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Comment by rupi | Hacker News Reader

Property tax is higher but there is no state income tax. Also, property tax increase rates are significantly higher as compared to California. Austin is also growing very fast and is quickly turning into the sprawl that I have always associated more with Dallas and Houston.

Financially speaking, either place may turn out advantageous depending on your house's price and income. CA (Bay Area) has a lot of other positives that are almost impossible to get in TX - tech scene (quality and quantity), nearby sea, desert AND mountains, good weather are just some of them.

Many years ago, I chose to move to TX as opposed to CA. But most recently, after living abroad for some years, I picked Bay Area to move back to mainly because most of my friends have converged to Bay Area over the years - almost all are in tech. However, if you aren't involved in tech and don't care about some of the other positives of the Bay Area, Austin is almost a no-brainer.

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The interesting thing is, the sprawl of Dallas and Houston have now started to work in their favor.

I live in Dallas. We're growing massively, but honestly, I haven't really noticed too many changes in my day to day. It takes just as long to get somewhere as it did 5 years ago.

Because they were large, spread out cities already, the highway infrastructure, suburban development, and local planning have all been optimized to support that reality. Austin tried to keep that smaller college-town feel, which was hip and trendy and cool for visitors like SXSW, but is now leading to the awful growing pains they face today.

I think Austin has the potential to be a really great city, but it's gonna take decades to get anywhere near that reality.

In the meantime, Houston is building another loop, Dallas is extending the DNT practically to Oklahoma, and Ft Worth has a shiny new tollroad on the west side of the city. They'll keep absorbing growth while Austin struggles to get organized. Unfortunately, many of the people flocking to Texas don't know any better so they go to Austin first.

My 2¢.

Everything you said aligns perfectly with what I have heard from friends who still live in Austin/Houston. I personally would still rather live in Austin though as opposed to Houston or Dallas.

> Property tax is higher but there is no state income tax.

I do wonder how much this affects salaries, though. Do employers in states with lower or no income taxes tend to pay worse for the same job than employers in states with higher income taxes?

Sorta. From my anecdotal evidence up the road in Dallas, software engineers still make comfortable salaries, but more in the $120k~ range. Nobody I know up here makes $200k+.

One thing to consider though, is that the companies available to work for outside Austin, probably aren't supplementing salaries with generous stock compensation packages. If more startups move to Texas, that could change too.

With two working adults in the house, 120k/ea is a very comfortable living.

No. Supply and demand curves for the specific labor in question determines salaries. WA state has a very low W-2 income tax, in the 1% or less range, and has very high incomes due to the type of labor being sold there.

A lower income tax may cause more people to live somewhere and/or more people to be willing to work for less, but it still comes down to whether or not the supply of labor willing to work at a lower price exists.

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