitious growth move, more a cost control move.

why would you move to a place not known for ambition and have disdain for it lacking ambition?

Because you don't fully realize the connection between the high costs you don't like and the result of successful ambition and an influx of money making everything more expensive. You think you can have cheaper costs without anything else changing - the costs were somebody else's problem, not largely the fault of the successful businesses and lucrative jobs and the resulting monied demand.

Because life is more complicated than that level of reductionist thinking?

Interesting to hear such a report from a San Francisco news site. I don't want to imply anything but perhaps they aren't the most reliable narrator in this case.

I can see that although the expectation would be that a newspaper would truthfully report the views of those who have moved away, if anything to shine a spotlight on conditions that are driving residents to leave. If the narrator is more of the pessimistic type, then perhaps their motives are more personal, or the newspaper wishes to dissuade readers from leaving.

> thick traffic and unreliable public transportation

Can't imagine Bay Area residents complaining about traffic and bad public transport.

> city’s 100-plus-degree heat

Maybe should've googled Austin before moving ?

The Bay Area has inadequate public transport for a metro of its size, but its utility is kind of another universe from the Austin's CapMetro.

Austin’s public transit is an absolute joke compared to SF. It’s actually embarrassing how bad it is for a city it’s size, but that’s what you get when you live in an anti-tax area like Texas. Perhaps California taxes are too high, but at least some of them are being put to good use.

It's a myth that they pay low taxes in Texas. For most people the taxes are lower in CA (somewhat due to Prop 13).[0]

[0] - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-taxed-less-texas...

[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/texas-cali...

Which makes the decision not to fund things like public transit even more ridiculous. But then again, Texas refused to deploy its literal rainy day find when Harvey hit, so it really shouldn’t be that surprising.

> > It's a myth that they pay low taxes in Texas.

> Which makes the decision not to fund things like public transit even more ridiculous.

No, Texas still collects far less taxes and has less money to spend, but at similar income levels, people (outside of the very high end of the distribution) pay higher taxes in Texas.

California has more strongly progressive taxes and California has a higher income population, so it can collect a lot more total taxes (per capita, it has the #3 tax revenue per capita of the 50 states + DC) despite people at or below (and up to a fair amount above) US median income paying less in taxes than people making the same amount would in Texas.

You should probably read the sources you post. Right from #1: "For instance, despite being listed as number 12 compared to Texas' 40th spot, the average Californian paid $9,612 in taxes compared to the average Texan's $8,006. Even more dramatically, despite being only three spots below Texas, New Jersey residents paid $12,652."

It's also not relevant to the commenters on this site. People who move to TX from CA tend to be young, high-income, childless, and less likely to own a home. If some combination of those applies to you, the 0% income tax and lower sales tax massively lower your burden.

True, although landlords absolutely pass the cost of property taxes onto renters when they can and this was certainly true in Austin.

> True, although landlords absolutely pass the cost of property taxes onto renters when they can

“When they can” is essentially always: if landlords can’t pass costs on to renters, they aren’t going to be landlords for long.

Downtown Austin average rent is around $2,200 now [1]. Average in SF is, what, close to $3,500 now? Landlords everywhere pass along property taxes to renters, but even so, Texas renting is still cheaper than CA by a good margin.

[1] https://housingworksaustin.org/2022-city-council-district-by...

But for Texas they do have the very best public transport. Everybody there drives with the bus, in Houston or Dalles only the ones who cannot afford a car

It's really sad because in 2000 there was a public referendum on starting the first leg of light rail that lost by less than a percentage point. If we had started building out then it would have been much more affordable, and we would have had good momentum and people would have seen the value of it.

Instead we're still in the planning phase for the recently approved referendum that will cost billions upon billions for a few miles of stations.

On the plus side, I do think Austin has done a good job building out their bike lines over the past few years. Lots of central/suburban roads now have separate bike lanes that are at least protected by those "flexi posts".

