hellyes!! wrote:

blue wrote:is Austin cool?

no, actually i hear it's quite hot.

sorry, i couldn't resist.

It's okay, I was expecting that. I'm suprised it took so long.

I have lived in Austin for 17 years and the changes which were noted above have made the city less amenable to freaks and marginal types while simultaneously making it more palatable for land speculating bastards who add nothing to the cultural health of our fair town. Taht said, you can still find reasonable real estate deals and life is generally good. I think MTaylor has done a good job of enumerating the pros (though the music scene here is not as imaginative as it was 20 years ago).

My biggest warning is that Austin is very different from the rest of Texas and, for that matter, most of the southwest. As a result, you are stranded here and there are no easy drives to other 'cool' places. I feel isolated and thank my stars for Southwest airlines as flight is the only time efficient way of escape.

Texas is a diverse state with alot of natural beauty. The main problem with Texas, and it is a problem that increasingly infects Austin, is that the place is overrun with Texans.

Ranxerox wrote:The main problem with Texas, and it is a problem that increasingly infects Austin, is that the place is overrun with Texans.

Perfect! Thank you for my quote....finally...

Salut!

Ranxerox wrote:MTaylor has done a good job of enumerating the pros (though the music scene here is not as imaginative as it was 20 years ago).

I agree with you if you're referring to the punk rock scene of Austin, but it's a statement which is true of any city anywhere.

Locally, there is lots of great music created outside this band of the spectrum. Additionally, Austin has many great venues and outlets for attracting both these and other touring bands, symphonies, operas, etc.

Musically speaking, I've lived in much larger cities that offer so much less.

And yes, thank god for Southwest Airlines and West Texas.

John W. wrote:Does anyone know what the rent ranges are for 2/3 bedroom apts/houses? Or is there a site someone can point me to?

All depends on your standard of living. Try:
http://austin.craigslist.org/

http://www.statesman.com

http://www.austinchronicle.com/

it is getting very expensive here. i don't like to go to 6th street unless there is something i can't stand to miss. austin isn't like any other place in texas, but the further north you go here, the more it seems like Dubya country.
there are a lot of people from san francisco/bay area here. i have been playing music with a guy who moved here from s.f. this year, he lived there his whole life and just can't afford it anymore. he likes it here. but you gotta be prepared for the heat. it has hit 100 almost every day this month. the other night it was 94 at 8:30pm. it is humid here, but not like Houston. But when Austin was getting so much attention the last few decades, there were a couple hundred thousand people here. Now it is around 700,000 in the city limits, with the bordering towns growing faster than anything else. so it is around a million. definitely not a small town anymore. the most frustrating thing is they have not expanded the freeways fast enough to keep up with the growth. I do have barbeque about 4 times a week.

i spent a few days in august this summer and i thought that it was a really nice city. not my favorite place to visit, but still an incredible place to spend time. i don't know about MOVING there, but there is certainly enough to do. sixth street comes alive every single night whether school is in session or not, and that's a pretty incredible feat for any city outside of the coasts.

it's pretty nicely located too, i took like 3.5/4 hours to get to dallas, and maybe 75 minutes to get to san antonio. houston is east, but i'm not sure how far east.

I guess I'll make some additional comments as a former Austinite that has been living in DC for the past 9 or so years. By mentioning Slacker, that film really documents what Austin was in the very early 90s and the 80s, which is an Austin that really doesn't exist anymore. If you're expecting to fly to Austin and find the city much like it was when the movie was made you'll be sorely disappointed. It was a much smaller, close knit, cheaper place to live which made it more amendable and attractive for people who were more interested in working minimum wage jobs and doing creative endeavors on the side to live.

A lot of the things that existed and the general oddball vibe of the city are being diminished due to the influx of people moving there because it's a 'cool' place which from what I can see is destroying the place. The Drag used to have a lot of cool independent businesses that are quickly being taken over by corporate chains. A lot of things that I remember from that era are gone and have been replaced by a lot of corporate crap:

1) The Liberty Lunch where I saw a ton of great shows was demolished to make way for some condos or office building

2) Sound Exchange, which was for most of the 80s and early 90s, a great independent record store is gone and replaced by a Baja Fresh. A petition was started to keep the Daniel Johnston mural. I believe they were successful in making sure that remained as part of the new Baja Fresh facade.

