
Ask HN: How does Austin, TX compare to other tech cities? - __xtrimsky
Hello Everyone,<p>I am a developer that worked in a few startups in San Francisco and Mountain View. I then moved to New York for family reasons. But there is one thing that bothers me in the Valley or Manhattan. Housing is very expensive. I have a salary of 90k, but that does not allow me to live in my &quot;dream&quot; house in any of these cities.<p>I noticed that housing is really cheap in Austin, TX and it makes me want to move there. I was wondering for any of you that moved between a big tech city and Austin, how does Austin compare to the rest.<p>How are salaries ?
Is there a lot of cool startups ?
How is living in Austin, TX ? Too hot ? Is there a lot of restaurants ?<p>Please share your experience!
Thank you!
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calosa
I've lived in Austin for the last 13 years or so and worked on 6 startups. I
love it and can't see myself anywhere else. I've spent a bit of time in SF
over the years, and love it there, but just can't imagine _living_ there.

* Heat: It's hot in the summer. Really hot. Over 100 most days. After some time, you just accept it and move on with life. You stay inside. You live later in the evening when it's dark and cooler. The flip side of this is that for 8 months out of the year, the weather is pretty incredible :)

* Startups: There are lots of startups here. But you'll find that Austin tends to not focus as much on the consumer oriented startups. So many of them you'll never really have heard of. Some success stories are Spiceworks, Indeed, HomeAway, BazaarVoice, and Mass Relevance. There are also lots of agencies based here that are always looking to hire. There's also a big VC here (Austin Ventures) and an incubator that's had some success (Capital Factory).

* Tech Community: The Javascript and Ruby/Rails communities are very active. Each hosts a conference each year that are well attended and respected. Again, SXSW is here each March which is also pretty incredible.

* City: Austin is awesome. Live Music, Lakes, Pools, Great Food, SXSW, ACL, F1... I could go on... seriously, it's pretty sweet.

* Restaurants: Yes. Awesome. In the last 5 years, it's really exploded. I'm constantly amazed by the amount of great food that's available now. A lot of it stems from the rise of trailers a few years back. The best ones have gone on to open brick and morder locations. Notable standouts: Uchi, Barley Swine, Perla's, Franklin BBQ, Homeslice Pizza, La Condessa, Sway, Torchy's Tacos. So much good food. And if you're willing to drive an hour outside of Austin, there are probably 50 _authentic_ Texas BBQ places in the surrounding area. Also beer. A few incredible breweries have started over the last few years.

* $$: Definitely cheaper to live here than SF or NY :)

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mgh2
I lived in Austin, and did not like it, that is why I moved to Silicon Valley.
Austin seems cool in theory, but it still lacks a lot of what Silicon Valley
has. They say that VC is the problem, but I doubt it. The culture is there
too, but it seems to me that the main problem is talent.

UT does not even compare to Stanford. It is all about people; if you don't
have the right talent, no matter how much effort you put into culture,
resources, or investment, innovation will still not grow.

Housing is about the same if you know how to look in Silicon Valley. Silicon
Valley might be cheaper depending on where you live; I do not mean East Palo
Alto, I heard prices ranging from 500-800 a month in places like Sunnyvale and
San Jose, all the way to Menlo Park. My place in Menlo Park is 560/month. Use
craigslist/peninsula.

What about Google, Apple and other hi-tech companies moving there? I suspect
that they use it as satellite factories for blue collar workers, while all
their white collar talent is in the Valley. Taxes are low, wages are lower, so
why not outsource all the no-brainer labor to Austin? Creative and engineering
talent is still in the Valley and you have to pay a high price for it.

I know because I looked for jobs there for a year with no luck, when I moved
to Silicon Valley I got 3 jobs instantly. Do not listen to media, they often
have ulterior motives like promoting the state. The weather in Austin is too
hot. Again, the main problem stays the same: NOT ENOUGH TALENT. That is just
my intuition though.

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NemesisVex
I moved from Austin, TX to Seattle, WA a year and a half ago after having
lived there for 14 years.

I liked the first 10 years and couldn't stand the last four.

What ultimately forced me to move were seasonal allergies. Once you develop
allergies to the cedar and oak pollen in the region, your life will be hell
for five months out of the year. They also coincide with the months in the
year that are actually tolerable to be outside.

Texas has been in a pretty severe drought for most of the last half decade. In
the past, triple-digit days were concentrated in August and part of July.
Recently, those triple-digit days start as soon as June, with 90s starting as
early as late April. Summer doesn't end till around October.

Austin is the liberal oasis of Texas, but it's still in Texas. It's a lot
easier to be a Republican in Austin than in San Francisco or New York City.

Public transportation in Austin SUCKS HARD. You will need a car.

