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Moving to Texas

nytimes.com

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Re: Moving to Texas

#81

Post by mplanchard »

As an anecdotal data point, I have lived in Austin since 2014, but my wife and I are planning on moving elsewhere sometime in the next couple of years. Austin is a fantastic city if you can afford to live in it. Great neighborhoods, great food, relatively laid back culture. The summers are brutal, but borderline tolerable.

However, winter storm Uri was a real eye opener, and the (lack of) legislative response to it, while not surprising, is yet another indicator that no matter how great Austin is, it’s still subject to the state legislature. I can’t see myself staying in a state where the government is trying so hard all the time to insert itself into the culture war du jour and continually failing to actually govern, not to mention the continued assault on women’s and voting rights.

We’re lucky enough to have a house here, but for what we paid for it we can get 2x or more land/house in other places. Now that remote work has taken off, there’s a lot less tying us to this city in particular. We’ll probably try to keep the house and become yet another set of out of state homeowners renting out space in the city (which I swear is at least 80% of the purchases I’ve seen in our neighborhood lately).

Re: Moving to Texas

#82

Post by abernard1 »

pkrotich wrote: post #20

People mentioned cheap property but property taxes in TX are insane… but I guess it helps that they don’t have state income taxes.

> People mentioned cheap property but property taxes in TX are insane

But the houses--I kid you not--can be 20% the price per sq ft. Any assessment that does not consider this is dishonest.

Austin's prices have skyrocketed by 40% over the last year, but if you compare a house in Austin to SF, even excluding lot size or modernity, it's not a comparison. If you look at Houston or Dallas, it's basically free.

Average sq ft in Austin is 2100 sq ft vs average sq ft of 1150 sq ft in SF. Average price in Austin is $606K and average price in SF is $1.5M.

Re: Moving to Texas

#83

Post by PeterWhittaker »

My gay aunt and her partner moved to Austin just before the 2008 housing crash. Within months, they had experienced sufficient discrimination that they desperately wanted to move back to NE but had to wait until the housing market recovered enough for their loss to be palatable.

They miss the weather but don’t miss tradespeople refusing to enter when they realize the house belonged to two women.

Re: Moving to Texas

#84

Post by betwixthewires »

dang wrote: post #74
betwixthewires wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that conversations get more contentious and less productive when these things are brought up, but if it was a point made in the article it is arguably less productive to discussion to just ignore it and not bring it up at all. We are talking about the article after all, and the article says what it says.

With issues like that I always return to the first principle of HN: we're trying to optimize this site for intellectual curiosity ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... ). Since that's the overriding value, the answer easily follows: if there's something that gratifies intellectual curiosity in an article, bring that up and let discussion flow from there; if there's nothing that gratifies i…

I agree the article should be flagged, it is a low quality article lean on information and insight, it doesn't even offer an interesting perspective.

Re: Moving to Texas

#85

Post by foobiekr »

betwixthewires wrote: post #47
foobiekr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. I’ve spent some time working on retirement options since my wife and I are close. Arizona really has nothing to recommend it. Florida does, but southern Florida is kind of a wasteland with pending climate issues and northern Florida is a trashy hell hole. I have family there. If not for the cultural issues it would be a no brainer but who wants to retire somewhere awful? Taxes-wise, I think California is underr…

> The property tax is insane and regressive but it’s a wash. How are property taxes regressive? Working class people bear the tax burden with income taxes, land owners bear the tax burden with property taxes, I'd argue that having 0 income tax and funding the state through property tax is as progressive as it gets. Of course, rental property has to pass that tax on to renters to remain profitable, but still that allo…

Property taxes are regressive because they tend to be flat rate - two properties with the same value in the same place will have the same tax assessment regardless of the income of the owners. The lower income owner pays a greater % of their income to taxes.

Relatively speaking, a steep progressive income tax regime is less regressive than a property tax since the burden is entirely on home value which is largely out of the control of homeowners.

For those who don’t live in Texas, there’s a whole cottage industry of companies that will contest the annual assessment (typically tax increase) for you, often with a guarantee that they can save more than their fee.

Re: Moving to Texas

#86

Post by foobiekr »

rconti wrote: post #52
foobiekr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. I’ve spent some time working on retirement options since my wife and I are close. Arizona really has nothing to recommend it. Florida does, but southern Florida is kind of a wasteland with pending climate issues and northern Florida is a trashy hell hole. I have family there. If not for the cultural issues it would be a no brainer but who wants to retire somewhere awful? Taxes-wise, I think California is underr…

I recently saw folks dealing with the flip side of Prop 13, over in Texas. Vehemently against raising property taxes to pay for badly-needed schools, because retirees on fixed incomes can't afford large property tax hikes. OTOH, Prop 13 is also awful, and, surprise, surprise, we can't pay for schools in California, either, so....

