Austin Gets Compared to a Lot of Cities. But Is Life Better There?

There are plenty of reasons to love Austin and the enormous, unique state it’s part of.

There’s also no shortage of reasons to pull up stakes and leave. Whether it’s the far-right state government depriving you of your civil rights, the scorching, climate-change-fueled summers, the cost of housing, or the lack of public transit.

So, this week, we take a look at a number of Austin’s unofficial sister cities across the country to see how they’re dealing with the same issues Austin faces. To get a 30,000-foot view of life in each city, the Chronicle interviewed news editors of independent news outlets in each metro.

We were especially interested in the state of housing, policing, and democracy in the kinds of cities that are often compared to Austin – cities that are smaller than New York or Los Angeles, but bigger than Asheville or Santa Cruz. Are they facing the same challenges Austin is facing? Are they having more or less success in solving them? And how many of the problems facing American cities today can cities really address by themselves?

For all their differences in geography and culture and cuisine, major American cities in some ways have more in common with each other than they have even with other parts of their own states. Here’s a look at the state of six.

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Raleigh

Like a number of other cities in the South, Raleigh’s star has risen rapidly. For Jane Porter, a contributing editor at INDY Week, the area’s appeal makes perfect sense.

“It’s a great climate, cost of living is still relatively low, we’ve got three universities here in the Triangle. ... We have Research Triangle Park where there’s a lot of STEM jobs,” Porter said. “Culturally, we have a lot going on. We have a big arts scene, museums – it just feels like a dynamic kind of place.”

Raleigh has added a few hundred thousand people to its population over the last two decades, while Durham and Chapel Hill grew as well. The influx put significant pressure on the city’s housing market, infrastructure, and historically Black neighborhoods in Southeast Raleigh facing an accelerating pace of gentrification. It all came to a political boiling point just prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I would say 2019 was really a turning point,” Porter said. “We elected a very pro-growth Council, and they were able to usher through a lot of these policy changes like the missing middle.”

The missing middle policy, passed by the Raleigh City Council, made it significantly easier to build multifamily housing and small apartment complexes in the city. The results have been swift.

“[It’s] one of the most productive programs in the country in terms of what has been built during that time span,” Porter said.

Though only a small fraction of the units that have been built since the policy took effect over three years ago are considered affordable, Porter attributes some of the significant housing price changes in the city to the new construction.

“We have seen rents cooling down,” Porter said. “We’ve seen the market cooling off a lot.”

There’s also been backlash. A group called Livable Raleigh, formed as the tides were turning decisively in favor of pro-growth policies in the fall of 2019, has rallied against the zoning changes with a pledge to “celebrate healthy, vibrant neighborhoods.” The group has sued to block the changes, and its membership helped to elect a new City Council in 2022 that has threatened to revise the city’s housing policy.

The city hasn’t just been focused on housing problems. It’s also been addressing policing.

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the Raleigh Police Department established a new unit composed of social workers and police officers to respond to mental health crisis-related calls. The program mirrors similar efforts in cities like Portland and Minneapolis to have trained mental health professionals respond to mental-health-related crises, with one notable difference: the ACORNS (Addressing Crises through Outreach, Referrals, Networking, and Service) Unit in Raleigh is housed within the police department instead of outside it, a distinction that has rankled police-reform activists.

Indeed, a report by WTVD in Raleigh in 2022 found that the ACORNS Unit was not primarily responding to mental-health calls and instead primarily responded to calls labeled “follow-up investigation.”

Activists have other concerns about policing in Raleigh as well. With the city’s downtown still struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic last year, the city and its Downtown Raleigh Alliance both contracted private security forces to patrol different areas downtown that have seen upticks in crime, raising questions about how the various forces are trained and whom they are accountable to.

“There are two sets of contracted security officers: One set is armed, one set is unarmed, and they’re there to just kind of supplement the police department, basically,” Porter said. “They can’t be everywhere. We have a pretty large officer shortage.”

