Austin sucks unless you can find a place to live that is convenient to work and other interests (parks, lakes, music scene, club scene)...the traffic is abysmal (and I've driven all over the USA!). SA is better traffic-wise, but more assholes are moving in, daily. My little house is now valued at three times my purchase price, which wouldn't be bad if I wanted to sell, but $6k in taxes, and increasing annually, on a 1400 ft² house is a bit much! No state income tax is nice...but we take up the slack with property tax. The hill country is nice, though property values are increasing there, too ..and outside city limits, you don't have city services, so make sure your house doesn't catch fire, as one of my friend's home did recently. VFD didn't make it in time to save more than two of her dogs or any of her possessions. :'( She wasn't home.
I'm not a huge fan of downtown anything and am a bit of a hermit, though I live minutes from the SA airport, and could be downtown in about 12 minutes. I visit wineries in the hill country...drive takes about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the route. Similar drive time to the Deep Eddy Vodka distillery, and the nicer lakes in the area. Lots of parks and wilderness areas around for walking, running, biking, and hiking. The city govt is fairly liberal, but kept somewhat in check by state govt, if that is a concern. I live a couple miles from the local RNC offices and there are a lot of conservative ideologists in my area of town. If you want to know about specific areas of town, I know people that live or have lived in most of them, though the demographics are changing a lot from year to year. Feel free to message me!
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