Nowhere else is as nice as California, especially the coast.

That is a fact, and people can try as hard as possible to deflect and "what about -" but nobody cares. The truth is, California is an amazing place to live. It is hard to afford (I'm moving out because its too expensive) but I'm going to come back once my bank is full again lol.

I spent some time in southern California as a software dev contractor during the dotcom heyday of the 90s. I was renting in one of the more affluent areas and it was clean, had great venues within walking distance, great weather, people in general didn't seem to have gigantic political sticks up their asses, etc. It also had horrible traffic on the highways and cost of living was easily about 2x as much as living in Austin in the same era.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience in California - probably isn't the same these days though.

while some might disagree with the politics of CA and that's their reason given the chance if affordable, a lot of people would choose to live in CA and around on the of the 3 coastal cities.

We moved from NYC->SF->Denver->San Diego and CA always pulled us back once we left.

My wife isn't from the US and from a third world country. She said something that stuck with me. You have people in her country that wanted nothing but the chance to live in the US and then you had those that hated it and laughed at everything wrong with the country. She said they secretly would move in a second if they won the green card lotto but just make fun of it because they will never get a chance to move to the US.

I have a feeling CA is a bit of the same for some people.

> That is a fact

No, it's an opinion.

As someone who has been to nearly all 50 states I’m going to have to disagree. California CAN be nice, but overall is overrated and most definitely not the “best”.

Even under the understanding that each state has its own advantages and disadvantages, California still does not top out in a simple ranked list imo.

The relative lack of rain and green would get to me eventually. I like rain and green things.

Sure, CA has some deserts and dry areas, but I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "lack of green things". Parts of CA have some of the most beautiful foliage imaginable - I call them "Dr. Seuss Landscapes" because of all the unique and beautiful trees.

I feel like there is a subset of people, these are vocal online, that think cheap houses and cheap col metrics are the pinnacle of life satisfaction. You get what you are paying for. If it was actually desirable to live in these places prices would go up.

The prices have already gone up. However, unlike the Bay which artificially restricts new builds and has the added benefit of that prop that locks property tax rates comically low Texas has neither. There's an abundance of land to build in almost any direction. There isn't a cancerous NIMBY voting block that prevents new high rises. And more importantly, property taxes can go as high as or low as needed which keep downward pressure on home prices.

The unfortunate thing is, there is plenty of land to build in San Francisco. What there isn't available is the political will to turn those sprawling hills of nothing into new homes or to upzone areas currently.

I love San Francisco and think it has immense potential, but the place has become awful in terms of its CoL.

> And more importantly, property taxes can go as high as or low as needed which keep downward pressure on home prices.

The major downside of this is that it forces out the lower income folks who originally owned the property. I saw so many families who bought houses 40-50 years ago in Austin who had to leave because of the property tax increases.

If you’re serious about laying down roots in a town like Austin, you have to be prepared for wild increases in property taxes, which can really eat into your portfolio long term.

I mean, it's really hard to feel that bad for folks. People say it's about the property taxes, but a lot of people also saw that their property values tripled in a few years and were more than happy to cash in that winning lottery ticket, and I certainly don't blame them.

Texan residents 65 and older are exempt from property taxes if they live in their main property.

If they aren't taking advantage of this, they need a real accountant.

Prices have gone up everywhere. Median price for a home in Austin looks to be 500k and declining. Compare that to just about anywhere in California, it's a lot less

I find this a positive development.

The people that moved to Austin from California are conformists. The disappointment they experience is what happens when they are not surrounded by the concentrated capital that makes their (relative boring and mundane) jobs seem more important than they are.

Austin will be just fine without the herds of "talent" that stuff overfinanced Series-C "startups."

Do you live in Texas?

A fellow IRC lurker lives near Austin and we often compared outdoor temps this summer whenever he was complaining about the heat.

Despite my being in the California hi-desert by JTNP, he was often hotter - with more humidity on top of it.

