The traffic in Texas is significantly better than SF and LA.
My parents live in a suburb that is 25 miles from the Houston and it takes 45 minutes to get to downtown during commute hours. My girlfriend has an equivalent commute in the Bay which takes around 75-90 minutes during commute hours.
The public transit is terrible in Texas so I expect it will be worse than the Bay in a decade or two if they refuse to build up transit, but for now it's a lot better. Texas has a lot more space so they've addressed traffic issues by building much wider highways and also multiple rings of highways. Obviously that's an unsustainable solution in the long term but for the time being, my Texas friends have way better commutes than what I see my co-workers deal with in the bay.
We shouldn't really be criticizing other states when California is definitely not the model for transit and traffic either. LA is a nightmare and SF is getting close to one as more and more tech companies move away from transit centers and force employees to drive.
In Texas, you are forced to drive because there isn't public transit. In California, you are forced to drive because you have to live far away from transit centers in order to find affordable housing.
Dallas is terribad. At least it was in 1999 when I lived there. I can't believe that there are fewer people on the road and less traffic now than then.
Fun trivia tip: the opening scene of "Office Space" with the old person and walker going faster than traffic was filmed in Las Colinas (where I worked at the time).
It has gotten better in 20 years (that's way too long to retain judgement on transportation). Not a ton better, but since most of these companies aren't moving to Dallas proper, it's moot anyways.
It's going to be funny in 5-10 years when the major Texas cities become the next SF because none of them are planning for any sort of large population growth.
Austin already suffers from horrific traffic and poor infrastructure. City planning here is a joke.
Virtually all city planning is a joke, and even if one can conjure up an example of a currently "well planned" city it may well be a short lived title based on a number of economic and industrial changes in the coming years and decades.
SF is unique in that it is an industrial incubator for the modern tech industry, much as Detroit once was for the auto industry. There's nothing to say that SF couldn't become the next Detroit, save for its significant tourist appeal. In which case it would become more like Venice.
It's not entirely surprising though, and I can say that on intuition alone I've been guilty of just laying the blame at the politicians doorsteps and shaking my fist at the sky while proclaiming "such incompetence!".
The fact is that it's an incredibly difficult thing to get right, is extremely expensive and carries huge risk if one is hoping to get such planning done right in a pro-active manner, than in the reactive manner which we're accustomed to. The potential downsides to getting such an effort wrong are catastrophic.
Austin has been attempting to create a plan for an extensive zoning rewrite for the last several years. It recently restarted after the previous attempt was abandoned in August 2018 (after spending $8.5 million on consultants) because "it became a political lightning rod for preservationists and neighborhood groups who warned the effort would upend longtime neighborhoods."
We still have very loud neighborhood NIMBY groups. But the votes are what matters. I'm hopeful.
As for the grandparent, this doesn't mean suburban traffic will improve. I doubt it ever will, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand -- I recommend relocating to walkable/bikeable/busable parts of town, which are expanding (albeit slowly, because of pushback from drivers).
I think the appropriate measure is median sales price, not price per square foot. Cities show that most people can consume much smaller homes than the median new construction in America, but small homes isn’t as much of an option in this part of Texas.
Austin is the least affordable of the Texas metros. The affordable ones are Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas/Fort Worth (basically any major metro outside of Austin).
Because of the highest property tax in the nation.
This is a feature, not a bug. It’s very difficult for the wealthy to hide their property. There are also a number of ways to reduce the tax rate on one’s primary residence. Combined effect of this is surprisingly progressive, closer to a wealth tax.
Another effect high property taxes, is that most existing homeowners feel some pain when real estate prices soar and therefore there is a large contingent of voters who want to make sure that supply keeps up with demand so that their taxes don’t go up.
By contrast, where I live (in San Francisco), the existing homeowners make out like bandits when the government policies are punitively exclusionary towards outsiders. Soaring home prices mean nothing but good for homeowners when their taxes are both very low and virtually frozen at the original purchase price by prop 13.
Don't forget the joy of parcel taxes, city and county sale taxes, and other ways of bleeding you out to make up for the people who aren't paying their fair share because of Prop 13; which you still have to pay even if prop 13 doesn't help you because you were born in the wrong decade.
I'm struggling to see how someone who got $1MM+ in free equity would be priced out of a home they could previously afford; or how the current system that prices people who grew up here out of the entire area is somehow more fair.
Work your whole life and live in a moderately priced home. Housing prices around you drastically shoot up for reasons outside of your control while you're in your 60s. Not fair to be forced to move at that point I think.
It's a good thing you're not forced to move at that point, then. If your home value goes up, you've got a lot more equity you can borrow against. There are many investment vehicles at that point that are very low risk and will cover the meager 1% property tax (less in CA) you'll be paying.
Higher tax rates, but fairer than California. Your neighbor isn't paying lower taxes than you just because they bought 10 years ago when the property was cheaper.
High property taxes are one of the most liberal policies of Texas. It's a progressive tax that is largely shouldered by rich landowners and the revenue form a large part of budget for public school systems.
I'm not sure why people in California love our regressive Prop 13 tax rebates that largely benefit the wealthy and are a cause of huge budget deficits. Prop 13 is the most Republican policy we have in our state.
