>But many startups are now choosing to leave the capital city they once flocked to because of the rising cost of living, low funding, and lack of diversity, according to TechCrunch.
No one leaves because of "lack of diversity": look at how Bellingham WA exploded in the last few years. Further, the VMware layoffs and Meta/Facebook and Google retrenchment are country-wide and not confined to only Austin.
What is more likely is that Austin, which saw a huge run-up in home prices, is just not as affordable as before. Add in quality of life things like longer commute times, and the end of ZIRP draining available funding...
1) It's hot for any skin color, compared to most anywhere else in the country. Not everyone enjoys staying indoors for half the year (I have lived in TX.) Folks might move from coastal California and then learn that lesson the hard way.
2) If you are a woman, or woman adjacent, then the fact that religious extremists now set reproductive law might affect the desire to live in the state, if one has a choice.
TX is really only hot in.... mid-late summer. Even then, everyone just uses A/C and alters their patterns for that time. Just like up north, where it can be quite cold in the mid-winter, and people alter their patterns for 60 days.
I really dont see how these hot climates are any worse than corresponding northern cities. I live in Chicago and we dont leave our house for 5 straight months in the winter and then there are 2 more months where the weather is consistently shit. Is a summer where its consistently over 100 for 3 months worse than the 6 ish months of not going outside that northern cities see?
Yeah, that felt entirely shoe-horned into this article. I couldn't find any further explanation within the article, or the parent article it references. Just pure assertion on the author's part.
If true, we'd also expect to see mass closures of eng offices in places like Tokyo, Shanghai or Mumbai due to their "lack of diversity."
Tech companies were too myopic only trying Austin. The DFW Metroplex area of Texas has much more room and scale, and is more business-friendly, lower cost, and has a much larger professional class population.
John Carmack is a famous transplant here who has never wanted to move since. It's also a few degrees cooler than Austin - though with all the new pavement the urban heat island effect might even that out.
Lack of diversity in the sense of living under a state government aiming for 17th century christian theocracy as a role model of governance as opposed to more liberal states.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? Texas has been that way for decades, and yet it’s a major destination for people leaving “more liberal states.” California was never as Christian, but it was solidly red through the 1980s, and was a major destination at that time as well. Same thing for Virginia, through the 1990s.
When my parents came to this country, they chose to live in a Virginia county that was so red a Democrat wouldn’t even run for the Congressional seat in some cycles. They could’ve moved next door to liberal Maryland, but they didn’t. I’ve never gotten a satisfactory explanation for that.
The model of governance may not be too your liking, and also be a bit heavy handed in some areas for my personal Christian beliefs - it is ok to have different belief systems... and let the states and citizens of the states decide where to live.
Something seems to be working well enough for most TXn's though.
> is just not as affordable as before. Add in quality of life things like longer commute times,
Home prices are dropping like a rock. And commute times were hell a decade ago.
I think the bigger issue is that these firms bet big on real estate and then the pandemic suddenly clued people in that remote work was possible and now instead of admitting they made a mistake are blaming the issue “on Austin.”
Also: to speak to the diversity part. Read up on Austin’s 1928 plan to intentionally segregate the city. Austin is still one of the most racially segregated. In an interesting turn of events Houston (due to its lack of zoning laws making redlining hard to impossible) is the most racially diverse city in the nation. Amazing what impact a bunch of people a hundred years ago can have on a place even after they are dead and their laws changed.
> In an interesting turn of events Houston (due to its lack of zoning laws making redlining hard to impossible) is the most racially diverse city in the nation.
In a nation that includes, amongst other cities, New York City, this is extremely unlikely.
Yeah kinda salty about northern WA has exploded. I'm nominally from there and think about moving back... but then a house costs just as much as much of the rest of the US so might as well stay where it's warm.
I stated Bellingham, you may not have ever spent time there, but certainly it has grown as former Amazon people decide it is a nice place to be (it wasn't diverse when I was there).
All great points. I don't recall the valley being that diverse, nor is ... for example, Boulder, CO and they're still hot spots.
