Are Silicon Valley Tech Workers Now Swarming 'a Reluctant Austin'? (bloomberg.com) 222
Austin, Texas is America's fastest-growing major metro area, reports Bloomberg Businessweek, growing 30% from 2010 to 2019. But today a minimum wage worker hoping to afford a one-bedroom rental "would now need to work a 125-hour week."
And meanwhile, homeowner Matthew Congrove says he's now getting a half-dozen all-cash offers on his house every week. "In the boldest attempt, a stranger simply showed up at his home unannounced and asked to buy it..." Even Congrove — a software engineer who moved from Florida seven years ago — is most concerned about how the new wave of tech workers is affecting his adopted city's culture. Lately, he's seen more T-shirts bearing startup logos than band names. New condos have sprouted up where quirky bungalows once stood. And the commute time to his downtown office has tripled. "They just keep coming," Congrove says. "The fleece vests, the tech bros — that's definitely imported from California."
During the pandemic, Austin has welcomed more new residents from the Bay Area than from any other region outside Texas, according to records provided to Bloomberg by the U.S. Postal Service... Oracle late last year said it was moving its headquarters to Austin, and a stream of tech elites including prominent investor Jim Breyer and the chief executive officers of Dropbox and Splunk made plans to relocate. Elon Musk, the second-richest man in the world, is now a resident of Texas — though he hasn't said where — and Tesla Inc. is building a factory in Austin's outskirts, where Musk has said the company will need 10,000 people by 2022. He's also expanding the Austin area operations for Boring Co. and SpaceX, and has moved his personal foundation to the city's downtown.
For all his boosterism, even Musk recognizes the potential hazards of the influx he's helping spark. In a tweet on April 4, he called out the "urgent need to build more housing in greater Austin area!"
The region is facing the same boomtown dynamics that have plagued San Francisco for decades.... "There is a fairly broad-based concern that some of the things that aren't working in other areas are going to be brought here," says Dax Williamson, a managing director for Silicon Valley Bank who leads its technology banking practice for Central Texas. "If we price out the musicians we're going to find ourselves in a bad place." In a sign that may already be happening, Tesla recently selected a warehouse in southern Austin that served as music rehearsal space, with plans to transform it into a $2.5 million Tesla showroom this summer.
Hating California is a tradition in Texas, but Austin's growing pains aren't all California's fault. According to the Austin Chamber, more than half of newcomers from 2014 to 2018 came from other parts of the state, followed by just 8% from California and 3% from New York... Still, out-of-state arrivals from affluent cities tend to be richer than average existing residents and, as a consequence, have a greater impact on the local economy. "Probably 5 out of 10 of my clients are Californians, and others could say the same thing," says Susan Horton, president of the Austin Board of Realtors. "The majority are all tech people, and the last wave were all coming to work at Tesla."
And meanwhile, homeowner Matthew Congrove says he's now getting a half-dozen all-cash offers on his house every week. "In the boldest attempt, a stranger simply showed up at his home unannounced and asked to buy it..." Even Congrove — a software engineer who moved from Florida seven years ago — is most concerned about how the new wave of tech workers is affecting his adopted city's culture. Lately, he's seen more T-shirts bearing startup logos than band names. New condos have sprouted up where quirky bungalows once stood. And the commute time to his downtown office has tripled. "They just keep coming," Congrove says. "The fleece vests, the tech bros — that's definitely imported from California."
During the pandemic, Austin has welcomed more new residents from the Bay Area than from any other region outside Texas, according to records provided to Bloomberg by the U.S. Postal Service... Oracle late last year said it was moving its headquarters to Austin, and a stream of tech elites including prominent investor Jim Breyer and the chief executive officers of Dropbox and Splunk made plans to relocate. Elon Musk, the second-richest man in the world, is now a resident of Texas — though he hasn't said where — and Tesla Inc. is building a factory in Austin's outskirts, where Musk has said the company will need 10,000 people by 2022. He's also expanding the Austin area operations for Boring Co. and SpaceX, and has moved his personal foundation to the city's downtown.
For all his boosterism, even Musk recognizes the potential hazards of the influx he's helping spark. In a tweet on April 4, he called out the "urgent need to build more housing in greater Austin area!"
