By the time you get to Phoenix, she’ll be rising.
People keep saying Austin is 3 to 3.5 hours away. That is a BIG maybe.
I live in south Fort Worth and that has not been the case for the last year (at the least). I find that getting to north Austin takes about 4 hours. The traffic in Dallas and in Austin can easily add an hour to maybe two, depending on starting and stopping points.
DFW might have humid days, but overall it is not humid.
Anyone who has lived in either place will tell you to pick the other.
I used to make fun of that until I finally experienced 110+ dry heat in Phoenix, and, I have to say, I far preferred it to lower 90s and humid in Chicago. That said, I’m not a big fan of Phoenix. I’ve grown to be tolerant of it (and it has my favorite pizza in the US at Pizzeria Bianco), but everything is so same-looking there. Almost every day is a copy of the last: sunny, not a cloud in the sky. Every major intersection looks the same to me: desert reds/sandstone colors with a giant strip mall. I don’t get its appeal. But they have In N Outs there, so there’s that.
Or neither. Turn down the job there are better places to live.
Dallas has In N Outs too now.
I grew up in Dallas and liked it, but that was back in the 70s and 80s, so things have changed since then. One thing that has changed is that real estate has gotten crazy expensive if you are anywhere close to downtown. I visit my dad every year, and the house he lives in now is easily worth half a million (just to tear down and build a McMansion). But as everyone says, there is tons to do. Museums, restaurants, everything any big city has to offer. When we stay for any length of time in the summer we put my daughter in day camp–at the science museum at Fair Park, or at one of the local schools (St. Marks has some cool camps.) Depending on what part of the city you live in, you are 30-45 minutes from Lake Lewisville, which I grew up waterskiing on.
If you have kids, I know that one of the Dopers in this thread teaches in a Dallas public school (coincidentally, in the high school I attended as a lad.) Maybe she can give you the lowdown on Dallas public schools. But I’ll let her volunteer that info, if she wants.
I have lived extensively in both, and the choice would depend on the OPs preferences. I liked both places for different reasons, but I’d choose the Dallas area nowadays if I were planning to buy a house. Maybe I’m just being Chicken Little, but the “west” is about to run out of water. My personal opinion is that it would be insane to invest in real estate in the desert now.
It isn’t just that Mead and Powell are getting low, it’s becoming apparent that most of the groundwater has been used up. They’ve come within feet of uncovering the main water lines into Las Vegas which, if I understand it would have completely shut down water flowing to that city (and maybe Phoenix as well).
I wouldn’t move to Phoenix for anything except a temporary position… and I sure wouldn’t buy property there.
ymmv
Ummm…one of these things is not like the other. 
I grew up in Atlanta. Thanks for playing.
Less humid than the most extreme humidity can still be pretty damn humid. Dallas humidity. Phoenix humidity. It’s all relative.
And rolling hills ≠ non-flat. Mountains = non-flat. Here’s a terrain map showing the topography of both Arizona and Texas. The OP can decide which is more appealing.
One of my very earliest memories is my father screaming at me to get out of my sandbox as he ran over and stomped a scorpion to death that was about 18 inches from where I had been sitting. My brother and I used to sit in a field with shoe boxes and catch tarantulas for fun. I once picked up a t-shirt that had been slung over the back of a kitchen chair and put it on only to have a brown relcuse spider crawl out of it and up my neck and face. More than once in my life the dragonflies were so bad we could go outside with badmitton rackets and knock hundreds of them out of the air in an afternoon. In high school the football games would attract record numbers of crickets or locusts or some similar hideous insect that would swarm the lights so badly that they were almost non-functional. The reason I adopted my first cat after moving out of my parent’s house was because I woke up in the middle of the night when a “waterbug” fell off the ceiling and landed on my face. In that same apartment building the grass would writhe with centipedes during certian times of the year. And every single evening of my life (except for about 6 weeks in the winter) from birth through the day I boarded the plane out of that hellhole was being swarmed by mosquitoes that left huge red welts on my body if I dared to leave the house at dusk.
Anyone that tells you Dallas isn’t full of bugs is either very, very lucky or just doesn’t notice that type of thing.
I’ve lived in the Dallas area for 41 years (since I was 5), and I’ve never seen a scorpion in anyone’s house. I’ve never seen a brown recluse. I’ve never seen a bajillion locusts (either cicadas or grasshoppers, whichever you are referring to). I HAVE seen black widows, but that was in the yard of my new house that used to be a field before the subdivision was built a couple of years ago. I’ve never seen a tarantula. IN DALLAS. I have seen all of these things in other parts of the state (Big Bend NP, specifically).
