Just curious about this article and it’s conclusions that you might want to move just outside Dallas. As a Canadian I have no opinion on the matter.
I can’t get the article to load but I’ve lived in the suburbs of Dallas. They’re pretty bland. Very Monkee’s “Pleasant Valley Sunday.”
Summary: Author uses four criteria to rank US towns and cities - jobs, climate under change, affordability and high levels of racial diversity. Concludes most of the top few results are towns close to Dallas which appear to be suddenly popular.
Why the hell would I move to a state where I am a second-class citizen where old White Christian men feel free to interfere with my body without my consent? Isn’t that just another form of rape?
That trumps absolutely every other consideration.
On top of that, the fact Texas is hot and getting hotter is not a minor issue. It WILL be impacted in a major way by climate change, ALL of Texas will be. People tend to discount the impact of heat waves, but they’re just as deadly as other natural disasters. Maybe it’s because they don’t see the dead, expiring quietly in their homes instead of bothering the neighbors with their moans or visible suffering.
Screw Texas. You couldn’t pay me to live there.
I’m planning to retire to the north, where it won’t be so hot in the coming decades. Hopefully, the trend-setters and wealthy won’t find my intended spot and price me out of the market.
For the many hypothetical life scenarios I ran through our quiz, the suburbs around Dallas — places like Plano, McKinney, Garland, Euless and Allen — came up a lot.
I say this as someone who lived in Dallas for 30 years, and who semi-regularly visits: ugh. Massive, stultifying sprawls of strip malls, roads, highways, apartment cities, and tract housing. Euless is okay at best, and it’s the best of these.
My hotel in downtown Dallas was within a short walk of several gay bars; sex shops selling packers, which are often used by trans men; smoothie shops; and purveyors of CBD remedies of all kind. Black Lives Matter signs dotted front yards.
Ah, so someone put him up at a hotel in the oasis that is Oak Lawn. Someone really sold him a bill of goods on this one.
As you can guess, I’m glad I left there. That said, if I were indifferent to my surroundings, both political and geographic, Texas might be an ideal place to go for work.
Sure, I’ll move to Texas.
And then? I will hug some snakes.
Yes! I will HUG! And KISS! Some poisonous SNAKES!
(now THAT’s sarcasm!)
Agree. I would never voluntarily live anywhere the rights and freedoms of myself, my wife, and my daughters would be at the mercy of some of the worst troglodytic shitheads ever to have burrowed themselves into power. There is not any amount of money sufficient to change my mind.
Not only no, but hell no! I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pay me enough to live anywhere in the Lone Star State.
No.
I’ll move to Texas when they pry my cold, dead hands off of New England.
As a resident of Dallas Texas, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to NOT live in a constant state of embarrassment.
No wage garnishment unless you’re the IRS or Child support.
No state income taxes
And a good state program for autistic children are the only pluses I’ll give to Texas.
Texas is too damn hot.
Texas won’t let me abort a baby that threatens to kill me, until i am in medical crisis.
Texas is a “stand your ground” state.
Texas is full of roads. I mean, there’s just so much pavement there. And strip malls. Dallas is one of the places i enjoyed least to visit.
I suspect it’s awkward to be a Jew is Texas. You know, identifiably non-Christian.
No, I’d prefer not to move to Texas.
could not have said it better myself.
I can’t read the article, but it’s interesting to me that it apparently emphasizes “Dallas suburbs”, like actually living in Dallas is incomprehensible. I’ve lived in a first ring suburb for 20 years, but that whole time I’ve worked in Dallas, proper, and I gotta say, it’s honestly a very livable city. I regret buying the house where we did, honestly.
It’s not pretty or cool, but it is (or was) relatively affordable. Politically, it’s deep, deep blue, because of a sort of siege mentality. The food is fantastic. Summer sucks, but we all have AC and there are plenty of sunny, dry days between 60-80 in every month between Oct and March. Shorts in January is the bomb.
I dunno. Texas isn’t perfect, but I continue to hope it will flip in terms of politics. It just seems weird to me that they excluded the city itself.
I’d move to Texas. I liked living in Corpus Christi, the hill country is really nice, and for enough zeros I’d move back to Midland. There is no way in hell I’d move to Dallas or Houston though easily in my bottom 10 for places I’ve been.
Back in the day, I strongly considered a residency program in Dallas. I’m glad I wound up elsewhere, but not because Texas is a Ghastly Police State.
Dallas has some of the worst climate extremes in the state. Temps are commonly over 100F in the summer months; then you have to cope with periodic blue northers in the winter bringing ice, snow and temps down into the teens. I went to a conference there a few years back around Thanksgiving and it was frigid with a couple inches of snow on the ground - normally it would be in the 60s that time of year. Also lovely droughts and flooding rains. A difficult place to garden.
Living in the Dallas suburbs often means a wretched commute.
We’ve had opportunity recently to see energy infrastructure problems in Texas.
On the plus side there’s good BBQ and Mexican food to be had, but the same goes for other places in Texas. On the negative side, Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys and their fans.
If Texas was on the short list for a retirement home, the Houston, San Antonio or Austin areas would be better bets.
Of the seven finalist cities, five are in Texas and two are first tier suburbs of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Predictably, the two Minnesota cities are greyed out and never mentioned again presumably because of the author’s distaste for winter.
The winters are relatively long, but the fact that 3.5 million people still choose to live in the MSP area attests to the many positive counter-balancing factors of living here.
There are advantages. No state income tax was already mentioned. In addition, here in Corpus Christi we have the longest stretch of undeveloped oceanfront in the entire continental US. During the offseason the Padre Island National Seashore is amazing. Even in the summer it’s not at all difficult to find an isolated stretch of ocean that you can have all to yourself.
ETA. My guess is that other than Alaska and the Arctic ocean areas of Canada, it’s probably the longest stretch of undeveloped oceanfront in all of North America.
Question: how do yo get to Texas from California?
Answer: you walk east until you smell it, then you walk south until you step in it.
You learn something new on the SDMB every day: Texas is on an ocean!
I’ve lived in Texas for 15 years. I’m only here because it’s practical; there’s no state income tax and my family is here. Otherwise I would far rather be in a place like Hawaii or California. It is not a state for fun or pleasure, nor do I like hot weather.
That being said, yes, the job market is the strongest in the nation, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio are growing extremely fast, and the cost of living is still moderate. People are also, by and large, friendly.