Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity(economist.com) |
Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity(economist.com) |
Who knows if that will be enough to move the needle on any of this, but companies aren't just buildings and incorporation paperwork, they're also the people.
Texas is a gerrymandered purple state, not a red state. It's just that the state is the California's bogey-man, because Californians don't actually want to face the fact that we have major problems with long-term affordability and the ability to build a life for middle-class folks (perhaps less appreciated by the disproportionately high-income folks on this forum). Every single urban area in Texas is now heavily aligned with the Democratic party, and the vast majority of those areas are affordable places to build a life and build wealth.
When I was growing up in Austin, it had the second highest per-capita gay population in America after San Francisco. Houston had a lesbian mayor. In many cities Spanish is the dominant language spoken. Texas cities are not some place where minorities have to fear for their safety.
The reason not to move to Texas is that it's a suburban hellscape, and you'll be stuck in traffic for more hours a day than you'd like to admit. I left after pushing for transportation alternatives at Austin City Hall, and the result of that traffic mitigation was an express lane down the highway. Texas is, in large part, following the development pattern of Southern California.
Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso are all lovely towns, full of vibrancy, amazing culture, friendly people, reasonable weather most of the year, wonderful food, and reasonable cost of living. Politics are an issue, but again, that all hangs on a 2%-5% swing in a census year, and the entire state could end up redrawn as 50-50 split. I just want folks on the American coasts to remember that a big part of why Texas is branded as "that really bad place" is exactly because folks on the coast refuse to look in the mirror and fix the problems of affordability, wealth inequality, and clean energy that Texas has addressed. Instead, they've made Texas a bogey man that is "very bad" so that you can't point to things like rapid development of housing and renewables as actually the way to fix affordability.
Man, I just don't get this at all. Sure, there may be some democratic areas in the large cities, but they pretty much have zero say in the local state governance. Look at the recent walk outs and leaving the state only to return to have the legislation they were protesting pass with nothing they could do. There is no democratic power. Even those large cities that lean left have attempted to buck the system by passing local regulations that the state then sues them to prevent those liberal policies from taking place. As an example, Dallas passed decriminalization for marijuana, but the governor said no via law suits. This idea of Texas being purple just comes across as farcical and out of touch. I say this as someone that grew up in Dallas, lived in LA, and now lives back in Dallas. You sound just like someone from Austin.
I know plenty of women that are very unhappy with the state for not dissimilar reasons as the GP with friends that have moved out of state specifically for the government's apparent disdain for women.
California: we know how SoCal is culturally worlds apart from Norcal, and both are worlds apart from inland California.
North Carolina: culturally Charlotte ≠ Research Triangle ≠ Greensboro-Winston Salem-High Point. There is no single NC culture.
Florida: the stereotypes exist, but I've visited different metros in Florida and they couldn't be more different. South Florida (Miami) is very Latin while the panhandle (Tallahassee, Pensacola) couldn't be less Latin -- it's mostly southern culture. Orlando, Tampa are also way different.
Florida in fact shouldn't be governable -- every part of the state has different interests. Yet it somehow works.
How much does that matter with the state legislature firmly in Republican control? The legislature isn't shy about making state laws to stop cities when the cities try to do Democrat things locally.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-texas-el-paso/news/20...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/13/10-states-worst-quality-of-l...
https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-abortion-ban-miscar...
https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-maternal-mortality-...
There are a number of laws in Texas that make it a non-option for many of us.
The only thing that sucks about Texas is the property taxes, other than that it is a very welcoming state with great infra and comfortable standard of living.
"Racist clauses in property deeds can’t be enforced, but still exist. A Texas bill would make it easier to remove them."
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/17/texas-property-deeds...
"Racist Clauses Are Common In Local Zoning Documents. Several Texas Bills Would Make It Easier To Change That." https://www.kut.org/texas/2021-05-14/racist-clauses-are-comm...
The real reason companies are moving to Texas (the casual racism is just a bonus)? Court shopping for their arbitration clauses. If you sue/have an arbitration dispute with a Texas based company they have strategically located their headquarters in the areas with the most 'court shopped' judges that will rule for the corps.
And even worse than establishing corporate headquarters as a form of court shopping, creations of corporate courts. https://www.commondreams.org/news/texas-business-courts
And the new Texas hotness? Why yes, private courts. https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/private-judges-...
Refuse to do business with Texas corporations. They are un-American and take away so many of your rights when you do business with companies based there.
I don’t want her to have less rights.
It's warm. It's dry, and there's some evidence the power system isn't up to the task. Their call.
i hope the right people and companies leave and go deal with high humidity and heat waves
The low regulation and trend of news articles from Texas... it doesn't inspire confidence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48249747 / https://reclaimthenet.org/texas-woman-arrested-for-facebook-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198551 / https://www.autonocion.com/us/tesla-lithium-refinery-texas/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121178 / https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/28/texas-fracking-water...
There was a huge Bitcoin push in Texas about 5ish years back. But the way they went about it was that they passed a bunch of tax breaks for Bitcoin miners - the most commodified, energy-intensive part of the value chain. Coinbase and Kraken and Ripple and Solana and Binance's U.S. operations are all based out of California.
