I hear you. I can’t say as much though because to be honest I’m not thrilled to be stuck in Texas still, though I guess if you have to be you might as well be in Austin. I’m not sure I want to be stuck here long enough to see the aftermath. For me it’s weird because I’m from here but I was gone a long time. Coming back it’s kind of a strange parody of itself, with the things I actually remember being bulldozed by spiffy replicas. There seem to be a lot of the old folks here just hunkering down and waiting to see if it passes. I think a lot of what people aren’t getting is that it was never that this was such a great place, but rather that people had to pull together to have community here in a state where, well, your options were limited. I don’t think it will really pass though because there aren’t that many cities to choose from in Texas. You have DFW (which most of the people moving here have never really seen, and most wouldn’t really mind living in if they knew what it was like) Houston (same goes)… maybe San Antonio. Anything else will be waaay too Texas for most non-Texans to deal with unless they were already from say, Oklahoma or Arkansas. So in some ways Austin was just delaying the inevitable (large wealthy urban population gobbling up the pretty views and then gutting them to put in golf courses). Now it looks a lot like the other Texas cities. IME when resources become scares the elites won’t be the ones who have to give up and run.