If tech is mostly "bro dudes", they're definitely not moving away from Austin due to "diversity or abortion rights". They moved to escape the CA state taxes & the politics of the area they left.
The article is trying to support an economic thesis with social / identity politic reasoning.
Considering that having a complication during pregnancy could now mean either jail time or death, I don’t know why any well off professional with options would choose to continue to live in Texas.
> The Texas Supreme Court on Friday night put on hold a judge’s ruling that approved an abortion for a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis, throwing into limbo an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S.
> Cox learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to her lawsuit.
> Furthermore, doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her two prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
Considering that having a complication during pregnancy could now mean either jail time or death, I don’t know why any well off professional with options would choose to continue to live in Texas.
And then return home to a state where much of the populace, and the government consider them to be actual murderers.
Also, depending on the county they live in, anyone who helps them leave the state to have the medically required abortion may be breaking the law. Would this include the reservation agent at the airline? Sounds like it would.
The eventual court cases over whether going to another state to do something legal is in fact illegal in your current state will be sad and interesting.
"Emergency healthcare is just a flight to a neighboring state away, and you may be prosecuted when you get back" isn’t as much of a sell as you think it is.
> If this is a growing trend, it begs the question. What will Austin have to do to remain the darling of the tech world?
I moved to Austin in 2008. The locals had a “go home, we are full” ethos at the time.
Looking back in history, that same vibe shows up in the 90s, 80s, 70s and before.
So, it’s somewhat presumptuous of the author to assume that the people who lived here when I moved here or live here now ever desired to be the “darling of the tech world.”
The article also doesn’t mention all the hardware we had way before metafaceboinstagramoogle showed up. Amd and National Instuments and Dell. Not to mention Apple has a huge campus. Richard Garriot, creator of ultimate online and a ton of gaming shops are in town. We’ve got a major university, healthcare, and a diverse number of other industries already here.
Austin likes what’s in Austin (minus the grumpiness about traffic and regressive state politics). If Silicon Valley likes that too, cool. If not, I don’t think we’ll be worried about it too much. I’ll just keep remote working like I’ve been doing for the past decade+ and paddle boarding on the weekends.
Lived in Austin for most of my life and moved away as soon as I could due to Heat and traffic. It’s not an enjoyable place to live weather wise for most of the year. Basically you feel trapped at home either due to heat or don’t want to deal with traffic which I am sure by now is most the day.
The supposed migration to Austin was always destined to reverse.
Austin is a mid-tier city when it comes to amenities, weather, food, and more. That works for a lot of people, including myself.
But for those established in places like the Bay Area, Seattle, or New York City - it’s a hard sell. Sounds like it took a few years for these companies to figure that out.
> many startups are now choosing to leave the capital city they once flocked to because of the rising cost of living, low funding, and lack of diversity, according to TechCrunch.
Texas in general is having brain drain. Some due to politics, some due to systemic factors that made the areas relatively less desirable in the past.
Nope it's just the usual politics and media sensationalism. There are plenty of smart people in well paying jobs in Texas like anywhere else with such a large overall population. Just because it's not like California doesn't make it undesirable for people and businesses. Pretty much the opposite actually.
A left leaning drain, yes. But that doesn't mean the state is any worse or better intellectually than the influx that has been occurring into Texas for years.
> But many startups are now choosing to leave the capital city they once flocked to because of the rising cost of living, low funding, and lack of diversity, according to TechCrunch.
What a weird thing to say. What difference does the color of people’s skin make? I just got back from Tokyo—wouldn’t it be bizarre for me to complain that it was too uniformly Japanese? Would it be better if there were fewer Japanese people and more Indian people? Why exactly?
It's not a skin color question, it's a question of other cultural elements. For example: My Indian & Chinese friends & family enjoy having a deep community of friends, restaurants, heritage events, bilingual schools, etc. The school matter is particularly acute; virtually every community on the SF peninsula has Mandarin immersion programs. In San Jose, Asians are 38.1% of the population versus 8.4% in Austin.
