I've been told Austin's city council mulishly refused to see the growth trend and didn't annex the hills around the city when they had the chance. Austin waterways like Bull Creek went from summertime swimming holes to unsafe to enter due to septic tank runoff and high levels of coliform bacteria because city services - sewerage in particular - weren't extended to those areas.
People who lived there really hoped the usual waxing and waning of population in cadence with student university attendance would go on forever. But according to an aunt who lived there from the 1960s until property taxes priced her out a few years ago, too many people loved it and moved back after school or just never left and it sort of snowballed from there. Her anecdotal evidence was the cashiers at her Half Price Books stores she managed often had Masters degrees but chose to work there rather than move and find a better job elsewhere.
These days people running a cash register while holding an advanced degree is more of a cliche than remarkable evidence that some place is so special you'd rather be underpaid there than be paid better somewhere else.
But yeah to hear her tell it, in her forty years there every decade that passed brought some unwelcome change to Austin.
I mean is anybody from here?
Have you ever met anybody from here?
Have you ever seen so many condos in your whole damn life
That were built here in one year?
Everyone I know that was born here is dope as fuck
And everybody else sucks
There's no easy fix for this, especially in a place as extremely laissez-faire as Texas, where urban planning and zoning are seen as mortal sins.
Take Vancouver - even though they passed residency laws, with penalties. Average price in 1977: $90k. 2017:$1.05M. Average price dropped to $900k in Dec 2020 ... now $1.4M.
Residents of Austin, TX have been complaining that the city changed or got too crowded shortly after they moved in, whether that was a year ago or decades ago. People who moved to SF in 2010 complained about the people moving there in 2015.
Same thing happens at a neighborhood or district level too. Everybody feels like they were the last person to move in while it was still good and everything after them is unwelcome.