patrick.net

edvard2 says

Good example: we went to Austin which is supposed to be the coolest city since sliced bread. Guess what? There's a whole lotta' nuttin, the downtown was sort of small, and the rest was made up of cookie cutter subdivisions with most of the nicer older areas near the city already being hopelessly overpriced with some houses just as much as the same in the Bay Area.

Are you trying to say that comparable houses in the highest priced parts of Austin and the highest priced parts of the Bay Area (Palo Alto, Atherton, Los Altos, etc.) are the same price? Or are you saying that houses in the highest priced parts of Austin cost as much as an average house in San Jose? There's a big difference between the two.

My company has engineering groups in both the SFBA and Austin. The pay differential is about 12-13% between the two locales.

I still like San Diego a lot better than the RBA and it is cheaper place to live. Only if more jobs were there or had chance to work remote to move back in a heartbeat.

ducsingle5313 says

Are you trying to say that comparable houses in the highest priced parts of Austin and the highest priced parts of the Bay Area (Palo Alto, Atherton, Los Altos, etc.) are the same price? Or are you saying that houses in the highest priced parts of Austin cost as much as an average house in San Jose? There's a big difference between the two.

Let me clarify a bit. I think there is a sort of misconception about Austin by many in California that its going to be drastically cheaper than the Bay Area. To be certain, in dollar terms, it is to an extent.

But from my experience of spending not only a lot of time there but also looking for a job there as well ( granted this was around 3 years ago) was that at least as far as I could tell, any of the places I'd personally want to live- aka- areas that weren't some suburban sprawl hell in some new-ish subdivision surrounded by strip malls in some suburb like Round Rock or whatever were actually pretty pricey. As in if you wanted to live in say- the Circle C area, or one of the older neighborhoods within the city up on the surrounding hills, then you could expect to pay anywhere from 400k-600k for a house, and a smaller one at that.

Now... perhaps many Californians would say: " Gee wizz! 400k! is that all?" Well not so fast. Unlike California, TX has not only high real estate taxes, but progressive ones at that and additionally, if your area has more amenities like schools, libraries, and whatnot, your taxes could be higher. So the tax rates were usually pushing 3% in some of the nicer areas.

Translation: a 400k house would have a $12,000 annual tax bill. That $400k house suddenly becomes very expensive indeed.

On top of that, the taxes are re-accessed and if your house goes up in value... so too do your taxes.

But the single biggest problem I had with Austin was that the jobs simply weren't there. Sure- its a 'major' tech city. But there was a BIG difference between my job search in the Bay Area where every other day yielded dozens and dozens of positions versus Austin where in my field there were maybe a handful and of those, there was a LOT of competition. One recruiter told me that every position she dealt with had at least 100 responses within the first day alone.

I looked in Raleigh, Atlanta, and a few other cities that seem to come up routinely as this new area for tech and when it came time to search for jobs there were a surprisingly small number and for the most part fairly low entry level type stuff anyway.

That was 3 years ago. Whether things have changed I don't know. But as for now it seems that the tech biz in the BA is fairly strong and there's a lot of demand for talent, which probably explains some of the bubbly in the housing market as we speak.

edvard2 says

Translation: a 400k house would have a $12,000 annual tax bill. That $400k house suddenly becomes very expensive indeed.

But it sounds like that $400k Austin house (smaller house, highly desirable neighborhood) would correlate to a $1M+ house in the SFBA. So in terms of property taxes, maybe a wash. Plus there are much cheaper alternatives in the Austin 'burbs, whereas $400k in the SFBA gets you a 3BR/1BA in East San Jose with Nortenos neighbors.

edvard2 says

But the single biggest problem I had with Austin was that the jobs simply weren't there.

That's pretty much a deal breaker. One of the reasons I'm considering leaving the SFBA is because the job growth in my field is transitioning to other (cheaper) locales. I have confirmed this with recruiters who have been watching this trend for the past few years.

ducsingle5313 says

But it sounds like that $400k Austin house (smaller house, highly desirable neighborhood) would correlate to a $1M+ house in the SFBA. So in terms of property taxes, maybe a wash. Plus there are much cheaper alternatives in the Austin 'burbs, whereas $400k in the SFBA gets you a 3BR/1BA in East San Jose with Nortenos neighbors.

Maybe... maybe not. The areas I mentioned were definitely hoity-toity. But to be sure, the areas in question were not really comparable to somewhere like Palo Alto or Cupertino. There was an area that was across the 360 bridge where I'd say it was probably a closer comparison and the homes there were easily over a million dollars just the same as Palo Alto.

True- there are definitely cheaper burbs but from what I saw the Austin burbs might as well have been anywhere USA. There wasn't any correlation or comparison to what you might find in the East Bay where you have older established burbs with character and in most cases an actual downtown area. Most of what I saw was a whole lot of 90's-2000's tract homes and Mcmansion type construction.