The region is facing the same boomtown dynamics that have plagued San Francisco for decades.... "There is a fairly broad-based concern that some of the things that aren't working in other areas are going to be brought here," says Dax Williamson, a managing director for Silicon Valley Bank who leads its technology banking practice for Central Texas. "If we price out the musicians we're going to find ourselves in a bad place." In a sign that may already be happening, Tesla recently selected a warehouse in southern Austin that served as music rehearsal space, with plans to transform it into a $2.5 million Tesla showroom this summer.
Hating California is a tradition in Texas, but Austin's growing pains aren't all California's fault. According to the Austin Chamber, more than half of newcomers from 2014 to 2018 came from other parts of the state, followed by just 8% from California and 3% from New York... Still, out-of-state arrivals from affluent cities tend to be richer than average existing residents and, as a consequence, have a greater impact on the local economy. "Probably 5 out of 10 of my clients are Californians, and others could say the same thing," says Susan Horton, president of the Austin Board of Realtors. "The majority are all tech people, and the last wave were all coming to work at Tesla."
News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:3, Informative)
Grabs More PopKorn
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:4, Insightful)
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California is a victim of it's own success. Is there room for improvement? Definitely. But far from being the failed nanny state people keep making it out to be, it is the largest economy in the USA. Costs have gone up forcing business to relocate elsewhere, but that's what happens when you have too many businesses in too small of an area.
Now Texas is the opposite of "Nanny state" but that brings even worse problems. For example: businesses need a functioning power grid, easy ways for employees to get
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You mean all those things Texas was doing pretty good without. Also, fuck you and the power grid. As if golden california doesn't have power outages yearly. All states have issues and rare weather causes issues.
As for all those other things, if you wanted them and had them in California, why the fuck did you leave California?
Whatever. Living in San Diego the more of you people that leave the better. If enough progress leaves California, we may be able to get back to better.
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My impressions of Texas are from a combination of having friends who own a home in a flood plane with no mitigations in place to prevent flooding and the numerous trouble tickets where equipment had to be repaired (in one case equipment was down for a week) Bit scary given the systems I maintain handle emergency calls.
As for living near where I work, I'm a bit lucky with my new job, but my last job was much easier (faster/more comfortable) to get to by subway. Sitting for a half hour each way just readin
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Very often the idea is to keep the California salary while not living in the high cost areas. This doesn't even mean leaving California, I know several who commute to the Bay Area from the Sierras. There are still affordable places in California, but they're not in the desirable areas is the problem. I grew up in the central valley, and it may be where I go to retire just to save money. Other states are either too hot, too cold, too crazy, or just as expensive.
I'm in tech, and this is where the jobs are
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Texas is great, but really, there ought to be a citizenship test. Maybe something really simple, like: you must own a gun and show that you can hit a target at a local range.
... and have parents who had the same surname even before they were married. If you have all that and more than ten fingers, you're in the wrong state, try Alabama.
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I don't think you understand that "cowboy culture" just does not scale to heavier populations. The ancient Romans noticed the same thing as rural residence had trouble adapting to and accepting city culture, complaining about "regulations" etc. The red/blue culture war is not a new problem. It's like embedded programmers coming to work on CRUD software, and vice versa. They think different.
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Texas is great, but only when it wants to be a part of hte US and it wants to be diverse. Texas sucks when it wants to be it's own independent country again, clamps down on political dissent, and marginalizes its minorities.
Texas has very large cities, and cities tend to lean more liberal, whereas rural tends to lean more conservative. The only way to stop that sort of trend is to manipulate the electoral rules, which Texas has plenty of experience wity. Austin isn't liberal because Californians moved in
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:5, Insightful)
Things just haven't been the same since the communist lefties banned stringing up people with highly progressed melanin levels.
Why is it, that every criticism of progressivism brings out the racist inherent in every progressive? As usual, you - the progressive - are the one bringing race into the discussion. The problem with progressivism is very simple: it is the epitomy of that old saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Progressives have good intentions, but not much grounding in reality. One of those "reality" problems is money: it doesn't just magically come out of ATMs. Somebody has to pay for stuff, and y'all never want to open your own wallets to the real costs.
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Fighting racism with racism seems to be the key rallying cry.
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Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:5, Insightful)
So just like conservatives?
