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Thank you for articulating what I was thinking much better than I would have been able to.
San Jose is the runaway train in per capita wealth, but its at the bottom end of large metro area status. Seattle is expanding from mid to large metro status so I think it along with metro SF are the most impressive examples of maintaining an unusually high GDP per capita across a large population.
San Jose is in the same MSA size group as Austin and has double the per capita GDP (in a much smaller geographic area). They also more than doubled their population since 1970, installed a full light rail system in the 80's....all with almost zero hype or horn-tooting.
This goes back to being "middle sized fish in a small pond." San Jose (and Seattle) are swimming in the big pool where you don't get any atta boys for success, and if you take too long of a nap the other guy won't hesitate to grab your milk money.
If Austin were on the west coast, like so many are fond of imagining because its such a natural, obvious, not contrived scenario to contemplate, its attention spectrum would likely be several levels above Fresno and several levels below Sacramento.
I don't see San Jose, Seattle, Fresno or Sacramento in this poll? Enjoy the San Diego weather and relax. I'm in Orange County and I'm fascinated by the level of angst a midsized city in Texas causes you. How is Austin tooting it's horn?
I'm not sure Sacramento is a true sun belt city but since you brought them up, their per capita income is *gasp* below Austin's. We can look at Fresno vs Austin next but I'd expect similar results.
In total GDP, yep. Not even close. Houston beats Austin by a larger margin. Of course, as we've seen in this forum, some of Austin's biggest critics are from it's home state.
In terms of per capita high income salaries? No it absolutely does not. And it’s not even close. At all. Austin is third in the state in terms of number of high-paying jobs. But per capita? It’s not even remotely close. It’s first by a large margin
In terms of per capita high income salaries? No it absolutely does not. And it’s not even close. At all. Austin is third in the state in terms of number of high-paying jobs. But per capita? It’s not even remotely close. It’s first by a large margin
Here's an article from a few years ago that some posters will probably print out, frame and hang on their wall. It mentions, in terms of economic success, Austin in the same breath as San Jose, San Francisco, and Seattle in the second bullet point in large font:
It uses a variety of economic indicators to place Austin at #3 behind San Jose and San Francisco.
When explaining its methodology it linked to this website, where I found a metric called "real personal income", something that Dallas/Houston more than triples Austin in:
Thank you for articulating what I was thinking much better than I would have been able to.
San Jose is the runaway train in per capita wealth, but its at the bottom end of large metro area status. Seattle is expanding from mid to large metro status so I think it along with metro SF are the most impressive examples of maintaining an unusually high GDP per capita across a large population.
San Jose is in the same MSA size group as Austin and has double the per capita GDP (in a much smaller geographic area). They also more than doubled their population since 1970, installed a full light rail system in the 80's....all with almost zero hype or horn-tooting.
This goes back to being "middle sized fish in a small pond." San Jose (and Seattle) are swimming in the big pool where you don't get any atta boys for success, and if you take too long of a nap the other guy won't hesitate to grab your milk money.
If Austin were on the west coast, like so many are fond of imagining because its such a natural, obvious, not contrived scenario to contemplate, its attention spectrum would likely be several levels above Fresno and several levels below Sacramento.
Sure...using San Jose excluding the fact that to most people except MSA geeks, it's basically part of SF Bay Area.
The best comparison if you insist on West Coast to ATX is actually Portland OR anyway - which ATX has a leg up as Portland doesn't have a state flagship university in the smack middle of the city. Similar metro size, similar starts as "tech center" (both are semiconductor manufacturing center) only to diverge somewhat as ATX now has numerous regional office along with HQs like Tesla and Oracle, while Portland, well, they remained where Austin was about 10 years ago or so before the boom.
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Something I'm thinking about though - for the OP which metro did Seattle exactly leapfrog anyway? The metro area itself is always #3 after LA and SF, and ahead of (but close to) San Diego. Then the OP starts thinking Austin will somehow climb ahead of 4 different metro areas (Houston, DFW, Atlanta, Miami) that are literally "Tier 2" (or Tier 1.5) metro in the entire country (Tier 1 = NYC, LA, Chicago)?
Compare ATX to Raleigh...to Charlotte...yes. To Houston/DFW/Atlanta/Miami? Those are a different beast!
Sure...using San Jose excluding the fact that to most people except MSA geeks, it's basically part of SF Bay Area.
