Daily Data: Austin is Weird
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Daily Data: Austin is Weird
More people want to move from than to?
People want to leave Austin, and it’s just when things are getting cheap.
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Austin is weird
With some caveats around sample-size and methodology, apparently people are looking to leave Austin, Texas (for the first time in a while).
Or rather, there is more outbound search interest than inbound search interest:
Net-outflow of 441 is pretty small, but whatever the quality of the signal, it seems to have gone the other direction.
It’s strange that people want to leave Austin because home prices are actually coming down.
Normally, when people start leaving trendy places it’s because they’ve gotten so trendy, they’ve been priced out—like, Miami for example (which is different from expensive markets that people are leaving because they are priced out and because they are less trendy, e.g. San Francisco and New York).1
But Austin has seen a flood of new housing supply recently, and prices have been coming down significantly, so it’s hard to see prices as the reason people are leaving:
In fairness, prices got pretty high before they started to come down, so maybe that still has something to do with it, but I’m not sure.
Are people leaving Austin because they got called back to the office? Is the lifestyle not for them? Or is this just a hiccup in the data?
Over the past year, this is (supposedly) where Austinians leave to:
The Austin-to-Denver pipeline is what exactly? An outdoor sports and hiking thing? A weather thing?
Idk.
Texas is sticky
Anyways, this too was neat.
Apparently Texas is the “stickiest” state in the country, i.e. has the largest share of native Texans still living in-state:
The Northeast has a lot of exiles, California is stickier than I would have expected (and almost as sticky as Florida), and North Carolina is also apparently a place people don’t leave.
It all checks out.
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People are still leaving the Old Guard of Coastal preeminence for the new guard (i.e. Florida).
And I still find it amazing that apparently, Hartford has gotten so hot that people are trading down for Boston. (Or they too have been called back to the office.)
Daily Data: Austin is Weird
(Anecdote): Over the last year I've been meeting people here in Tampa who relocated from Austin because it became "too expensive/crowded," some of them relocating without jobs. This is a new phenomenon (I returned from Austin 20 years ago).
For years, I heard locals saying they wanted to make Tampa "the next Austin" and to some extent, we've succeeded, sans the great music, tech and BBQ. Many of the folks who helped make Tampa a cool and interesting place to live can no longer afford to live here, unfortunately. I was surprised we didn't make the Austin migration graphic. Hopefully the Austinites will bring some brisket and startups with them.
Boulderite here - we do have some Austin transplants here (unclear to me in that image if the migration is to Denver and Boulder, or Denver and Colorado Springs - all about 80 miles apart).... Anyway...anecdotally, the Austin folks I've met like the college town character, in a smaller town, that is growing, but not growing like Austin. There is tech here, there is biotech here, and there also is defense tech here... so most folks in Austin could find a job here (but the people I know just work remote). I've also heard "Austin grew a lot over the past 10 years, and feels like a different city now")
The Denver - Chicago migration, also noted in the newsletter, is interesting. I grew up in the midwest in the 90s and people moved to CO - same cost of living, better quality of life... that's no longer true, but Chicago remains one of the most under appreciated cities - a great city, closest to New York in the states (but not as "city" as NYC, of course).