What are the employment options there? If I move to a cheap house somewhere where there are no jobs for me, I just moved somewhere where I cant afford.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/everything-bigge...
As someone who has lived here for a long while, it seems like there are lots of jobs in a lot of industries here. We're not all oil riggers and cowboys.
Again, I'm not trying to be difficult here, but "where" is "somewhere." There are jobs in Austin, San Antonio, Kerrville, Marfa, and El Paso. They might not all be for me, but they exist in all these places. Where you live and what your commute is, again, is not exactly something that's particularly trivial to define. At what point should I start looking in San Antonio rather than Austin?
These are hard questions. This is what I mean when I ask whether I have a right to housing in Malibu? At what point should I be expected to just move to East LA?
At the end of the day, housing in Austin is relatively inexpensive. There are real options below $300K. Living in SF, it's pretty astounding that that's even possible within the city limits, much less at reasonable commuting distances.
I certainly think incentivizing subsidized low income housing is worthwhile, and I think even incentivizing builders to just target the low income price points is also worthwhile. I just think that focusing on subsidizing the lowest income folks, rather than letting markets actually work for most people has been shown to trivially fail in CA where I live at actually accomplishing anything. A lot of "ugly" 5-over-1's have been built in Austin, and it's working to keep the place affordable for working class people. I'm absolutely fine with that.
This is so insanely out of touch. Most people will never be able to afford a house over $200k, even in Austin. I live here, you apparently live in California. As a resident, let me tell you that Austin is not affordable, and definitely not "inexpensive". Housing here is relatively inexpensive compared to the most expensive metros in the world, it's not relatively inexpensive compared to the US housing market, or more relevantly, the Texas housing market. This isn't the Bay Area, it's the middle of Texas.
> A lot of "ugly" 5-over-1's have been built in Austin, and it's working to keep the place affordable for working class people.
Austin isn't affordable for working class people and it hasn't been for a long time, so no, those new constructions aren't keeping it affordable, they've just stopped the insane rent increases that were coming every year for more than a decade. A living wage in Austin for a single person is $100,000, for a family it's $200,000, and that is well above the median household income of ~$90,000. Working class people are well below the median and aren't making $90,000 per year. These numbers are from an article in our local newspaper from this week. [0]
[0] https://www.statesman.com/news/local/article/austin-cost-of-...
According to your article:
> Based on those costs, MIT estimates the living wage for a family of four in the Austin metro area is $112,866 a year, or $49,322 for an individual.
That’s well below median household income.
> The organization created a “Household Survival Budget,” which includes housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, technology, taxes and miscellaneous expenses. According to the group’s estimates, the living wage for a family of four in Travis County is $102,096 with two kids in child care and $85,356 with no kids in child care. For a single adult, the survival budget is $39,924.
Again. When we are talking about the housing crisis in the Bay Area, we are talking about small condos costing $1M. Just forget having anything be closer to median income affordable for a family of four. In Austin that’s still possible. It’s not Milwaukee, but it’s a functioning housing market.
