Californication and the real reasons not to move t
-
10/3/2006
My wife and I and our daughter moved to Austin about a month ago from the SF bay area. I've had a couple "what the hell have we done?!" moments, but they've been brief, and mostly on the freeways while trying to get to work (more about the traffic later). Like the previous poster, I've only gotten warm welcomes from the people here, and really enjoyed getting to know them. Having previously lived in Oregon and Santa Fe, NM, I can attest to what real anti-Californian sentiment feels like.
While Austin is culturally and politically more liberal than many parts of California, I would agree with some of the posters below: if the thought that your neighbor might be a church-attending Christian freaks you out, you might not want to move here. There are a lot of churches, almost all of them are Christian, and some of them lean social-conservative. This does have its disadvantages (see the part about Sunday mornings and beer-buying below).
On the other hand, if you hate homos, or fear that your children may lose their faith in Jesus because they associate with thespians and non-believers at school, you might want to move to Fort Worth instead. In fact, if you're not drawn to Austin by the tech industry, the music scene, and/or the liberal culture, I don't understand why you'd want to pay the premium to live in Austin when you could get roughly the same house for 1/2 to 1/3 the price in other parts of Texas that would be a better cultural match.
Now, here are the reasons *not* to live in Austin that the liberal and the conservative, the Christian and the Heathen, can all agree on:
1) the Traffic: it is bad. It is very bad. There are parts that are worse than the worst parts of the SF Bay area, or Seattle. I've run into stop-and-go traffic on the 183, at 6:30 AM, where there was no accident or construction. Optimists will point to all the freeways being built. I'll point out that a friend of mine from SF said that the traffic was bad when he visited, but there were a lot of freeways being built... the last time he visited was eight years ago. Choose your home location to be no more than 5 miles from your workplace, which will probably be a 30 minute commute, and never get laid off or quit, because your next job could well be on the other side of town and that will be a two hour one-way commute. On hot days, electronic signs on the freeways urge you to take public transport, which is odd, because the public transport consists of buses... two or three of
Nato | Cedar Park, TX