In Your Heart, You Know He's Right
A Californian moves to Austin, hates it, and goes home. Why is everybody so touchy?
A week or so back, the Texas internet was abuzz with the lamentations of one Brett Alder, a semiconductor salesman, lately of San Diego, and a father of seven children.
Actually, to confine this to Texas is to due this phenomenon an injustice; Alder’s bitter exit interview was originally printed in Business Insider and then digested and vomited back up by the voracious, amoral behemoth that is London’s Daily Mail. And elsewhere. And even more elsewheres.
As the story dinged and donged through the pinball machine of modern-day social media, by week’s end some were ready to declare that “Brett” was the new “Karen.”
I’ve been in Alder’s shoes before. In 2011, I penned a lengthy anti-Austin diatribe myself. It was printed in both the Press and our sister paper in Dallas, the Observer, and battle lines were drawn, cudgels were taken up, and Austinites figuratively pelted me with rocks and garbage for a week or two.
At the time, some of my antagonists actually engaged me on the merits of my case, pointing out, accurately, that Austin had…well, it was more blessed by Mother Nature than Houston in terms of hills, lakes, creeks, greenbelts, and rivers. Which I had granted in my story, anyway, but my main points were that it had outgrown itself and lost its charm. Where once Willie Nelson was the icon, nu-Austin’s hero was Lance Armstrong. Big tech money had despoiled the former hippie Shangri-La; it had morphed into a hideously competitive and expensive city that traded on the very slacker past it was burying as fast as it could beneath glittering downtown condotels (aimed at billionaire investors’ seeking sixth homes) and oontz-oontz dance clubs and high-pressure jobs and keeping up with the Joneses.
At one such aforementioned douche-ridden dance emporium, patrons danced atop a giant aquarium in which sharks were confined; said predators were fed daily with seafood purchased from the Whole Foods flagship nearby.
“Molly Ivins wept,” I wrote.
And it’s only gotten worse since then. In typical Austin soul-stealing fashion, they named a boutique hotel after Townes Van Zandt, even though he never really lived there for more than a month or two at a time.
Worse still, that hotel’s bar bears the name of Geraldine, his hyper-intelligent wolf-dog and companion for two decades. So what is this Geraldine’s bar in the Hotel Van Zandt like, anyway? A few years back Vanity Fair declared it America’s nexus for the sugar daddy scene, and were Townes to rise from the grave and belly up to the bar for a brandy Alexander, he would be removed quicker than you can say “White Freightliner Blues,” likely to a round of applause from the icked-out would-be sugar babies. (Not because he would be a zombie; even a restored-to-youthful-handsomeness Townes would squick out the bougie clientele of the bar that bears his beloved dog’s name today.)
Townes, of course, would think this all hilarious, as it confirmed one of his lifelong credos: “Cheer up, it only gets worse.”
Yeah, few people debated that Austin had, um, changed, so a lot of the flak I took came in the form of simple name-calling. (And in the years since, more than one of the most vociferous of my detractors has admitted that my actual arguments held no little merit.)
And that’s pretty much the case with this Brett Alder fellow, too. “Well, bye,” is the general ‘tude, sometimes couched in that oh-so-clever “Thanks for writing this! Now nobody else will want to move here!” cloak that might have been a good zinger back in 1985 but has been nothing other than tired and obnoxious ever since.
Alder came up with an even ten reasons why Austin fell short of the “hype and the perception that California and Austin are reasonably comparable in lifestyle.”
And yes, some of them were ridiculous. “The car washes were lame,” he whines at one point. What does that even mean?
But as for the rest?
Judge for yourself.
Austin is not affordable, he said, even in spite of what to a Californian is a reasonable home price.
Because he had seven kids, he wanted “great” public schools, which meant he was bound to end up somewhere like Bee Cave, a suburb to the west of town, where homes are expensive even by Austin standards. (And yet still, seemingly a bargain to a Californian.)
Although the house he bought was double the size of his former home in California and came with a pool. He’d factored in Texas’s higher property taxes, but not the utilities:
You want a big house, and they're so cheap, but then it costs a fortune to heat and cool. We were paying $400 per month during the summer and winter and we were uncomfortable (our thermostat was set to 79 degrees F in the summer, and 65 degrees F in the winter). To be comfortable would have cost us $700 to $1,000 per month.
Water was also much more expensive, he wrote, as were services such as landscaping, home repairs, and pool maintenance. Texas weather plays hell with your house, he pointed out: hailstorms and downpours cost him thousands in roof repairs and mold remediation. And “scorpions will get inside.” (Deal with it; that’s another one of his pettier complaints, and I say that even though I have something of a phobia of those critters. Nothing should be allowed to have both claws and a stinger. Pick one.)
