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Little California: Techsodus transplants love Austin, but does the city love them back?

Gail Glass and her husband moved from California and love Austin. But they keep quiet about where they are from.
Gail Glass and her husband moved to Austin from the Bay Area in 2017 to be closer to their daughter, who is a professor at the University of Texas. Now in her 70s, she lives in the Mueller neighborhood, which she likes because it reminds her of California, with its transit-friendliness and liberal politics, but without the high prices.
Glass has found Austinites to be welcoming—but she also learned not to mention where she moved from.
While house-hunting, a buyer turned down the couple's offer because they were from California. "Texas is for Texans," she said. "I've heard that a number of times."
Although the majority of people moving to Austin come from other cities in Texas, Californians are often blamed for the city's challenges. It's easy to understand Austin's appeal: relative affordability compared to cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, liberal local politics and—as an added bonus—no state income tax. But many Austinites feel that these new arrivals are jeopardizing the very benefits that drew them to the city in the first place.
A cautionary tale
Californians accounted for about 8% of all migration to the five-county Austin metro between 2014 and 2018, according to an Austin Chamber analysis of U.S. Census survey data. Although 2020 numbers are not yet available, there are some indicators that this trend has only been turbocharged by the pandemic. Just last month, LinkedIn ranked Austin the most popular city for newcomers in 2020.
Podcasting's $10-million man Joe Rogan and former Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek recently relocated from Los Angeles to the Austin area. Individuals, however, aren't the only ones following this migration pattern.
Joe Rogan and James Van Der Beek moved to Austin in 2020, while Elon Musk has been house-hunting after bringing the next Tesla Gigafactory to the area.
Lured by the state's business-friendly climate, Austin's existing workforce and cushy tax incentives, Tesla announced it would build a new Gigafactory in Southeast Travis County last summer, and CEO Elon Musk began house-hunting locally not too long after. Oracle recently relocated its headquarters from the Bay Area, and Samsung, whose U.S. headquarters are in San Jose, is reportedly mulling a $10 billion microchip plant in Austin.
"There already were trends toward remote work," said Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of "The Code," a history of Silicon Valley. "This year, there was this giant experiment at scale, which showed big tech companies in particular that they could operate in a different way."
Austin offers companies a sizeable labor pool and lower operating costs than the Bay Area. But it also matches some of Silicon Valley's tech-friendly attributes.
Both regions developed nascent tech industries during the Cold War, spurred by federal investment in defense spending and research universities—Stanford in California, the University of Texas at Austin here—followed by the emergence of microchip and then hard- and software companies, O'Mara explained.
But what drew tech companies to California starting in the 1960s and '70s has now been compromised by the success of those companies. "The Valley used to be attractive because it was relatively affordable," she said. "Now that no longer holds."
Austin, on the other hand, remains relatively affordable for people and companies moving from more expensive cities and states.
"We live in an era where there is quite great demand for living in cities," said Jacob Anbinder, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University where he is writing a dissertation on urban growth and the Democratic Party. "People often move to Austin because they are priced out of these wealthy, coastal cities."
This isn't necessarily good for Austin.
"It's always great to be on the high tech map, but there's challenges and costs," O'Mara said.
Another Texodus?
California may be a scapegoat for Austin's growing pains—Austin Mayor Steve Adler told the Los Angeles Times last year the "Californization of Texas is like a social media meme without a factual basis"—but there's no doubt that population growth has contributed to the city's affordability crisis and related issues.
Between 1990 and 2020, the median home price in the Austin-metro area increased more than five-fold from $71,000 to $370,000, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center. Nationally, the median home price has increased less than three-fold, according to an analysis of Federal Housing Finance Agency data by the research firm DQYDJ.
State Republican leaders have weighed in.
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ran for reelection in 2018, his campaign website featured a "Don't California My Texas!" petition.
More recently, U.S. House Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, wrote an op-ed for Fox News about the city's homeless crisis. "As droves of Californians move to Texas for jobs, it appears they and their values are turning parts of Austin from merely 'weird' to potentially dangerous mirror images of failed California cities," he wrote.
Some residents feel similarly—and are considering moving elsewhere.
(Jill Klucher)
Jill Klucher has lived in the Northwest Hills neighborhood since 1992. Over the last five years, she has felt the impact of Austin's growth: more chain stores where there used to be local businesses, less green space as land is redeveloped to build more housing and a more visible homeless population.
"I think Austin's great, and I do love living here," Klucher said. "But there's probably a time that I'll leave."
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Popular
As summer temperatures continue to increase, so does Austin's "Party Island"—a hundreds-strong army of kayakers and paddle boarders who gather each weekend in the middle of Lady Bird Lake.
Born from the pandemic, the swarm of paddleboarding partiers has continued to grow each summer and can be seen from the nearby Lamar Boulevard Bridge. And while "Party Island" certainly lives up to one half of its name, it's not actually an island at all: instead, it's located at a shallow sandbar near Lou Neff Point.
