michael_rb

Thanks for sharing, sounds like a reasonable comparison. I’m really sorry to hear that by the way. I spent a year in a suburb outside of Houston and also felt it was far less tolerant than Palo Alto / MTV / Cupertino was, but wasn’t sure if it was a fair comparison for me to make given the differences between the two (the suburb of Houston I was in was an hour outside of the outer loop and had very few jobs and very little diversity, whereas the suburbs making up the Bay Area all felt a bit like one continuous city to me, with a large population and the university right next to them). I haven’t spent any time near Dallas either though, thanks for that perspective.

Proposition 13, which arguably had a hand in creating the housing problem that exists there today (alongside neighborhood efforts to pause any new housing development, something Austin is facing as well) was championed mostly by Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, both of whom were conservative.

Anecdotal, but everyone I know who left California recently did so due to the high cost of housing, not because of their tax liabilities or a plastic straw ban. Kinda hard to be upset about having to give 9% of your income to the state when you have to give 50% if your income to the landlord (for an 80 year old, 350 sq ft studio heated by radiator in my case when I lived there).

Depends where in Texas and where in California no? If you grew up outside Bakersfield and then moved to Austin for college would the reverse not also be true?

People experiencing homelessness often do need things like phone minutes and electronics and gift cards for things like toothpaste or deodorant or various needs that aren’t covered by just food donations. These things are often needed in order to help themselves get out of the situation they’re in, to connect or to be presentable for opportunities that arise that might aid them (and to be able to get the phone call telling them of such opportunities). To say this is something many Texans can’t understand I disagree with strongly, and that holds for Austin as well.

Also the idea that Californians moving are responsible for pushing Austin in a more liberal direction I find untrue and a bit at odds with reality both from data presented on metro-to-metro movements [1, 2] and also with my own anecdotal experience here. I find many of the people I know who moved here from California think they’re getting away from what they consider an overtly liberal area by doing so, and in part move specifically because they believe Austin (by being in Texas) will be more conservative. From my experience having lived in Austin and in Texas (over twice as long as I’ve lived in California, which I first moved to from Austin), it is and has been more progressive than even most of the Bay Area has seemed to me (excluding Santa Cruz and Berkeley which I find comparable).

As far as what might be making it more liberal, it was a large part of the 60s and 70s counter-culture movement (Whole Foods and Wheatsville, Janis Joplin and the 13th Floor Elevators, Mother’s Cafe, etc.) the founders and artists of which were not from California, and in the case of Whole Foods and Janis actually were Austin exports to California. And also being widely more known for being a college town with large music festivals and a huge DIY scene. Austin feels more like San Jose to me these days, but it’s politics, especially when discussed with those I’ve known who were born and raised here, feel more akin to what I see and hear being discussed in places like Portland and Berkeley than what I saw and heard from those I knew in Palo Alto and Mountain View.

This is not due to Californians moving in, as even to this day the majority of Austinites are either born and raised or migrated from other parts of Texas. Even the initiative against keeping public homelessness from being criminalized was widely supported in council and by the mayor (of which I’m not aware of a single party being from California, Greg Casar who is pushing for a lot of the more progressive policies is actually from Houston and Adler went to UT and is from Washington DC).

Basically just trying to say, I disagree with the “liberal by Austin standards” idea, I think if anything you’re just seeing the city as it always was but with more political clout due to recent changes in how city council works and with a very energized mayor. The transplants from California if anything, in my anecdotal experience at least, are fairly conservative by Austin standards. But our experiences are our own.

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/geographic-mobi... [2] https://austonia.com/austin-growth