A few more things to consider: the weather. Apparently the weather in Austin can get into the triple digits and stay that way for long periods of time. I was there in late Spring and it was already on the 90's. Its a given that you MUST have an AC system installed and if you've ever lived in a house that has central AC, we're talking potentially hundreds of dollars per month in power bills.

I guess I'm being negative. In the end I have no problem with the idea of living in Austin. To me some of the advantages was that it was a much younger city than most of the Bay Area cities. Lots of younger people and that translated to a little more energy. That and its different from the bay area. The people there seemed a hell of a lot nicer.

Perhaps your field or profession is easier to find work in Austin than mine so for you it might be a totally different situation.

wave9x says

I moved to Seattle from SF. After 2 years I moved back. Don't underestimate how depressing the cloudy weather gets.

I didn't last that long. I would have left sooner but needed my signing bonus in Seattle to vest to cover relocation expenses incurred moving for another company on the East Side. Big companies spare _no_ expense when moving employees.

Taxes are low (0% income tax being the most obvious; although my property taxes were about 0.7%), prices for similar size + location properties are lower (which doesn't mean a lower cost of living - my housing expenses have been pretty much identical in Sunnyvale, Seattle, and Boulder CO), and the live music scene is better although otherwise Seattle and the East Side are devoid of redeeming qualities.

While I picked up a few friends in the area that I rather like, overall the weather makes people depressed and mean.

Traffic can be horrible (low taxes don't buy big roads) - I spent 3.5 hours once driving 90 miles from Shelton back to Seattle because everyone takes advantage of the sun when they can. During one storm my wife spent 3-4 hours making the 10 mile trip from the East Side to Seattle. When we were there the government was figuring out how to accommodate baby deliveries on the highways because mothers couldn't make it to a hospital in time.

The startup scene and technical job opportunities aren't in the same league as the SF Bay Area, and worse for non-big company, non-webby people than other tech hubs like Boulder.

This be the boat?

Atlanta chiming in here...

I visited Dallas-Ft. Worth (I've never lived there) and it looks less dense and cleaner than Atlanta. It almost feels like Northern Virginia. So between Dallas and Atlanta it is my opinion that Dallas is nicer. People who move to Atlanta do so because that's where their job hunt took them but nobody thinks "I'd like to live in Atlanta, let me find a job there." I hope that makes sense. Atlanta does have a lot of large companies for its size (CocaCola, AT&T, HomeDepot, Delta, etc) and a moderate cost of living so it tends to be easy for educated people to "make it" here. On the other hand, it also has its fair share of pan handlers and hustlers. Traffic is also horrendous and is the biggest hindrance to growth that the city faces. The city's transportation infrastructure is appropriate for a smaller city like Cleveland (2 million metro area), not Atlanta (5.5 million metro area). City officials realize this and are trying to fix the problem but they are 20 years behind.

Back to real estate - Atlanta, like Phoenix and various cities in CA, has been the target of large institutional investors. Flippers are definitely back in force. I've seen multiple in my own neighborhood. New grass, new paint, and three months is all it takes to justify a $100,000 price increase. It's ridiculous.

However, given Dallas' relative location to the stratospherically-high-prices-of-CA and the resulting flow of population from CA to TX, it is my hypothesis that Dallas real estate (which has been largely insulated from past bubbles) is also ripe for significant price increases. Dallas has even more employment opportunities than Atlanta and it's moderate cost of living makes it a target for Californians willing to trade in their hipster culture for more money in their wallets.

Atlanta, on the other hand, tends to see people coming from New York and Washington D.C. Those are "our" Californians and Atlanta looks like a bargain to them.

I had a friend who stated that Atlanta was like LA with none of the parts that makes LA cool. I'd agree with that assessment. I grew up 3 hours from Atlanta and to me there was not really any redeeming qualities. Its one gigantic suburb with a small city center.

robertoaribas says

California had high car insurance and registration, florida car registration
was effictively zero and my car insurance fell by 50%

So what pays for the golf cart and hoveround lanes then?

I grew up in a small town of around 20,000. There were good and bad aspects to that. The good was that yes, traffic was non-existent, the cost of living was less, and people were seemingly less rude.

The bad was that people were nosy, knew everything about our family and who we were, and as far as things like decent restaurants, microbreweries, a music scene, arts, and so on were non-existent.

Also- job opportunities were limited to mostly retail and lower end type jobs, which was why housing was so cheap. I would caution those who can work online to consider what might happen if they lose that job and how easy it would be to find another considering opportunities in your field would probably be very limited in whatever area you settled and if the home you bought or rented depended on the income you were getting, that luxury house might very well turn out to be extremely expensive if you can't find a new job and have to suck it up and work at a fast food joint.