Hot Headlines

Favorite suburban pizzeria slices into Austin, plus more popular stories

Slapbox Pizzicheria heats up our hottest headlines.

Editor's note: The holidays are in full swing, but there's still plenty of news to catch up on. From a pizzeria's expansion into Austin to yet another change to the city's skyline, these are the stories that kept Austin reading over the past seven days.

1. One of Central Texas' best pizzerias fires up first Austin location in 2020. A favorite suburban pizza joint will finally make its debut inside Austin's city limits. Slapbox Pizzicheria is headed for Parmer Lane, with an opening targeted for summer 2020.

2. 6 things to know in Austin food right now: Secretive new bar rolls into former El Naranjo space. Something new is in the works for the original El Naranjo space on Rainey Street. That, and more restaurant tidbits, are served in our latest round of Austin food news.

3. P. Terry's drive-thru burger stand cooks up new UT Austin campus location. On December 20, the Taco Ranch located near the University of Texas campus wrapped up service for good. But fret not: It'll be transformed into Austin's newest P. Terry's outpost.

4. New 60-story high-rise banks big changes for downtown Austin skyline. Austin's ever-changing skyline could welcome a 60-story tower that would become the second tallest building downtown. On December 19, BBVA USA, alongside developers and architects, unveiled plans for a 530,371-square-foot project for West Sixth and Guadalupe streets.

5. Missing Austin woman found dead, infant alive, after weeklong search. Heidi Broussard, an Austin mother who went missing on December 12, was found dead in a Harris County home on December 20. Her infant, Margot Carey, was found alive.

hot-headlines

millennial magnet cities

Austin has fallen out of favor with millennials for 2025, report shows

Downtown Austin, state capital, Congress Avenue

Photo by Justin Wallace on Unsplash

Don't worry, you'll still find plenty of millennials on scooters downtown.

Millennial Austinites may be growing tired of the city's consistently changing landscape: Austin has once again fallen out from the coveted No. 1 spot in SmartAsset's annual report of "Cities Attracting the Most Millennials" in 2025.

In fact, Austin barely scraped into the top 10 and ranked No. 9 this year, just like it did in SmartAsset's 2023 report.

The 2025 study dug into data from the U.S. Census Bureau 1-Year American Community Survey to determine the number of millennials who moved to 271 U.S. cities in 2023 (where the most recent data is available). Rankings were determined by the percentage of the total population of millennials who moved into each city in 2023.

A total of 103,738 millennial transplants landed in the capital of Texas in 2023, according to the study's findings, bringing the city's total millennial-age population to 395,776. That means about 41 percent of the city's entire population is made up of people aged between 25 and 44.

Breaking that down further, the report found that the number of millennials who moved to Austin from elsewhere in Travis County was more than double those who moved from other Texas counties: 55,591 and 21,403, respectively. In addition, 19,890 millennials moved in from a different state, and 6,854 moved in from abroad.

SmartAsset also unveiled that the average household income of a millennial Austinite is $91,501 annually, and their total median housing costs add up to $1,828 per month.

While the report doesn't give a reason why millennials favored other cities over Austin, the city's housing prices, job market, and family planning prospects can all have an influence.

"Millennials are often in their prime earning years, and many have young families, which may significantly impact the communities they join and leave," the study said.

In a separate 2024 report by commercial real estate platform CommercialCafe, Austin was crowned the No. 1 city for millennials.

Alexandria, Virginia, is the No. 1 millennial magnet for 2025 with the highest proportional influx of millennial transplants in 2023, at 12.67 percent. For context, Austin's share of new millennials was only 10.69 percent.

Austin was the highest ranked Texas city in the report, with Houston ranking second statewide but 51st overall. Houston had a far higher influx of millennial newcomers in 2023, at nearly 177,000 transplants, but the share of new millennials that moved in as a percentage of the total population was lower than Austin's, at just 7.7 percent.

The top 10 magnet cities for millennials in 2025 are:

No. 1 – Alexandria, Virginia
No. 2 – Cambridge, Massachusetts
No. 3 – Denver, Colorado
No. 4 – Sandy Springs, Georgia
No. 5 – Seattle, Washington
No. 6 – Sunnyvale, California
No. 7 – Santa Clara, California
No. 8 – Arlington, Virginia
No. 9 – Austin, Texas
No. 10 – Orlando, Florida

austin millennials reports smartasset