Joan Didion invented the New York breakup letter with her seminal essay, “Goodbye to All That.” The essay spawned so many followers-on over the decades since 1967 that it’s a cliche for youngish writers to wax solipsistic about the place on their way out the golden door.
There is a similar though opposite phenomenon in Austin, what I’ll call a “Hello to All This” essay, written by those newer to the city but largely in response to the oft-fielded query from baffled friends and family: “Why the hell did you move to Austin?” It says something about these two cities that writers feel the need to justify leaving New York and living in Austin.
In his own contribution to the justification genre, prolific writer and podcaster David Perell offers a possible reason why: “Austin is a mediocre city.”
Austin is “a great place to live,” David writes, but “Just about everything is a 7/10. The food, the weather, the music, the sports, the nature, the comedy. It’s pretty good in almost every category.”
But apparently not good enough to score above a C-minus.
As a relative newcomer to Austin myself, I found this triggering. What kind of person would move to a C-minus city—a C-minus person? When I stepped back and realized that David’s essay was not a personal attack on me, I wondered: is he right? If so, what would it take for Austin to be a 10-out-of-10 city?
David, who like me spent a lot of pre-Austin life in San Francisco and New York, has built a successful business and online following around writing and podcasting. He is certainly not a C-minus person. In fact, I’m currently enrolled in his fantastic program, Write of Passage—so this essay is sorta meta. Reading his essay again, I found that much of what David captured about his experience in Austin resonated with my own, even if I didn’t always agree with his takes. He writes:
The people are down to earth. Instead of defaulting to drinks at a bar, people meet up for active, outdoor activities like pickleball and paddle boarding. Though it’s the capital of Texas, the quirky vibe hardly resembles the guns and cowboys culture that rightly defines the rest of the state. Socially, it’s one of the most communal places I know. Intellectually, it’s a haven for the kind of free-thinking that’s historically defined America but is on the way out these days. It’s as far as you can get from a coastal city, while still being able to work out at Equinox. And technologically, it has its finger on the pulse of the future — maybe more than any other American city.
This rings true. The people are down-to-earth and communal: Austin is by far the friendliest city I’ve ever lived in, miles ahead of San Francisco, where even the baristas will only chat with you if you tip with stock options. (New Yorkers are just too busy to care.)
Austin is a playground for outdoor enthusiasts: its shimmering downtown lake, miles of urban walking, biking, and hiking trails, and mostly temperate climate (besides the thermometer-bursting hellscape of summer) make it easy to get outside with friends year-round. And also to its many open-air bars.
The vibe is different from the rest of Texas: though I’ve encountered plenty of folks here unironically donning cowboy apparel, the only guns I’ve seen have been in the warmer months when strapping young men strip off their shirts basically anywhere in town.
And technologically, from electric vehicles to rockets to semiconductors to 3D-printed homes, people are doing revolutionary, moonshot shit here. This is all 10-out-of-10 stuff.
Further, David’s identification of the free-thinking intellectual climate here can’t be overstated in its importance to the culture of the city. In San Francisco, the climate was dominated by a kind of monolithic groupthink that could find an injustice in any act of kindness but couldn’t see the literal human shit that littered the sidewalks. In Austin, the so-called progressive “blueberry” in the conservative “tomato soup” of Texas, people don’t automatically assume you agree with them. There is a liberal heterodoxy in the waters that burble from Barton Springs: people here have largely figured out how to live with people who disagree with them. From the perspective of pluralistic democracy, that’s more 10-out-of-10 stuff. Certainly better than anything we’re getting in Washington, D.C.
Where it starts to slip in the rankings is in the built environment. David writes, “At its best, Austin is understated. At its worst, it’s ugly. No matter how you cut it, the city’s not very photogenic.”
Ouch.
With the glaring, gleaming exception of the state capitol, there’s a dearth of beautiful or historical buildings. But this is a reflection of the city’s history: Austin was a small town for a very long time, so if it doesn’t have that many beautiful old buildings left it’s because relatively few were ever built. What might have survived was bulldozed during the era of urban renewal and highway construction and ultimately replaced by parking lots or postmodern government monstrosities. Indeed, much of what we recognize as downtown today—including City Hall—was asphalt or dirt only twenty years ago.