Except property taxes for landlords are lower. Multi-family residences have a much lower property tax rate. A neighbor left the extra front door on his home as he remodeled just to keep that massiv discount.
Edit: This is just another example of supposedly progressive rules that create a nice safe wall between upper middles and don't have to works.
> Does that include taxing employee equity based on how it is valued based on each round of funding?
This already happens, except as a tax on income rather than wealth. Exercising options in a private company that has increased in value will result in a tax bill. And you can't sell shares to pay that bill (usually) because the company is private.
That’s exactly my point. Property tax is a tax on wealth. You are not taxed on options until you exercise them. You also can’t sell part of your house to pay taxes on it. You also aren’t taxed on the increase in your stock portfolio until you sell it.
I think equity, even relatively illiquid equity, should be wealth taxed (at least on amount >$50m). I am sure there will be novel financial tools to provide liquidity to pay this tax if this was the case. At the same time it might discourage bubbles in valuations (eg weworks).
Why carve out equity that should have a wealth tax associated with it differently based on the type? I would think that intellectually consistency would demand that either we tax all equity based on unrealized gains the same whether it is stock, equity in a business or real estate property.
That's all relative because there is no state income tax so if you are a high-income person then Texas is paradise, even with high property taxes. Also guess who makes all the executive decisions in terms of where to put the jobs? Executives aka rich people.
Fair point, but my wife and I bough at $1600 sqft home on a nice large lot in a decent neighb when we were in grad school (College Station, TX). We paid $120K and had P+I of $400. Sure, taxes added a couple hundred bucks, but it was still a fraction of California. We interviewed at Livermore labs during that time and the same home was about $1M.
We stayed here (she still at university as a professor), and I left to co-found a startup. Still pretty cheap real estate, affluent & educated population (of all political leanings), and endless supply of smart folks to hire. And BBQ. I'll take it.
Though I love California too, just returned from a week in Big Sur and then the wine country. It's just must cheaper to visit :)
Seriously, Texans in the cities may be redneck compared to the rest of the country, but holy fucking shit are they friendly as hell. If you suck in social situations, you will find plenty of extroverts that will gladly make you feel included in a group of strangers.
It really is best to come experience it in person. Yes, there's always stupid people doing stupid things anywhere and it's certainly a conservative state, but people are generally much more tolerant and intelligent than the stereotypes.
The stereotypes are hilarious. I'm a computer scientist and spent 9 months at IBM's TJ Watson facility up in New York outside the city. Every person I contacted to rent a room from made a point to tell me that I'd have to leave my horse at home because they didn't have a stable. They uniformly were shocked in disbelief when I explained I owned no horses, no cowboy hat, no boots. The horror...
People here trend conservative. This cuts both ways, it means that they don't want to make a scene when they see something that offends their norms, but it also means that you have to try a little harder to open minds.
The other ruling ethos here seems to be 'good fences, make good neighbors'.
Might be the types of people I met in Texas, but I generally feel people are receptive to counter view points if you dont look down on them. I never had issues with debating people in Texas.
I lived in Dallas and it is the only place I've lived where people would scream homophobic slurs at me in the street. I wouldn't say I'd never move back, but the situation would have to be dire for me to consider it. Definitely cut your hair if you visit.
I dunno, 40 years of living in other places, stuff like this only happens in Texas and the South. There are definitely assholes in NY and Boston but they won't get up in my grill for "looking gay" on the street so that's pretty neat.
It happened to me in Chicago, twice in one weekend. All I did was wear a pink shirt and walk down the street. That was enough to garner homophobic slurs.
I'm not gay and when I mentioned it to one of my Chicago friends, and he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "Yeah."
People can be friendly to your face and still vote for and support laws and political leaders who want you out of their area or worse.
Look at how they fought gay marriage or how they treat Mexican-American's. There are pockets of safety in that state (Houston/Austin) but as a whole it's not that great.
I lived a number of years in Idaho which has the same problem. I'm "OK" in Boise (even there things can happen) but I'm genuinely concerned for my safety when I have to drive anywhere else in that state.
based off the experience of soem of the LGBT people from there who've talked about it on Discord servers I'm in. Some areas are better than others but even someone from Dallas in this thread experienced issues.
>Friendly if you're the right political party and orientation, I hear.
Yes, it's conservatives who have done and continue to do the following:
- Attacked people in the streets over a hat they've chosen to wear. A hat merely supporting the nation's elected President.
- Deplatformed, or had banned from even attending non-political events, for wearing the same hat at an entirely irrelevant place and time.
- Cornered or essentially kidnapped college professors, and then continuing on to destroy their careers, for expressing views not even contrary to their own but merely in light conflict with it.
- Started trending topics on social media lamenting a desire to kill an entire demographic of people based on their race and gender, or denouncing a race or gender as "trash".
- Held marches in prominent cities calling for cops to be shot.
- Attacked journalists from the "opposite" side for merely being at events to report on them.
etc. etc.
Long story short, I would wager that your typical radfem socialist type, adhering to the stereotypical dress attire and appearance choices, would be a magnitude of order more safe and welcomed walking down a street, or attending a university, in a major Texan city than a conservative with a MAGA hat, or similar stereotypical signal, in a liberal city.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment was flamebait, but this comment is the bursting into flames that we're trying to avoid here.
