I've looked at properties in Austin area a few months back. It's more affordable than CA, but it's still way out of reach of most non-HQ staff that Tesla employs. I've read the stat that property values have gone up 43% due to exodus from locked down blue states over the course of just the past year. Couple this with Texas' higher than average property tax rate (_especially_ in Austin area) and you've got some pretty un-affordable housing. FWIW, I'm looking at FL now instead.
As someone who used to live in Tampa Bay—and may have to move back for family reasons next year—I find that a little dubious as well. :) Although to be fair, Tampa and St. Petersburg both got measurably more interesting in the last decade than they were when I left in 2002.
Never lived in Jacksonville, but I’ve visited it and have a friend who used to live there. Jacksonville is to Florida what Fresno is to California: bigger than you think, probably perfectly pleasant, utterly non-descript. :)
St Petersburg is nice. Amazing beaches and kitesurfing at fort desoto, plenty of water access for boating and sailing, generally out of the path of hurricanes. Not much in the way of universities to recruit from though.
Don't know yet. One thing I realized is I can't really decide whether a place is worth moving to without living there for a few months. So that's what I intend to do before I uproot my family and move. I like TX in general, but a week or two does not give an even remotely complete picture, beyond just the basic "affordability" and quality of available housing stock.
The traffic situation is already pretty bad in that area, seemingly deliberately so. That is the case even during the pandemic, I can only imagine how bad it is when _nobody_ is remote. It seems that progressive Austin wants everyone to move to the city and give up their cars, which is not a realistic thing to do for most people in TX because it's not built for such lifestyle. I have no other plausible explanation.
Since I'm apparently "posting too fast", I'll just post my reply to the post below here.
US cities (including Austin) are not built to make this viable. I grew up in Russia which mirrors the European way of building things. Everything you need for your family is within walking distance, for what I hope are obvious reasons. The US is not built for this. If one's goal is to get rid of cars, you have to build cities with that in mind. This takes decades, which is why nobody seems interested in actually doing this. Instead we get this passive-aggressive "let's build less parking and roads" thing that you see in US urban centers. No attention whatsoever is paid to how the folks actually live, how they raise their kids, and so on. I'd also argue that, as we switch to electric (and eventually to nuclear power, since that seems inevitable if we actually want to solve the climate crisis rather than just make Al Gore filthy rich), cars will become less and less of a problem, and population will spread out rather than move into the cities. Cities are a bad deal as it is. Expensive real estate, congested roads, high crime.
Take a ton of people with CA urban ideology and plop them down in a random city in TX and "intentionally bad traffic because we expect everyone in the city to give up their cars" seems like a not unforseeable outcome.
Frankly this is why we leave major infrastructure planning up to the states so that the state can wring the best possible outcome out of an entire economic region without getting too bogged down by local politics. Left to their own devices cities would build shit infrastructure because they'd try to exclude the poors and other petty stuff like that.
In this case terrible traffic is the result of buding a ton of crooked relatively narrow roads without any rhyme or reason. Family with children _cannot exist_ in most of the US without a car. Even in Austin itself if you don't have a car everything is just too far apart, and you could spend an hour or more fetching groceries quite easily. I actually forgot my driver's license at home and while it was being fedexed to me I got to experience the car-less Austin lifestyle. Let me tell you authoritatively, you wouldn't want to live like that. But at the same time if you live in Austin itself you don't want to bother with a car either, there's relatively little parking, so you'll really be struggling to find a spot once COVID subsides. I've seen the same deliberate shrinkage of parking happen in other "progressive" cities. Nobody gives a shit if you got kids and need a car. Another thing that Austin shares with other progressive cities is its massive and growing homeless population, though I must also say that even the homeless people are nicer there than, say, in SF or Seattle. At least I haven't seen anyone shoot up heroin in public or shit on the sidewalk.
SF seems to be telling me to give up my car, but that's a non-starter unless Muni gets about 500% better (higher frequency, more coverage, faster routes).
Even in Manhattan, where transit is pretty decent, the only reason why transit is faster (sometimes) is because traffic is terrible all the time.
You still have to find a builder, or a place where a builder has built a house that you can afford to buy.
Even regular handymen are backlogged by six months or so. Forget trying to get a builder within a year or more.
Meanwhile, all those expensive high rises on the river for those millionaires and billionaires keep going up, faster than you can blink an eye.
> property values have gone up 43% due to exodus from locked down blue states
Citation needed for this property value claim, also for the existence of “locked down” blue states. I haven’t seen a lockdown yet like many other places.
Not anymore. Go to Redfin and see for yourself. I wasn't even looking in the "city proper", I was looking within half an hour drive to Austin downtown. I consider it dumb to buy property without any land to go with it, so I wanted a decent house with an acre or two of land at least. The only decent options I was able to find were all over a million dollars. And then there's flood insurance to contend with in Austin area - you really have to look where it does and does not flood or you could also be on the hook for $1K/mo in flood insurance, without which the bank won't issue a loan.