Re: News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:2)
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At this point though, a flat tax is kind of irrelevant to the extremely wealthy, because most of their income is not in salary. It's in capital gains. For long term investments the rmaximum rate is 20%. When the wealthy propose a flat tax, such as Steve Forbes, it's not that it's going to save them a significant amount of money but because it gains them a big political following from those who mistakenly think that taxes will get simpler or fairer.
One of the simplest things already in the taxes is figuri
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Progressive tax" means the rate increases with the amount. When Warren Buffet pays a lower rate than his servants (which he has admitted) there's an issue that probably needs to be addressed,
He's welcome to address it if it's true. The IRS stands ready to accept his gift.
It's highly unlikely to be true, however, unless he pays his servants incredibly well.
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Well, Ayn Rand was very happy to accept her social security checks, while remaining firmly opposed to the whole concept. Ok, she was a nutty lunatic, but the point is that you don't fix a broken system by voluntarily giving up your own money as an individual. Thus Buffet does not give the IRS with a bunch of money but would rather give that money to charities. In the meantime, Buffet would like to change the system's laws, in the say way that Rand would have liked to change the system's laws.
America has
Cause we don't tax wealth (Score:5, Insightful)
His secretary has an income, a really big income. Warren makes $1 a year, and that's only when he feels like making any money. He has access to wealth and he can use that wealth to borrow money. He pays a small interest rate on that borrowed money (a lot less than taxes), and his income is hidden by the loan.
He doesn't talk about this. He talks about raising INCOME taxes for the wealthy, knowing that it will not affect him one bit. But for some reason, he gets a free pass and no fact checkers, no reporters and certainly no one on the left ever mentions these things.
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Warren makes a TON of money outside of a $1 a year. Now maybe he only had $1/year in salary, but he makes a shitload of money on investments. This is like Steve Jobs making his $1/year and getting extremely wealthy from it because he knew is stock would make a CEO salary look puny in comparison. Buffet is talking about not just raising payroll taxes, but also capital gains taxes where he makes most of his money.
The problem is not just the base rate of capital gains but all the ways there are to reduce thos
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His secretary has an income, a really big income. Warren makes $1 a year, and that's only when he feels like making any money. He has access to wealth and he can use that wealth to borrow money. He pays a small interest rate on that borrowed money (a lot less than taxes), and his income is hidden by the loan.
He doesn't talk about this. He talks about raising INCOME taxes for the wealthy, knowing that it will not affect him one bit. But for some reason, he gets a free pass and no fact checkers, no reporters and certainly no one on the left ever mentions these things.
He also criticized Trump's corporate tax cut [theguardian.com] and supported estate taxes [cnbc.com]. So I'm not sure I buy this suggestion of hypocrisy.
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it's usually the rich guys getting the big tax money hand-outs.
If a "rich" person paid $1000 over the fiscal year in taxes, and gets $10 back as a tax refund, he did not receive a "tax money hand-out". He just paid $990 in taxes instead of $1000.
Big difference. See this example [cat-v.org].
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the rich guys usually pay for new spending, especially in the US [theatlantic.com] -- we have the most progressive taxes in the First World, mostly because we have such low taxes on middle- and low-income households. For example, Donald Trump's tax cuts made federal taxes even more progressive [yahoo.com]. (While that Yahoo article focuses on rates that Clive Crook said would be misleading in an inter-country comparison, they're relevant here because those tax changes were only within the US federal income tax.)
Both at the state level [cbpp.org] and within the federal government [wikipedia.org], the largest slice of money comes from the rich, a large majority goes to the causes you like, and very little goes to the things you complained about.
The Trump middle class tax cuts expire...and the ones for businesses and the rich do not...
SO tell me again how "progressive" those tax cuts really were....
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:5, Informative)
All the personal income tax changes expire together [investopedia.com]. The corporate tax rate changes don't expire, but (a) they don't affect calculation of income tax progressity, (b) the US had one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and (c) companies didn't pay those rates [wikipedia.org] anyway.
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Nice way to dodge the fact that Trump's tax cuts cost us $2T, and that the wealthy move their costs and thus their taxes into corporate entities so as to avoid paying personal income taxes.
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Oh, you mean the workers?
Unfortunately the tax cuts for the poor are going away.
Tax cuts for corporations are not, and that is where the wealthy hide the money they stole from the working class.
Your view of reality is very small. Reality is very large.
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This "accrued debt" and its consequences belongs to all of us ass hole. Please think a little longer before posting such drivel.
