Moving to Austin

[BoldW]

Unless you live downtown or around campus, I don't know anyone who walks or uses the bus system extensively, pretty much much like most western cities that originally built outwards due to topography, cheap land, and cheap gas - no need to build up.

It's possible, depending on location, to bike some places. You'll find on the weekends some of the roads get packed with Armstrong wanna-bes. 620, 360, parmer, 71, always get a lot of bicyclists The bus system isn't horrible if you stay central to south, and I mean time wise. I don't know how it is up north anymore.

I don't consider Austin very flat, especially when speaking of metropolitan Austin though.

[intelnavi]

There are bike marathons every other weekend. Also, when a UT game is playing, gg traffic. I tend to use downtown for visiting and prefer living up north. However my friends lived downtown so that was definitely the place to go party. Depends on your attitude. Stay downtown if you want to score a cute college chick.

[James]

Originally Posted by BoldW

I don't consider Austin very flat, especially when speaking of metropolitan Austin though.

Yeah, Austin is in the Hill Country so these crackheads saying Austin is flat must be comparing it to the fucking Rockies or some shit because Austin is anything but flat.

[Keddo]

Lived there for about 8 months on a contract job for Dell in...2000? Don't remember a whole lot, but there were 2 restaurants stuck in my memory.

Baby Acapulco's - killer margarita's. They have (had) this purple one that they limit to 2 per customer. Pretty strong from what I remember. Food was ok. Tons of Tex-Mex food all over though.

Hula-Hut on the lake - eat some ok food on a big deck on the water. Lots of drunken college chicks around. Decent atmosphere from what I remember. Always a wait whenever I went there.

If you like camping...there was this old couple that lived on a natural spring that would let people camp on their land. It seriously rocked. There were always a bunch of people camping out and it was cheap. Like $5 or $10 bucks per car, I think. Wish I could remember the name. Met a lot of cool people out there. Someone here might know it...they have this huge wind chime hanging from a tree, the spring flows into an in-ground pool, then back out and waterfalls into a big pond. There's a natural jaccuzzi just beyond that. At night you can sometimes see bats swarming out from caves nearby. Cool place for sure.

[AladainAF]

Baby Acapulco still has the purples, and I think they still limit you to 2.

[pooch]

Ya, they are made with everclear =D

[findar]

pros: cool hippies, lots of "outdoorsy" stuff going on, lots of music, lots of art, lots of jobs, lots of food, metric fuckton of non-chain places, older crowd is cool

cons: pretentious hippies, expensive, traffic sucks from 7-10 and 4-7, lots of beggers/homeless people, parking is atrocious, younger crowd is pretentious


also, juan in a million for hangover food

[MrGraham]

If you think Austin has bad traffic, parking, homeless and is expensive, do not move to just about any other metropolitan area.

After living in DC and spending time in several other places, Austin is not bad at all about those things.

[Rune]

Pretty sure he is basing it off four years in Lubbock but what do I know.

[MrGraham]

Eh Lubbock has about 1/4 the people of Austin.

In my experience there's not a city in the US that you can get as good of a ratio from variety of food, as many concerts, and as good of a job market vs traffic/homeless/cost. My experience is limited to living in DC / San Fran areas and having friends in Chicago, Nashville, St Louis, Seattle though.

[Adam12]

Originally Posted by MrGraham

In my experience there's not a city in the US that you can get as good of a ratio from variety of food, as many concerts, and as good of a job market vs traffic/homeless/cost. My experience is limited to living in DC / San Fran areas and having friends in Chicago, Nashville, St Louis, Seattle though.

Yeah, I'll second that...I've lived all over the fucking place (most of my life in San Diego, several years on O'ahu, Chicago, Denver/Boulder etc), and Austin is pretty great.

I agree with James on the driving part, people tend to drive too fucking slow. The restaurants, outside of the amazing BBQ that must be consumed several times a week, are average at best. That's about all I can complain about though.

[findar]

Originally Posted by Rune

Pretty sure he is basing it off four years in Lubbock but what do I know.

time in lubbock + spending 16 years in dfw. the homeless people in DFW don't sit in the busy parts of town like in austin and generally appear more "ashamed" of being poor. in austin it's not uncommon to even be in the "nicer" suburban areas and find them under bridges, ready to eat your billy goats like trolls. hell i remember talking with kids in the 19-25 bracket who said they were living on the streets and proud of it. drag rats i think was the nickname?

that being said, i'm actively looking for work in austin. i enjoy the city but i'm not blind to it's downsides.

[pooch]

think they are called "street kids" for the whole im homeless and cool at the sametime vibe.

[fat12]

They're called drag rats because they all congregate on "the drag" aka Guadalupe running along campus.

[AladainAF]

Figured this would be a good place to put this...

America's Best Bargain Cities - Forbes.com

Four other Texas cities make the list of America's Best Bargain Cities, but none come close to Austin, whose 5.5% unemployment is the best in the country and about half the national average.

We assigned points to metro regions across four data sets: Average salary for workers with a bachelor's degree or higher, from PayScale.com; annual unemployment statistics, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; cost of living, from Moody's ( MCO - news - people )Economy.com; and the Housing Opportunity Index, from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo, which measures the amount of homes sold in a given area that would be affordable to a family earning the local median income based on standard mortgage underwriting criteria.

Austin earned high marks across the board.