There's definitely a hype bubble surrounding Austin blinding people to the realities of living in the region.

My father was a born Austinite [St. David's] — he raised me in Cuernavaca (just outside city limits, west of Austin). We are both relics of a 20th century Hill Country, which time has now changed (inevitably, as always happens):

I am grateful to have moved away from my childhood memories of not having to purchase tickets in order to enjoy so many of the natural water features around town. I live outside Texas, with no plans to return.

¢¢ — I'll get off my [own] lawn, now. Enjoy ATX's modern fluorishings! All are welcome to make anywhere Something.

This article glosses over the reason people moved to Texas in 2020-2021. It had nothing to do with tech or public transportation.

These news sources don't actually care. If you've followed SF news for any length of time, what you'll realize is how extremely thin-skinned they are about any criticism.

"Doom loop!? Stop making it worse."

As if bad press is the root of the problems they face. What that regional tech industry morphed into post dotcom-bubble was a machine that required interchangeable, replaceable butts in seats to financialize existing business models. The city of SF, the Bay Area region, and California as a whole recognize this centrality was key to their successes and less about talent than they'd wish.

The VC community there, which is notoriously trendy and short-term, realizes that they have no leverage or advantage without that concentration. Hence the panic (that's been going on well before COVID).

Outside of the obvious bias of a site with SF in it bashing Austin.

I'm going to tell the tale of two people. One is a product manager for apple in Cupertino and the other is a product manager for some random non FAANG tech company in Austin.

Both of these guys make $200k which is a healthy salary. The one guy at Apple, who clearly has a job that has a lot of glory, lives in a 1k sq ft 2 bedroom apartment that cost him $500k. His wife and kid live in Cleveland (to be close to family). He spends 5 days a week in San Francisco and flies back to Cleveland on the weekends to see his wife and kids. His commute is 5 minutes to Apple but he flies out of SFO Friday night (gets into Cleveland around 11pm) and then flies on Sunday after noon and gets back to San Francisco around 8pm. They also did this because his kids would have gone to abysmal Cupertino schools since he could afford a better place zoned for better schools.

The other PM lives in a 3k square foot 5 bedroom house in Austin where he gets to see his kids and wife every day. His daily commute is 20 minutes.

In case you didn't pick up on it, I'm the PM that lives in Austin and my friend is the Apple PM.

I have him over right now for the holiday weekend and i've never seen him more miserable. He told when he sees his kids they change so much each and every week. He admitted that even with his salary, the travel, and paying 2 mortgages (one for San Francisco and one for Cleveland) him and his wife have nothing at the end of each month (thanks to CA taxes). He looks like he aged several years from this lifestyle. He won't be able to take a real vacation back to his home in the UK to visit family because he can't afford it.

My friend is trying to get Apple to let him work out of the campus here in Austin.

Look, I love San Francisco but it has long ceased to be a place where you can raise a family. If you're young (or old and don't care about having a family) and don't mind the rat race, then treat it like you would any over priced metro area. Make your money and GTFO.

In the meantime, I absolutely love Austin. I'm loving the heat, my commute, my house (owning a house in either LA or SF, haha funny), and more importantly spending time with my family in my backyard with the sprinkler.

There's more to life than this rat race and the chill atmosphere of this town is a dream. I wish I never moved to California after my stint abroad.

Abysmal Cupertino schools are among the best public schools. Half the math faculty in the local high school are Calculus teachers, because half of the student body is on the fastest math track. A good number of students continue their high school math education at the local community college.

Of course you can always get better like Proof School, where your kids take Linear Algebra without having to walk to a local community college.

Also, is $200k actually right for a PM's base salary? My friend who comes from a non-traditional background recently broke into the tech industry by joining Amazon for $180k as a junior. My other friends at similar big companies have similar offers.

you're justifying your life choices, which is fine, but it makes it too hard to get any perspective from it.

