The People Moving to Austin and 'Ruining' It Are Texans
(StuSeeger/Flickr)
So can we please stop talking about this and putting Austin on lists and then talk about how Austin is on said lists? The lists! Stop! Because what would happen, say, if we told everyone that maybe Austin isn't the Best Ever? That's pretty definitive, ever. What if we just said it was good? What if we just said it's a somewhat liberal-leaning college town with some nice restaurants, a vibrant music scene, and more festivals and conferences than it knows what to do with? One where you could probably raise your family and it wouldn't be so bad? Doesn't that sound nice? Let's stop all this "best" business.
Because! As Stephanie Myers at the Austin Post points out, all the people moving here and allegedly "ruining" the city are not from California or New York or wherever else city-ruiners come from—they're from the good 'ol Lone Star state.
“We think of Austin’s in-migration stream as coming to us exclusively from places like California when, in fact, most of it is indeed coming from other parts of the state,” City of Austin demographer Ryan Robinson told the Austin Post. “My sense has always been that Austin gets a lot of two-step migrants. First, they move from New York to Houston or California to Dallas; then realize that where they really want to be is in Austin.”
And after compiling census data, it turns out most of the people moving here are coming from surrounding counties, with the most coming from Williamson County, just north of us and includes Georgetown and Cedar Park. Yes, Los Angeles County and Chicago's Cook County are also players in the moving-to-Austin game, but they don't stack up against intra-state transplants.
It gets even more interesting when you flip it and see what cities people are leaving Austin for. The top 10? All in Texas. After that, it's all coastal, namely California and the Pacific Northwest.
austinist.com |
