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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

We almost moved to Austin during the pandemic. Luckily my wife's potential job offer fell through so we stayed in the Bay Area. We've heard of friends of friends who sold their Bay Area house during the pandemic, moved to Austin, but now can't move back because they can't afford to sell their house and take a loss, and then come back and get a 7% mortgage on double the house price.

I think we would have been okay in Austin, but the things I've heard from close friends from Texas are:

1) Austin is not like SF Bay Area at all. People around here seemed convinced by the myths that Austin was like a liberal oasis in a Republican desert but it's not like that at all. It's more liberal than rural Texas but it's still Texas.

2) There's only desert and rolling hills for 3+ hours around. No water, no mountains, etc unless you make a long road trip. It's not like the SF Bay Area where you have water, desert, mountains, etc all very close by.

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This must be an American thing but I have never in my whole life even remotely considered the political opinions of my neighbours when choosing somewhere to live. I really, really just do not care even one bit.

Do you have kids?

Getting taught creationism at school would be a big turnoff for me and that slavery had its upsides and To Kill A Mocking Bird is verboten.

Fortunately where I live there is no political meddling in the school syllabus - standards are set nationally by the Education Dept and schools boards don't get voted in on political lines.

If you don't like the good ole boys running things don't come to Texas. It's basically an authoritarian state run by a cabal of car dealers and preachers.

The biggest trick elite professionals played in America is creating the impression that their point of view is neutral and that everything else is political. They are trying to optimize for some value function just like everyone else.

> there is no political meddling in the school syllabus

> standards are set nationally by the Education Dept

If you have a point to make, make it. I'm not here to tell you about my personal situation.

You suddenly start caring more about the politics of your neighbors (i.e. people who vote in school board elections) when you have kids to raise.

Political opinions matter when they affect your daily life. For instance, after the Dobbs decision last year, Texas passed an anti-abortion law which made it illegal to terminate pregnancies even when the fetus had no chance of survival and continued pregnancy was a mortal risk to the mother. This was finally changed last month, but the situation persisted for over a year. For women at high risk of miscarriage (for instance, my sister-in-law who moved to Texas and has previously had a miscarriage), their neighbours' political opinions could actually kill them.

Perhaps it's an American thing because the American political system has resulted in a complete lack of common-sense legislation; but it's absolutely justified.

(My background here: I'm an American living in the UK. I've been consistently surprised by the number of common-sense laws and regulations that are supported by even conservatives, or if not supported, are not immediately repealed once conservatives gain power.)

OP indicated that they're disappointed that the city of Austin was not the liberal Oasis in Texas that they hoped. So they're not discussing state politics, they're concerned about the politics of the people and city. I doubt OP was expecting Austin to have different abortion laws to the rest of Texas.

I'm saying I don't understand why one would be concerned about the politics of the people in the city they live in. It wouldn't even cross my mind to consider it.

Honestly, local politics can still have a big impact. The city I grew up in cancelled weekend bus service because the local Republican party thought it was a waste of money. If you're a person of colour, it can change your day-to-day life significantly if you're around people of particular political persuasions (either way). If you're uncomfortable with people carrying guns into grocery stores, likewise.

You don’t think your neighbors’ voting habits in local elections will affect your life? There are numerous counties in Texas, for instance, that have criminalized driving a woman through their county for the purposes of getting an abortion. That behavior would make a material difference in my choice of where to live.

I can’t imagine simply not caring, unless one is so wealthy that the laws don’t matter, or the kind of person who is never affected by their neighbors’ antagonistic voting.

Not to mention that even in Austin you are likey to see a few open carry dickheads per week.

Why are they dickheads?

Open carry makes me fear for my safety. Sure, it's mostly irrational, but it still degrades my quality of life.

Calling someone else a dickhead for your mental issues ironically makes you a dickhead.

If I was the only one who felt that way sure, but I'm not. Most non gun owners are scared of guns in my experience. Open carry is frankly extremely disrespectful. I don't know what you're going to do with that gun, and I think it's a mistake to think of it as anything other than a threat. And threatening literally everyone you see is a dickhead move. Not really sure how you could see flashing your gun at every random person as not a dick move, the only reason to do it is to scare people.

It absolutely is a threat. "Good guy with a gun" incidents are so much rarer than "bad guy with a gun" incidents that it would be insane to see it otherwise. Nobody knows you're not the next Kyle Rittenhouse who, in the absolutely most charitable interpretation I can think of, might not have meant to kill anyone but ended up with a body count anyway. Or the next mass murderer, whose names I will not repeat. If I walked around with an unsheathed six-inch knife I'm pretty sure people would quite rightly feel threatened, and literally any gun is more dangerous than that. So yes, "dickheads" does apply.

The intent of open carry is to make the people around you feel fear. It's clearly a "dickhead" move.

How about open drug use? Or open defecation and other antisocial behaviours that have been plaguing certain cities?

also dickheads

It's not an American thing. The same issue crops up in the UK with London, for example. If you move to London you know you're going to be hit by things like ULEZ or endless ideological propaganda ads on the public transport system because of how the people there like to vote. If you move to a village in the home counties you're going to have a very different set of experiences.

In the UK this is often disguised because it gets conflated with age: people want to live in the big cities when they're young, and when they're young they're more liberal. As they got older they get less liberal and want more space, so move out of the cities, so at no point does it feel like they're selecting where they live based on politics. But it does shake out that way regardless.

The USA is big enough and California far enough to the left vs other places, that even moving from one big city to another will yield noticeably different neighbourhood politics.

More of a Californian thing, I'd think. You can live your whole life in SF or LA without seeing any promos for the opposition party. In other states, even in as Blue of a city as Austin you can still see an occasional bumper sticker on a car, or even, a plaque in somebody's front yard. And if you drive in/out of the city, you will see a whole lot of those.

Abortions are illegal in Texas and anyone going out of state to get one is persecuted. Kind of a big deal.

Also, non-competes are banned in California but not in Texas. Moving to Austin means giving your employer a veto over your future career.

Hah there are no deserts for more than 10h driving from Austin. It's rolling hills and scrubby prairie, which is far from a desert.

It might not technically be a desert, but saying it's "far from" is incorrect too. Semi-arid climate zones are as close to deserts as you can be without actually being a desert. For recreational purposes in particular, people tend to look mostly for open water or mountains, sometimes forests or canyons. Miles and miles of "scrubby prairie" lacking any of those might as well be a desert.

Once you get past Abilene or San Angelo you're getting into the eastern reach of the Chihuahuan Desert, so around 4 hours. Some maps put it west of the Pecos but that's not the official line, to be fair different maps seem to put it in different places.

> It's not like the SF Bay Area where you have water, desert, mountains, etc all very close by.

Wait, desert?!

I would say that e.g. Panoche Hills could be considered a desert environment and it's just a bit down I-5.

SF's not too far from some famous deserts - within 8h drive you can get to Death Valley, Mojave, or the home of Burning Man, Black Rock Desert.

(From Austin, Big Bend's part of the Chihuahuan Desert is about 8h away, plus of course many other dry & dusty west Texas locales.)

I would definitely classify an 8hr drive as "far"

Far closer than for most of the US population, east of the Mississippi! And, less than a day's drive. People should get out more.

Fun fact: Death Valley Junction is due east of Monterey.

(Los Angeles is east of Reno.)

>(Los Angeles is east of Reno.)

Very far to the east as it seems . . . ;)

LA: 34.086159 N, 118.375984 W

Reno: 39.527110 N, 119.821812 W

About 1.45 degrees east.

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