I have come to believe, that issues of fair taxation are the most important ones that need addressing in America. In particular it should entail a nuanced approach utilizing Sales Tax, Value added taxes, and Property Taxes. These seem to be the hardest to "escape" in some Amazonian cheat the system kind of way. As your regular American with a house in the "burbs", i know proportio
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Trump's tax cuts cost us $2T,
Oh, fuck right off. That's NOT YOUR MONEY, asshole. It belongs to those who earn it.
-jcr
EARN IT. Define earn it, for example how much does someone earn playing basket ball? Don't get me wrong it makes financial sense to pay them a large amount as they bring eye balls and therefore advertising money.
You could argue that they deserve it. But even then they had to do their work in an environment created by those who came before them. In the US this includes roads, schools and large scale infrastructure. Many that were funded in the post WW2 boom when taxes were significantly higher.
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(c) companies didn't pay those rates anyway.
Out of all of the debate with taxes, I really wish this was the one point that everyone would try to fix. Corporate rate, personal rate, whatever. Just stop giving people loopholes out of taxes.
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Slightly skewed flat tax with a small upward trending line: You pay an infinitesimal bit more for every dollar you make, up to some theoretical maximum since you really can't go past 100%, and don't want to get there.
Everyone pays some amount : from the guy earning $10/year to Elon Musk.
But most importantly: No deductions, and all income is income. Free house from your job? Income. Tax earnings? Income. Aunt Flo willed you $50K? Income.
Everyone's got skin in the game.
Yes, yes, there's always the rallying cr
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Slightly skewed flat tax with a small upward trending line: You pay an infinitesimal bit more for every dollar you make
The tax rate is not the problem. The problem is defining what counts as "income".
Taxing "every dollar you make" is not easy when it isn't clear when a dollar is "made".
Are inventory expenses deductible as FIFO or LIFO? What about health insurance for employees? What about the cost of company events or trips to conferences? Is the cost of a new laptop deductible in the year it is purchased, or spread over its useful lifetime?
There are millions of pages of rules covering these issues. None of that is fixe
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The analysis revealed that the tax break would hit 93.7% of taxpayers in the highest-earning quintile, and only 53.9% of those in the lowest quintile. Even so, on average, every quintile was expected to receive a tax break.
That is no longer expected to be true once individual tax cuts expire after 2025. At that point, the TPC estimates that the majority of taxpayers—53.4%—will face a tax increase: 69.7% of those in the middle quintile (40th to 60th percentile) will pay more, compared to just 8% of the highest-earning 0.1%.
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:4, Insightful)
What ? The US has nothing like the most progressive tax structure. Let me guess you're looking at this: https://taxfoundation.org/news... [taxfoundation.org] A widely debunked piece of work from 2008 using data from early 2000 and refreshed in 2014 that cherry picked data and didn't include many forms of taxation (e.g. capital gains) to produce the narrative they wanted.
Any independent (ie not commissioned by a US political group) tax analysys will show the US is no where near the most progressive. For instance here https://taxfoundation.org/taxi... [taxfoundation.org] which is the exact same site but with an updated view.
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You claim my sources have been debunked, but you provided nothing that actually debunks them. For example, your last link compares "top effective marginal tax rate" across countries -- this is very far from total tax burden, which is what normal people mean when they talk about income tax progressivity.
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:5, Insightful)
You're all over the place. Total tax burden and income tax are two different things (the last phrase in your last sentence). If you want to talk about total tax burden (which says nothing about whether a country's tax policy is progressive or regressive) then the US is nowhere near the top: https://www.taxpolicycenter.or... [taxpolicycenter.org] but again that says nothing really about how progressive it is.
Top effective marginal tax rate is a decent proxy for how progressive a country's taxes are but admittedly it's just a proxy. Try this https://www.cbpp.org/research/... [cbpp.org]
The mistake that folks make in interpreting things like the OECD report is conflating rate with amount. The US can appear to be the most progressive if you look at the percentage of total receipts that the highest 1% pay compared to other countries but this isn't a measure of the tax rate difference this is a measure of the income inequality. The US top 1% pays 1/2 the tax rate as say Norway rate but it' has 10% the income disparity so it's percentage of total tax receipts are much higher than Norway's even thought the rate is lower.