He claims that dining and movies are likewise more costly in Austin than San Diego, and that travel was prohibitively expensive. “To get anywhere interesting involves flying and hotel stays,” he writes. Remember, he’s from California. I don’t think any Texan whose traveled extensively in both states would try to argue that Texas is prettier than California.
All that before we even get to the first of his ten bullet points; to wit, the weather.
Compared to Cali, Brett says, Texas heat is hotter and our cold feels colder. To him, Austin seemed, of all things, both humid and rainy. (Good lord, one wonders how he would fare in Houston. And I don’t understand it, but Californians really all do seem to hate rain. Different strokes.)
Here’s Brett elaborating on the heat:
It's hard to describe how oppressive it is.
Although we had a huge yard and our own half basketball court, we really only felt like going outside about 3 to 4 months of the year. The rest of the time it was too windy, too hot/cold, too mosquito/horse fly/fire ant ridden or pouring. Often the kids would go outside anyway and come back with heat rashes and bug bites.
(Turns out he owned what amounts to many a Texas city park; get a load of that back yard)
Yes, that does sound whiny, but how many Texans take that same approach? I know Houstonians who won’t spend more than an hour or two outside save for those rare days when the weather is absolutely perfect, much less venture out for hours at a time for whole months of the year. I mean, look at Houston’s baseball and football stadiums, with their seldom-ever retracted retractable roofs. Look at Houston’s downtown tunnel system. We love to think we’re tough living in this shitty climate, but we spend more time avoiding it than we even do bragging about how tough we are for enduring it.
His second point — Texas’s lack of public land — is hard to grasp unless you have lived in both states.
Think about public land much? Yeah, me neither. On the west coast, we take public land for granted. Soaring Sierra Nevadas, sandy beaches, public space canyons, and even trails along creeks are standard fare in the West — not to mention Yosemite. Not so in Texas.
Because of Texas' history and lack of natural barriers (mountains, oceans) to settlement, most all of the land around is private and flat or rolling hills. Yes, there is a lot of land in Texas, but it all has barbed wire fences and no trespassing signs on it. Even creeks are parceled up as private property.
This has the effect, Brett writes, of funneling too many people into too little space, and he is absolutely right about that. This state seriously lacks for parklands. (Think I overstate things — try to find a camping spot in any of the more scenic Texas state parks on a weekend from now until infinity.)
That’s partially because so much of Texas is relatively featureless, but also, I guess, because so much of it is too profitable for its owners to surrender, thanks to either cattle or oil or both. Or maybe it’s just pig-headed greed, I dunno.
And additional parklands are not keeping pace with population growth, and so popular garden spots and river destinations like Garner and the Frio, the Comal and Guadalupe rivers, swimming holes like Deep Eddy, and Enchanted Rock are absolutely overrun to the breaking point, on weekends through most of the year and all summer long.
Brett had an especially dim view of Enchanted Rock, in his words, “a granite rock outcropping that would largely go unnoticed on the west coast.” After enduring a three-hour traffic jam trying to get on the grounds with his wife and seven kids, he aborted the mission for the time being and returned later the same day, only to find out that the parking lot was full.
“Even our neighborhood creek was divvied up as private property. So much for the kids exploring and catching crayfish,” he continued.
Now this is something I’ve experienced. Dividing time between Nashville and Houston as a kid, Nashville was far more free-range. Fences were rare. Kids trampled through everyone’s yards and rambled up and down creekbeds at well. I spent hours on end building dams and flipping rocks, snagging crawdads and snakes and whatever else. And then I’d come to Houston and feel kind of imprisoned. About the only thing comparable to my Tennessee creek adventures I enjoyed down here was catching tadpoles in the gutters after heavy rains and, um, salting slugs we found under rocks in my grandparents’ yard. I am not proud of that, but it’s a fact, and it was my aunts’ who taught me how to do that, so it’s their fault.
Bullet point three: “Nowhere to go”
There are no snowy mountains, no raging rivers, and no soaring arches. If you live in Austin things don't change much in a huge 7-hour-drive radius. Since we love the outdoors — exploring, climbing, rafting — Austin was not our cup of tea.
Okay, this is funny, because as a Houstonian, I’ve always considered Austinites relatively spoiled for choice when it comes to nature. In Houston, you can drive an hour in any direction and find yourself in….more Houston. Not even a prairie or a decent forest or a lake that isn’t full of old tires, toxic fish, submerged automobiles, poisonous snakes (with toxic flesh), and likely the bones of 1950s murder victims.
The next two of his complaints were highly subjective. He found Austinites to be liars in his personal dealings (with realtors and tradesmen) and also to be unreliable narrators on Yelp. With the latter, once more he comes across as a titty-baby:
Yes, there is good food in Austin, but you can't trust Yelp to find it because it doesn't work in Austin.
