The Suburban Life

Californians really are moving to Austin — and where they live will surprise you

Austin house home 101 Pascal Lane Weslake Rob Roy neighborhood front exterior

Goodbye, West Coast. Hello, Hill Country!

Photo courtesy of Concierge Auctions

Californians: It's easy to blame them for everything bad in Austin, from traffic to unaffordable housing. Although we already know that most new Austinites actually come from other parts of Texas, one California city is exporting more folks to Central Texas than ever before.

According to a new report from Redfin, Austin is a particularly attractive destination for people leaving San Francisco.

The real estate firm asserts that there is an ongoing Bay Area exodus due to sky-rocketing home prices. While West Coast towns like Seattle and Portland are still strong magnets for San Franciscans, other cities across the U.S. — including Austin, Denver, Boston, and Washington — are growing in popularity.

What's bringing them to Austin? Our thriving tech sector, of course, is a great match for workers hailing from Silicon Valley. Pair that with a more affordable housing market, and it's no wonder that San Franciscans are itching to become Austinites.

Digging deeper, Redfin found that there are about 79 tech jobs for every 1,000 jobs in San Francisco. Austin's ratio is close behind, with 64 tech jobs per 1,000. And Austin's median home price of $286,000 blows San Francisco's $1.2 million out of the water. As a result, Austin area homes are among the most searched-for properties by San Francisco folks.

This influx of tech professionals (and other out-of-towners wooed by our great food and warm weather) is contributing to Austin's rising home prices. As a result, new Austinites are looking further outside the city for accommodations.

"Builders can't keep up with the demand closer to the central core of Austin, but areas like Pflugerville, Cedar Park, and Round Rock are experiencing rapid growth and new-build communities are getting snatched up quickly by buyers moving to the area from more expensive cities like San Francisco," says Lauren Johnson, a local Redfin agent, in the report.

But newcomers don't seem bothered by being pushed outside of city limits. "Living 30 minutes outside of the urban core doesn't faze many of my clients — for a third of the price they're getting three times the property, so being just outside the city is a fair trade," Johnson says. "One of my recent clients was living in a $1 million townhome in San Jose and purchased a much larger home in Pflugerville for under $400,000."

Guess it pays to be a tech exec with a love for the 'burbs.

trends home-for-sale reports

Rental Rumblings

Cramped? Austin renters feel the squeeze in more ways than one.

Algarita Apartments/Facebook

Austin renters have less space than they did in 2009.

Feeling cramped? There's a reason. In a recent study, real estate website Trulia found that renters — especially those with children — have less space than they did several years ago.

Trulia looked at U.S. Census Bureau's 2014 American Community Survey data to determine the number of needed bedrooms based on children and married couples in the family. Married couples together only need one bedroom, while non-married adults as well as children were assumed to each need one bedroom. Households with fewer bedrooms than non-married adults or children are considered to suffer the “space crunch.”

In the nation’s biggest metro areas, 14.7 percent of households had fewer bedrooms than family members, an increase of half-a-percentage point since 2009. The study showed that renters with kids are especially cramped, and the larger and pricier the metro, the more likely renters are tight on space. Trulia found that just 8.1 percent of nationwide homeowners are tight on space, versus 26.4 percent of households who rent.

Contrary to the national trend, a few major Texas metros, including Houston and Dallas, posted a bigger drop among space-crunched renters compared to homeowners. Austin, Fort Worth, and San Antonio, on the other hand, are consistent with the national trend, where more renting households are sharing bedrooms than they did in 2009.

In the Austin-Round Rock metro area, 13.2 percent of residents face the space crunch. The bunk-bed wave hit just 7.3 percent of Austin homeowners in 2014, down .6 percentage points over a five-year period. In comparison, 22.8 percent of renting households have fewer bedrooms than they need, up 2.4 percentage points since 2009 — the highest increase in Texas by far.

While space is seemingly getting worse for renters in Austin, as well as Fort Worth and San Antonio, the share of cramped renters in Houston and Dallas has dropped more significantly between 2009 and 2014 than the share of cramped homeowners. Still, 28.8 percent of Houston-area renters are bunking up. In Dallas, the figure is over 27 percent.

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