As someone who just bought a house in Austin this year, if the reason is "affordable housing", they're in for a world of hurt.
It's not even close - a crappy house on the peninsula is 1.7M, with the median closer to 2.5-3M. I mean, look at this: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom... I think Austin is better about building too, meanwhile in the Bay Area they just rejected units desperately needed in the tenderloin because they might become a "tech dorm".
Property taxes are _much_ higher in Texas than California, in fact Texas has one of the highest property taxes in the nation (because there's no income tax, and TX still needs to fund itself somehow; TX also has one of the highest sales taxes for this reason, too). You pay the same on property taxes for a $400k house in Texas as a $1M house in California. Not only that, CA has Prop 13: for better or worse, your prope…
This is a huge reason that property values are cheaper in Texas. Either you pay high property tax rates on (relatively) cheaper property or you pay exorbitant rent to your landlord that just keeps escalating. There is very good evidence that property taxes are capitalized into property values. Land taxes in specific are fully capitalized (which is to say, they lower the price of the land, and the landlord can't pass…
I agree! Also the fact that TX has much more lax zoning laws (Houston has none whatsoever) than CA, and a general lack of NIMBYism compared to the Bay Area in even the cities, you get a much more affordable metro area.
Unaffordable housing prices are as much a policy choice as a function of the market.
California's tax regime is really backward. I suspect Tesla's departure is just the tip of the iceberg and that the repeal of the SALT deduction in 2017 really hastened this trend. High earners pay an effective tax rate of > 50%. They are partially picking up the slack from Prop 13, which artificially distorts the housing market by allowing longtime homeowners to pay property taxes based on decades-old assessed value…
Resource driven economies like Texas can maintain a low income tax by deriving most of their tax revenue from property taxes and taxing oil and gas revenues. IMHO the high income tax regime found in California is actually a function of high density, high income, knowledge based earners moving in. If enough of them arrive, demands for services (schools, fire, police) and infrastructure (i.e. light rail, etc.) will inc…
This seems like a bizarre way to torture the narrative to say high taxes are good, no, required?
Have you seen where the money goes? It ain’t supporting a “technology infrastructure”.
I think the exodus from California to Texas is overblown. The choice is between Earn above average salary and enjoy good weather, politics, and outdoors. Earn a median salary and enjoy okay weather and lower taxes.
To back this up, CA and TX tax people differently, but CA is more fair: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/11/taxes-are-sur... By More fair, I mean, CA has a similar tax rate across incomes, but does place more burden on top earners than TX does. TX on the other hand, is unfairly taxing people more at lower incomes, and less for people at higher incomes. TX policies don't align with my moral beliefs–I would…
I disagree with that article (which repeats the ITEP WhoPays report). It incorrectly assumes that the incidence of the property tax is on the renters that occupy a house rather than the landowner. If you think that property taxes are more regressive in Texas than California you would predict that poor people pay more for rent in Texas than California, when the truth is the reverse. And if you think that property taxes are regressive, you would predict that low property taxes reduce inequality, but the truth is that California’s low property taxes only enrich landowners at the expense of the poor and are the biggest source of inequality. The property tax is a rather progressive tax insofar as its incidence is on those who gain from excluding others, while it allows taxes on labor to be low.
> High earners pay an effective tax rate of > 50% How so? I put a salary of $300k in SF here, and came up with 38%: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#c0piT... . Obviously Fremont workers do not need to live in SF.
Put in 3 M$/yr and you'll get 50.7%. Not a lot of people hitting that regularly, but I imagine it can sting a little if you've got a more proletarian salary normally and are hitting that region just once because of say, a start up liquidity windfall
Good. This will both alleviate pressure on the Bay Area as well as accelerating the political shift to the left in Texas. It's a win all around. I actually think that living in the Bay Area as a tech employee is increasingly unjustifiable from an ethical point-of-view. It was once the case where that was necessary for many career paths but that's increasingly not the case and the pandemic has hastened that shift. Why…
Here’s the rub.. his job also goes away when those companies go away. I still agree with you for a different reason though - if you believe that it’s a poorly governed place, at some point it becomes immoral or at least unwise to continue to sustain it with your tax dollars.
So you see this kind of argument in the current "labour shortage". Some people will say certain businesses can't afford to pay more and they'll fold otherwise.
I personally don't see the business owner earning an income (sometimes a substantial income) as justification for the workers to earn less than a living wage.
It's the same here: there's no good justification for someone commuting plus working 18 hours a day and getting paid for 10 of those hours.
I mean, to be fair, 78725 is effectively the middle of nowhere in Austin. It makes sense if Musk's goal was to choose a fairly undeveloped exurb, but the gigafactory is as close to Manor and Webberville as it is to central Austin. I know Fremont is suburban, but it's a well incorporated suburb to both SF, Oakland and San Jose. 78725 is on the opposite side of Austin from most of the fancy neighborhoods.
Google maps says downtown Austin to Giga Texas is 17 miles, 24 minutes. I don't know what traffic is like in Austin but I imagine it's not nearly as bad as the bay area. I think a 25-30 min commute is pretty reasonable and most people would happily take that for much cheaper housing. The big difference is that in Austin you have the option to commute a bit for much cheaper housing. But in the bay area you could be co…
Traffic in Austin is insane. Legit insane. Definitely comparable to the Bay Area if not worse.
And there is absolutely no transit alternative comparable to BART. There is a morning and evening train, but it's really only effective if you live and work exactly on the stops.
I temporarily lived out in Sacramento, and commuted occasionally to MP. This is not bad compared to some others, but seeing stationary brake lights getting on the highway at 4am was something else
I’m pretty sure if I moved out to Sacramento from where I am now (the South Bay) I’d try and take the Capitol Corridor in, if I could find any way to make the timing work. It’s not that I’d expect it to cut down on my commuting time, but I’d definitely want to test whether it could cut down on my commuting stress. (Granted, these are pre-pandemic thoughts about moving.)
> homeless people [...] are just more visible in the bay area due to lax rules for them I'm not normally someone who picks on phrasing, but this one is a little orwellian. The implication is that, while homelessness is endemic basically everywhere, the proper "rules" for them to obey are that they are not to be seen . And enforcement regimes that allow them to exist in public are "lax"? Yikes.
I feel like orwellian is the wrong term. Isn't that geared more towards the thought police and how you feel about the government's politics? Not if you're homeless or not? I don't think OP meant anything by his post. California's policies are lax. Regardless if you think they're deserving of consideration or not, it's miserable to have a huge homeless population living next to your house. People may pretend its not r…
The homeless are also people who live somewhere, just not in houses. "Lax" implies that treating them harshly would be better. But fining and jailing them isn't going to make them more able to get a place to live. Aggressive anti-homeless policies just hide the suffering from the well off.