This is a strong downside to Texas. It is very hard to get around without a car. You might be able to live in downtown Austin without a car, but that's a pretty expensive part of town. And once you want to go anywhere else, you'll want to drive.
Downtown Austin, btw, is not good thinking territory. It's super crowded. I mean crowded. I mean, many streets are simply not accessible for driving on because they are so packed with drunk college kids. It's fun and frenetic, but it's an attraction not a lifestyle.
Houston? San Antonio? Dallas? All cities with their own vibe, but they are not walking cities at all. Texans have vast tracts land and boy o boy do they USE it.
I'm both up voting you and commenting because I used to live (more than 4 years) and continue to monitor (in a very real time way) the DFW Metroplex. Then, I moved to Southern California, so I've kind of made the MIRI move in reverse.
Beware of motivated reasoning when it comes to things in TX that you think will change for the better soon. For example, if you had listed Dallas as a possibility, I would be warning against counting on improved DART service.
If you find a positive attribute in a particular area of Austin, make sure the other positive and negat...
Seconding this.
While it's possible to get around without a car in some spots of most cities in Texas, your quality of life and ability to visit others, go to interesting places, etc. downright sucks* unless you have a car. Additionally, the moment you leave the big cities in Texas (and even in them in some parts), the culture gets very religious and conservative, very quickly. Also, the state government and legislature is fond of going on crusades against the big cities from time to time, because they think the big cities are too progressive / liberal. Fur...
I would avoid Waco, mostly because I-35 is so central to the North/South traffic flow there and is so terribly always in a state of disrepair and repair and demolition and re...molition... Waco is also a college town, but it's a very conservative college town. You'll get the college town downsides, but not many of the upsides. The only thing in my mind that is a merit to Waco is that it isn't far from West and in West you've got Kolaches. (I went to Baylor, briefly, in my younger days and soon fled.)
I live in Austin. I've lived a long time in North Austin, South Austin, and now I live in Travis Heights / SoCo. This was broken up by a 12 year stint in Bellevue, WA.
Some thoughts:
The I-35 corridor through downtown is not a great drive. If you live North of downtown, you'll tend to want to stay up there. If you live South, you'll tend to want to stay down there. In my mind, South of downtown (anywhere south/east/west as long as you don't have to commute through downtown) wins in the exchange. North Austin is a flat, uninspired land that more resembles Dal...
(I wrote a post laying out some notes about Austin, but wasn't logged in. When I logged in the post was lost. So, this is a note for the site developers that this is a pretty bad failure case.)
Sent you a PM. My guess is we should be able to help you recover it, unless you are using Brave, which I think has broken localstorage in a way that might combine badly with the way we use it.
I'll have to hit you up about LW meet-ups in the area. I didn't like the ones I attended in Seattle and as a result I became very adjacent to the community. I also have kids, which consume a lot of time. It would be nice to have some grown up friends.