We did have a year back in the 80s when the crickets were EVERYWHERE. It was an exceptionally wet and warm spring, and I guess it made for a great cricket crop. The roads were kind of brown under streetlites because of all the squishing.
That said, I don’t pick up anything that’s been sitting on the ground for a long time (fireplace wood, stones, etc.) without wearing leather gloves.
Dallas is flat. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
As I sat here scratching, wondering “Do I have a patch of dry skin along my waisteband?” I realized one thing nobody has mentioned that we DO have, and that’s chiggers. This year has been exceptionally bad for them. I hate the little suckers.
This and the fact that damn near the entire stretch of I35 between the two is under constant construction totally fucks up travel plans.
I recommend Dallas, for a different reason.
We don’t need any more people out here in Phoenix. As a matter of fact, everyone should just stay away. If you come out to visit relatives, see if you can take them home with you.
Frankly, they should have stopped permitting people from moving out here right after I moved in. Damn Californians. 
Chiggars and mosquitoes are a big TX thing, for sure. I lived in the swampy Gulf Coast area near Houston for a couple of decades and I NEVER saw anything even close to pbbth’s post.
Maybe he saw a gross thing at one time that memory has since over enhanced. For instance, I put lawn insecticide out one early Summer. The next morning, my house was loaded with beetles, grasshoppers, wormy things, etc… All pretty much dead or dying. Pretty gross. Not a bug apocalypse tho. A couple of bug bombs, some strategically placed boric acid, and a half hour with the vacuum, and I had ended the SCOURGE. The next Summer, I bug treated the house first, THEN the yard.
In the 80s, Houston Magazine had a quiz. One of the questions was when I-45 was started and completed. Correct answer, began (or opened) in 1945. Ended? Yeah, right! It’s STILL under construction. I enjoyed that answer.
I will soften my claims about Dallas humidity. Crackers and chips don’t get ruined if left out unsealed. Paper doesn’t curl when you leave the windows open. Mold is not a problem. It doesn’t feel humid to me. The data, however, says otherwise.
Data here: Relative Humidity in August at US Cities - Current Results shows that out of the 51 US cities with population >1 million, Dallas ranks 5th for lowest humidity during the summer months (behind Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Sacamento, if you’re interested).
However, data here (second table) : Hot, Humid Weather: How US Cities Compare - Current Results shows that during the summer, the middling humidity combines with the rather high temperatures to give us way more nasty, sticky, sweaty, horrible weather days. Interesting.
Anyone who says Dallas is bug-ridden is either relying on selective memories or is highly sensitive to the presence of bugs, possibly due to a traumatic childhood event involving arthropods.
I am quite aware of bugs and go out of my way to photograph unusual ones. I like to capture them in my home and move them outdoors, after showing them to the kids. Having worked jobs that required being out at night, or wandering around the woods and fields in rural areas, crawling under buildings in urban areas, in my considered opinion, Dallas has an average amount of bugs, in other words, it’s not buggy. In particular, there are far fewer bugs indoors than anywhere I’ve ever lived. The winter “no bugs” period is rather short and there are some large bugs compared to say, Chicago, but it’s nothing unusual for a warm temperate part of the US.
Lights attract some bugs, especially in warm weather, just like everywhere else, and in far smaller numbers. My outside lights never have clouds of flying bugs or visible accumulations of dead insects below them, unlike North Carolina.
There are occasional swarms of particular species, typically related to hatching or mating events, just like everywhere else. Never seen huge gatherings of centipedes.
There are tarantulas, scorpions, and brown recluses, just like large swaths of the US. None are particularly dangerous and the first two generally avoid dwellings; no one I know has ever seen either near houses. Brown recluses will come indoors, but are rarely seen, reclusive, and inspire far more fear than they ought to. I’ve seen one in my house in 4 years, compared to 50+ annually in Oklahoma. Sticky traps work well to control them if you’re really worried.
Big, red-brown American cockroaches, also called (incorrectly) wood roaches/water bugs/palmetto bugs are here, but nowhere near as common as in Houston or the entire southeast US. 2 in my house in 4 years.
The common outdoor “bugs” are: mosquitos, ladybugs, little bitty jumping spiders, lacewings, moths, pillbugs, ants, craneflies, dragonflies, and butterflies. They are all inoffensive or cute, except the damn skeeters.
I drove to Austin a few months ago. It took SIX HOURS. The drive was ok until I hit Waco. At this point, I have zero desire to go to Austin.
I read some of the OP’a other posts. I think he will prefer the Dallas social scene over Phoenix.