Apple “announced this month it’s opening new offices in Austin, investing $1 billion and bringing as many as 15,000 jobs to a city that was already the fastest growing in the nation for three years running — with a thriving music and arts scene, an established technology industry, a rising national profile and a booming real estate market,” Rachel Adams-Heard reports for Bloomberg. “While Apple’s announcement lacked the months-long drama of Amazon.com Inc.’s search for a second headquarters, the news is triggering the same fears of soaring rents and home prices that Amazon’s decision sparked in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City and to a lesser extent in Northern Virginia.”
“But Austin is different. It’s already a tech hub — home to more than 6,000 Apple employees, about 13,000 Dell Technologies Inc. workers and another 3,000-plus at Oracle Corp. and Amazon combined,” Adams-Heard reports. “Austin’s population surged almost 20 percent from 2010 to 2017, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. The most recent figure puts Austin’s population at just shy of 1 million people — a stretch for a town with just two major north-to-south highways.”
“Probably the only thing you’ll hear residents complain about more than traffic is how much rents have gone up. The median rent in Austin has climbed more than 30 percent over the past eight years, according to Zillow, compared with a more-modest 15 percent increase across the rest of the country,” Adams-Heard reports. “‘Austin, as any city, is always changing, and with change comes challenges,’ said David Pruitt, Central Texas district manager for Coldwell Banker United Realtors, who’s lived in Austin since he enrolled at the University of Texas in 1981. ‘At the end of the day, I don’t think growth is bad. I think it’s an opportunity, actually.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Go read the full article at the increasingly anti-Apple Bloomberg and note the pervasive negative slant that runs throughout the article that’s not as apparent from the above excerpts.
Oh, no, Austin is booming! Perish the thought.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s gets $41 million in incentives for new Austin campus – December 18, 2018
Apple shows how to select new tech hub locations with class – December 14, 2018
What Apple’s new U.S. job additions tell us about their future product plans – December 14, 2018
Apple to build new $1 billion, 133-acre campus in Austin and add jobs across America – December 13, 2018
The real problem facing Austin is Leftification, not Gentrification.
That’s what you get when you invite SJW’s into your midst.
“Gentrification” is an improvement to an area.
Liberalism has co-opted that term just like they have so many others to give it a hint of white privilege, hence white supremacy, hence improving impoverished areas is now the new racism.
Only in a Liberal Bubble could gentrification be a bad thing.
Texas needs a little left to balance the right. That’s what we all want, right? Balance.
How dare people have different attitudes than us!
Also, I think it’s really great how you guys put up a single word, and then react to it. That’s a great way to deal with the complexities of the world.
Thanks.
One could, quite fairly, say they were triggered by seeing the word!
People THINK that snowflakes don’t come in shades of red, OH but they do. 🙂
I lived in Austin (and hated it) for 24 years and moved to Fort Worth six years ago. It’s hard to believe that Austin has just now become the city I would like to have lived in all those 24 years when I was there. Still, as Texas cities go, except for the humidity, Houston has it all especially in shopping, dining, and the fine arts, with Dallas being a close second, but I would not live there for all the money in the world.
Stop Austin from being weird. Weird means left-wing effwits effing up the city. Eff off left-wing nut jobs, your love of socialist communism is EFFING DISGUSTING.
FFFFFFUUUUCCCCCKKKK YYYYOOOUUUU LEEFT TUURRRDS.
What precisely does a future Apple employee in Austin do that disturbs you?
Having lived in Houston, I rather enjoyed the diversity. Houston has one of the biggest Chinese districts of any US city. Not to mention all the great international restaurants and community events. Summer evening salsa parties every week. I suppose a rightie would detest using the term Tex-Mex. Just as stupid as restaurants renaming spuds “freedom fries” and banning Grey Poupon (which is an American product, by the way). Modern right wing has lost its sanity. There are no principles they can show progress defending. Just over the top paranoia.
When you boil down the right wing rhetoric, you see quickly that it is all about greed, selfishness, and racism. Closed mindedness to the extreme.
I don’t like inept liberals, but they are mostly harmless. Right wing nasty politics that is always against anything new is a disease with serious ramifications. Just ask the hundreds of refugees spending xmas in a detention camp, kids locked up in a desert tent, hanks to racist paranoia. Zero attempt to reform a broken immigration system, that would be too humane. I don’t treat our dogs as badly as trumpanzees refer to people of other birth nations. So much for the US being a beacon of democratic hope for the world. The nation looks old and bitter, not very beneficent.