The best comparison if you insist on West Coast to ATX is actually Portland OR anyway - which ATX has a leg up as Portland doesn't have a state flagship university in the smack middle of the city. Similar metro size, similar starts as "tech center" (both are semiconductor manufacturing center) only to diverge somewhat as ATX now has numerous regional office along with HQs like Tesla and Oracle, while Portland, well, they remained where Austin was about 10 years ago or so before the boom.
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Something I'm thinking about though - for the OP which metro did Seattle exactly leapfrog anyway? The metro area itself is always #3 after LA and SF, and ahead of (but close to) San Diego. Then the OP starts thinking Austin will somehow climb ahead of 4 different metro areas (Houston, DFW, Atlanta, Miami) that are literally "Tier 2" (or Tier 1.5) metro in the entire country (Tier 1 = NYC, LA, Chicago)?
Compare ATX to Raleigh...to Charlotte...yes. To Houston/DFW/Atlanta/Miami? Those are a different beast!
Yes, the OP is pretty hard to interpret clearly.
It also said Austin is "getting expensive like west coast cities", which implies real estate, though you can find fully upgraded SFH's in Austin's suburbs for around 300K.
I haven't been able to figure out who Seattle leapfrogged either, and its certainly not the first thread where people have hashed out all kinds of intellectual contortions and sleight of hand to make Austin appear to be a top tier metro.
I posted this 2 years ago...Austin had the 4th fastest growing GDP in the 2010s. That's very impressive. Raleigh was right behind.
50 Largest Metro Area GDPs by 2010-2019 Growth Rate
+99.80% San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara
+85.97% San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley
+77.43% Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue
+76.98% Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown
+75.89% Raleigh-Cary
+67.02% Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin
+66.19% Salt Lake City
+62.44% Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia
+61.71% Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario
+61.23% Denver-Aurora-Lakewood
Among Metros with >500k jobs, Austin now trails just the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Seattle, DC, and Denver in terms of average wages. It has a lot more "tradeable" jobs, ie. those in industries where the product or service is mostly consumed somewhere else, than other sunbelt regions. Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Phoenix, etc are built on growth and local consumer spending on real estate and personal services. Houston is much like that with the big exception of its energy industry. Those cities also have deep histories as rail and air hubs, which Austin does not, and in some ways has made it less diverse economically, more tech dependent, and more higher wage as a result.
Now what's interesting is that just four years ago, avg wages in Metro Austin trailed Chicago, LA, even Charlotte, and were around 15th in the country. No other place has shot up like this, clearly the impact of all the California, or former California, HQ companies opening huge offices there.
Re: Seattle, Austin's regional wages are about half of that city's, in part due to avg wages being about 15% lower. Seattle also has the benefit of Microsoft and Amazon being HQ'd locally, while Austin doesn't have the same presence in cloud infrastructure, and it's VC funding is still fairly light. But no question, it's way ahead of other sunbelt cities. Wouldn't surprise me to see it surpass DC and Denver in avg wages and move to #5 nationally by that measure.
Lately I've liked using this metric because I think it more or less tells us what typical working families are earning.
[b][u]MSAs by Median Income, 2-Earner Families, 2021 Austin $133,371
I agree it is a better metric than per capita income.
But it is still a statistic so you gotta use it in context.
It tells you what families in the middle of the pack is expected to make. It doesn't tell us how big or small that middle Stat is though.
Where we go wrong is comparing cities of varying size. We seem to think that averages, medians and modes even out things so we can make sweeping generalizations. We can't.
You can probably draw the conclusion that on average Austin has a wealthier middle class than bigger cities using a combination of per capita and median income but you still can't make sweeping generalizations.
Example, let's say the data points for Austin are:
$10 ,$25, $26
And the data points for DFW are:
$10, $12, $12, $14, $16, $18, $18, $18, $32
In that totally made up example Austin would have the higher average income (per capita) and it would have the higher median income ( the one in the middle) BUT to make sweeping conclusions like the OP did we would need a lot more info.
We need stats on employment, job creation, actual size and growth of the middle class, cost of living , growth of amenities.
In the example above DFW would have the more robust middle class while Austin's would be virtually non existent.
The thing with statistics an average person would say that the median in Austin is higher, the per capita income is higher therefore it will be easier for me to fit in to that middle bracket. Not true! Austin is still small and that smaller range is going to make it harder to break in to that cushy range. You would probably have a better chance in a bigger metro with good economy than in a much smaller one with a blazing hot economy despite the higher statistics.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gaylord_Focker
Austin's per capita income has been above Houston's for years. I don't remember when Austin wasn't more expensive TBH. This isn't a flash in the pan deal. Austin has been growing for 20+ years.