Prop13 is really not awful. The extensions to the law that don’t encourage relocation are awful (such as passing properties to heirs) but having tax stability is generally beneficial in many ways. I actually expect to see prop13 laws proliferate as Californians invade places without similar laws, though perhaps tied to age.

Re: Moving to Texas

#87

Post by dang »

betwixthewires wrote: post #84
dang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With issues like that I always return to the first principle of HN: we're trying to optimize this site for intellectual curiosity ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... ). Since that's the overriding value, the answer easily follows: if there's something that gratifies intellectual curiosity in an article, bring that up and let discussion flow from there; if there's nothing that gratifies i…

I agree the article should be flagged, it is a low quality article lean on information and insight, it doesn't even offer an interesting perspective.

Perhaps we should downweight major media opinion pieces. They seem mostly not to be very good for HN.

Re: Moving to Texas

#88

Post by howinteresting »

rossdavidh wrote: post #62
howinteresting wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does touch on abortions, but brushes it off in a way that I found rather shocking given the gravity of the situation.

20+ year Texas resident here. The abortion law was, I believe, mostly passed in order to attempt to keep progressives from moving to Texas. The state legislature and governor know that it is most likely to be struck down by the courts. Therefore, it will be gone and out of the way before the next election, so they don't face much of a backlash, but it may keep a bunch of Californian Democrats who might otherwise move…

The problem is that even if everything you're saying is true, the signaling is enough to have a tremendous chilling effect on actual, material access to abortion in Texas.

Re: Moving to Texas

#89

Post by AnimalMuppet »

betwixthewires wrote: post #47
foobiekr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. I’ve spent some time working on retirement options since my wife and I are close. Arizona really has nothing to recommend it. Florida does, but southern Florida is kind of a wasteland with pending climate issues and northern Florida is a trashy hell hole. I have family there. If not for the cultural issues it would be a no brainer but who wants to retire somewhere awful? Taxes-wise, I think California is underr…

> The property tax is insane and regressive but it’s a wash. How are property taxes regressive? Working class people bear the tax burden with income taxes, land owners bear the tax burden with property taxes, I'd argue that having 0 income tax and funding the state through property tax is as progressive as it gets. Of course, rental property has to pass that tax on to renters to remain profitable, but still that allo…

It works like this: Here's a guy who makes $50K a year, has $20K in assets other than his house, and his house is worth $150K, of which $30K is equity. Taxes are proportional to that $150K. Total assets / house price is 1/3.

Here's a billionaire - literally worth $1 billion. He doesn't have a $3 billion house. So the ratio of total assets to amount covered by property tax is much more favorable to the billionaire. His house may be $30 million, but total assets / house price is 33/1.

Re: Moving to Texas

#90

Post by seanmcdirmid »

systemvoltage wrote: post #56
techsupporter wrote: post #30

I was born in Texas and lived the first part of my adult life there. All of my family still lives there. But many years ago, I decamped for Seattle (before the tech boom really got started here) and, bluntly, I'm never going back. I wish everyone who is moving to Texas the best of luck and truly hope you succeed. But if you think moving to Dallas or Austin or Houston and putting a Beto sign on your front window is an…

I haven't lived in Seattle but close - Portland and has more similarity to Seattle than differences. > In 2017 Portland ranked third. Now it has dropped to 66th out of 80. [1] I am glad I got out. The entire west coast needs less Seattle chadzone, Portland protests, LA homelessness, SF crime and Berkeley wokeness. The great thing about America is that we have states competing with each other and keeping in check. My…

All the west coast cities (what you mentioned + Vancouver BC) have roughly the same boom town problems, and, to be honest, have always had them. Hobos hopping trains for LA or SF in the 1920s, skid row being a term invented somewhere in either Seattle, Vancouver, or Portland circa the late 1800s as a place where the logs were skid up to the saw mill, and the muddiest ickiest place for someone (only the destitute) to live, etc...

> My hope is that west coast will become better in next decade after some self-introspection. I love the west coast and it is sad to see the decline :-(

The west coast is the way it is because they've always been boom towns. You could say "I hope Seattle learns it lessons!" when it has grown 25% in the last decade, there just isn't the feedback for that. And from this perspective, the west coast has been in decline since the mid 19th century. I'm actually glad it isn't perfect, or it would attract even more people!

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