That's my naysayer's perspective on the city. There are more than enough
opinions out there about what's good, and I agree with them.

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jaworrom
I'm actually native of Houston, but my girlfriend's folks live up in Round
Rock, TX, just outside of Austin. Austin is a unique city, no doubt. I've
spent many weekends up there and it's always a lot of fun-- the best food
you'll ever have in my opinion. Especially the food truck scene! If you love
craft beer, you're welcomed with open arms. The city itself is very active and
lots of people love being outdoors/staying active.

Cost of living is very reasonable, and that's a good thing. No state income
tax! As far as tech jobs are concerned, you'll find that you will make a
pretty good living.

All in all, I think Austin is a great place to live, and I plan on moving up
there myself in the next couple of years. You'll find lots to be happy about
and proud of in Austin!

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erlkonig
Austin is hot, over 100°F for a long time in the summer, snowless 4 years out
of 5. It has a deliberately bad highway system leading to a three-hour rush
hour from 4 PM to 7 PM on weekdays. Granted, anyone from Los Angeles would
probably laugh at this plaint, since even in rush hour, one will still make it
home at some point here. There's a little light rail, and an unimpressive but
functional bus system. Be warned that bicycling in Austin can be challenging
in some areas. Austin's surrounded by bible-belt, republican Texas, but - in
part due to the large university-derived community - has a diverse and
surprisingly democratic/unaffiliated contingent in the city itself, including
fringe religions and spiritualism (Wicca, etc), and a wealth of musicians,
artists, and digerati. (We've likened it to West Berlin surrounded by East
Germany before 1994) Restaurants are legion, we have Frys Electronics, Alamo
Draughthouse (cinema + dining + local attitude) and lots of 3D cinemas, maker
shops, etc. Consumer ISPs here are Time Warner, Uverse, etc, although getting
both a static IP and good customer service from them is a faint dream, and
Austin is not a mecca of cheap Internet, sadly, although offered speeds are
pretty good. ISP options are a little wider along IH35, including Grande and
possibly others. Google networking is coming in 2014. There are a lot of good
options here for server colocation. Houses are easily available under the
$200k mark for ~2k sqft in some fairly nice areas farther from the city
center, with property taxes perhaps being around[ $4k/y on such - however,
prices scale up substantially in some areas, especially deeper in town.
There's a sales tax just over 8%, but no state income tax. There are a number
of nice outdoor areas, some scenic views in the western, hillier side, parks,
a (smallish) river through town, Lake Travis nearby (both are typified by
rather murky green water), and so forth, although more popular in summer with
those who can take the heat. The downtown area has scads of live music
performers and dancing available. We have an active local faultline, the
Balcones Fault, but the most notable earthquake on hit a 3.0 in Irving, TX,
and Austinites aren't aware of any local earthquake activity. Burning Man
isn't here, but we do have a Burning Flipside event popular with much of the
same crowd.

Austin is rife with startups :-)

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FellowTraveler
Austin is a cool town, but the property taxes are between 2 and 3% (per year.)

That means if you buy a normal house worth about $400K, you will pay an
additional 11K per year in property tax, which is a little less than a grand
per month.

Hopefully they will eliminate this horrible system, which favors rich people.
Some might say, "Well it's better than an income tax" but I think if you asked
Thomas Jefferson about the matter he would say that neither is morally
acceptable.

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morkfromork
I moved there from SF in 2005. I had a job for a while until that company went
under. I moved back to SF in 2010 because I could not find another job in
Austin. Things have been great since then. Most people are nice but, others
are not so friendly to people from CA. Most places I spoke to were a few years
behind in tech.

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yourapostasy
Sorry for the wall of text. I travel a lot on business, and am just moving to
one of the outer suburbs of Austin from the inner core, so I happen to be very
familiar at the moment with the comparison you are asking about.

Pull out a map of Austin. Locate West 45th Street which turns into East 45th
Street, slide down along IH-35/290 until you hit West Oltorf St, cut across to
South Lamar Blvd, then go up 360 and then up MoPac Expressway to the river
until you close the loop back to around Mount Bonnell. Within this polygon,
you will not find a 2500+sf 3BR/2BA for less than around $500K without some
serious remodeling, and in some neighborhoods within this polygon like
Tarrytown, listings are commonly in the $700K-$900K range. Pull out a bit to
the suburbs in concentric rings around this area, and the prices start
dropping. Your commute gets longer, too.

A lot of the appeal of Austin's Slacker'ish lifestyle meme comes from an era
when house prices in this same area were in the $100-200K range in the
late-80's. It was in retrospect very cheap to live here, a little disposable
income went a long way, cheap gas in a beater car let you get just about
anywhere, and the city was in a much more compact area so "anywhere" in Austin
was only about 10 minutes away. There are a lot of residents who remember this
era and resent the rapid rise in real estate prices that eliminated this
lifestyle for most; this is where a lot of the "Welcome to Austin, now please
leave" sentiment you see comes from. There are only a few use cases where this
kind of lifestyle still holds true today.