We drove 40 minutes for good Southern Indian food at a 4.5-star rated establishment. It was one of the worst service experiences of my life.
Uh, dude, Yelp sucks. Check other sources. Google Reviews, for example. That’s my go-to and it seldom leads me astray, because I take care to read both the raves and the rants and take both with a grain of salt. But then I guess I am just a jaded Texan who expects to be lied to at every turn so my cynicism comes naturally….
[NOTE: It turns out that Alder left Austin in 2016, so all these complaints are five years old. Why or how Business Insider chose to print this now is anyone’s guess. Anyway, in some ways, this gives a little more heft to his complaints about Yelp, as it wasn’t quite as terrible then as it is now. But as for all his other complaints? All those things have just gotten much worse year after year.]
Moving on, Brett found Austinites rude, and I agree. Wholeheartedly. Year after year after year at SXSW, some Austinite would glance at my badge and see “Houston” on it and sneer. “Oh I’m so sorry,” they would say, as if my badge denoted me a sufferer of a fungal brain-eating disease. Total strangers. Every year.
For Brett, it was encountering a fellow parent in one of those aforementioned "Don't move to Austin" shirts.
Let me get this straight, I uprooted my family, moved across four states, and that's the welcome I get? And the worst part of it all is that it's not even funny. There's a bumper sticker in the West: "Montana sucks. Tell your friends!" Same message, but with some humor.
Eh, Brett, you shouldn’t get your knickers in a twist over that one. And come to think of it, it’s less rudeness than it is unbearable smugness. Your true Austinite, especially the transplants, be they from California or Brooklyn, or Cypress or Frisco, takes it as an article of faith that Austin is the only city worthy of calling home. This without knowing the first thing about what is life is like in the actual cities of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, or San Antonio. They judge all those cities by their suburbs and Austin and only Austin by its prohibitively expensive heart. Where they most likely don’t live, anyway. It’s weird.
“Austin drivers are also terrible, I mean, reptilian brain terrible,” he continues. Whatever. If you don’t like a city, you find the drivers terrible. I’ve never really noticed drivers to be better or worse — as a group — anywhere I’ve ever lived. There are different driving cultures, sure, but not an appreciable difference in the quality of driving as a whole. And locals of every city seem to take some kind of weird pride in claiming their hometown has the worst drivers, anywhere. Bah. Though I love open-road car trips, I hate even thinking about driving, much less writing about it, so I won’t bore you anymore with it.
And I am going to kind of yada-yada through number 7, in which he calls Austin a “conservative dystopia” because of sleazy insider deals sticking people with exorbitant energy bills, and how the “football industrial complex” funnels kids into basic public schools instead of a patchwork of “charter schools, two day schools, public schools, cash/combo charter school/homeschooling, you name it.”
Item 8: He found Austin to be too White. Well, yeah. And you moved to the Whitest part of it, Brett. And yet still, his critique was on the money.
In California we've had Vietnamese neighbors, Iranian neighbors, Filipinos, Palestinians, you name it. We love it.
In parts of Texas it's not just a monoculture, but a monoculture that doesn't seem to be aware of it's own blandness.
Yeah, Austinites will fight you about how diverse they think they are. It’s hilarious.
He found the schools to be overly disciplined and militaristic:
There was a massive emphasis on conformity that was good for teachers, bad for kids. I went to read to my kindergartner's class and felt like I'd landed in a dictatorship. They had aides making sure all of the kindergartners faced forward while marching in line to the cafeteria. Kindergartners.
We withdrew our children. Our school may have been particularly bad, but it's something to look out for.
And at number ten, a factor that may well have colored everything else about his time in Austin: cedar fever.
And not only did he pile in a few complaints before he got to his ten, he added an eleventh for good measure: “Big, luxury home obsession.”
I'm guessing because of the lack of public land, terrible weather, etc. that Austinites get really into their houses. We saw some unbelievably ornate homes — castle-esque.
And there's pressure to keep your house immaculate. You can buy a home that is really nice by California standards (updated kitchen, crown moldings) only to find that everyone else's house is much nicer than yours, which we didn't care about until we found that no one wanted to buy our less-than-luxurious home.
Moral of the story:
“If you're moving to Austin, make sure it's because of the things that it offers (downtown lifestyle, BBQ, football, live music, nice houses, professional opportunity) and that you won't miss the things you're leaving behind (good weather, public spaces, etc.)”
Spot on.
He's not wrong. By the time I got to Austin (2006) it had lost some of the charm but was a huge improvement over where I moved from (Tyler). I remember my first day here, I was in South Austin and saw a guy with a long ponytail walking down the sidewalk, I was just delighted because it was so different from East Texas. LOL. But a lot of the places I enjoyed in my early years in Austin are long gone and sorely missed. It's a whole different animal now.