Imoved to San Francisco just shy of a year ago, bright-eyed and brimming with foolish optimism, like most other people who end up in this city. A copywriting contract in a posh Financial District office and a healthy uptick in my regular magazine work represented, in my mind, the equivalent of an Oprah “aha!” moment—not much could convince me that I shouldn’t make the 28-hour journey west from my home in Austin, Texas.
Yes, Austin—the only suitable place in the Lone Star State for any liberal-minded person to set up shop, the town known for live music festivals and cowboy-crafted beer, the bastion for Southern creatives. It’s a metropolis with a reputation of being a hipster haven in the middle of the country, one that seamlessly blends green grass and spring-fed pools with high-end city living and a vivacious gastronomic scene. One where food trucks populate any spare lots that have yet to fall prey to urban planners. Where BBQ perfumes the air around Barton Springs Road; dog parks abound; coffee shops never close; and people seem unabashedly happy. But I’m here to tell you that there are caveats to what you’re dreaming up in your head as a cheaper, more relaxed version of San Francisco.
I’m a Texas boy at heart. I was born in Dallas and raised in the surrounding suburbs. Since arriving in SF, the number-one conversational icebreaker I get after admitting to my Texas roots—whether on a Scruff “date” or in warm conversation with a newly acquainted stranger at Fifty/Fifty — is rooted in the logistics of my former home city.
Once Austin is mentioned, the questions begin rolling in. They, in some way, go a bit like this:
“I’ve been thinking about moving to Austin, since San Francisco is emptying my soul and bank account at an alarming pace. It seems like a more affordable option to ‘do me’ rather than here in the Bay Area.”
When the above statement is volleyed at me, my throat always clenches, my mind dizzy from the assumptions. The reason for my visceral full-body response every time a San Franciscan equates Austin with utopia? Because, well, I fear there’s an unhealthy sense of perfectionism Bay Area locals now equate with Austin living—and that they’re willing to bet their proverbial farms on it in order to get out of Dodge.
While it’s a great city, don’t get me wrong—it’s definitely not paradise. Let me lament on the reasons why that’s so.
The nightlife and live music scenes are great...for a while, at least.
Admittedly, Austin’s become pigeonholed as an up-and-coming Nashville, in the same way that it’s been pedestaled as the Silicon Valley of tomorrow. (More on the latter later.) It’s sprouted a healthy nightlife scene, bristling with lively venue spaces and bars that span every cultural and societal niche. Unfortunately, though, on a busy, bustling weekend night, bars and venues on 6th and 4th Streets become pressure cookers for college-aged drunks looking to empty out their financial-aid refund and stereotypical tourists who’ve Googled “nightlife in Austin” 15 minutes prior to showing up. When you find yourself combing South Congress for a parking spot, glancing up at the construction cranes above your head, it’s abundantly clear that the city is moving in a million directions, with no clear North Star on the horizon.
Because of that high-paced, multidirectional growth spurt, Austin is suffering from a myriad of growing pains that are, frankly, lending an unwelcoming amount of monotony to this once unapologetically spontaneous city. The gay bars have remained virtually unchanged. And if you’re a quasi-social gay man like myself, it can feel at times that you may, in fact, be acquainted with virtually every homosexual man in the city. San Francisco, by comparison, sports a much larger pool of rainbow-hued fish to school with.
Museums and galleries are something of a secondary thought. All those aforementioned semi-skyscrapers being erected downtown aren’t businesses but residential buildings. Austin now feels like a city you can literally “do” in a single three-day weekend. San Francisco—and the greater Bay Area, at that—is a cityspace that delights with something new around every turn, in every neighborhood and on any given day of the week. They aren’t comparable.
Rent is affordable—but take in the whole picture.
I’m not here to tell you that Bay Area rent is atrocious. If that’s somehow news to you, then count your lucky stars and burn an effigy next to whichever healthy trust fund you’re fortunate enough to lay claim to. Austin, with its rumored affordable rental properties and echoed “cheap” cost of living, seems like an ideal antidote to San Francisco’s bleak financial landscape.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
It’s true that rent prices are lower in Austin than SF (where are they not) and that the overall cost of living is roughly one-third less—but focusing solely on those statistics doesn’t paint the full picture. Aping the renting habits of most San Franciscans, the vast majority of Austinites and soon-to-be locals can’t afford to live in the city. Instead, they set up five-year-old IKEA foldable mattress on the outskirts of downtown. It’s not uncommon nor ungastly to see $2,500 listings on Zillow for one-bedroom units in Austin’s downtown, eerily mirroring the rental prices of apartments in the Mission or SOMA. But unlike the Bay Area’s transportation system, Austin’s is deplorable, and the city is virtually unwalkable. While the populations of the two metropolises are virtually identical, San Francisco spans seven miles at its widest. Austin? Twenty-one. If you have a job and fancy being punctual for it, you’ll need to burden yourself with a 60-month car loan — or build Armstrong-like calves to help propel you through the loosely marked bike lanes latticing the city.
The craft beers are cold; the summers are ungodly.
You’re never more than a few yards from any one patio bar, no matter your geographic position in Austin (Buzz Mill, Halcyon, Whisler’s, Contigo, Olive & June, etc.) Leashed dogs, for the most part, are just as welcome in any bar space as 20-percent-plus tippers.
You, too, will come to understand how people seemingly lose their minds in the summer’s heat, committing all kinds of acts of unusual criminal mischief in 100-degree afternoons. Seat belts and leather-wrapped steering wheels double as automotive necessities and branding irons come early June. When you find yourself in the full glow of a searing, glaring, blistering summer Texas sun, you’ll begin to wonder why you were ever petulant toward Karl the Fog in the first place.
Pro tip: use the frosted mug that said poured cold beer is contained within to help soothe your freshly rawed, scorned palms.
Austin is still stuck in its comfortability.
It’d be remiss of me not to harp about a strikingly similar way in which SF and ATX resonate: they both share an undeniably independent entrepreneurial spirit. It’s of little wonder why many, from global economists to tech-savvy creatives, have deemed Austin as the next Silicon Valley.
SXSW is all things career progressive and culturally entertaining. But you, in this theoretical instance, live in Austin now; you’ll grow to loathe it, much like any other Austinite, if for no other reason than the maddening traffic it causes. Where the two cities begin to string different melodies is when you begin to truly pull back the stage curtain to what’s going on behind the scenes.
While San Francisco comes off as confident in its place as a forward-thinking urban space, Austin seems to be a bit unclear as to how it will find its footing in the years to come. ATX is a city where work/life balance exudes from every street intersection. Punch out of your nine-to-five, grab a drink with your manbun tribe, play with your adorable pitbull mix and go to bed with the AC blasting. Rinse and repeat. Maybe get started on that B deck — or not.
But alas, Austin’s missing that certain drive that we Bay Area locals have grown to so fondly love. The feverish yearning to re-engineer the world around us; the cerebral need to be in splendid company with creative, pragmatic minds; the cutthroat-ness that only comes from building steel-clad resilience cultivated by trial and error—all these characterizations (and more) are why thousands have this ongoing love/hate relationship with our seven-by-seven slice of NorCal. I know I do.
In summary, I’ll throw it over to Austin Grant — a man who, like myself, has dipped his toes in the two cities and has perhaps said it best: “Come to Austin for the balance, and stay for the barbecue and the Southern feel. Come to Austin to ‘be yourself.’”
I’d say, without a moment’s pause, that the vast majority of people reading this would admit that they’re still en route to discovering themselves, which is reason enough to not put a deposit on a U-Haul—just yet.
