Austin

Austin Leads Working at Home Commute Share: 2022

Wendell Cox — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:49:45 -0400

The just released American Community Survey indicates that 28.0% of the commuters in the Austin metropolitan area work from home, which is the highest figure among the 56 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population). Austin displaces last year’s leader, San Francisco.

The table below lists the 10 major metropolitan areas with the largest work from home shares in 2022. Each of these metropolitan areas has been rated as a tech hub by industry publications.

WORK FROM HOME MARKET SHARE: 2022
Major Metropolitan Area	Work from Home
Austin, TX	28.0%
San Francisco, CA	27.0%
Raleigh, NC	26.1%
Washington, DC-A-MD-WV	25.4%
Seattle, WA	25.4%
San Jose, CA	24.4%
Denver, CO	23.7%
Portland, OR-WA	23.3%
Charlotte, NC-SC	22.3%
Phoenix, AZ	21.7%
Source: American Community Survey: 2022

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Meta (Facebook) Leases All Office Space in Austin's Tallest

Wendell Cox — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 19:13:58 -0500

The Austin Business Journal reports that Meta (former Facebook) has leased all 33 office floors of the under construction Sixth and Guadeloupe Tower, which is due to open in 2023. The building will be Austin’s tallest building, at 66 floors and a height of 873 feet and is located downtown.

This will make the building the fifth tallest in Texas, behind the Houston’s JP Morgan Chase Tower (former Texas Commerce Bank), the Wells Fargo Plaza, and the Williams Tower, the tallest building in the United States outside a central business district (located in the Houston Galleria). One downtown Dallas building is also taller, the Bank of America Tower, which ranks third in the state, following Wells Fargo Plaza.

The building is mixed use and will have 349 residential units. It will be interesting to see how many Facebook employees will be able to afford living in the building, which would eliminate physical commuting almost as much as remote work.

Downtown Austin is developing rapidly and now is indicated by Cushman and Wakefield to have about 13 million square feet of office space (before Sixth and Guadeloupe), about equal to Cincinnati’s strong central business district. In this regard, Austin is following earlier models of dense downtown development in Calgary and Charlotte.

Downtown Austin is experiencing a building boom, which as of 2022 will have opened 15 buildings 400 feet high or more since 2010, when there were only four. In addition to the Sixth and Guadeloupe Tower, there are a number of new residential buildings planned for the Rainey Street District, adjacent on the east to downtown.

Austin was the fastest growing among the 56 major metropolitan areas (more than 1,000,000 population) in each of the last two decades. From 2010 to 2020, Austin added 567,000 residents, a 33% increase. Austin attracted 337,000 net domestic migrants between 2010 and 2020. This is more than all major metropolitan areas except for Dallas-Fort Worth, which is three times as large, and Phoenix, which is twice as large. Most of the new Austin residents settled in the suburban counties, which accounted for about two-thirds of the metropolitan area’s net domestic migration.

For decades, Austin has been playing a larger information technology role. Meta lease, and the new downtown “Google Tower” (Block 185) add significantly to this development.

Rich Keep Getting Richer in Tech as Apple Picks Austin for $1 Billion Campus

Aaron M. Renn — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 19:48:46 -0500

Apple has picked Austin as the site of its new $1 billion campus, one that will ultimately have 15,000 employees. The Verge has the initial details:

Along with the 6,200 employees that Apple already has in the city, its new 133-acre development is expected to make it the largest private employer in Austin. Apple expects the new campus to accommodate 5,000 employees at first, though it will ultimately have a total capacity of 15,000. The new Austin campus will handle tasks ranging from engineering to customer support for the company. Like all Apple’s other facilities worldwide, the facility will run on 100 percent renewable energy.
…
Along with its new Austin campus, Apple has also announced expansions across a number of other US cities. Seattle, San Diego, and Culver City will each grow to have over 1,000 employees apiece, and Apple also plans to expand its operations in Pittsburgh, New York, and Boulder, Colorado, over the next three years. In total, Apple employs 90,000 people across the US, and has over 1,000 employees per state across 16 states.

Once again we see a major tech company going with the “usual suspects.” Austin is not a superstar city, but is a booming Sunbelt city with a longstanding tech cluster. Apple picking Austin may help explain how Amazon ended up in Nashville over Austin.

The other places Amazon is going to are all already on the list so to speak. This map from Verge says it all about how things are playing out in American tech:

Click through to read the full piece over at the Verge.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

Moving from Travis County (Austin) to Williamson County

Wendell Cox — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 10:54:41 -0400

In an article entitled, “The People Moving to Austin and ‘Ruining It’ are from Texas,” the Austinist notes that more people are moving to Austin from neighboring Williamson County than from Los Angeles County.

The article has the potential to mislead in two ways.

The lesser of the problems is that it confuses Austin with Travis County. The cited data is for Travis County, not the city of Austin. The source of the data, the American Community Survey does not report on municipal migration. (Austin is most of Travis County’s population, but itself has sections in Williamson and Hayes counties).

The bigger problem is that the article tells only half the story. Yes, 10,500 people moved from Williamson to Travis over the 2006-2010 period, but 14,200 moved from Travis to Williamson. Thus, there was a net outflow of 3,700 people from Travis to Williamson. Meanwhile, there was a net gain of residents in Travis County from Los Angeles County of approximately 800.

Thus, while there is net migration from Los Angeles County to Travis County, the net migration from Travis County to Williamson County is 4.5 times as large.

