Round Rock is an exurb tho. If you're ok with that, then great! But it's hardly and apples to apples comparison. A better comparison is the going rate for rent in Austin proper.

I'm looking at that area. Currently in Seattle. Can you give me some advantage of round Rock, cedar Park or Austin? My current employers office is near The Domain in North Austin. It looks like I can get a decent house in Austin, but cedar Park and round Rock also look nice.

South Austinite so I'm a bit biased, but here's my take. Cedar Park and RR are quite a ways out of the city and traffic in Austin heading north/south is atrocious and getting worse, fast. You can live up there cheaply but if you're coming for the Austin city experience, you may be disappointed. If you do end up that far north, I would recommend looking into Pflugerville, as well, which is a very nice area.

The Domain/Arboretum is between those suburbs and the city and it's a booming area these days with a lot going on. My advice would be to look near there or south of there for your housing. This gives you good commute flexibility for jobs in the burbs and the city, and makes getting into the city much more pleasant.

I think the only advantage would be cheaper housing. They are fairly typical suburbs so it all really depends on what kind of lifestyle you are looking for.

Traffic going North/South is getting really bad, so if you are wanting to be central/downtown during the weeknights you're going to want to stick around for a while and delay your commute or somehow offset your commute.

I have a coworker who lives in cedar park (our office is by UT) and fortunately for him his manager allows him to come in around 10 and leave at 4 to miss the traffic, but he has to make up for hours later in the evening.

Texas is a hot and humid political mess. At least in Colorado, your vote won't go to waste.

I don't see how Texas is more of a political mess than CA, NY, or NJ.

Also, diversity sometimes looks like places other people love and you don't care for.

Mind sharing more?

Hot as hell. More humid than hell half the time, oddly dry the other half.

Sure it's hot and humid, thankfully everything is Air Conditioned and I'm in the pool every night.

No public transportation means no public transportation that smells like urine. Since housing is so cheap everyone has nice cars.

The desirability of transit is not because people love taking the subway, it's because cars as the main form of transport do not scale well with city size.

Anecdotal example: when we lived in Tel Aviv (bad transit, although probably not as bad as many places in the US) I had several jobs and it would take me 50-60 minutes to get from home to work or vice versa.

This was not just me but is usual in greater Tel Aviv, unless you can afford to live in the city (almost nobody with kids does, metro tel aviv has 3.7m residents vs 450k for the city itself).

We've lived in Vienna before we moved and moved to Berlin after, both cities with great transit (that sometimes smell like piss). Both metros are comparable in size to TLV (metro Vienna 2.6m, metro Berlin 4.5m) and I've had several jobs in either - it usually takes 30-40 minutes to get to work and again it's not just me but the common case.

There is public transportation and hopefully it's on the way to getting better. I personally take the bus to work everyday. Cap Metro is adding bus routes on the mopac express lanes from RR to downtown Austin.

The problem is there is a culture of driving in Austin and not of taking the public options. Most people don't even know what is out there. We could do with quite a few less cars on the road.

Since pay is high in the bay area, I have a couple of nice cars.

Thankfully the climate is outstanding so I don't even need A/C.

Sounds like you'd have a lot of traffic then....

...which we do. Getting into Austin from one of the suburbs is a nightmare during rush hour and still a slow 'stop-and-go' at all other times.