481–490 of 691 posts
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"Effective" rates. It accounts for prop 13, so you aren't getting .7% if you're buying a brand new home. My mom has a million dollar home in California and pays around 1.5k/year in property taxes because she's owned it since the 70s.
Whereas we paid about eight times that last year, and our house isn’t valued as high. EDIT: and we’ve owned this house since 2008.
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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…
I lived and worked for six months in the Cupertino area for a contract job at Apple. My wife and I moved to Austin in 2006. 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…
> Thanks for visiting, but Austin is full. Yankee go home, please.
This NIMBY mentality is why Austin is rapidly catching up to California in housing prices. The advantage is not going to last long at this rate.
(And before you start, I'm like 4th generation native Texan.)
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…
The exodus has been soundly proven to be a myth. [1] But assuming it isn't, there aren't many better places to go. Texas is a joke. Traffic is worse than LA in the major cities and it is run by Christian zealots. Yeah maybe you pay fewer taxes but the other quality-of-life tradeoffs aren't worth it. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/California-exodus-is-ju...
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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.
I talked to several Tesla and former Tesla folks that will probably relocate because of this, and the say is that since Austin in less NIMBY than the Bay Area new housing will get built and prices will go down. It's a more complex bet than just "we move there because houses are affordable now".
Or is Tesla going to give each of them 25kw solar arrays plus three Powerwalls, and a backup natural gas generator for when the sun doesn’t come out in January or February and ERCOT decides they’re going to just go into rolling blackout mode because they are unable to sniff their own butts?
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It’s a no brainer, my company offered to let me move out of CA a few years ago. My utilities are 50% cheaper and more reliable, crime is lower, the air quality is better, and I bought a new construction with 10G Fiber Internet (You will never get this in California due to failing infrastructure). I miss is the arts, culture, and nightlife, but that was wiped out by government-enacted COVID restrictions so there are f…
I don’t know where in CA you were… But here in Oakland I have the option for 10G fiber (albeit the landlord only wired my actual apartment for 1G ethernet, but the fiber is like 50 feet from my door). Utilities are extremely low… Far lower than I had to deal with winter and summers in the US South. And at least so far, this year air quality hasn’t yet entered in to the toxic level.
Otherwise, you get what little you can get and you just have to be happy with DSL because it’s still better than what you can effectively get with Spectrum, since you’re sharing that with all your 500 closest neighbors and you still have to put up with outages and throttling and being treated like trash from the “cable guy” installers who wouldn’t understand concepts like bend radius if you broke their arm at the right distances and showed them how the glass fiber also breaks when it is bent too tightly.
Yes, this is an old pet peeve.
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It’s a no brainer, my company offered to let me move out of CA a few years ago. My utilities are 50% cheaper and more reliable, crime is lower, the air quality is better, and I bought a new construction with 10G Fiber Internet (You will never get this in California due to failing infrastructure). I miss is the arts, culture, and nightlife, but that was wiped out by government-enacted COVID restrictions so there are f…
NIMBY housing cartels aren’t political idealism, and they are the main reason people are leaving. Also I’m not sure the utilities are better in Texas. Cheaper, sure, but is that gas infrastructure winterized yet?
Nothing happened then, and I don’t expect anything to happen this time.
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There are many millions of people in the country that don't share your politics. Some of them are even engineers with families.
I don't know which people like sitting in traffic. Wide roads is a sign of sitting in traffic. Family wise though, moving to Texas is bad for half the members of your family. Half the people in your family, aren't going to agree with the Texas government's views, whether you want to force them to or not.
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I don’t think housing would be the “official” reason as Elon is keenly aware of how hard it is to buy a house in central Texas right now. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-austin-texas-housi...
Compared to the Peninsula, Austin is basically free. Median home price in Austin is $575,000. Median home price in Palo Alto, where the current Tesla HQ is, is $3,488,610.
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The east part of Austin where Tesla is located is still underpopulated compared to most of Travis county, so there's room for a lot of housing to be built out that way. Connectivity from there to central Austin isn't too bad, since that's the direction of the airport and Houston.
Yeah that's what they said! I am not saying it's not a sound bet, honestly I hope it goes well. The thing is that nothing indicates that the new housing built there will not be sold at prices that flatten the curve. Yeah supply and demand and all that, but there will be more demand and the real estate market is good a limiting itself to the supply that keeps the prices increasing just about right for them to make a q…
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The east part of Austin where Tesla is located is still underpopulated compared to most of Travis county, so there's room for a lot of housing to be built out that way. Connectivity from there to central Austin isn't too bad, since that's the direction of the airport and Houston.
Yeah that's what they said! I am not saying it's not a sound bet, honestly I hope it goes well. The thing is that nothing indicates that the new housing built there will not be sold at prices that flatten the curve. Yeah supply and demand and all that, but there will be more demand and the real estate market is good a limiting itself to the supply that keeps the prices increasing just about right for them to make a q…
There’s no new inventory being built, and there won’t be a significant amount of new inventory built any time soon, because Texas is the most terrified state in the country of all the Mexicans coming across the border to take all the jobs.
They’ll spend billions of dollars to protect that border, but nothing to build new housing for people moving to the state.