$200k is not a high salary for SV tech, which i know sounds crazy, but a large part of this thread is about ambition and making it in the big city. Your data point isn't an earnest example of that trade off.

i like that you like Austin and seeing your family. I don't like that you have to paint that picture against some kind of shit terrible black hole that is California. It's just not true.

You wish you never moved to California!? I'm a california native, and perhaps that hurt me more than it should haha. Everyone loves California. How and wheher it's sustainable is its own question.

As an Austin native I wish I could GTFO but family commitments preclude it. CA would be my preferred state but I can't afford to live there even though I make more than the parent commenter here. Maybe that's because I'm past my hustle stage and want a WLB that is more weighed toward life than work.

I agree that CA isn't some terrible black hole. My Austin native brother moved to SF a couple of years ago and while the magic of SF has worn off he would still never pick Austin over it.

Regardless, I can't trust someone that says they love the heat. 30+ years of it and every time I step foot in the Bay Area or PNW I wonder WTF I'm doing in Austin.

I grew up in the snow belt where 2-3 ft of snow and -10F for several months were the norm for the first 23 years of my life.

Trust me, 110F texan heat is a dream compared to being stuck inside for 6 months of the year and watching everything slowly fet destroyed by road salt.

Though i will say, I do love Seattle, another city that is also nearly as expensive as

Don't take it personally.

California was great and I vividly remember how great it used to be. Unfortunately it isn't anymore and it's so obvious after having seen it's decline from 2011 to post pandemic. I can only imagine how great it used to be in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Unfortunately, California has a landed gentry problem who have a desire to not see things change. The end of that property tax prop would fix a lot of issues both nimby and otherwise.

As for making it, I mean yeah I made it and certainly got mine from living on that rat race but think critically for a moment. No one is going to remember us once the living memory of us passes. Children are really the only legacy we can build. Family and time are far more important than anything elusive career wins you're going to get.

I'm getting too old anyway.

thanks for replying. I understand much better now.

I definitely agree with the family being most important part. It can become too trite of a response, so i'll add color by extending it to the _idea_ of family - really it's human intimacy - that's most meaningful. ambition and accolades are mostly a facade yes, but it's possible in that journey you dare and are vulnerable and meet people and learn about moments of intimacy and vulnerability and all that. Spoken like a true Californian! TLDR: people and connection (family) yes.

Cheers mate. It does seem trite until your old lady pops out the first one. Then you sit there and wonder why the hell you spent so much time working or spending time doing silly things like brunch and bars when watching kids do kid things is infinitely more entertaining.

Writing in the book of life takes living to whole new level. I wish I had kids sooner.

So your friend made some poor life choices, what's your point?

I've lived in Austin a long time, I've liked it a lot, though have seen the negatives grow more than the positives in the past 5 years, but I don't know what anyone would take from your comparison.

Your friend deliberately chose a shitty lifestyle. I have really little compassion for that because I'm always dumbfounded how little people value the time with their loved ones. His choice to fly back and forth from SV to Cleveland every week is certainly not that common, and definitely has nothing to do with the specifics of living in SV.

He's a nice guy but yeah I agree. He screwed up big time.

His wife is an illustrator (books). If she expanded into something they could probably get their total income above 300k.

Regardless, I wouldn't live in SV unless both myself and my wife were making $300k for a $600k combined.

I worked a six month contract for Apple Retail Software Engineering in Cupertino. I was staying in a 1BR apartment on the edge of Cupertino and San Jose, and my rent for that apartment was $2k/month. That was 2014. During that gig, my wife stayed here in Austin, and we were paying considerably less than $2k for our 4BR house we have in one of the nicer neighborhoods. I saw shacks (not fit for human habitation) on postage stamp size lots in Cupertino where the property was for sale, the land had a value of $700k, but the property overall had a value of $600k. The house literally had a value of negative 100k, because that's what it would take to knock it down and rip everything out and start building fresh. Meanwhile, the median home cost in the Austin area was like $200k.