One is student-level living in something like the ICC co-ops. There are the
usual co-operative living drawbacks there. The other use case is if you have
substantial (7-figure and up) liquid assets after paying off shelter costs.
Both let you live in the more compactly-developed areas of the city, and
pursue a relatively low-stress lifestyle that harkens to that meme. Even now,
the real estate pricing and ownership dynamics are starting to edge out the
former compactness of the city even in the downtown and campus areas, but if
you are savvy or wealthy enough to live in these still-compact areas (for
now), then you can still feasibly get around daily with a bike (and showers at
your work destination).

For folks living in the concentric rings however, the already-familiar "go
into the city" routine for night life and meeting urban friends that others
know about from other cities has already become a feature of the culture here,
and living outside that hip urban vibe commonly portrayed in national media is
the reality for most, like young families or "only" $100-150K household
incomes. Young professionals with your kind of salary will thrive in the core
of the city, but I have no idea how they manage to save up any money with the
kind of rents being charged, and IMHO it is much more imperative to save for
the 20-30 year cohort now than when I was that age. Due to the car-centric
nature of Austin's development, if you have to commute from the suburban rings
to the center, it can easily take 45-90 minutes one-way at the height of a
rush hour depending upon the specifics; there are some really bothersome
bottlenecks scattered throughout the city that create this nightmare. An
exception noted below.

Ignore what you hear about the "dangerous" East side. If you have had any
experience with the rougher parts of the large tech cities, East Austin is
tame by comparison. I served on a county grand jury that reviews and passes
felony indictments, and from direct experience there I can tell you the most
consistently roughest part of the city is around IH-35 and Rundberg. East
Austin is mostly petty crimes; muggings and stranger-on-stranger rapes happen
but are rare. Rundberg/IH-35 is where a lot of the drug-related and lower
socioeconomic-associated crime is centered; you will see more violent crime in
this area, but it is still nothing compared to East Palo Alto during the
1980's for example. You can also look up crime statistics on spotcrime.com,
which pulls a decently-recent feed from both the city police and county
sheriff.

The light rail offers some intriguing possibilities that might create
exceptions from what I covered above. There are some condo and apartments
built very close to the stations. If you can put up with the somewhat limited
schedule and the higher prices (relative to their general area) of these
multi-unit dwellings, then it is entirely feasible to enjoy most of the
compactness of the "old Austin" experience in the core without having to live
in the core. The light rail is very bike-friendly, but Austin drivers are more
hostile to cyclists than, say, Portland/OR drivers.

Salaries are slightly lower than the big tech cities, but not by much, and if
you work for one of the HFTs in town for example there is practically no
difference. As long as you don't live within that polygon I described, or
insist upon hanging out in that area all the time, you'll do fine. If you have
a fairly high tolerance for the slow/zoned-out drivers that Austin is infamous
for, which can make for shorter but much more road rage inducing rush hour
commutes compared to the big tech cities, then you can have your pick of
extremely affordable areas around Austin. If you can put up with 1.5-2.0 hour
each way commutes, you can get palatial-sized houses (4000+ sf) on 1-5 acre
lots for around $500K out in rustic areas. For the $1.5M that gets you a
"normal" small house in Cupertino, that far out will start to get you onto
lake waterfront, large properties. For a 1.0-1.5 hour one way commute, the
$500K price point can still get you the same size house on a 0.25+-acre lot.

The others have already given you a good idea of what to expect for the heat
in the summer and the restaurant scene here (Austin is a budget foodie's dream
come true; Bay Area has way better foodie options, but I found them much more
expensive to access). The allergy situation is not exaggerated, the city is
frequently found in the AFAA top 10 worst cities for allergies, and is unique
with three distinct pollen seasons that nearly cover the entire year. There
are some excellent allergy clinics in town but effective treatments can get
very expensive (thousands per year for severe cases). A common occurrence is a
newcomer moves here, has no problems with allergies for 5-10 years, then
develops severe allergies (or actually crack a rib from the violent, frequent
sneezing like one of my friends suffered). A smaller, luckier group that guts
it out from there instead of moving away develop a resistance to the molds and
pollens, and the allergies gradually get better over the next decade or two.

Hang out in reddit.com/r/austin to get a feel for the vibes of the various
groups in Austin, it is pretty active.

