[fapjacks]

Well, there is a big difference between "Austinites" and people that moved to Austin from somewhere else and now make up 4/5ths of the population. I made up that number, but it's not a bad guess. Austin is an east coast city in Texas. Everybody there is from LA or the east coast and brought their road rage and terrible attitudes to Austin. It seems all the actual Austinites are leaving the city for nearby small towns like Dripping Springs, Elgin, Fredricksburg, San Marcos, New Braunsfels, etc. People actually from Austin seem to be way cooler than the people that moved to Austin from somewhere else. No offense to the transplants -- I used to be one and certainly Austinites are way cooler than I am. But I'm guessing they've also looked around and come to the same conclusion like the person here. Austin was probably as cool as they say in the 80s and 90s. Not so much these days.

[Recoveringhobo]

> Well, there is a big difference between "Austinites" and people that moved to Austin from somewhere else and now make up 4/5ths of the population. I made up that number, but it's not a bad guess. Austin is an east coast city in Texas.

You could say the same thing about SF, Oakland, Portland, LA, Seattle, Boston, New York, etc etc. Name a city with a booming economy in the U.S. that isn't mostly transplants.

> Everybody there is from LA or the east coast and brought their road rage and terrible attitudes to Austin. It seems all the actual Austinites are leaving the city for nearby small towns like Dripping Springs, Elgin, Fredricksburg, San Marcos, New Braunsfels, etc.

Once again, you could say the same thing about any of the popular cities for young people to move to. I currently live in Seattle and hear people saying the exact same thing all the time. Californians pricing Seattlites out and bringing road rage yada yada. I'm originally from the East Bay and have experienced the exact same gentrification process in my own home town.

> People actually from Austin seem to be way cooler than the people that moved to Austin from somewhere else. No offense to the transplants -- I used to be one and certainly Austinites are way cooler than I am. But I'm guessing they've also looked around and come to the same conclusion like the person here. Austin was probably as cool as they say in the 80s and 90s. Not so much these days.

I've heard this exact same sentiment online about all the hip cities in the U.S.

[fapjacks]

Maybe, but I've lived in those places you mentioned (except the east coast cities) and the problem is stifling in Austin. I'm originally from a small, liberal college town in a conservative plains state which in the 80s might have been a great twin city for Austin, if somewhat smaller. So I have some insight into what it "should" be like when people describe how cool Austin is, or how cool people have heard Austin is (because a lot of Austin's reputation is propagated by total strangers). And Austin simply isn't like that, anymore. All of the reasons that people love Austin are actually nowadays being manufactured by outsiders. The plastic, false reality of those qualities is palpable and easy to spot when you're there. There are a few secrets and a few items of local flavor which were still sort of genuinely "Austin" but even when I lived there more than five years ago, they were being inundated by outsiders as "best kept secrets" and diluted.

Having lived in most of the places you mention above, I can say definitively that Austin is experiencing this problem the worst among the "boom cities" by orders of magnitude. I'm guessing it's because of the proportion of recent transplants to "original Austinites". Austin was a small city in Texas in the 80s! ZERO of your boom cities were anything like that so recently. And it's worst among your examples not only because there are actually so few people proportionally who lived in Austin since it was actually cool, but compounded by the fact that a lot of those Austinites are leaving Austin for the surrounding countryside (or wherever).