It’s the kind of big-city problem that Raleigh didn’t use to have, along with what Porter called “awful” traffic, strained infrastructure, and massive, recent property tax hikes in Wake County that have been painful for longtime residents. On the local level, residents have political options to address those new challenges. On a state level, it’s more difficult: North Carolina’s aggressive gerrymandering means that, even though the state is split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats, Republicans hold an unassailable majority in the state’s general assembly.

“I feel so bad for our state representatives, because they can’t do anything in the Legislature,” Porter said. “They’re in the minority, and they’re representing this massive population of people, but any kind of progressive legislation they try to put forward is generally dead on arrival.”

Renewing the state’s democracy and investing in public services, Porter said, could strengthen a city and an area that is otherwise primed to take another step forward.

“People are really thinking about how we’re going to ... stabilize the tax base, make it so it’s more predictable and easier for people to live here,” Porter said.

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Portland

It wasn’t so long ago that Portland was one of the darlings of the nation: a quirky, green, friendly little city famous for its outstanding restaurant scene, legions of bike commuters, lefty politics, and the IFC sketch comedy show that satirized it all. It was quite a moment. And it didn’t last.

“The protests of 2020 were a turning point,” Courtney Vaughn, the news editor of the Portland Mercury, said.

Following the murder of George Floyd in May that year, Portlanders poured out of their homes for 100 straight days of protest – at one point facing down federal troops ordered into the city by President Donald Trump who were credibly accused of snatching people off the street. Portland has long been a hub of left-wing protest in the U.S. and has long had issues with racist policing, and the city received a shout-out for its activism from George Floyd’s brother following Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction in 2021.

But repeated clashes between protesters and police changed the image of the city almost overnight into a symbol of chaos and disorder. It didn’t help that the uprising against police violence coincided with the devastating effects of both the COVID-19 pandemic and a fentanyl crisis sweeping the West Coast that left the city’s downtown largely vacant and scores of people visibly struggling with homelessness and addiction.

In the years since, Portland has struggled to recover its mojo. The energy behind police reform dissipated to the point that the Portland Police Bureau received its largest-ever budget this year. Business and police-friendly candidates won a string of high-profile victories over progressives in races for mayor, City Council, and district attorney, benefiting from a reactionary wave Vaughn called “a little bit antithetical to the spirit of Portland as we know it.”

Now, even as Portland has begun to recover economically from the worst effects of the COVID crisis, underlying questions remain about whether something fundamental about the city’s character has changed: Whether a city so celebrated for its livability and creativity has lost the qualities that made it special. Chief among those qualities, Vaughn said, is affordability. While Portland remains cheaper than the other major West Coast cities, its housing stock has not kept up with its pace of growth over the last several decades.

“I think it’s absolutely true that Portland used to be much more friendly to artists and to musicians because it was a place you could afford to live – it was kind of known as this place where you could be a creative person and still get by,” Vaughn said. “That was the beauty of it.”

Both the city and the state as a whole are well aware of the issue. Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, has made housing one of her biggest priorities in office – pushing a $376 million housing bill through the state Legislature in the spring aimed at boosting housing production and accompanying infrastructure.

Portland has made changes in recent years as well, ending single-family zoning in 2020 and mandating the inclusion of affordable housing in new apartment buildings. But construction remains expensive in the aftermath of the pandemic, and Portland has struggled with other factors that Vaughn sees blunting the effectiveness of the city’s response to its housing crisis.

“Portland in particular really needs to fix its permitting system,” Vaughn said. “It’s apparently very cumbersome, it takes a long time, it’s confusing, and it’s frustrating to say the least for anybody trying to build or even open a business in a building. Nobody has anything nice to say about our permitting system.”

Vaughn said boosting housing production is critical to tackling homelessness, which has emerged as one of the dominant issues in the city’s politics in recent years.