With beers, burgers from portable grills and even DJ turntables in hand, more friends and strangers continue to beat the heat in new ways at the distinct Austin hangout.
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(Pexels)
If you are a committed, grunge-wearing resident of the Pacific Northwest, it is easy–almost automatic–to look at Texas as an extraordinarily dry, hot and culturally oppressive place that is better to avoid, especially in the summer. Our two granddaughters live with their parents in Portland.
Recently we decided to take the older girl, who is 15, to Dallas. Setting aside the summer heat, a Portlander can adjust to the vibes of Austin without effort. So let’s take Texas with all of its excesses straight up. Dallas, here we come.
Our 15-year-old granddaughter and her sister, 12, have spent summer weeks with us, usually separately so that we could better get to know each individually. In visits focused on Austin and Port Aransas, the girls seemed to be developing an affection for Texas.
Houston and Dallas are two great American cities, the 4th and 9th largest, each loaded with cultural treasures, each standing in glittering and starchy contrast to Austin’s more louche, T-shirts and shorts ways.
Three hours up I-35, Dallas loomed before us as a set of gray skyscrapers in a filmy haze, accessed only through a concrete mixmaster of freeways, ramps and exits. I drove with false confidence. Be calm, I said to myself, it will all end in 10 minutes under the hotel entrance canopy. And it did.
The pool at the Crescent Court Hotel in Dallas. (Crescent Court Hotel)
We stayed three nights at the Crescent Court Hotel ($622 a night for two queens), a high-end hotel in Uptown, patronized by women in white blazers, business people in suits, and tall, lean professional athletes, their shiny Escalades and Corvettes darting in and out, and other celebrities like Bill Barr, the former attorney general who shoe-horned his ample self into a Toyota.
Each morning as I walked to Whole Foods for a cappuccino, a fellow identified by a bellman as Billy the Oilman arrived in his Rolls Royce Phantom. Where does he park? “Wherever he wants to. He likes the Starbucks here.”
We garaged our more modest set of wheels for the visit. We were chauffeured for tips by Matt Cooney and Alfonza “The Rev” Scott in the hotel’s black Audi sedan. They drove us to museums, restaurants and past the enclaves of the rich and famous. In Highland Park, The Rev pointed out the homes of the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones and Troy Aikman along with the family compound of the Hunts, oil and gas tycoons.
The Dallas Museum of Art’s “Cartier and Islam” exhibit (until Sept. 18) attracted an older crowd; the nearby Perot Museum of Nature and Science was a powerful whirlpool of kids’ groups ricocheting from the Tyrannosaurus Rex to the oil fracking exhibit. Watch your shins.
A Geogia O'Keeffe oil painting called "Ranchos Church, New Mexico" at the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art. (Rich Oppel)
For us, the best museum was the Amon Carter Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, a 50-minute, madcap drive away via a 75 mph toll lane along I-30. Don’t try it during rush hour. The Carter has an exquisite collection of Remington paintings and sculptures and an excellent array of 19th and 20th-century paintings as well. Pick one museum? The Amon Carter. Peaceful, beautiful, uncrowded, free admission and small enough to manage in two hours.
The Fort Worth Stockyards, a place of history (with a dab of schmaltz), fun and good shopping, filled one of our mornings. The 98 acres brand the city as Cowboy Town, with a rodeo and a twice-daily (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.) cattle drive. We shopped for boots, drank coffee and watched the “herd” of 18 longhorns. So languid was their progress that if this were a real market drive the beef would have been very tough and leathery before it hit the steakhouse dinner plate.
The cattle drive at the Fort Worth Stockyards. (Rich Oppel)
But we could identify: the temperature was 97. “I saw a dog chasing a cat today,” said the emcee, deploying a very old joke. “It was so hot that both were walking.”
With limited time, we chose three very different restaurants:
- Nobu, in the Crescent Court Hotel; Jia, a modern Chinese restaurant in Highland Park; and Joe T. Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Nobu’s exotic Japanese menu set us back $480, with tip, for four (we had a guest), but it was worth it.
- Jia was an ordinary suburban strip mall restaurant, but with good food and a reasonable tab of $110 for four.
- Joe T.’s is an 85-year-old Fort Worth institution (think Matt’s El Rancho but larger), a fine Mexican restaurant where a meal with two drinks was $115.
Sushi at high-end restaurant Nobu. (Crescent Hotel)
It was all a splurge for a grandchild’s visit. Now we will get back to our ordinary road trips of Hampton Inns, where a room rate is closer to the Crescent Court’s overnight parking rate of $52. And to corner cafes in small towns.
Did Dallas change our 15-year-old’s view of Texas? “Yes. I think it’s a lot cooler than I did. The fashion, the food.” So, not only Austin is cool. Take Texas as a whole. It’s a big, complex, diverse and wonderful state.