Liberal Free Chat Zone

[HoosierHoagie]

Hmmm...

By choosing Austin as its marquee job-creation locale, Apple, unlike Amazon and Google, is expanding its footprint significantly in the middle of the country, instead of the East Coast. Cities like New York, Boston and the greater Washington, D.C., area have long attracted top tech talent, setting up fierce competition there. That’s been less intense in much of the interior of the country, though cities like Austin, Atlanta and Nashville have all enjoyed a fair share of tech investment.

Austin has shed its slacker college-town past and embraced a new image as a high-tech employment hub. In addition to Apple, Google and Facebook Inc. have all opened large offices in Texas’ capital city. Home prices have risen, as have median incomes and commuting times.

A longtime lure of Austin, which once promoted itself as the Silicon Hills, has been its low cost of living, compared with San Francisco or New York, and lack of a state income tax. The metro-area population of 2.1 million residents is younger and significantly better educated than the rest of Texas and the U.S. It hosts a parade of music festivals through the year and a surfeit of high-end restaurants. All that has made it attractive to the type of younger workers that firms want to hire.

The city was a bit of a dark horse in the quest to land Amazon’s second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. Amazon acquired Austin-based Whole Foods and its downtown headquarters in 2017, making it an Amazon company town of sorts already. But Austin’s relatively small airport, crowded highways and underdeveloped mass transit system struggle to match what Amazon said it was looking for in a headquarters city.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-build-new-campus-in-austin-11544691545?mod=hp_lead_pos1