These considerations are amplified for smaller cultural niches - e.g. Afghani, Vietnamese, Korean, French, etc. I'm sure Austin ranks high in (tech-weighted) diversity compared to other cities in Texas, but it probably doesn't hold a candle to SFBA & NYC.
(Note: Plenty to love about Austin. There are no silver bullets.)
I'm not sure what tech weighted diversity means. Number of Asian people? If you're looking at % white people Austin is the whitest city in Texas. SA, Houston, and Dallas all have less white people than New York or San Francisco.
It sounds like your friends aren't interested in diversity but specifically looking for the opposite. People that share a shared cultural heritage and language. Nothing wrong with that, but it's just weird to call that diversity.
> It's not a skin color question, it's a question of other cultural elements. For example: My Indian & Chinese friends & family enjoy having a deep community of friends, restaurants, heritage events, bilingual schools, etc
Sure. That’s why a lot of my family has moved to NYC or Dallas, because there’s large populations of Bangladeshis in those cities, and they can be around people who share their language and cultural background. But why would you care about that? (Why is it mentioned in the Tech Crunch article?)
And clearly skin color does have something to do with it. If you’re talking about culture and food, Austin is pretty “diverse” for a white person from the west coast.
Because knowing and interacting with minorities tends to make people less racist. That's why there's a huge difference between the level of racism that minorities have to encounter between cities and small towns.
That seems circular. Also, I don’t think your premise is correct. For example, the kind of “diversity” that exists in San Francisco (where there is a sharp class divide between whites and Asians on one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other) probably breeds racism, even if it’s a subtle kind: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen...
Also, your premise doesn’t match my experience, at least as a south Asian. I’ve never felt any racism or stereotyping in rural America. But I have in Toronto, where there’s a large underclass of south Asians. I’ve also experienced racism from other minorities in urban parts of the US. I think it’s quite possible that the conflict that inevitably arises when groups live alongside each other in the real world causes racism. I suspect the only exception to that is ethnically diverse places that are culturally and economically homogenous across ethnic lines. There’s virtually no places like that, pretty much anywhere.
Readit News
No one leaves because of "lack of diversity": look at how Bellingham WA exploded in the last few years. Further, the VMware layoffs and Meta/Facebook and Google retrenchment are country-wide and not confined to only Austin.
What is more likely is that Austin, which saw a huge run-up in home prices, is just not as affordable as before. Add in quality of life things like longer commute times, and the end of ZIRP draining available funding...
1) It's hot for any skin color, compared to most anywhere else in the country. Not everyone enjoys staying indoors for half the year (I have lived in TX.) Folks might move from coastal California and then learn that lesson the hard way.
2) If you are a woman, or woman adjacent, then the fact that religious extremists now set reproductive law might affect the desire to live in the state, if one has a choice.
If true, we'd also expect to see mass closures of eng offices in places like Tokyo, Shanghai or Mumbai due to their "lack of diversity."
John Carmack is a famous transplant here who has never wanted to move since. It's also a few degrees cooler than Austin - though with all the new pavement the urban heat island effect might even that out.
Dead Comment
When my parents came to this country, they chose to live in a Virginia county that was so red a Democrat wouldn’t even run for the Congressional seat in some cycles. They could’ve moved next door to liberal Maryland, but they didn’t. I’ve never gotten a satisfactory explanation for that.
Something seems to be working well enough for most TXn's though.
Home prices are dropping like a rock. And commute times were hell a decade ago.
I think the bigger issue is that these firms bet big on real estate and then the pandemic suddenly clued people in that remote work was possible and now instead of admitting they made a mistake are blaming the issue “on Austin.”
Also: to speak to the diversity part. Read up on Austin’s 1928 plan to intentionally segregate the city. Austin is still one of the most racially segregated. In an interesting turn of events Houston (due to its lack of zoning laws making redlining hard to impossible) is the most racially diverse city in the nation. Amazing what impact a bunch of people a hundred years ago can have on a place even after they are dead and their laws changed.
In a nation that includes, amongst other cities, New York City, this is extremely unlikely.
If tech is mostly "bro dudes", they're definitely not moving away from Austin due to "diversity or abortion rights". They moved to escape the CA state taxes & the politics of the area they left.