So it is in fact not progressive. The US did have a comparable top effective margin rate to most of Europe in the 70s but it has been whittled down from 70% to about 35%. Couple with that the numerous ways one can avoid taxation that the poor and middle class have no effective access to and the realized tax burden of the top 1% drops to less than the median.
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A progressive tax [wikipedia.org] is one where the burden -- total tax as a fraction of the taxable amount -- increases as a function of the taxable amount. Looking only at top tax rates means you don't know the last part, how it changes as a function of income. Looking only at the top marginal rate, you also lose most of the first part: what the effective tax rate really is.
As a side note, "effective marginal tax rate" is economically incoherent. See that Wikipedia link for a discussion of the contrast between effective
Re:News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:4, Insightful)
Percentage comparisons are distorted comparisons. I don't know of anybody except a few movie stars who get paid in percentages, most get paid in units. I did 20% better on my last test means nothing. You could have gotten a 5/100 before and you got a 6/100 this time, the 20% looks awesome but the grade is still terrible.
If the US %1 pays 1/2 of the rate in Norway for a total of ~$620B, and Norway collects $20B from their %1, which outcome is better? The other issue is that 1% wealthiest is not a perfect superset of the top 1% of incomes. If someone spends a lifetime building up their business, earning a respectable $100K per year over that time, then sells that business at retirement for $4M, should we tax that $4M "income" at 80%? Where is the line in the sand that constitutes too "rich"?
The other thing that concerns me is that those who want to blanket "tax the rich" don't fully understand what the "rich" do with their income. They only see the visible excesses like the mansions, cars and yachts, which is easy to get angry about. What's more opaque is that most of that "extra" income doesn't go into purchases or into bank account to earn 0.005% interest. The majority goes to investment managers who then funnel that income into investment vehicles, many of which are venture capital funds. Those pools of risk money are what creates new companies and makes the US unique. What to know why Canada or the UK or France doesn't have an Amazon, or a Google, or a Tesla? It's because there is very little risk money available and the investment managers entrusted to invest that limited money have to be risk averse since there aren't enough risk pools to average out losses.
I have no doubt that income inequality is painful for those on the low end of the income spectrum. That pain is certainly exacerbated by social media and artists glamorizing lifestyles extreme wealth affords. However, the reality is that visible manifestations of wealth are the tip of an iceberg that happens to fund the majority of startup, corporate, and capital investments. Taxing income heavily will arguably change the visible stuff last while curtailing risk appetite that powers innovation in our economy.
I've raised money for a startup, and for anyone who thinks it's easy, it's insanely hard. It's significantly harder outside the US where the appetite for risk is a fraction of what it is in the US. The less risk VCs can take, the fewer startup success stories there will be, the more stagnant an economy will become. I don't believe for a millisecond that tax cuts for the wealthy increase "spending" in any way that helps the tiers lower on the income ladder, but they absolutely, without a doubt, increase *investment* that help the tiers lower on the income ladder. Income inequality is the ugly, unavoidable side effect of ensuring access to large pools of risk tolerant venture capital. It's something we need to agree stinks, pinch our noses, and get back to birthing world class companies that employ Americans at high enough wages that they can move on to investing in venture funds.
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Yes I'm aware of what progressive tax means and when the US had a top tax rate of 70% and a bottom tax rate of 14% (not counting 0% for no income) that was much more progressive than the current distribution. I'm not conflating total tax rate as a proxy of progressivity I'm using the distribution of tax rates as a function of income. I've linked to several documents that show that variance. Norway is not a great example but it's an example, ie they have a flat 22% income tax and then a bracket tax on t
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we have the most progressive taxes in the First World
Oh really? Is that why the US has the largest wealth gap, from all the progressive taxes making the rich pay more? Please, explain to me how that works.
Because tax rates don't have a lot to do with creating a wealth gap. Wealth gaps are mainly created by long periods of stability. Which is why the very progressive Netherlands have a huge wealth gap. It often has to do with the fact that aristocratic families were able to build wealth in a stable environment for centuries. The US is actually quite old by the standards of modern countries. It has one of the oldest governments in continuing operation (look it up, I believe only the UK's is older), it has
Re: News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:2)
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Most of the new spending for the last few decades has been funded with government debt, not with taxes. So no one is paying for it (yet).
