Tech workers say they regret moving to the triple-digit city, given its middling tech scene, horid weather and traffic, and “fake” atmosphere.
Austin is where ambition goes to die, if the bullets don’t kill it first. People are moving in droves to San Francisco and the city’s buildings are filling again. The much ballyhooed move of Tesla from CA to TX by the impetuous Musk has been reversed. Tesla moves back to the SF Bay Area. While people who bolt things together will remain in TX, the people with brains move back to California. Likewise, Oracles move to Texas was because of give aways from the taxpayers of Texas to the wealthy billionaire owners of Oracle, but the preponderance of jobs stayed in the SF Bay Area. Huge new office/retail/housing complexes are springing up in many parts of San Francisco, including the Potrero and Mission Rock areas. Meanwhile, in Texas, about 25% of office space is empty in Austin, Dallas, and Houston, and becoming worse as people leave for California. The tech hype about Austin from conservative, corporate news sites wasn’t real. Nor was the overblown data about the vacancies in downtown San Francisco. You won’t hear about this from right-wing, billionaire-led news organizations, such as Fox and Newsmax, who do not support taxes and regulations that are a underpinning of public institutions that support the middle-class, and indeed, democracy itself. Funny thing though, the middle class in Texas pays higher taxes than does the middle class in California. It’s the wealthy in Texas who aren’t taxed, and the wealthy are taxed in California.
“Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California’s 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub.”
Many are arriving to California from Texas and Florida. Austin now has the 5th highest rate for out-migration, and lay-offs are skyrocketing. One of the other destinations of Floridians and Texans is San Diego. Ranked the greenest city in the USA and the top big city tourist destination (yes, the place is beautiful and the food and music scene, with more live music venues per capita than any other US city, are arguably the best in the US; and as the NY Times writes, California is the contemporary music capital of the US), San Diego is a booming tech city (over 100 AI startups, for example) – fourth in the nation behind SF Bay Area, NYC, and Los Angeles as a tech hub. National Geographic recently made a documentary about San Diego as a “smart city,” one that is booming, but doing so in a smart, planned fashion that benefits its citizens and creates a since of community. And smart it is, San Diego has been called “America’s finest college town,” and the University of California, San Diego ranked 7th globally in the number of highly cited scientists.
Danielle Fountain, an Austin real-estate agent, saw a flood of tech workers arriving over the past few years, mainly because of right-wing media selling the polluted, inferno of place in a narrative to support their libertarian, authoritarian points of view. The governor of Texas was giving handouts to tech companies if they moved some of their assets there. The handouts were taxpayer’s dollars. Abbott was using the Texas middle classes’ money to pay rich people to move some of their jobs to Texas, jobs that didn’t require much education. Profits rise, and the wealthy benefit. The middle class is left with new jobs at $7.25 an hour, and their money was stripped away such that middle class institutions, such as public schools, are laid bare. While California has 6 of the world’s top 20 universities (Berkeley, Stanford, UCSF, Caltech, UCSD, UCLA), Texas has none. And from where do tech startup founders come? Number one is UC Berkeley in terms of the number of companies started, and number two is Stanford. After all, Texas is a deep red state with lax gun laws, few environmental regulations, and tax breaks and money giveaways for the wealthy where their universities care more about football than they do about education. As Fountain says, “But as quickly as they came, many are leaving.” Once the few tech people that actually arrived in Austin found out that the place is a hell-hole, those who could leave, did. Others suckered into low paying jobs in Austin, didn’t have the money to leave. They would become part of Austin’s deregulated concrete jungle.
Insider spoke to six workers in tech who recently left Austin or are trying to relocate (two of these workers spoke to Insider on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to upset their employer). They cited several contributing factors, including extreme temperatures, traffic, overcrowding, and — perhaps most surprising to those who have been fooled by right-wing media hype — a middling tech scene that fails to live up to the hype. Rather, this is the city of Greg Abbott, Alex Jones, and right-wing neoliberal institutions such as The University of Austin. Neoliberal means the conservative economic policies that Reagan foisted on us as a shill for the wealthy, where policies and tax regulations benefit the wealthy and then their money is supposed to trickle-down (aka tinkle-on) the middle class. It’s what gutted the US middle class and sent high tech manufacturing to Asia.
Once you peel back the boldface names, such as Elon Musk, who moved to the city and the corporate announcements about flashy new headquarters, the reality of day-to-day living and working in Austin’s tech scene leaves a lot to be desired according to those who were fooled into moving there. First, Musk, and even those without private jets, spend very little time in the “three digit city” and have shown little loyalty or civic pride. Now in 2023, having received gobs of money from the tax payers of Texas through Greg Abbott’s giveaways, Musk announced Tesla’s “engineering headquarters” would be in Palo Alto in what was widely seen as a rapprochement with California officials. Musk announced Tesla’s new headquarters were in California. Musk realized without the highly educated talent pool in California that is missing in Texas, Tesla was losing ground to those EV companies with headquarters or engineering HQs in California. Yes, you can have a factory in Texas that pays workers minimum wage ($7.25/hr in Texas), where they bolt things together, but that won’t work in the design and engineering of the car. All of that happens in California, including at Tesla’s actual headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, not the “Paper HQ” in Texas that serves to facilitate the billionaire Elon Musk’s taking of Texas taxpayer’s dollars.
And even though jobs in Austin are classified as tech because they are tech companies, the job functions tend to skew toward lower-skilled jobs, like customer service and sales. If you are the “waterboy” at the Tesla factory in Austin making $7.25/hr, Greg Abbott is happy to call you a “tech worker.”
For comparison of the two states, of the 8,311 Apple employees in Austin, roughly a quarter are engineers, according to an analysis. By comparison, about half of Apple’s 52,610 employees in the Bay Area are engineers. According to tech workers, “People say it’s a tech scene just because that’s what they were told, but when you get to it, there’s no evidence for it. I think it was just oversold.” Nick Thomas, 30, moved to Austin from downtown Los Angeles in January 2021 and is hoping to return to California soon. He said Austin is a “watered-down” version of other places he’s lived like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Austin ranks No. 5 in net outward migration from big US cities from January to May of this year, according to an Insider analysis of US Postal Service data. As the tech scenes in San Francisco (8 of the world’s largest companies are located in the city, and the AI revolution is centered here, see below), Los Angeles (home of the world’s largest aerospace industry, including SpaceX), San Diego (home to tech giants such as Qualcomm, Illumina, Cubic Corp, Dexcom, Viasat, Teradata, and General Atomics), with more startups and venture capital spent in San Diego than in Austin and Miami combined), Berkeley (4 major quantum computing startups, for example, are located here), Oakland (the tech scene is huge here, with companies such as Pyka and in nearby Pleasanton is Vector Atomic), Sacramento (where rocket engines and electric trains are built), Livermore (where net-gain fusion was first achieved at a UC lab, and Monarch Tractor made the Forbes Unicorn list), and Santa Barbara (Google’s quantum computing center is located there) are booming, Austin withers in triple digit temperatures as it tech scene withers under the heat of a regressive governor and legislature.
Looking at these charts, you realize despite all the people’s money spent to lure wealthy tech executives to Texas and Florida by their Republican governors, Texas is where tech goes to die, and in another post I’ll explain why Miami is where tech goes to jail.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 