But what does that tell us though?
Quote:
Originally Posted by 18Montclair
I posted this 2 years ago...Austin had the 4th fastest growing GDP in the 2010s. That's very impressive. Raleigh was right behind.
50 Largest Metro Area GDPs by 2010-2019 Growth Rate
Austin and Raleigh definitely did well, but does that mean they did better than the bigger ones tho? They had a higher rate, but again smaller metros are easier to rack up the rates. The really impressive ones are the Bay Area. The rates are high despite the larger size.
Now if Austin can keep up the 80% growth for decades up to where it is as large as the others then THAT would be impressive. More likely as Austin and Raleigh gets to be about the size of DFW, Houston and Atlanta the rates would even out, or they may not even be as high.
Averages are great when comparing similar sizes but it does not even-out size like we try to push on here. Getting 80% growth is great anyway you look at it. I would be a hater to say otherwise. But is 80% of 140 Billion better than 50% of 400B to 500billion? IDK, it's just how you look at it. Houston and DFW are just dealing with greater baseline numbers. Statistics are very deceptive without context.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheseGoTo11
Among Metros with >500k jobs, Austin now trails just the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Seattle, DC, and Denver in terms of average wages. It has a lot more "tradeable" jobs, ie. those in industries where the product or service is mostly consumed somewhere else, than other sunbelt regions. Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Phoenix, etc are built on growth and local consumer spending on real estate and personal services. Houston is much like that with the big exception of its energy industry. Those cities also have deep histories as rail and air hubs, which Austin does not, and in some ways has made it less diverse economically, more tech dependent, and more higher wage as a result.
Now what's interesting is that just four years ago, avg wages in Metro Austin trailed Chicago, LA, even Charlotte, and were around 15th in the country. No other place has shot up like this, clearly the impact of all the California, or former California, HQ companies opening huge offices there.
Re: Seattle, Austin's regional wages are about half of that city's, in part due to avg wages being about 15% lower. Seattle also has the benefit of Microsoft and Amazon being HQ'd locally, while Austin doesn't have the same presence in cloud infrastructure, and it's VC funding is still fairly light. But no question, it's way ahead of other sunbelt cities. Wouldn't surprise me to see it surpass DC and Denver in avg wages and move to #5 nationally by that measure.
Again, Austin did great last decade or 2 but it's that sustainable. There is just so far that certain industries can take you. Austin will need to be fed, clothed, places to reside... as Austin grows the portion of high earning indiduals will drop as the supporting service and construction sectors grow. We can't predict the future and it doesn't make sense comparing Austin's wages to DC until Austin gets to DCs size. If Austin ever gets to DCs size it may be the Next San Francisco or the next Detroit. What we can say it's that POUND FOR POUND Austin does better than just about any in its weight class. It's the MVP for smaller metros, but I don't think it would survive many rounds in the Ring with the big guys.
To me Atlanta, Houston, DFW and Miami were all greater cities when they were Austin's size. At 2M people all 4 anchored large areas, they all served large hubs airlines, those cities to me were just further along than Austin.
I know I'm very critical of Austin, but I'm also very fair in my assessment of the place. It's booming, it has high average incomes, it is highly educated, but all im asking is will it maintain those accolades as it grows up.
Wait till Austin starts getting tens of thousands of immigrants that came to the US with just the shirts on their backs like Houston had been getting for decades.
Wait till Austin starts getting tens of thousands of domestic migrants looking to service the growing population like Atlanta and DFW have been getting for decades.
I just don't see it keeping up so I think all the comparisons are premature. Detroit's rate of growth was higher than Chicago but that didn't last long enough for it to surpass Chicago. I'm betting that the per capita, median income and all that were higher too. But the vast majority of boom cities can only maintain those averages for a few decades. I can bet you that if City-Data was a thing back from the 1950s to the mid 1980s you would be even more tired about hearing about Houston and Dallas than you would now as they had higher rates of growth, bigger economies, Houston threw up 2 supertalls in the 80s and built other almost supertalls in the period, but all that slowed down as booms don't last forever. Austin today is almost as good as these big southern metros were 40 years ago so can we really say it is set to surpass them today? We might have to wait 40 years.
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