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Conserve here doesn't mean recycling, it means resistant to change.
So yes political labels aren't absolute but it would be useful to get the base meaning at least kind of right.
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Because their policies trashed the place and turned it into a nanny state.
I have lived in the bay area for over 20 years. I grew up in a very red state. I feel I have a bit more perspective on this than most do for these reasons. People lived in CA before the tech industry started. SV was started where it started to avoid the overly unionized SF and Oakland. Most of the people in the tech industry are social progressive (which has gotten entirely out of hand as the millennials arrived) but are often pretty conservative fiscally. They want to have the freedom to try experime
Re: News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:2)
Taking road capacity away for light rail just make congestion worse.
There's nothing wrong with underground or overhead light rail.
Re: News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:2)
PS. other than the massive costs and more often than not ridiculously poor utilization in the US of course.
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Except the cost.
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Y'all need to enact mandatory gun ownership before it's too late.
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Cities where there's a net inflow to Austin: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, Abilene, Laredo.
Cities where there's a net outflow from Austin: Killeen, College Station, Odessa, Waco, Longview.
The magnitude of the net outflow to Killeen is roughly 1/4 the size of the net inflow from Houston and 1/2 the size of the net inflow from Dallas.
Data from here [austinchamber.com].
Re: News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:2)
Re: News Flash: Texas Hates Austin Too (Score:4, Interesting)
" Everbody else can't stand Murica."
Is that why millions of people are risking their very lives each year to try to sneak in? How many people are trying to legally immigrate to your country, much less sneak in?
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Not great at math I see. âoe1 millionâ of your American loving immigrants to billions of American hating people in the world.
Found the Russian troll.
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This is the exact same racism Reagan spewed except replace blacks and Mexicans with Californians.
I suppose you're trying to pivot into super crazy world where being a Californian means you're obviously disadvantaged and thus "protected citizens"? Sounds about par for the course.
Pro tip: Calling someone/something racist does not, in fact, make them/it racist. Nor does it's utterance "win" discussions, it only makes you look ignorant.
The cancer spreads. (Score:3, Funny)
Not Wall Steet. Not Washington. The other cancer. ;)
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> The other cancer. ;)
Male breast neoplasm?
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Not Wall Steet. Not Washington. The other cancer. ;)
Nah, there are already plenty of QAnon fools in Texas. It should be fine.
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Bringing SV with them I guess (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in metro NYC and it's expensive. California, especially a 75 mile radius around San Francisco, is a mind-boggling whole new level of expensive. Just like metro NY, they're not making any new land so there's only so many places to expand. Even with that, I'm not locked into a bidding war for a tiny 3 bedroom house with no property going for over $2M, just so my commute's less than 2 hours each way. Bring this kind of money and this willingness to pay crazy money into any real estate market and it'll go nuts.
Austin's not exactly a sleepy little town, but one thing it has (not necessarily a good one either) is the ability to expand hundreds of miles in any direction. Traffic will suck and it'll become a massive sprawly mess as people buy $2M mansions on 3 acre lots (and pay $2000/year in property tax) with their SV tech bubble money...just look at metros like DFW or Atlanta with few natural boundaries. So I'm sure they can absorb the population -- not sure they'll like the result.
Where I live, during the height of COVID and even a little bit today, houses are going for crazy amounts because people still want to live in NY but don't need to live in NYC anymore. Same goes for people living close to the city moving further out -- if you have to do a horrible commute 2 days a week instead of 5, suddenly living 1.5 hours away isn't awful anymore. The prices are crazy because people literally are trading $2M apartments (and I think a lot of residents who don't have retirement savings are seeing this as their one golden opportunity to move to North Carolina or Florida or whatever.) I imagine something similar is happening in Austin...a sleepy cow town suburb suddenly becomes super-hot real estate because it's near Tesla's headquarters.
Re:Bringing SV with them I guess (Score:5, Informative)
... as people buy $2M mansions on 3 acre lots (and pay $2000/year in property tax) with their SV tech bubble money...
Texas has some of the highest property taxes a quick check on property taxes in the Auston areas shows a $3M property being about $54K/year
Re:Bringing SV with them I guess (Score:5, Informative)
Good thing you don't have to spend $3 Million to have a nice place in Austin. $500K would do just fine, which would be about $9k a year in property tax. This might seem high to some people, but when you consider that there's no state income tax, that more than offsets the higher property tax. Even some houses for around $250k look not too bad compared to the cramped living conditions of San Fran and NYC.