The article is trying to support an economic thesis with social / identity politic reasoning.
Also known as "journalists just making shit up and passing their agenda off as facts."
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> Cox learned she was pregnant for a third time in August and was told weeks later that her baby was at a high risk for a condition known as trisomy 18, which has a very high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and low survival rates, according to her lawsuit.
> Furthermore, doctors have told Cox that if the baby’s heartbeat were to stop, inducing labor would carry a risk of a uterine rupture because of her two prior cesareans sections, and that another C-section at full term would would endanger her ability to carry another child.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/texas-supreme-court-pa...
Also, depending on the county they live in, anyone who helps them leave the state to have the medically required abortion may be breaking the law. Would this include the reservation agent at the airline? Sounds like it would.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/us/texas-abortion-travel-...
I moved to Austin in 2008. The locals had a “go home, we are full” ethos at the time.
Looking back in history, that same vibe shows up in the 90s, 80s, 70s and before.
So, it’s somewhat presumptuous of the author to assume that the people who lived here when I moved here or live here now ever desired to be the “darling of the tech world.”
The article also doesn’t mention all the hardware we had way before metafaceboinstagramoogle showed up. Amd and National Instuments and Dell. Not to mention Apple has a huge campus. Richard Garriot, creator of ultimate online and a ton of gaming shops are in town. We’ve got a major university, healthcare, and a diverse number of other industries already here.
Austin likes what’s in Austin (minus the grumpiness about traffic and regressive state politics). If Silicon Valley likes that too, cool. If not, I don’t think we’ll be worried about it too much. I’ll just keep remote working like I’ve been doing for the past decade+ and paddle boarding on the weekends.
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Austin is a mid-tier city when it comes to amenities, weather, food, and more. That works for a lot of people, including myself.
But for those established in places like the Bay Area, Seattle, or New York City - it’s a hard sell. Sounds like it took a few years for these companies to figure that out.
Texas in general is having brain drain. Some due to politics, some due to systemic factors that made the areas relatively less desirable in the past.
Nope it's just the usual politics and media sensationalism. There are plenty of smart people in well paying jobs in Texas like anywhere else with such a large overall population. Just because it's not like California doesn't make it undesirable for people and businesses. Pretty much the opposite actually.
Also known as lack of cheap Indian labour
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What a weird thing to say. What difference does the color of people’s skin make? I just got back from Tokyo—wouldn’t it be bizarre for me to complain that it was too uniformly Japanese? Would it be better if there were fewer Japanese people and more Indian people? Why exactly?
These considerations are amplified for smaller cultural niches - e.g. Afghani, Vietnamese, Korean, French, etc. I'm sure Austin ranks high in (tech-weighted) diversity compared to other cities in Texas, but it probably doesn't hold a candle to SFBA & NYC.
(Note: Plenty to love about Austin. There are no silver bullets.)
It sounds like your friends aren't interested in diversity but specifically looking for the opposite. People that share a shared cultural heritage and language. Nothing wrong with that, but it's just weird to call that diversity.
Sure. That’s why a lot of my family has moved to NYC or Dallas, because there’s large populations of Bangladeshis in those cities, and they can be around people who share their language and cultural background. But why would you care about that? (Why is it mentioned in the Tech Crunch article?)
And clearly skin color does have something to do with it. If you’re talking about culture and food, Austin is pretty “diverse” for a white person from the west coast.
I'm not sure if that's actually true for Austin though.
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For example https://www.reddit.com/r/okc/comments/12vli29/black_family_m...
Also, your premise doesn’t match my experience, at least as a south Asian. I’ve never felt any racism or stereotyping in rural America. But I have in Toronto, where there’s a large underclass of south Asians. I’ve also experienced racism from other minorities in urban parts of the US. I think it’s quite possible that the conflict that inevitably arises when groups live alongside each other in the real world causes racism. I suspect the only exception to that is ethnically diverse places that are culturally and economically homogenous across ethnic lines. There’s virtually no places like that, pretty much anywhere.