As a native Austinite I feel like I should at least post something to this thread.
That is all.
Something I always point out to people: Funny how nobody has any jokes about global warming as parts of Texas reach their third month with temps over 100 degrees…
Agreed. I’m a conservative, married, Catholic Republican, and I have no troube finding like-minded people in Austin. But if you’re a lesbian Wiccan, you’ll find your niche with no problems, either. Neither of us should be taken as typical.
First thing to remember about Austin- just as in L.A, you’ll find that NOBODY in Austin (except my wife) is really from Austin. EVERYONE is from somewhere else.
Austin HAS its weird people and areas, but they’re not omnipresent.
As for the OP… there are plenty of good places to live between the Arboretum and downtown. The thing to remember is, Austin has been growing like gangbusters for a long time now, and a lot of the housing (heck, a lot of the NEIGHBORHOODS!) didn’t exist 30 years ago. So, there’s nothing like stability.
What WAS a terrible neighborhood in 1986 (when I moved here) may be entirely different. South Austin was once regarded as the land of knuckle-dragging rednecks, and South COngress AVenue USED to be synonymous with hookers and porn. Today? South Congress is nothing but eclectic shops and trendy restaurants, and much of South Austin is Yuppified.
Neighborhoods that USED to be all-black or all-Mexican are increasingly occupied by white couples with money.
WHATEVER lifesyle and people you want in Austin, you can undoubtedly find them.
I’ll try say this kindly - Have you considered that maybe the women aren’t rude, cold, and snooty as much as you’re unattractive to them? Stop blaming the women for your lack of success. The fact that they aren’t interested in you does not mean they have negative personality traits. It only means that they are not interested in you.
Women in Austin may be superficially nicer and friendlier, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less selective about who they get actually involved with. They have the same wants and needs as any other American woman. Southern and Texan women are likely to be socialized to humor you more and blow you off more politely than northeastern women, but if you can’t get anywhere with the DC bitches, it’s not likely that you’ll end up doing much better with the Austin belles.
If you want to be more attractive to women, I’d suggest you change yourSELF, especially how you think about women. If you’re moving to a new city, now is the time to do it. If you want advice, this board is a good place to get it. You may not like what you hear, but the men and women here will do their sincere best to help you out.
Hopefully, 5 years from now, you’ll be happily living in Austin with a great job and a hot girlfriend/wife, and you’ll look back at yourself and say “man, I was such an asshole back then!”
I hear Austin is pretty great. Good luck, and welcome to the boards. 
I thought I just mentioned it but I’m a native, so are my wife and kids. I admit though that I don’t meet too many other natives.
I moved here three years ago, violently against my will, from Los Angeles. I loved LA, but had to choose between moving to Austin and getting a divorce. I moved. I like everything about Austin except the weather. It is horrid. And whoever said the winters are mild must not have been here in January when schools were closed due to freezing rain.
However, I have to say that at least half the people I have met here moved here from someplace else and lots of them came from California. So that contributes to the weird factor.
The food and the music are the best parts. The traffic gets a little heavy but being from LA it isn’t all that bad. We live in Cedar Park which is just north of Austin and has easy access to the city without having the high prices for rent and home sales that you find further South. Arboretum area is nice but pricy; you might want to think of going a little further north just to save money. In both Cedar Park and just over the border in Austin a ton of new apartments are going up near the Lakeline Mall and a major southbound highway (183) so you might get in there easier.
I think you will like it here.
Absolutely. If you don’t have the munchies, they’re awesome too. You can usually get them for less than a buck a pop, chow down.
If you’re comfy with rural areas, you’ll be generally pretty comfy. One’s never far away here. I’ve never felt the need for a CPL. Hell, you can carry a long gun most places, but please don’t be a fool about it. Downtown isn’t really the place for them.
I’ll try, check the sig for info on the name :).
Wow, 6th street looks more drunk than ever. It’s bordering on 365 New Orleans. Avoid 6th street unless you have pressing business there.
There is no defense against this claim. The Texas climate is often completely fickle. When it isn’t, it’s just hotter than hell.
I absolutely love the affection that adopted my hometown is getting here, but shhhhhhhh! Everyone will move here, and it’ll be like Austin!
But Dallas is the Dallas of Texas, which is far potent and powerful… and frightening.
I’m not a global warming denier, but that was 2 years ago. This year we haven’t broken triple digits! Yes, that is our measure of mild, with crazy humidity. Texas is a bad place to measure climate change from. <Hank Hill>It’s 110 degrees in the shade, and if it gets one degree hotter, I’m gonna kick your ass!</Hank Hill>
Sometimes I think that natives are rare. But if I consider it, my band was 3/4 native Texan, and my co-workers are 1/2 native. For a state that’s had an immigration influx my entire adult life, and a history of immigrants, that’s not bad.