City of Austin Approves Big Greenfield Development

Wendell Cox — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:32:55 -0400

Despite its smart growth policies, the city of Austin has approved a new development on the urban fringe that will include new detached housing starting at $115,000.

Austin is the third fastest growing metropolitan area with more than 1,000,000 residents in the United States, following Raleigh, North Carolina and Las Vegas. The city of Austin accounted for 53% (672,000) of the metropolitan area's 1.27 million population in 2000, but has seen more than 70% of the growth since that time go to the suburbs. Now the metropolitan area has 1.65 million people, and the city has 785,000.

The Austin metropolitan area managed to experience only modest house price increases during the housing bubble, though other metropolitan areas in Texas (Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio) did even better (see the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey). Austin's Median Multiple (median house price divided by median household income) peaked at 3.3, slightly above the historic maximum norm of 3.0. Like other Texas markets, there has been little price decline during the housing bust, illustrating the lower level of price volatility and speculation identified by Glaeser and Gyourko with less restrictive land use regulation. This stability has helped Texas weather the Great Recession better than its principal competition, the more intensely regulated states of California and Florida.

The city of Austin, however, is rare in Texas for generally favoring the more restrictive (smart growth) land use policy devices that have been associated with the extreme house price escalation in California, Florida, Portland, and many other metropolitan areas. The city's freedom, however, to implement the most draconian policies and drive house prices up is severely limited by far less restrictive land use policies in the balance of its home county (Travis), neighboring Williamson County (usually among the fastest growing in the nation), Hayes County and the other counties in the metropolitan area.

Austin is competing. This is illustrated by the recent Austin city council action to approve a new "mega" development on the urban area's eastern fringe that could eventually add 5,000 new houses, town houses and apartments. The first phase will be 350 detached houses that the developer indicates will be priced from $115,000 to $120,000 (including land), an amount less than a building lot San Diego, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Australia.

By comparison with other developments in the Austin area, however, these houses may be expensive. One home builder is currently advertising new detached houses, only 7 miles from downtown Austin for $90,000. These are not the least expensive in Texas. Detached houses in Houston are being advertised for $79,000.

A case study in the 3rd Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey showed that the median income Austin household could purchase the median priced house for 11 years less income than in Perth, Australia (this includes mortgage interest). While both Austin and Perth have been growing rapidly, Austin's faster growth is evidence of stronger demand, which, all things being equal, would have been expected to drive house prices up more than in Perth. But, with more restrictive land use regulation, all things are never equal.

U-Haul Prices as Migration Indicator

Mark Schill — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:28:28 -0400

Austin fared very well on this year's Best Cities Rankings, and here's another interesting indicator of the difference in migration between Austin and San Francisco:

"When comparing California with Texas, U-Haul says it all. To rent a 26-foot truck oneway from San Francisco to Austin, the charge is $3,236, and yet the one-way charge for that same truck from Austin to San Francisco is just $399. Clearly what is happening is that far more people want to move from San Francisco to Austin than vice versa, so U-Haul has to pay its own employees to drive the empty trucks back from Texas."

This anecdote comes from a report comparing business environments in Texas to California.

Here's a table of the latest domestic migration numbers from US Census for all metropolitan areas of more than 1.5 million total population (rate numbers are per 1,000 population):

NAME	Population, 2008	Net Domesitc Migration Rate, 2008	Ave. Net Domesic Mig Rate, 2001-2008
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA	19,006,798	-7.6	-12.0
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA	12,872,808	-9.0	-12.2
Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI	9,569,624	-4.4	-6.8
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX	6,300,006	7.0	5.7
Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD	5,838,471	-3.8	-2.3
Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX	5,728,143	6.6	4.5
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL	5,414,772	-8.7	-5.1
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA	5,376,285	8.2	10.2
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	5,358,130	-3.4	-2.9
Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH	4,522,858	-1.8	-7.1
Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI	4,425,110	-13.9	-9.1
Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ	4,281,899	12.3	17.9
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA	4,274,531	1.3	-10.5
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA	4,115,871	-1.9	16.1
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	3,344,813	3.6	0.9
Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI	3,229,878	-1.1	-1.0
San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA	3,001,072	0.1	-4.8
St. Louis, MO-IL	2,816,710	-2.0	-1.8
Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL	2,733,761	2.4	12.9
Baltimore-Towson, MD	2,667,117	-4.6	-1.6
Denver-Aurora, CO /1	2,506,626	7.3	1.8
Pittsburgh, PA	2,351,192	-1.0	-2.9
Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA	2,207,462	8.3	6.2
Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN	2,155,137	-1.7	-1.2
Sacramento--Arden-Arcade--Roseville, CA	2,109,832	2.2	8.7
Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH	2,088,291	-7.1	-7.5
Orlando-Kissimmee, FL	2,054,574	1.6	15.9
San Antonio, TX	2,031,445	11.5	10.4
Kansas City, MO-KS	2,002,047	0.7	1.5
Las Vegas-Paradise, NV	1,865,746	7.9	23.7
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA	1,819,198	-1.5	-16.4
Columbus, OH	1,773,120	1.4	1.8
Indianapolis-Carmel, IN	1,715,459	4.0	4.8
Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, NC-SC	1,701,799	20.9	18.2
Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC	1,658,292	-9.4	-0.6
Austin-Round Rock, TX	1,652,602	22.0	17.2
Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA	1,596,611	-6.6	-3.7
Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro--Franklin, TN	1,550,733	10.9	9.6
Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI	1,549,308	-4.2	-5.9