I totally get how house prices are much cheaper here in Austin. But the housing prices have rapidly gone up -- like 3-4x in just a few years. And our property taxes are going up as fast as the law will allow. What house you could have bought for $300k just a few years ago will now cost you over $1m. It's going to take a long time for the property taxes to catch up to the home values, unless that law gets changed. I hope my wife and I can continue to afford to live here long enough to retire, and then sell our house for ridiculous amounts of money so that we can afford to buy another place somewhere else where the weather is more moderate and the prices aren't so totally out of whack. We will just have to see what happens.

EDIT: I will add that I calculated how much I was making as a contractor for Apple, and I realized that they'd have to pay me over $250k to have the same amount of take home pay, were they to make me an offer to become a permanent employee. At that time, only VPs were making that kind of money, so I was very relieved when I was told that my work was done and my contract was ending, and that my early Christmas present that year was that I would be able to move back home to Austin.

Hello, Austin. The PNW has been dealing with this for years. Happy to share!

> One company’s product lead pointed to thick traffic and unreliable public transportation. Another transplant cited the city’s 100-plus-degree heat, in what was one of the city’s most brutal summers since 2011, when only two days in July didn’t hit triple digits.

Clearly not the brightest bunch it seems.

I've lived here (in Austin) for three years. My partner and I decided to move to smaller city in Washington state come November. There is a lot of things to like about Austin (and even Texas), but as someone who was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I don't think I can live here longterm.

It's not just the heat, but there's definitely more unnecessarily oversized vehicles on the road with only a single occupant driving. I'll admit it may be all in my head and I only notice these things because I'm in a different environment, but it seems many people here don't user turn signals, run red lights, and are regularly looking down at their phone while driving their truck or SUV, all while driving 10-15mph over the speed limit in a residential area. /rant

> are regularly looking down at their phone while driving their truck or SUV, all while driving 10-15mph over the speed limit in a residential area.

I live in TN and this has been my everyday experience since I got my license in 2015.

Might simply be the new normal in all US cities then. Though more terrifying when it's someone doing it in a larger vehicle.

My dad lived in a Memphis, and his parents lived in Murfreesboro. I've done extensive driving in both of those areas, and the stretch of I-40 between them. My dad passed away a couple of years ago, but I haven't seen crazy drivers in TN that are as bad as the ones I've seen here in Texas.

Somewhat crazy, yes. But not as bad.

Regarding driver behavior, I feel the same way about the SF Bay Area for the past three years. I think the pandemic really did something strange to us. Whether it gave us faulty memories of a better time, or caused a regression in civic-mindedness, it is hard to tell...

I remember two things in the 80's.

People drove faster and more aggressively. That seemed to fade over 40 years but now it's back but the people doing it are reckless and stupid.

Drives in San Francisco drove fast with great awareness and competence. Now they drive fast without that.

Off by one error: Pedestrians have gotten really stupid.

Ehh I dunno about that. I’ve lived in Austin for 15 years and in Spokane before that. A lot of people in eastern Washington drive pointless gigantic trucks just like Texas lol, especially because of the snow.

I see a lot of those same driver behaviors in Washington, especially since 2020.

I don’t think it’s in you’re head. I’ve driven across most of the U.S. and have lived in major cities that are known for their traffic/bad drivers, and Texas, by a long shot, had some of the worst drivers I’ve seen across the U.S. Same experience as you, reckless speeding, drivers running red lights and making unsafe lane changes in massive pick up trucks.

This might have to do with an old law that was changed around 2008-2010ish that allowed permitted drivers to skip the physical driver’s test if they opted to learn through the parent taught driver’s ed program (the driver’s parents could essentially just sign a form saying the driver had enough hours of driving experience which would allow them to waive the in person driving test).

I've lived in the DC area, the Bay Area, visited NYC, and various other cities in the US. I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years, and in that time we visited many countries in Europe, including London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Naples, among many others. I've also lived in Austin since 2006.

