I hope that places like Austin are forward-looking enough to absorb the new people without running into the same issues as SF. To be fair, it's pretty hard to actually do worse than SF, but there are still issues to watch out for. The biggest thing is housing. When tons of people suddenly show up who consider a million dollar house affordable, it can really do a number on people who don't earn tech salaries. It looks like Austin is still working on getting away from the exclusionary zoning paradigm, I hope they're successful.
if you take the human factor out of play it is painfully absurd that businesses and itinerant professionals continually choose to locate their business hubs within midsize boutique cities that are poorly situated for if not outright hostile to expansion. seems like it'd be a lot easier to make phoenix 'hipper' than it will be to make boulder or austin 'bigger'. resentment is intellectually lazy and i know hn frowns upon NIMBY-ism but it is hard not to feel like the west coast locusts are bearing down upon us to cannibalize everything that made home 'home' before moving on in another 10 to 20 years once our communities have been stripped to the marrow.
Austin's already out of play for being "cool". The downtown area is stupidly expensive now (it was higher than the Bay Area before Covid--I suspect that is worse now).
One of the problems going on everywhere in the US right now is that places won't drop rent. Apparently, you can tack missing rent onto the end of your financing, but if you offer lower rent the bank holding your financing can call you up and demand cash.
This is going to totally screw up recovery as everybody will leave places empty until they're about to go bankrupt. And then everybody will go bankrupt simultaneously rather than piecemeal.
Austin has had a growing homeless problem, but nothing like SF or NYC. Still, lots of drug use, petty theft, and loitering in the inner city and university areas.
However, it is Texas, and there is lots of room to spread out. If you never find yourself in the city center then you will not see it.
Houston doesn’t have zoning. And both Houston and Austin both don’t try to restrict housing development like California seems to do. Permits are relatively fast to get, land is plentiful and you don’t have nonsense like how San Jose turned 1400 acres of empty farmland at Coyote Valley into an open-space preserve. (Not opposed to open space, but that 1400 acres was literally just empty fields when supposedly the Bay Area has a “housing crisis.”)
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I hope that places like Austin are forward-looking enough to absorb the new people without running into the same issues as SF. To be fair, it's pretty hard to actually do worse than SF, but there are still issues to watch out for. The biggest thing is housing. When tons of people suddenly show up who consider a million dollar house affordable, it can really do a number on people who don't earn tech salaries. It looks like Austin is still working on getting away from the exclusionary zoning paradigm, I hope they're successful.
if you take the human factor out of play it is painfully absurd that businesses and itinerant professionals continually choose to locate their business hubs within midsize boutique cities that are poorly situated for if not outright hostile to expansion. seems like it'd be a lot easier to make phoenix 'hipper' than it will be to make boulder or austin 'bigger'. resentment is intellectually lazy and i know hn frowns upon NIMBY-ism but it is hard not to feel like the west coast locusts are bearing down upon us to cannibalize everything that made home 'home' before moving on in another 10 to 20 years once our communities have been stripped to the marrow.
Austin's already out of play for being "cool". The downtown area is stupidly expensive now (it was higher than the Bay Area before Covid--I suspect that is worse now).
One of the problems going on everywhere in the US right now is that places won't drop rent. Apparently, you can tack missing rent onto the end of your financing, but if you offer lower rent the bank holding your financing can call you up and demand cash.
This is going to totally screw up recovery as everybody will leave places empty until they're about to go bankrupt. And then everybody will go bankrupt simultaneously rather than piecemeal.
Austin has had a growing homeless problem, but nothing like SF or NYC. Still, lots of drug use, petty theft, and loitering in the inner city and university areas.
However, it is Texas, and there is lots of room to spread out. If you never find yourself in the city center then you will not see it.
Houston doesn’t have zoning. And both Houston and Austin both don’t try to restrict housing development like California seems to do. Permits are relatively fast to get, land is plentiful and you don’t have nonsense like how San Jose turned 1400 acres of empty farmland at Coyote Valley into an open-space preserve. (Not opposed to open space, but that 1400 acres was literally just empty fields when supposedly the Bay Area has a “housing crisis.”)
Relevant article I read the other day: https://www.wsj.com/articles/start-up-city-accelerated-growt... . My impression from it is that Austin will be embracing growth better than the Bay Area. They seem more keen on increasing supply to meet demand.