How Texas Can Become the Next Silicon Valley
Native of Austin here, moving to SF. I can only speak to the trends I&#x27;m personally seeing, but the flood of tech money into Austin is sweeping my favorite parts of the city away. The places that filled the nooks and crannies in the city are getting replaced by fonts. Put up a steel and glass building with a cafe in the bottom, slap on an &quot;indie-western-hipster&quot; font and boom, we&#x27;re still &quot;keeping Austin weird&quot;. My parents moved to Austin after law school to avoid the money-culture in Dallas and the humidity in Houston. But you can&#x27;t outrun the money culture forever; it&#x27;s relentless at finding pockets of <i>cool</i> to sell.<p>The tech wealth moving to Austin is a certain type of wealth. It&#x27;s largely the wealth that is socially liberal, but sure as heck likes the low taxes. For them, Austin is having your cake and eating it too. You get loudly decry everything the state government does while silently enjoying the tax and business environment. It&#x27;s uniquely Austin seeing how people take comfort knowing if the Austin mayoralty swings too far left that the Capital will crack the whip. It&#x27;s a <i>win-win</i> all around.<p>People forget that South Congress was grungy for awhile. People forget that Liz Lambert took a big risk when she bought the motel there, that ACL was only one weekend, and that Whole Foods started here. Before all this, Austin was anchored by the Capital and UT, but now we&#x27;re getting a SoHo House down the street from the Equinox. And Oracle has a new skyscraper, cool. If I had to bet, it&#x27;s only a matter of time before we start putting up skyscrapers up North near the Domain where the Amazon&#x27;s and Apple&#x27;s are setting up.<p>And when y&#x27;all move here anyways, try to leave Austin weirder than you found it. This is a great city.