I wouldn't say the drivers here are the worst in the US. In my experience, that would be DC, NYC, and the Bay Area. The bigger cities seem to attract the worse drivers, and those are like bad apples that spoil the bunch. Because Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio drivers are all worse than Austin drivers.

But US drivers are not anywhere remotely as close to the bad drivers in Europe. My skills learned the hard way in Brussels stood me in good stead when we went to Paris and Rome, the two places where I've seen the worst drivers I've ever encountered.

Yes, Texas is the land that inspired the Canyonero, and other giant size SUVs. Today, I'd be terrified to drive anything that wasn't nearly the same height, even if it's not nearly as long. And yes, Austin has the worst stretch of Highway in the country, known as I-35. Anyone who has driven in Austin for any reasonable period of time knows to avoid I-35 like the plague. But MoPac and 360 aren't all that much better -- especially with all the construction that is and will continue to be happening on 360 for the next several years.

IMO, the drivers aren't the big problem here in Austin. The big problem would be the combination of the extreme temperatures (both hot and cold) and the continuing piss poor performance of ERCOT, the organization responsible for running the Texas electric grid.

There are plenty of good things to do here, except when things like SXSW comes to town. That's when you want to make sure to take your vacation and get at least 50-100 miles away. And good live music is happening all over town, not just down on the tourist-happy 6th street.

I was in SFO 2 weeks ago during a layover and overheard a guy talking about being on his way to Austin to do a final walkthrough of the house he was building there. As a Texan with with over 30 years of living in Austin under my belt I asked him how much time he's spent in Austin before building a home here. "A few days he said." I asked him if he's aware of the temp difference between SF, where he declared being born and raised, and Austin and his response was, "Yeah, but it's so much cheaper."

This was a week after eavesdropping on a man at a concert venue talking to someone about recently moving to Austin from SF and being stunned at how little there is to do here. How when he lived in SF he could easily get to the mountains and the beach and there were museums and events outside of Austin's limited music and BBQ scene.

All of that to say none of them are the brightest bunch. They move here because it's cheap and they visited during SXSW or ACL when it wasn't 120 degrees and they they thought "it's so cheap and fun here" without looking at the big picture.

They don't realize that outside of those festivals the music scene is mostly dead and has been replaced by comedy since the pandemic.

Lived in Austin 8 years. Music scene is great over on east 6th.

It’s said only people who can’t successfully live in SF move there.

Thank GOD. Please stop moving here then. And if you hate it, leave and take that annoying attitude with you.

The housing is still comparatively cheap though, so while it might slow it wont stop

Define "comparatively". Ricky dink suburban ranch homes that are anywhere remotely central, but otherwise nothing special, go for 1.3-1.5 million. Sure, that's cheaper than super in-demand places like the Bay Area, but (a) property taxes are much higher here because we have no state income tax, and (b) it may be cheaper on a per-dollar basis, but salaries here aren't usually as high as SF or NY, and we have way, way, way fewer amenities compared to those cities.

This should be a top comment.

The unofficial motto of Austin has been "don't move here" for something like at least the last decade I think.

The unofficial infrastructure policy has explicitly been "if we don't build it, they won't come" since at least the 70s.

This is what I've been saying about the people in SF. While I feel for you, I hope they don't come back here. Every city, including SF and Austin, are better off without the people who don't actually want to live there.

Maybe if the Bay Area started building enough housing, people who wanted to live there could do so.

Maybe the techies should form a union and lobby the local municipalities to relax the zoning laws.

After all, some of that monopolistic rent should go to good uses.

There are groups working on this:

* https://new.yimbyaction.org/

* https://cayimby.org/

The article says they are trying to...

The rising interest rate thing sucks. People are trapped in their home, because an equal value home mortage would cost more. Then there isn't any supply, so prices go up, making it even harder, now even equivalent homes are less quality

Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar, or any flamewar, no matter which region or group you have a problem with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

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