Fun factoid: Austin-the-city-proper has about 8000 more in population than San
Francisco-the-city-proper. The SF MSA is much, much larger. But the core of
Austin went through the 350-840K population growth in an explosive 33-year
period of 1980-2013. San Francisco took over 100 years to accomplish almost
that same population growth. The core is insanely popular, and the real estate
business is eating it up right now, and will continue to make bank from this
incredible mania for the core for the foreseeable future.

Something to realize about the Austin tech scene: it is active, but not as
strategically important to many companies with a presence yet no headquarters
here. This means you need to watch out what teams you join if you sign up with
a company that isn't headquartered here. Tech recessions can really beat up
the divisions located in Austin that are very operations-oriented or on
bleeding edge product development, and this has gotten much worse as the cost
of living has gone up in the past decades, and salaries start getting closer
to big tech city salaries.

If you are a startup that has already assembled your team and just wants a
cool place to chill while creating your MVP for example, it's hard to go wrong
with hanging out in Austin outside the core. However, I could say the same
about San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc. Austin definitely has its
unique charms and quirks, but contrary to the hive mind, from my travel
experience I can't honestly say Austin is all that unique now (there was a
very small window of opportunity when it could have been turned into a truly
unique city experience, but it is gone for good now). It's assuredly a nice
city, but like a lot of things in life, it is what you make of it.

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mesozoic
Obligatory don't move here.

Lol just kidding it's pretty cool. But you'll hear that a lot. The place is
getting overfilled and traffic has gone to shit so live close to work.

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yeezus
If you have problems with seasonal allergies, this place will be hell for you.
I stay on a cocktail of three allergy medicines for most of the year.

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kurd_debuggr
Lot of cool startups, hot over the summer, cheap living expenses.

Salary given with experience to taste.

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wh-uws
I'll add how I answered this question for someone who sent me an email once.
Here goes:

I wrote a good Quora answer about just living in Austin in general start of
with reading that.

[http://www.quora.com/Austin-TX/What-should-someone-know-
befo...](http://www.quora.com/Austin-TX/What-should-someone-know-before-
moving-to-Austin/answer/William-Harris?srid=X0&share=1)

It doesn't really cover startup life though. I'll get to that.

Quora has a lot of other pretty accurate content about Austin so check that
out too.

\- First off let me warn you... sadly Southby is not Austin.

SXSW is a festival that happens to happen once an year in Austin but they are
completely different things lol. Do not have that as you expectation of how
Austin will be. Austin is much sleepier the rest of the year and even during
southby you may have noticed that stuff pretty much closes down at 2am

\- The Austin tech scene is mostly B2B startups, consultant shops, bigger more
established tech (think IBM and Dell), the newer shiner (for lack of a better
way to put it) companies mostly have smaller encampments here. (i.e Facebook
has an office in one of the towers downtown. Apple has a fairly sizeable
campus north of town and they are expanding but not much there yet.)

\- Second checkout these quoras answers they say alot about it.

[http://www.quora.com/Why-wont-Austin-TX-become-the-next-
Sili...](http://www.quora.com/Why-wont-Austin-TX-become-the-next-Silicon-
Valley/answer/Shon-Bayer?srid=X0&share=1)

[http://www.quora.com/How-does-Austin-compare-to-Silicon-
Vall...](http://www.quora.com/How-does-Austin-compare-to-Silicon-Valley-as-a-
place-to-live-and-work-\(in-tech\))

\- O and meetups in Austin...

Another thing about Austin is you will meet some genuinely smart people who
are good and passonate about what they do... and you'll also run into the
types who are "looking for a technical founder" alot too.

It sucks that you'll find alot of those at the meetups for more well known
languages or frameworks. You'll have to dig deep into more esoteric or cutting
edge topics if you really want to meet good technical people here and not just
people looking for someone to do it for them.

Also just about all of the meetup groups have an online presence just google
"[you favor subject] austin meetup"

i.e. Austin on Rails is a good one

[http://austinonrails.org/](http://austinonrails.org/)

\- You'll definitely also want to look up Capital factory

[http://capitalfactory.com/](http://capitalfactory.com/)

There are a metric ton of startups there.

They also have showcases and host a big portion of one of my two favorite
Austin events. The Startup Crawl. As matter of fact if you can swing it figure
out when the next one of those is and come then. You'll meet a bunch of people
in the scene that way... its another big party event much like sxsw but it is
much more local so you'll get a flavor of the people actually here.

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amerika
It's full of Californians, increasingly expensive, and, thanks to heavy
subsidies from state and parent-based funding, kind of filled with kind of
useless people.

Otherwise, it's great. The climate's a bit warm but not too humid, there's
lots of hippie stuff to do and you can run away to the suburbs which are more
like Houston, and if you like live music -- even though most of it is boring
-- you'll love swiping that card all over sixth street.

As far as tech opportunities? * cough * I'd look to Houston or DFW.