The article mentions Exxon's reincorporation in Texas, and Chevron also recently moved their headquarters from California to Houston. But oil is a dying, commodified industry. The replacement is electrification, in terms of solar, batteries, EVs, inverters, and other parts of the value chain. Enphase is in California, SunPower was until its recent bankruptcy, Tesla R&D is still in Palo Alto, and other major companies like Rivian and Lucid also put all their R&D in the Bay Area.
The other major industry Texas is known for is construction, and cheap houses. But construction, if you read any of the construction-physics.com articles that frequently pop up here, is another famously low-margin industry. We know how to do it, and millions of people do.
My theory is that low-margin industries get located in Texas because they make it easy. By being business-friendly, low-regulation, and low-expenses, they become the only place that low-margin commodity businesses can survive. Thus, everyone who has no pricing power and struggles to cut costs moves to Texas, because they offer the lowest costs of everyone.
California is the opposite: by making business onerous, creating huge amounts of regulation, taxing the hell out of both people and businesses, and enshrining a pyramid scheme in their state constitution via Prop 13, they make sure that only the richest can survive there. And thus only the richest do survive. The state is filled with wealthy companies and wealthy individuals because everybody else got priced out and moved elsewhere. Selection effects dominate efficiency effects.
Tech is one of the highest margin industries.
Honestly, the reflexive hate both Texas and California get on HN is ridiculous and a great way to filter out accounts to ignore.
There are valid criticisms to make for both, but if someone only criticizes and cannot point out or conceed positive attributes as well, it's best to just treat that account as a lost cause.
Geographic negative polarization has become far too entrenched in online discourse.
> Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity
> What Happens to an Economy When It's Too Hot to Work?
Same thing that happens when it's too cold to work? Wait for another season?
This is a huge deal, just like how Wachovia-Wells Fargo merger helped build NC's PE industry and Citadel's new HQ in Miami helps put Florida on the map for high finance.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/036a838f-8209-4df7-8cbc-bb069e4e7...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/efeca6be-c9b5-4912-b66b-15716cc91...
Perhaps it’s different this time, but the underlying message in the past has been more about negotiation with the city and state rather than an earnest intent to relocate to an entirely new state (and regulatory environment, etc).
For example, if you were always specialized in Energy, Houston/Dallas would have always been comparable to NYC, or if you were specialized in TMT then LA and SF were similar.
Reading between the lines, I'm assuming Austin was chosen not just for QoL but also to solidify an Energy and probably AI and Data Center thesis as well. Also, I'd assume most backoffice roles like Accounting, Compliance, IT, etc would be shifted to Austin similar to what JPMC did in Dallas.
Interesting, hadn’t heard. I can’t wait to see where this goes.
Working with regulators is a terrible experience. I hope they can fix this as well.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/13/texas-water-explaine...
The property taxes are what keep Texas affordable. Texas's infrastructure is going the way of Southern California, when the politics on property taxes follow what Southern California did, the affordability will disappear too.
Great infrastructure is fucking insane thing to say. I was living there during the big freeze in 2021 The state is incredibly unprepared for any sort of major weather event and refuses to actively harden infrastructure against these sort of events. That was one of the many reasons why I chose to leave, because I don't want a repeat.
(Or I'm just built for Siberia and fit right in idk)
Honestly, I wish the HN/YC moderation team could be explicit in showing how it has taken down certain bot rings as a trust building exercise, because there absolutely are nation state bot rings on HN as well.
At the same time, you can't ignore the facts. Texas has high property taxes, which are de facto wealth taxes, so it shouldn't surprise anyone on that Texas has significantly lower wealth inequality than California does.
Again, unless you literally inherit a house with an inherited property tax assessment in CA or vest equity in a unicorn, you're probably going to be poorer in CA than in Texas.
We have to stop pretending the landed aristocracy that exist in California somehow "doesn't count" as inequality and injustice.
Absolutely not here pretending that California is some promised land. Hell, even the state I ended up moving to has its own problems.
It’s just that the problems that Texas does have are untenable for my family.
It would be good if everyone agreed that taking away basic human rights from women is a bad thing, but I guess were way past that.
I'd much rather companies that incorporated in Delaware than the Wild West that is Texas: I want to have peace of mind knowing the company is not trying to get away with shady stuff like Elon is with his companies.
A “Red State” is a state where pretty much wherever you go, it’s Republican voters. Their election results statewide are R+15 or more. Oklahoma is R+34. Texas’s statewide elections are surprisingly close. Often R+5 or less, and occasionally R+2. That’s purple. That means that half the state are allies.
If the later I'd expect Florida to get a big boost because so many people retire there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
My point is that it’s easy to clutch pearls in a zero-sum economy like CA’s when you’re on top. The reason I still have a fondness for Texas is that despite some of the political change that I find frightening, it’s still a better place for most folks to go to build a life.
It’s not perfect, but when every single blue city in a blue state has an affordability crisis, I have to commend Austin for actually building the housing people need to actually own something, instead of just talking about it and doing mostly nothing like SF, LA, Seattle, Portland, NYC, and Boston have all done.
Good on Texas for not letting cities try to preserve themselves in amber. That just enriches incumbents by allowing them to engage in rent-seeking.
In comparison I'm paying around $2000/month for an apartment in Seattle but this is in an area that's right next to the light rail and well taken care of. With the light rail expanding I could easily find apartments even cheaper that still keep me within walking distance and without needing a car.
Austin is much cheaper than Seattle.