Ok, I’ll admit that mild is a bad adjective. How about “warmish”? Still, you’re probably spoiled from winters in L.A. Winter in Texas usually just shows up for the weekend, four days at most. If it doesn’t, it’s the 10-year ice storm. Other than that, it’s a hell of a lot better than Kansas in the winter.
But other than that, I agree. The best parts of my home state are the music and the food…oh, and the visual arts…and I’ll shut up.
I maintain that the reason people do so many outdoor activities in Austin is because, if they didn’t, they’d get fat on all the delicious food.
(I’ll give the city that much. :p)
I think I can add a bit to this- having lived in Houston and Dallas, married a girl from Austin and visited the in-laws more than is probably healthy.
Austin’s weirdness seems to be a legacy from the 1960s, when there was a large population of hippies at UT, and who subsequently settled in Austin and attracted like-minded people.
At some point in the 1990s, the tech boom took off, and Austin somehow ended up an epicenter of it, with nerd/tech culture’s own brand of weirdness.
So you tend to get a lot of socially and environmentally conscious nerds around there these days. But the old hippie roots run deep- my otherwise staunchly conservative in-laws still compost, recycle and are generally fit people- in a way that isn’t really the case in places like Houston and Dallas.
OTOH, that stuff apparently makes it hard for the city and county to effect real infrastructural change. The road and highway network in Austin is woefully inadequate for the number of people, and apparently environmental concerns (“the salamanders!” as my wife says) have long prevented any progress toward relieving that. There seems to be a huge push toward a more NYC/SF/Chicago style urban lifestyle that you don’t see elsewhere in Texas.
Definitely true. The city government has been trying to push all the growth downtown, and there are now scores of high rises along Town Lake, something you’d never have seen decades ago.
But there are still dozens of neighborhoods like mine, where strip malls, chain stores, chain restaurants and car culture dominate. And those neighborhoods are not going away.
Just to be clear, I totally get the “old hippy/indie music scene/tech boom/more liberal than nearby areas” thing. it just… not weird. Its called being a college town and Texas didn’t invent it. 
Much love to Texas, but Austin, far from being weird, is just like every other college town except with much worse traffic. Some days I think if Texans ever learn of the existence of Athens, GA, they might never recover from the shock.
I guess what you say might be true, Hello Again, if you are talking about the area right next to UT, but it’s certainly not true of the whole of Austin. And the traffic, I repeat again, is not that bad! (compared to California).
+1
Well, I haven’t heard from the cop/firefighter duo, but I did talk to a friend who used to live in the area you’re considering. From his description, the only bad part of it is that it’s the bland area of Austin.
It all depends what you’re looking for.
If, like me, you’re married with children, Northwest Austin is great. But it’s not necessarily going to appeal to a single yuppie. For a young single guy, the question is whether you require your apartment to be in the middle of your social scene, or regard it just as a place to sleep and change clothes.
In a broad sense, you’re right- you could certainly find a nice apartment in the vicinity of MoPac and Steck… but you’d be far from the nightlife and cool restaurants you’ve heard about, and closer to the strip malls and chain restaurants I referred to.
Austin is of course much larger than the typical college town, and in fact I wouldn’t even call it a college town. it’s a big city with a large college in it. It currently has around 870,000 people.
Austin IS a college town, meaning we have loads of intellectuals. But we have lots of middlebrows and lowbrows too. Sure, we have lots of old hippies, but since Austin is the capital of one of the largest states, there are lots of lawyers and state government bureaucrats, too Austin is also a high-tech mecca, so there are loads of engineering nerds. It’s also a town that used to house a large Air Force base, which means you have plenty of retired military types.
There are also lots of blue-collar Mexicans, artsy folks, rednecks, academics… no one group or lifestyle defines the city.
Since most housing and most neighborhoods are relatively new, you sometimes find surprising diversity within neighborhoods. To use one example, Austin has plenty of gays, but unlike New York or San Francisco or even Houston, it doesn’t have any one gay neighborhood or district- gays just buy or rent wherever they find something affordable and convenient to where they work. Same with Chinese or Indian immigrants- we have plenty of both, but no “Chinatown” or “Indian district.” We have all kinds of ordinary middle/upper middle class people living near each other.
The black community in Austin seems pretty small when compared to that of other Texas cities, and when compared to the Hispanic population in Austin, if that matters to anyone.
Yes, it is small, and as a percentage of the overall population, it’s getting smaller.
That’s partly because the newcomers to Austin are overwhelmingly white or Asian, and partly because the cost of housing is squeezing many of them out. Neighborhoods on the East side that used to be overwhelmingly black or Mexican are getting pricier as more yuppies move in.
Anyone been to Hamilton Pool Preserve just outside of town? Looks like an amazing spot to cool off.