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Keeping Austin Weird Winding Down? – HotAir

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March 20, 2025
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I’ve seen snippets here and there about Austin’s weird magic losing its mojo over the past few weeks and only now had a chance to look into it.

It seems to be true.





Austin, Texas, has always had a quirky, off-beat kind of reputation. I remember in 2003 or so, sitting in a NOLA restaurant with Kcruella. We were next to a lovely lady, and a gentleman who turned out to be her attorney. In the course of our chat, we learned she was a lifelong NOLA resident and a recent widow, and they were there finalizing her plans to leave. After all those years in the Big Easy, she was packing up and moving to Austin.

We were kind of surprised – leave NOLA for…TEXAS?! Who does that?

She said it had been one of their favorite places to visit because it was as fun and funky in its own right as New Orleans.

I’ve heard that so many times in the years since. Not to mention in the past five years or so watching as companies exit difficult, high-tax blue states with many of the edgier ones announcing they’re headed to Austin, as well.

According to figures Axios quoted, Austin was the boomtown of the Pandemic and suffered the growing pains associated with the influx.

Austin had the greatest increase in population among the 50 most populous metros in the nation during the pandemic period, per new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Why it matters: Not even a seismic disruption like COVID could stop Austin’s meteoric growth.

Driving the news: The number of people living in U.S. metro areas rose by almost 3.2 million between 2023 and 2024, the Census Bureau said this week — a gain of about 1.1%.

Zoom in: The greater Austin area grew from 2.3 million people in 2020 to 2.55 million in 2024, a nearly 11% increase.

Yes, but: The influx of high-end earners, many drawn to Austin during the remote-work revolution early in the pandemic, exacerbated Austin’s affordability crisis, pushing middle-class families to suburbs like Buda and Pflugerville.





But it’s starting to look as if the boom-time building bonanza may be a bust pretty soon.

One explanation is that the Austin city council slashed the red tape for housing project approvals during the Pandemic crunch as the supply of available housing shrank and rents skyrocketed. Between January 2021 and 2023, the average rent in Austin rose 31%.

There’s a debate about whether Austin rents have come down as much as this article claims, but there is no arguing they are down substantially from pandemic highs.

As the US confronts a housing crisis so severe that it became a wedge issue in the presidential election, helped fuel some of the fastest inflation in decades and made it all-but-impossible to recruit teachers, fire fighters and restaurant workers to high-cost areas, the Texas capital has become the poster child for advocates who say the only way out is by building more homes. And while other cities run by progressives including San Francisco and Chicago face criticism for onerous permitting processes, Austin has cut regulations to speed up development. It appears to have worked.

Nowhere in the country have rents declined as much as they have in Austin — now 22% off the peak reached in August 2023, according to Redfin. The median asking rent is $1,399 per month, down $400 in less than three years.

Also, apartment and condo managers are offering schweet incentives to get new occupants into their places while trying to retain their existing renters.





They call it YIMBY – Yes In My BackYard, as opposed to the N(not)IMBY practiced elsewhere.

All that building does come with a downside, and that’s what’s fixin’ to hit now. Builders will slow down or pull out of projects entirely when they reach the point of diminishing returns, and they’re starting to see that as rents fall and apartments languish empty.

The question is going to be how bad the impact will be, as it is still not an ‘affordable’ city.

…One result of the city’s falling rents: Austin’s no longer Texas’ most expensive major city for renters. The region’s population and job growth slowed as apartment building took off. As Fort Worth overtook Austin to become the state’s fourth-largest city, its rents surpassed Austin’s, too.

San Antonio, Dallas and Plano have also seen declining rents — but they haven’t fallen as fast as in Austin.

Though rents have dipped, the Austin region’s housing costs remain high. It’s unclear how long the downward trend in Austin rents will last. While nearly 17,000 apartments are under construction, according to MRI data, builders have pulled back on new projects amid the glut.

Austin rents sit about 17% above pre-pandemic levels, Zillow figures show. Nearly half of the Austin-Round Rock region’s renters are “cost-burdened,” according to a report last year published by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies — meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, leaving less money in their pockets to spend on other essential needs like groceries, clothes and transportation.





Austin home values have also slipped backward more than some other metro areas in the state but are still holding above their pre-pandemic levels.

These adjustments are happening just as Austin’s long-held, too-cool-for-school image is beginning to take a beating and residents are restless.

Last year, I told you there’d been a huge brouhaha when Hamas sympathizers, who routinely lit up the city council over ‘ceasefire resolution,’ came positively unglued when they found out that the US Army was one of the sponsors of Austin’s famed SXSW Music festival. They organized a boycott, Gov Abbott told them to pound sand, the festival told Gov Abbott, ‘Why couldn’t you just stay out of it,’ and everything erupted in hate and discontent.

This year they announced there won’t be any more ‘music’ part of the festival.





… Any Chamber of Commerce member or City Council or local news person calling this “The Live Music Capitol of the World” should pack their BS and leave.

The comments are scathing, and the most often repeated is ‘Liberals ruin everything.’

About that Soros DA. 

He’s not popular.

There are so many of these.

Locals were offering warnings to visitors arriving for this year’s SXSW festival.

Even if rents come down, the reputation Austin is rapidly accruing could make it very difficult to fill them, whatever the rents.





I’ve followed this account for a couple of years. The guy has been doing heroic work and fighting the city council every step of the way.

LIBERALS RUIN EVERYTHING

That’s a real shame.







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