Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

I wonder if something else is going on for California and Texas to rank behind Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana? I'd bet that the issue with the standard of measure, not the actual quality of education.

And sure, property taxes for a $1M home in TX is the same as a $2M house in SF, but that's a mansion in TX and a 2 bedroom apartment in SF. You get way more for your money.

And google tells me that TX does cap property tax increases. Not like Prop 13, but we all agree Prop 13 is terrible, right?

And everyone is ignoring the state income tax which is 9.3% in the $60 to $300k bracket (and goes up to 13.3%). So if you’re making $250k, that’s saving of $20k alone, which is about the property tax in TX.

It’s not even a close comparison in terms of the tax burden between the two.

Traffic in Austin is weird. There are some places where it’s literally the worst in the nation — I-35 is the most congested interstate in the nation, and the most congested part of I-35 starts just above Austin and ends just south of Austin. I-35 is more or less congested pretty much around the clock.

But if you live closer in, and you’re traveling further out, then you can go counter flow, and it might not be too bad, depending on where you start and where you end.

I can say the same is true for Cupertino. My commute there started on Stevens Creek Road, where it crossed 280 and went west on Stephen’s Creek Road and ended when I got to Bubb Road, just east of where Stevens Creek Road crossed 85. If you can carefully pick your starting and ending points, the commute isn’t so bad.

But I was a contractor. I was getting paid way more than the employees. At the time my contract was up, I calculated that if they were going to offer me a job, they’d have to offer me at least $250k per year plus bonuses and stock, just to let me keep renting that same one bedroom apartment. And nobody but executives were making that kind of money at that time. Meanwhile, my wife stayed here in Austin, with our cats and our house, and we were still making house payments as well — and my 1BR apartment out there cost way more than our 4BR house here.

Getting back to the traffic here in Austin, 360 can be a parking lot if you’re going the wrong direction at the wrong time. So can Mopac. And both are still better than I-35. And that’s really it for major north-south commuting options. The 130 toll road on the far eastern sides of town just isn’t an option for most people. As fast as it is, it would take far too long to get over there, go north or south by however much you need, and get back, compared to just staying on the parking lot you’re already on.

So, the key will be to choose housing that is close to the office, so that you can avoid most of the commute in the first place.

And housing costs is one area in which Austin fortunately still can’t compare to the Bay Area. As much as I hate how much housing costs have gone up and that my wife and I are now effectively locked into our house because we can’t find a place we could afford to buy within a 200 mile radius for what we would get for this house, our housing costs are still way, way below that in the Bay Area.

And yes, we still hate all the jokers coming in from California who are gladly dropping millions of bucks to buy up houses that just a few years ago were only worth a few hundred thousand.

Thanks for visiting, but Austin is full. Yankee go home, please.

Even in Manhattan, where transit is pretty decent, the only reason why transit is faster (sometimes) is because traffic is terrible all the time.

Amazon is here, and again they have a number of buildings in the Domain area. I think it might be their second or third largest site, behind HQ and possibly HQ2.

Of course Dell is here. Google doesn’t have much of a presence, yet.

There are lots of other companies that have massive presence here in Austin. Tesla is highly unlikely to be the biggest.