“I think people realize that we’re not going to solve our homelessness problem unless we get more housing,” Vaughn said. “That’s been said pretty widely. We have to increase the supply of housing.”

The good news, Vaughn said, is there are reasons to believe the city is moving in the right direction. In 2022, Portland voters passed a sweeping charter reform bill to more than double the size of its City Council and elect candidates from geographic districts instead of citywide – a move proponents believe can help amplify the voices of residents from areas of the city that have long been overlooked. The city will also have a city manager for the first time, freeing Council members to focus exclusively on legislating. Vaughn, who moved to Portland a decade ago, said that for all the city has changed, it still retains much of what made it special in the first place.

“Portland certainly has more big city problems now than it had a decade ago, and that stings for a lot of people, but it’s still such an enjoyable place to live, comparatively,” she said. “I think it’s hard to find many other big cities that offer all the amenities Portland does – and I hope people recognize that.”

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Minneapolis

Minneapolis, renowned for its plentiful lakes and superlative theatre scene, has long been regarded by outsiders as one of the Midwest’s most appealing cities.

Four and a half years ago, however, following the murder of George Floyd on a city sidewalk, the city found itself at the center of a global uprising against police violence and racial injustice. Tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets, and a majority of City Council members vowed to disband the city’s checkered police department.

The political winds shifted in the months following that pledge, and a number of members of the City Council quickly backtracked on their pledge to disband the police department. But some stood firm, and, in the year after Floyd’s murder, a coalition of nonprofits, activists, and organizers attempted to follow through on the promise – getting a measure on the ballot to remove the police department from the city charter and replace it with a new Department of Public Safety focused on public health.

It would have been an unprecedented step for a major American city, but Minneapolis voters rejected it – with 56% voting to keep the police department. Nevertheless, the fact that 43% of city voters wanted to disband the police department spoke to the remarkable level of distrust in the department whose officers were responsible for Floyd’s death.

Since then, the police department’s political position in the city has stabilized: Officers recently agreed to a new contract with a large pay raise, and the department continues to be amply funded. The political will to disband the department, or even to substantially cut it, appears, for the time being, to be dead.

“Democrats have run so far from that and just kind of boomeranged to being a uniformly pro-police party that any kind of energy from that has been sucked away except on the activist fringes,” Jay Boller, a co-founder and editor of the Minneapolis news outlet Racket, said. “And our activist community that was at the forefront of that has shifted to focus on the draconian and some would say cruel anti-homelessness practices in Minneapolis, where encampments are cracked down to great expense by the city and then just move a few blocks away.”

That does not, however, mean people are generally pleased with the state of the police department, which is still facing an officer shortage and delivering delayed response times.

“We’re paying more for cops than ever in terms of PTSD payouts, in terms of misconduct settlements, in terms of the massive raise they just got, and yet we don’t have enough police officers,” Boller said. “It remains a mess.”

Despite that, Minneapolis is working to improve its public safety by changing how it deals with mental-health crises. The city’s Behavioral Crisis Response team, formed in the aftermath of the murder of Floyd, is an unarmed team with mental-health training.

Behavioral crisis response is not the only area where Minneapolis is leading the national policy conversation. The city has also made waves in recent years for its aggressive housing policy – an approach referenced on the vice presidential debate stage by Gov. Tim Walz in October.

Five years ago, Minneapolis became the first city in the country to end single-family zoning and pave the way for the construction of multi-family units in formerly single-family neighborhoods. The city also eliminated parking requirements and pledged to favor projects aligned with public and active transportation. So far, the reforms appear to have had their intended effect: The city’s housing stock grew by 12% between 2017 and 2022 compared to just 4% across the rest of the state, while rents in the city fell even as they rose by more than 20% across the country. Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, is among the easiest counties to buy a home in across the metro area.

Boller said that while much of the new construction is not affordable, the relative success of the city’s approach generally supports the urbanist school of thinking that more housing construction – whether it is affordable or not – will result in lower home prices and rents.

“If you’re from New York or California looking on Zillow at listings around here, your eyes will pop,” Boller said.

Affordability remains one of Minneapolis’ calling cards, along with cultural amenities like an outstanding theatre scene, and it has helped attract new residents. But problems remain: Boller said both downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul are at “crisis points,” with high rates of commercial vacancies and low levels of foot traffic following the shift to remote work during the pandemic, and he criticized what he called a “lack of vision” at city hall, where Jacob Frey, an ally of the city’s police and business communities, is serving his second term as mayor.

“It is a complete mess,” Boller said. “The mayor has open disdain for the left-leaning part of the Council; they’ve returned that disdain in pretty vivid terms right back. A lot of it amounts to gridlock and not being able to get a lot done.”

But if the tension at city hall between progressives and moderates speaks to serious divisions within the city, it also speaks to the city’s political vibrancy – a far cry from what many both within Minnesota and beyond it have been led to believe about it since the protests.

“We’re still fighting the narrative that a lot of right-wing media continues to push four years later that we’re still in flames,” Boller, who lives close to where he grew up in South Minneapolis, said. “I’m looking out my window right now – it’s not true.”

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Oakland

The Bay Area is, for many in Austin, identified first and foremost with the outsize influence of its tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Within that world, however, Oakland has long been different: a resolutely diverse, working-class city with a character distinct from much of what surrounds it. But just as San Francisco has changed across the Bay, Oakland is changing too.

“As the cost of living has increased in Oakland, especially as property values have shot upward by enormous amounts since the Great Recession ... the city’s Black population has declined significantly,” said Darwin BondGraham, the senior news editor at The Oaklandside, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering the city.

There is no question that, in recent years, Oakland has steadily become a whiter, more affluent city. The city’s Black population has plummeted as prices have risen and industry has vanished; Black people make up just 20% of the city today after making up 47% in the 1980s.

“One thing we frequently hear from people in the African American communities in Oakland is they feel like the economy has pushed them out of the city and their communities are being disrupted,” BondGraham said. “It’s hard to hold on to your community when you’re facing these kinds of economic forces.”

The pandemic exacerbated much of the pain, even as it instigated movements to stem the tide of displacement. The Oakland City Council passed an eviction moratorium and strengthened tenant protections, and, in doing so, generated a considerable amount of political backlash from property owners. The pandemic was a source of pain on multiple fronts: It closed down the city’s downtown and disproportionately impacted the city’s non-white and less-affluent populations. Crime rose and the city’s reputation suffered – even while the city remained an extremely expensive place to live.

“The Bay Area and Oakland have taken a beating in local and national media as this place with high violent crime rates, property crimes, an exploding homelessness crisis, and there’s just a lot of discussion and talk about quality of life here – but you don’t see that reflected in the real estate market,” BondGraham said. “Home prices are really high. Rents are really high.”

For people familiar with the history of the Bay Area, the reputational downturn of the last several years isn’t a shock – and likely won’t last.

“Go back to the Gold Rush and go all the way to the present: The Bay Area has always been a boomtown that has had these wild swings in terms of prosperity and then the opposite,” BondGraham said.

Oakland, like a number of cities in the West, has long been a place where people have gone to start over and live differently – fueling the economic and cultural movements the city has become best known for.

“Oakland has always been a city where a big percentage of the population is new. Go back to the 1960s – a lot of the members of the Black Panther Party in Oakland weren’t born here, they moved here with their families in the ’40s and the ’50s and the early ’60s,” BondGraham said. “These were newcomers to the city who wanted to rattle it, upset the political status quo and transform the city.”

It remains an open question whether Oakland’s politics are on the verge of changing again. As San Francisco has gotten more expensive, it’s also gotten more conservative – as votes to recall progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin and drug test welfare recipients attest. That hasn’t happened in Oakland, where progressives have won a string of high-profile victories in recent years.

“It’s still, comparatively, a much more working-class city than San Francisco,” BondGraham said. “San Francisco is a very wealthy city compared to Oakland, and Oakland is a much more diverse city.”

Over the last year, however, there has been an effort to change that. Real estate and tech industry interests banded together to fund an effort to recall progressive District Attorney Pamela Price in an election held in November, while Mayor Sheng Thao also faced a recall. Voters chose to recall both. Price’s fate is particularly significant: After decades working as a defense and civil rights attorney, Price was elected as Alameda County D.A. two years ago as a reformer embraced by the likes of Angela Davis and Alicia Garza.

BondGraham said the politics around the recall campaigns was complex. It’s not simply that longtime residents are more progressive than newer residents or that non-white residents are more progressive than white residents. The overall trend, however, appears to be similar to the trend in San Francisco: big business and real estate interests attempting to use a narrative around crime and safety to “sanitize” a city known for its diversity and activism.

BondGraham said he doesn’t believe Oakland’s current trials are driven by local policy but by macro factors: the upheaval of the pandemic, federal housing policy, and rampant nationwide economic inequality.

“Anybody who thinks we could solve all our problems if we just have the right mayor, or the right city council, or the right district attorney – yeah, maybe you could make progress in some ways ... but a lot of what local government leaders are dealing with is fallout from problems that are caused way upstream,” he said.

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Nashville

Just over a decade ago, Nashville got the New York Times treatment.

“In 2013, The New York Times ran this profile about Nashville, they called us the new 'it’ city,” D. Patrick Rodgers, editor-in-chief of Nashville Scene, said. “People kind of pinpoint that as the moment in time where tourism started to just really flow into Nashville – bachelorette culture, tourist culture, Lower Broad being the entertainment and tourist district in town, short-term rentals, Airbnbs springing up in every neighborhood, zoning fights as to whether or not that is allowable.”

The profile wasn’t solely responsible for Nashville’s surge into the national consciousness as a major tourist destination and one of the emergent hubs of the South, but it serves as a point of reference for a trend that has remade Nashville. The city’s population has, like Austin’s, nearly doubled since the turn of the century.

That growth has meant big changes. Rodgers, who grew up in a suburb outside of the city and has been at the Scene since just after his college graduation, said that when he was growing up, the city was notable for the abundance of dive bars and 50-cent beer nights. That’s no longer the case.

“Those places have been all but wiped out because of rent increases, so you’re seeing fewer of those special little gems that people were proud of in Nashville and more and more, 'Oh, here’s this new restaurant concept from this big restaurant group,’ or a big development with a cocktail bar in the lobby [and] tourist hotel suites above,” Rodgers said. “It has really rubbed a lot of long-timers the wrong way, to where there’s a cynicism among people who have lived here a long time.”

The effects of that development, which many have read as a rise in corporatization and a prioritization of the city’s tourist economy over the needs of its longtime residents, have been uneven. With the city facing a housing shortage of tens of thousands of units and dogged opposition to rezoning from homeowners in affluent neighborhoods, gentrification has become a major issue.

“When it comes to development, there’s a lot of folks that have scooped up property in historically Black neighborhoods like North Nashville and Edgehill ... and there’s more and more pushback now, because folks are noticing this in their neighborhoods,” Rodgers said.

Rodgers said widespread frustrations with the direction of the city’s development had an outsize impact in its mayoral race last year, which saw Freddie O’Connell, a longtime member of the Metro Council, ride a progressive populist message to victory over a number of well-heeled, business-friendly opponents.

“Freddie O’Connell won just sort of on riding this wave of discomfort people had with the city rewarding tourists and outsiders instead of the people who live here,” Rodgers said. “He had this commercial that ran during the campaign that was this mock football game, and one side is Nashville, and on the other side is wealthy, deep-pocketed developers and bachelorettes coming to the city.”

O’Connell ran on promises to build more affordable housing, expand the city’s transit network, and expand child care. