I left Austin so I’d like to share a counter perspective. I still think it’s one of the best big cities in the country but that’s the problem, it’s a big city now. Austin went from 500k people to well over a million now during my time there. It’s impossible for a place not to change with that many people moving. Everything the author likes used to be even nicer before. Used to be more casual, more affordable, better music scene, less traffic, etc. I also don’t believe it’s a great place to raise kids anymore: epidemic of homelessness, more crime, crowded streets, too hot for extended outdoor play during the summer, etc. I used to meet a lot more people with “normal” jobs in Austin, e.g. mailman, teachers, nurses, etc. but over time they couldn’t afford to live close by and everyone I met had tech/finance/startup jobs. The establishments definitely got gentrified and cater to no-kid professionals now. Parks are now full of beautifully sculpted people playing frisbee where it used to be tie-dye wearing teenie boppeers or big Mexican families grilling. Ultimately, Austin grew to be a mono-culture of socioeconomic status in my opinion. No hate, Austin is a great city but just grew up into something that didn’t suit me anymore. It’s a weird thing when the place you live changes so quickly around you that you don’t feel you belong there anymore.
> Everything the author likes used to be even nicer before.
Such a universal sentiment, everywhere. I've never heard anyone who lived anywhere for more than a few years say "it's become so much better". I would suspect age effects rather than actually reality. Or maybe everything just does get worse over time, in which case the same thing is happening in Austin as is happening everywhere else.
Perhaps incorrectly, I’ve compared Cincinnati’s recent uptick in population and general reputation to Austin’s, and I’m hoping it’s handled much better.
I’ve lived in the area all my life, and it’s essentially birthright for folks born around here to think Cincinnati is just okay at best and you only stick around because you couldn’t make it elsewhere.
In my early 30s now, I love Cincinnati, with no plans on leaving, and no desire to live anywhere else in the US (at least not without a significant change in CoL or income).
That said, so many folks seem to be thinking similarly and are moving here, and I really hope all the things I love about this place either stay the same or continue to get better. I don’t know how similar we are now to Austin in 2007/8, but hopefully we’re set up better to absorb the influx without changing much about (the good parts of) our identity.
I don't really agree with that. I have family in both Nashville and Raleigh. By both their estimations and mine, both cities have gotten quite a bit better over the last ~20 years.
Downtown Raleigh has definitely changed for the better even if, like a lot of similar cities, the gentrified core with its craft cocktails and trendy restaurants is fairly small.
I'd also say NYC--for all the complaints about Disneyfication. As a visitor, I'd much rather have today's 42nd Street, Lower East Side, Chelsea, etc. than I would the 1980s version. People have certainly been priced out but, then, it's not like Manhattan was cheap even in the 80s.
My biggest reason is the ratio of quality of service and product (such as food) to price went way down. I imagine more and more resources are going towards rent and taxes than to the quality of what people are buying.
Next reason would probably be general cleanliness and drastic increase in homeless.
That's true, but when people complain about their cities getting worse because of transplants, they're usually talking about something different: the newcomers "killed the vibe." This is based on a 1960s-era presupposition that people move due to lifestyle considerations (as opposed to out of economic need, as has been the case since then) and that the newcomers are coming for the "wrong" reasons (people found out that California doesn't get snow!!)
They might be related, though. The ruling class has deliberately destroyed local communities and forced people to become an on-demand proletariat that will move (often at personal expense!) "where the jobs are". If you want to have a career in tech, for example, you pretty much to live in one of 5 or 6 highly expensive cities, because you won't be taken seriously if you live anywhere else. It's not necessarily pathological that Americans move so much; what is pathological is that they have to do so, just to survive.
>If you want to have a career in tech, for example, you pretty much to live in one of 5 or 6 highly expensive cities, because you won't be taken seriously if you live anywhere else.
That is complete BS. Certainly it is among the tech people I know. Furthermore, even those tech offices that are in the orbit of certain cities often aren't in those cities and are located in, not cheap, but pretty reasonably priced areas outside.
Agree with your sentiment. To add to it: I was just in Longmont, a town 45 minutes north of Denver, where Seagate, Western Digital, and San Disk all had major presence. Definitely not a big city.
Tech has enabled us to live anywhere and do our jobs.
I think there's this thread of people who live (and want to live) in very high CoL cities feeling the need to justify it to themselves and others on the grounds that they have no choice if they want to have a successful career.
Part of the problem is that you only get one real crack at the career game. As you get older, your options diminish and the negative social inferences that come with age (even though they have no basis) tend to mount, so you don't have a lot of chances.
Bosses definitely pick their successors based on the "one of us" metric, much more than actual merit or job performance, and this usually means one has to live in the same expensive neighborhoods and send one's kids to the same expensive schools as theirs. Is it possible to succeed, without playing that game? Yes, of course. However, it's unlikely, and so I wouldn't bet my life on it.
> that will move (often at personal expense!) "where the jobs are".
This is often stated on HN and Reddit, but simply not true. At no time in US history has there been less internal migration. It's actually one of the major problems we have with inequality - people are demonstratively not moving to where the economic opportunity is compared to generations past.
I'll have to dig up some stats, but it's been a consistent pattern in my reading on the subject over the past 20 years.
I'm not talking about 2019 to 2020/21 pandemic migration that your article covers. Those years will obviously be an outlier. I'm talking about long-term demographic trends over the past 100+ years.
Why do you think your opinion (and yes, “worse” is objectively an opinion) is reality and everything else is not? Maybe you get flagged/banned for making sweeping statements and shutting out discussion by denying the existence of any other viewpoint.
It has objectively gotten worse. Wages compared to cost of living have stagnated or declined, average height has declined, average age until marriage has increased to nearly 28 (which is usually what happens before things disintegrate) average IQ has declined, suicide and "deaths of disrepair" are way up, homelessness is way up. I can go on all day, things are bad and getting worse and have been since the late 60s/early 70s.
EDIT: And here come the down votes when I bring in facts the progressives don't like.
>I think we are seeing a global trend of mankind rediscovering urban life.
In the US at least, pre-pandemic the trend was primarily an uptick in the number of young college-educated professionals specifically wanting to live in (certain) cities. By comparison, when I finished grad school in the mid-80s, and took a job at a computer company in suburban Boston like quite a few classmates, pretty much no one elected to live in the city.
> Parks are now full of beautifully sculpted people playing frisbee where it used to be tie-dye wearing teenie boppeers or big Mexican families grilling.
There are plenty of neighborhood parks with people grilling and having birthday parties on the weekend? I think this might be a case of your choices creating your experiences, because if you go to Fiesta Gardens or the smaller neighborhood parks it's a much more family-oriented scene. (Zilker is mostly beautiful young people, but some of us are doing our part to inject an older and less sculpted element.)
It's true that Austin skews really young, and the later waves of migration have skewed much higher socio-economically. On the bright side, these new rich arrivals are tending to be much more friendly to policies that will allow less-rich people to live in Austin, such as density and affordable housing. Say what you want about the old chill progressive Austin hippies, but those folks helped create the affordability crisis by being and in most cases remaining to this day staunchly opposed to new multifamily housing. And say what you want about the rich young arrivals, but they're helping turn Austin around in that regard.
I feel you. I drove my old pickup truck to the Domain last year to pick up some Christmas gifts, wearing jeans and a button-down flannel shirt, and I felt completely out of place. So much ostentatious wealth here now.
With all due respect: you drove up to the an area that was mostly built up from nothing in the past 2 decades, is being developed as a “second downtown” and you feel sad to be out of place?
Have you been downtown of any major american city?
The way the Domain was explained to me is that there's a mobile cosmopolitan upper class that likes to float around the planet without ever feeling a sense of uncomfortable unfamiliarity. Austin attracted their attention partly by being "cool" and more importantly by having a Formula 1 track. The Domain was created to make money by helping those people feel at home.
The one person I've met who lived in the Domain was a rich tech guy from another continent who "moved" to Austin but never actually spent much time here. He rented an apartment in the Domain that was mostly vacant because he was always in other countries, acquired a girlfriend in Austin, was rarely here, and eventually stopped coming to Austin altogether. He treated Austin basically the same way I treat a restaurant. He came once, got really excited about his experience, came a few times more and then felt less excited, and then never came back because there was always another city somewhere else that he was a little bit more jazzed about. He was so wealthy that this level of interest in a city involved him renting an apartment for a couple of years and considering purchasing a condo. I wouldn't be surprised if he did purchase a condo, and it's been sitting empty for years because he likes having it and the cost of maintaining it pales next to the effort of finding somebody to manage it as a rental property for him.
That's what the Domain is, a world built for those people.
Anyone buying a car should look at TCO. The average new car price of any type is ~$40,000 in the US, so you're better off long-term with an EV based on fuel costs alone. Add in the really low maintenance needed for an EV and you're even further ahead.
A good petrol car can be bought used for $15-20k. Comparing the price of a new one to an EV is a false equivalency because you can't buy used EVs for anywhere near that.
TCO only favors EVs if you drive enough to offset fuel, oil changes, and maintenance. All bets are off if you replace the battery.
> A good petrol car can be bought used for $15-20k. Comparing the price of a new one to an EV is a false equivalency because you can't buy used EVs for anywhere near that.
The presence of low-range EVs—many of which need battery or tire replacements—doesn't really change the point. A similarly priced Honda Fit from the same model year is a better value due to its low maintenance costs, fuel economy, and infinite range.
> Anyone buying a car should look at TCO. The average new car price of any type is ~$40,000 in the US, so you're better off long-term with an EV based on fuel costs alone. Add in the really low maintenance needed for an EV and you're even further ahead.
If TCO matters, buy a cheap used car for ~$5K and nothing can beat the TCO.
Uh oh. I loved and lived in Austin from 2012 to 2015, and have recently been considering moving back. I think I’ve even played disc golf at Zilker Park while wearing tie die, though hardly as a teenie-bopper.
Over what period did the changes you reference happen? Am I longing for a City that no longer exists as I remember it?
Street View + Zillow show that a large two bedroom house I once rented for $1600/month in the heart of 78704 was demolished a few years ago. In its stead is a nice-looking but characterless house that just sold for $4 million. Fortunately, cost of living is not a significant concern at this point in my life, but I don’t want to move to 100 degree days, 100+ days a year, just to find that the city I left is no longer there.
Strongly agree with all of your arguments. Watched the city transform radically between ~2007 and ~2014, and not really for the better. Most notably, the city and surrounding suburbs did not prepare for nor manage the tech-driven population boom whatsoever.
Same, lived there in the early 2000's, and coming back recently it's almost unrecognizable. The music scene is largely gone, tech bros everywhere, the traffic is even worse than it was before, housing is ridiculous. The "Keep Austin Weird" charm, which used to be real, is now a faded memory that's packaged up to sell at the airport gift shop.
They did it to themselves. It’s one of the leading reasons I left the region after grad school for the ancestral planes of my parents: Suburban Illinois, heh.
Austin is in danger of following California's path.
The reason Silicon Valley sucks is that Wall Street started sending its failures into tech to boss nerds around, and they drove out the real people, the ones who actually cared about technology and steering its role in society to the good. Now, tech is full of FAANG bros who don't mind open-plan offices and daily interviews for their own job, because they're all going to be CEOs in three years (in their minds).
The Paradox of Tolerance is how Burning Man got infested by networking billionaires. California's death is the Paradox of Tolerance in action, and Austin is in the same danger.