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Good thing you don't have to spend $3 Million to have a nice place in Austin.
Austinite: So glad this isn't expensive like California.
Transplants leaving California: Hold my beer.
$500K would do just fine, which would be about $9k a year in property tax. This might seem high to some people, but when you consider that there's no state income tax, that more than offsets the higher property tax.
Yes, but then you have to live in a state that has an even more fucked up power grid than California :D
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Same thing has been happening in Ottawa, Canada. Only on a cheaper scales. People moving from Toronto and Vancouver are all too happy to pay only $1 million for a house in the suburbs. House prices are up 30% since last year, and don't look to be slowing down. And that's just the average. Because there are so many houses that are just completely unaffordable, the bottom end has seen ridiculous increases where people are now paying over $400k for a 2 bedroom apartment in the suburbs.
I'm sure those prices so
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it'll become a massive sprawly mess as people buy $2M mansions on 3 acre lots (and pay $2000/year in property tax)
You’re off by at least an order of magnitude on the cost of property taxes here in Texas. Texas is one of the few states that doesn’t have a state income tax, so we make up for it in property taxes. To put things in perspective, I’m paying roughly 2.5x what your hypothetical mansion owner is paying in property taxes, but I’m living on land and in a home that is roughly 1/10th the house price/lot size of the scenario you posit.
The property tax is perfectly reasonable when you consider
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Geesh. I only have a 900sqft condo in san diego, but my property taxes are about $2150 a year. Then again I bought at 120 and the stupid place is worth 300 now.
Real estate is just out of control and this time there is not enough inventory even with a crash.
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We have the same thing in the UK, I've always worked remotely but recently have had an inrush of people moving out of London, Skipping the commuter belt and going straight into the countryside. Most are picking village locations that are within 30 minutes drive of a high speed train line so they can still pop into London a few days a week. So you can live 200-300 miles from London but still get 80% of your London Wage, its a 90-120 minute train journey twice a week and you just rent a bedsit for those days
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Just like metro NY, they're not making any new land
Slackers!
Signed,
The Netherlands
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One has to assume that adults can make rational decisions about their lifestyle, and paying over 5 time the median income for a house is a fair trade for living where black people exists in single percentage point, and Hispanic people are not the majority. Otherwise they would live in a Texas city where a house is only three times the median income
Elephants all the way down (Score:3)
Old Transplants to Austin are complaining how newer transplants to Austin changed the culture such that a new wave of transplants to Austin are arriving from California.
If you don't like it go back in time and ensure the TV show Austin City Limits never gets off the ground.
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As a native born Californian from the 60s, I meet relatively few people in Silicon Valley who are native Californians. Transplants are just a fact of life here. Of course, you can't complain about it, and if you did you'd be in the minority :-)
But one reason old timers moved away is simple. You had a dinky little cottage in Palo Alto and someone wants to pay half a million for it in 1990, then hell ya sell it and move somewhere else. Especially if your job could be done anywhere. If you had the low low
Yeah it's crazy here (Score:3)
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I don't mind the growth so much, but the transportation infrastructure needs to be vastly improved yet we are being priced out by property taxes
Austin doesn't mind collecting taxes, but they hate spending money on infrastructure.
The real problem is, how do you fix the 35? Since Austin sprawled out instead of growing up, there's no good place to run another freeway.
There's probably no way to fix Austin's transportation woes without a next-level solution. Either a subway, or a PRT, or both.
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Is this guy right? (Score:2)
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Honest question: is this guy [businessinsider.com] right in his synopsis of life in Texas?
After reading the article, looking it over for accuracy ....
He sold his 1/3 acre 2000-square foot San Diego home, bought a 4000 square foot home, pool, outdoor basketball court, a quarter acre of lawn (so probably a half acre total?) which he sodded and watered despite making a bunch of comments about the huge volumes of water (spending $1200/month in water, in comparison we rarely run sprinklers only during two months of the summer for our yard) while also talking about how "Austin is wet, and the greener
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As soon as the page loads, pound Escape a few times and the paywall doesn't come up.
The linked article is quite interesting, so take the trouble to view it.
