So here we are in Georgetown, TX….a quaint town of about 70,000 and about 30 miles North of Austin. We had heard great things about Georgetown….close to Austin, affordable, lots of amenities, an old historic town square voted “the best in Texas”, etc. So, after reading lots of great articles about Austin….and getting recommendations to visit there from friends and family…we decided to do what we always do…get in the truck and find out for ourselves. Not wanting to look at neighborhoods directly in downtown Austin, we settled on Georgetown as a good suburb to visit. We found it to be pretty much as described. The town square is great…all the buildings have been restored and are now restaurants and shops of all types. Less than 10 minutes from town square, you can find all the national chain stores. The neighborhoods are another story. Surrounding the town, there are perhaps 10 different communities with prices ranging from $250,000 to over $1 million. Unfortunately, the builders of these communities decided to cram in WAY too many homes. Not only did we find that the homes are too close together, on each side, but they also backed up to one another. Many of the homes shared a common back yard fence. That might be OK for apartment homes, but in upscale neighborhoods where you might be spending $500,000….that’s a deal breaker for us.
And then there’s the traffic if you decide to leave Georgetown and head into downtown Austin. I’ll be really direct about the traffic in and around Austin. It’s terrible. We entered the Austin area from the West side on a Sunday afternoon….hoping that we would avoid the dreaded traffic we had heard so much about. Nope. Not even close. Every road, every interchange, every side road was bumper to bumper going into and out of Austin…and this on a random Sunday afternoon at 5:00. Wow. We finally got through town and headed North to Georgetown. It took us almost an hour to go a mere 30 miles. This was not looking good. If it’s this bad on a Sunday afternoon, what must it be like during the week? We found out…it’s grid lock.
Yesterday and today, we checked out towns around Georgetown, thinking perhaps some of them might fare better in the traffic department. We visited Sun City, Leander, Fredericksburg, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Liberty Hill, Andice, Florence and a few more I’ve already forgotten. The traffic was so bad in most areas that we quit early and took Tuck for a nice walk in a local park to decompress. And we haven’t even started to check out the areas on the South side of Austin.
What has happened to the Austin “area”? There’s an easy answer….the tech boom. Austin has become the Texas equivalent of Silicon Valley in California. All of the major players in the tech industry now have offices and manufacturing facilities in and around Austin. Many thousands of new jobs have been created. And these companies pay their employees really well. So well that in most neighborhoods around Austin, the home prices start at $750,000 and top out well above $2 million. Want to buy a restored home in the very hip 2nd Street District downtown? Try $700,000 for a 1,000 sq. ft. home built in 1920, that has no garage and only on-street parking. Due to the huge demand, prices are soaring everywhere. It’s San Francisco all over again. And to top it off, Apple just announced that they’re going to build a new headquarters in Austin starting in 2019 that will about 7,500 new jobs. Yikes! Good news for Austin, but bad news for commuters. This will continue until the tech boom either slows down or blows up, which it inevitably will at some point. Claudia and I have read this book before and we know how it ends. Real estate doesn’t appreciate 15% annually for very long. At that rate, your home would double in value every 5 years.
Clearly….this area is not going to work for us for many reasons. The last thing we want in a retirement area is traffic gridlock, a real estate boom waiting to blow up and a population of newly-minted tech millionaires as neighbors. Might be perfect for some…but not us.
And so, tomorrow we head back to Arizona, where we will begin the search anew. The bad news is that this was yet another dead end. The good news is that after each trip, we learn more about what we want in a town…and what we don’t want. As with many pursuits in life, clarity only comes after a lot of work and experimentation.
Cheers and thanks for reading!
Wayne, Claudia and Tuck