Does anyone care about Texas? (Houston, Dallas: high school, to live, moving)
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EzPeterson: Interesting that you consider yourself a "Texan". Not objecting to that AT ALL, just a different perspective for me. I personally consider myself a New Yorker, even though I no longer live in the City. It was where I was born, raised and my accent is very noticable. Think of the song "Englishman in New York" and replace it with "I'm a New Yorker in Aus-tin". I reserve Texan for the Texas-born, such as my children and my husband. Heh.
Then it will acquire the more volatile characteristics of California,
Sorry, catholicdad, I think your theory falls apart here. Austin is a city. California is a state. The tech bubble and housing bubble and cost of living in CA all required quite a lot of cooperation from the state.
Texas is the last state that would emulate many of those things, even if the city of Austin wishes it were otherwise. Even your description of California isn't accurate -- far more than 'a handful of entrepreneurs' made money and far more than that still live there and enjoy it, even with its higher costs. Even my in-laws, who left CA for Austin, weren't looking for a better place to live - they loved California. They were just tired of the politics and state government screwing up one of the most naturally beautiful places to live in the country. They were looking for a state that didn't regard them as its personal piggy bank.
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Austin's prosperity is based on government investments in education which created a large high-tech workforce.
Wow! Two weeks and you already understand the entire basis of the economy!
Austin was not some podunk town that sat stagnant, waiting for the magical hand of the government to come invest in something and turn it into a real city. It has grown steadily since its inception, and like a lot of places in Texas, it has done so because of its citizens, not because of its government. It was growing well before any enterprise funds got involved to lure the Apples of the world here.
It's also interesting you mention Pittsburgh -- a great city but one that is near bankrupt due to all the "government investments" it made.
I marvel at the hubris of making the kind of grandiose pronouncements about huge swaths of land and large groups of people that you've done in such a short time. There is "hostility against outsiders" everywhere you go, but it's isolated to jerks and the NIMBY crowd.
But I clearly lack your powers of perception, both on the human scale and the civilization scale. I have to actually go look up facts instead of just divining the truth merely by looking at something.
Texas is the last state that would emulate many of those things, even if the city of Austin wishes it were otherwise. Even your description of California isn't accurate -- far more than 'a handful of entrepreneurs' made money and far more than that still live there and enjoy it, even with its higher costs.
Texas and California share the same problem of having too many people packed into a place that has too little water. California dealt with this earlier through government interventions, constructing aqueducts, increasing water restrictions, which lead to a rise in the cost of living. It will be interesting to see if Austin's private sector can somehow make water appear out of thin air.
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Austin was not some podunk town that sat stagnant, waiting for the magical hand of the government to come invest in something and turn it into a real city. It has grown steadily since its inception, and like a lot of places in Texas, it has done so because of its citizens, not because of its government. It was growing well before any enterprise funds got involved to lure the Apples of the world here.
According to wikipedia's entry on Austin,
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During the 1880s, Austin gained new prominence as the state capitol building was completed in 1888, and claimed as the seventh largest building in the world.[27] In the late 19th century, Austin expanded its city limits to more than three times its former area, and the first granite dam was built on the Colorado River to power a new street car line and the new "moon towers".[27] Unfortunately the first dam washed away in a flood on April 6, 1909.[44] It was finally replaced in 1940 by a hollow concrete dam[45] that formed Lake McDonald (now called Lake Austin) and which has withstood all floods since. In addition, the much larger Mansfield Dam was built by the LCRA upstream of Austin to form the flood-control lake, Lake Travis.[46] In the early 20th century, the Texas Oil Boom took hold, creating tremendous economic opportunities in Southeast Texas and North Texas. The growth generated by this boom largely passed by Austin at first, with the city slipping from fourth largest to 10th largest in Texas between 1880 and 1920.[27]
Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Austin launched a series of civic development and beautification projects that created much of the city's infrastructure and parks. In addition, the state legislature established the Lower Colorado River Authority that, along with the City of Austin, created the system of dams along the Colorado River to form the Highland Lakes. These projects were enabled in large part because Austin received more Depression era relief funds than any other Texas city."
Sounds like big government to me.
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It's also interesting you mention Pittsburgh -- a great city but one that is near bankrupt due to all the "government investments" it made.