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The most "Austin" part of this article: (Score:3)
Even Congrove — a software engineer who moved from Florida seven years ago — is most concerned about how the new wave of tech workers is affecting his adopted city's culture.
Don't worry, they'll be gone in 20 years (Score:5, Insightful)
And Salt Lake City too (Score:2)
Salt Lake City is becoming a technology destination too. Younger, better educated population and better management during the last year are two big factors.
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The problem with SLC is that it's not primarily tech. If you live in Silicon Valley, there's a good chance you can find a company where you are treated with respect as a programmer.
In Salt Lake City, even if you work at a startup, you will be treated as a cost center, and you will be resented. Or you can work at Adobe. Everyone loves that. :/
Build taller buildings (Score:3)
Look, regardless of your politics, there's really only one solution to housing prices and it's building taller buildings until the supply is enough. Prices haven't dropped enough yet? Put up another building. Singapore and basically all of Japan work on that model, and it's the only way to get lots of people into a small space. There's a limit to how much your city can grow area-wise and still be viable, and suburbs are slowly (or not so slowly) bankrupting cities—infrastructure upkeep on vast swathes of single family homes is killing cities across north america.
If you want a population of people that do your dirty/boring/service work—cleaners, baristas, grocery store shelf-stockers, whatever—you have to have somewhere for them to live. I can respect the progressive politics of California and SF, but NIMBYism undercuts any good intentions you have. Talk a good game about worker rights and marginalization all you want, but until you stop trying to stop all development that might actually alleviate homelessness, you're not a progressive at all.
But people keep getting told that their home is an asset that should accrue in value, rather than a liability that serves a purpose (you should really only consider the land an asset; the house depreciates and requires a lot of maintenance and can be wiped out in a moment of bad luck), so they're extremely resistant to anything that drops the value, including building more housing until the local price goes down. Affordable housing is honestly a largely solved problem if you're just willing to build up.
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>If you want a population of people that do your dirty/boring/service workâ"cleaners, baristas, grocery store shelf-stockers, whateverâ"you have to have somewhere for them to live.
Or you can pay a location wage premium and invest in some excellent public transit infrastructure so they can commute. If the city's generating enough wealth that you just HAVE to have an office downtown, then it's generating enough wealth to pay more for the service workers.
The problem is excessive greed - wanting a
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They do and they don't, right? They want it, but they complain about the commute, the taxes, the fact that there's nothing nearby, that they have to drive everywhere, that prices are going up, that the roads are crumbling, that there's always construction...
Like, these are all problems because they insist on single-family homes with a big yard, rather than 6 high-rise towers with a huge public park and nearby swimming pools and whatever. I'm not saying big-city living doesn't have its own problems. But what
Omg too much money! (Score:2)
Lately, he's seen more T-shirts bearing startup logos than band names.
Winner, most inane thing to worry about, ever.
If this gentrification is the problem, stop the nimby zoning regulations.
Greedy capitalism will happily throw up buildings until the costs come down.
Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Profit is made and those not liking change can sell and cash out. Cities exist for economic reasons and development is a fine opportunity for existing residents to sell then retire somewhere inexpensive and comfortable.
Cities are not for living out your whole life (unless you're immensely wealthy). They are places to make money then escape, that is all. They're for living in when you're young, mobile and don't care about owning anything incompatible with mobility.
The US has near-infinite room for development and as desired cities fill up people can move elsewhere and enrich those areas with their money. Texas has no geographic constraints like CA and nothing worth preserving that would block development. Austin can grow for centuries.
Race doesn't exist? Or does it? (Score:2)
The left always says race doesn't exist, until it's politically useful for them.
When will they become self-consistent in their usage (or denial) of race?
Careful what you wish for Austin (Score:3)
Californians are fleeing the state in droves. It's gotten so bad that you can't even get a moving van - there are none available. They are going to Austin because Austin is regarded as the most liberal city in Texas.
They are leaving California because of high taxes, high home prices, excess regulations, terrible traffic, poor schools and high crime. I would argue that all of this is directly attributable to failed liberal policies in California. So they are now descending on mass to Austin confident that the same policies that have failed in California will somehow work in Texas.
The near term effects are already evident. The house prices are soaring in Austin, as well as Boise and Phoenix to a lesser degree. Traffic is becoming a nightmare. The excess regulations and poor schools will take longer to materialize but I predict that is also on the way.