But what’s been built since is “without character,” “lazy,” “functional and utilitarian.” David suggests this is the result of loose building restrictions, but if the architecture of the city is defined by a “sterile, globalist, and hyper-contemporary aesthetic,” the same is basically true of every other American city. It’s just that New York and other older cities have been building skyscrapers for more than a century, so their skylines are interspersed with elegant Woolworth and Chrysler Buildings that reflect the design-forward ethos of their age. We do not live in such an age. Indeed, the starchitects of the modern era seem to have forgotten that Louis Sullivan saw his famous maxim “form follows function” as the basis for beauty. That’s not uniquely Austin’s fault.
But Austin’s pattern of building parking garages and highways everywhere reflects a certain car-centric, suburban sprawl ethos that has made it one of the least dense big cities in America—this is a collective failure of imagination, but one that doesn’t distinguish Austin from other sunbelt cities.
David’s isn’t wrong when he writes that, “[t]hough pedestrians technically have the right of way, the streets are built for cars instead of people.” When my husband and I walk our dog through our residential neighborhood, we are forced to dodge passing trucks on the street because there are no sidewalks—just a half-mile from downtown. Most of Austin’s protected bike lanes are “protected” by flimsy plastic poles, which do not prevent Ford F-150s from parking on top of them. The Texas Department of Transportation, not content to have gashed an interstate highway through downtown sixty years ago, is preparing to bulldoze even more of it in a Sisyphean attempt to alleviate traffic—even as study after study shows this is futile and the city itself prepares to spend billions of dollars building a modern light-rail system.
None of this is 10-out-of-10 stuff. A city that prioritizes F-150s over people deserves an F-minus.
But this is Austin as we see it today, not as it might be tomorrow—and perhaps there is a future where something higher than 7-out-of-10 is within reach. Austin is beginning to work through its growing pains, and city leaders are realizing that the obstacle is the way: to address the challenges of a growing city, we must grow up as a city. The City Council has introduced ambitious reforms to an outdated land use code that is holding back the supply of attainable housing options, and just last week they eliminated parking mandates citywide, becoming the largest American city to have done so. The city is building more bike lanes and sidewalks and other multimodal transportation infrastructure. The light rail project enjoys broad public support. This is a generational shift in the way that Austin has approached city-building, but whether these efforts will lead to 10-out-of-10 stuff will take a generation to find out.
So it is interesting, as Austin expands its ambitions, that David feels the city shrinks his. He writes:
Being in Austin lowers my ambitions. The city doesn’t inspire me to be great like San Francisco or New York. But what I lose in ambition, I gain in focus.
I am finding something else to be true. Everywhere I look, I see people, including David, doing ambitious things here—but perhaps in a manner that would be foreign to New Yorkers or San Franciscans used to a certain kind of grind. Austin allows me to be more ambitious in a more focused way: by honing in on and building my life and career around the values that really matter to me. Whether that’s undertaking writing projects, pursuing new business opportunities, or fighting for reforms at City Hall, I’m pursuing a kind of personal entrepreneurialism that was hard to do while running cash-strapped in the New York rat race or building a bricks-and-mortar business that didn’t scale like software in San Francisco. This city, with its promise of freedom and opportunities, despite all its present limitations and challenges, better matches how I want to live my life in this phase of my life.
And isn’t livability really the most important metric by which to measure a city’s greatness?
Livability, I realize, is really in the eye of the beholder. It’s about personal ambition: it’s what you value, what you can afford, what you want out of life, what you’re willing to live with—and all that will color your view of the place you’re living in. In her essay, Didion was not so much saying goodbye to New York as she was to the person who she was when she arrived there, to a person whose values and ambitions she no longer shared and that no longer made sense in that city. A person’s values and ambitions evolve over time as we walk through the phases of life. Notably, Didion returned to New York in the last phase of hers.
Didion writes, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends”—and that is of course true for all of us who are not prophets. Like David, I imagine I’m in Austin for the foreseeable future—I keep finding new ways to say “Hello to All This” here—but that is in part because I see my own ambitions tied up with those of a city that is imagining a more ambitious future for itself.
And that is what makes Austin different from New York and San Francisco for me—my ambitions in those places were not intrinsically rooted in either, and eventually transcended the geography of both. So, in a certain sense, I concede David’s point: when considering the good and bad, Austin is perhaps on average a 7-out-of-10 city.
But it’s one in which I can pursue a 10-out-of-10 life for me.
Thanks for curating this Ryan! I read his piece a couple months back, so thanks for the reminders! That insight about ambition and focus is fascinating.
I'm in Colorado right now but I'm looking to move out to Austin in Q1 2024! I just found your piece through the WOP community. Would you like to hop on a call to get to know each other further?