3) Captain Quakenbush's, which was the oldest coffee house in Austin at one point, is gone. It's the coffee house featured in Slacker. Not sure what replaced it.

4) Europa/Olympia Books was a pretty large independent bookstore on the drag. It took awhile after the fact but I believe that the Barnes and Noble pretty much occupies the former space.

5) There's a Starbucks on the Drag now, pretty much like anywhere, but that in and of itself is a statement of what used to be predominately an enclave of small local businesses being taken over by crappy corporate businesses.

The fact that there used to be more great local businesses just really saddened me when I was there five years ago. No doubt the changes since then have resulted in more new corporate chains occupying the former spaces of really cool local shops.

In addition, when I moved back after dropping out of college the police response to homeless people was pretty heavy handed. Basically, they started driving out the drag rats & worms who were part of the character of the Drag. I remember watching the paddy wagons show up to haul people off for the crime of being homeless. I believe Austin now hold the great honor of being considered the least homeless friendly city in the US. The sad thing was, the existence of those homeless characters and the previous toleration for them was basically a signifier of the overall tolerance and live and let live attitude that the city exemplified giving way to the demands of the corporate powers that be to 'clean up' the city.

I also remember flying out to Los Angeles for my sister's wedding during that period and listening to all the people from LA talking about what a 'hip' place Austin was. This was right after it was deemed the most liveable city in the US. This is the point that I'd designate as the beginning of the end. I felt pretty disgusted at the time when that happened. I have family that has lived in Seattle since the late 60s/early 70s that I visited regularly and got to see what happened to that city in the late 80s and early 90s when it was bestowed with the title of 'most liveable city'.

Basically I think the reputation of Austin has a lot to do with it's past from the 60s to the early 90s and a lot of the things that made the city unique are being diminshed at a pretty rapid pace. I don't think the spirit of Austin is dead, but it's less and less the funky, weird town that it was.

So yeah, it's a hip city. Sure it has great things going on as far as active local arts and music. It's exceedingly liberal for a city in Texas and even most US cities. It's considerably cheap compared to other major cities in this country but expensive by the standards of Texas. Also keep in mind that while the city is liberal it sits smack dab in a state that's largely the worst example of unabashed conservatism. So, if you like the idea of living in a little oasis of liberalism surrounded by the rest of the shitty state of Texas, go ahead and move there.

yokophono wrote: a great independent record store is gone and replaced by a Baja Fresh. A petition was started to keep the Daniel Johnston mural. I believe they were successful in making sure that remained as part of the new Baja Fresh facade.

They were successful in that that portion of the wall still stands, but it looks really out of place now.

I was there last October and I agree with tmidgett about the "self-conciously 'artsy'" thing. In certain areas, I felt like I could cut the pretension with a knife. It has a kind of 'NPR totebag liberal' feel to it, not unlike Boulder, CO.

I was suprised by the lack of decent record stores.

I'm sure summer blows, but it was nice and warm/humid in October.

It is isolated, and while I figured it to be unlike the rest of Texas, one thing was universal: "Don't Mess With Texas". Holy shit! I did not expect this to be so prevalent in Austin. Liberal/conservative, gay/straight, black/white, atheist/religious, cowpoke/metalhead, young/old, I could not escape these t-shirts, stickers, posters (in every business!), etc.

Overall, I liked it, though. Lonestar beer is very enjoyable.

I tried living there (and am in the middle of desperately trying to escape).

Austin (or as I am realizing, Texas in general) is incredibly insular when it comes to it's population. I still have yet to acquaint myself significantly with anyone else because I am not "weird" enough and/or not "hip" enough. The city itself is rather pretty; the humidity is killing me though.

Being from a different state has made nearly everything an uphill battle, which is absurd, last time I checked we're all still part of the same United States.

The music scene is just as crappy as the town I moved from, "Live Music Capital of the World"? Give me a break. Both SXSW and the ACL festival are jokes that pander only to people who have money to burn (Oh yeah, the wages suck as well).