Then why is it that the G-20 summit was held in Pittsburgh, hailing the city as a model of economic revitalization? Have there been G-20 summits in Austin?
This is just shifting the goal posts. So the government built some dams and made the area more livable. Lots of areas have been made more livable in this manner. It doesn't sustain long-term growth. Before it was "Austin is going to become California" and now it's "well, neither place had water." Both places are in the US, too!
The fact that government has made investments in infrastructure (not at all the same thing as corporate welfare or entrepreneurship funds) at the same time that the city has been growing hardly means A caused B.
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Then why is it that the G-20 summit was held in Pittsburgh, hailing the city as a model of economic revitalization? Have there been G-20 summits in Austin?
Because Barack Obama isn't going to hold an economic summit in Texas?
This year's G-20 is in Los Cabos. Is that a model of economic revitalization?
I lived in PA for a couple of years before coming to Austin. The cities are union strongholds with varying degrees of adaptation to the 2012 economy. Pittsburgh has done a lot better than other cities in the state (notably Harrisburg) and it deserves credit for doing so ... but it's not comparable to the growth we've seen in Austin any more than the reasons for Austin is directly comparable to Silicon Valley.
Both places have traffic and both places have people who grumble about how things used to be before all the people arrived. That's about it.
This is just shifting the goal posts. So the government built some dams and made the area more livable. Lots of areas have been made more livable in this manner. It doesn't sustain long-term growth. Before it was "Austin is going to become California" and now it's "well, neither place had water." Both places are in the US, too!
Austin follows the same trajectory as California, so it will run into the same limits. No contradiction there.
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The fact that government has made investments in infrastructure (not at all the same thing as corporate welfare or entrepreneurship funds) at the same time that the city has been growing hardly means A caused B.
Historically, the US economy has grown whenever the government directed funds towards development -- from subsidizing the development of the West to subsidizing massive increases in university enrollment. Austin benefited from both. Neither boom is sustainable, as the West only has so much water, and a university education is only so valuable when everyone has a degree. From 1920-1950, Detroit was hailed as the utopian model city of America. Today it is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In the late 20th century, Silicon Valley was hailed as utopia. Today it is a dystopia of billionaires calling the shots while nobody else can afford a decent living. Austin is next in line.
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I lived in PA for a couple of years before coming to Austin. The cities are union strongholds with varying degrees of adaptation to the 2012 economy. Pittsburgh has done a lot better than other cities in the state (notably Harrisburg) and it deserves credit for doing so ... but it's not comparable to the growth we've seen in Austin any more than the reasons for Austin is directly comparable to Silicon Valley.
Pittsburgh overcame a greater challenge of turning a city around. Austin is starting from scratch, but will face Pittsburgh-style challenges in the future when old industries die out. When the boom stops, the wealthy opportunists will move out, the buildings will become old and useless, and the remaining residents will resist change.
Last edited by catholicdad; 05-10-2012 at 01:17 PM..
Ummmm, yeah. Guess we add another member to the Tinfoil Hat Club. Amazing you got this read on Austin in two weeks, then baited this thread to have a forum for your totally tangent rant.
Kudos for the use of no real data and early 1900's Wiki references.
Yes, Detroit is a wasteland just because the government stopped investing in it. Except for when the government bought the entire auto sector (minus Ford). I'm sure it being a wasteland had nothing to do with high labor costs, unions refusing to adapt, and inexpensive foreign competition...and some genuinely terrible cars. That's what killed Bethlehem Steel -- not lack of government investment.
I don't even know what "Austin is starting from scratch" means, and I don't think Austin is "booming" so much as Texas is booming, and I'd attribute that to its more business-friendly climate and lower cost of living -- all things that matter a lot in a recession.
You're ignoring decades of relevant industrial and political history in Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to support your extremely simple theory that all cities follow the same trajectory and only government investment can turn anything around. The sole piece of data you've cited is Wiki data on dam-building from 90 years ago.
Maybe where you come from that counts as research, but here in Texas we're edumucated. Keep up your internet prognosticating if you like, but don't quit your day job.
I have a family to feed, so I'll move to hell and back. I had other choices of places, but Austin appears to be the best place for my family for now. I guess I'll ride this city's bubble while it lasts. The preferential criteria were:
- In the South
- Affordable housing
- Good schools
- Large Catholic population
- Good local job prospects, should job change become necessary.
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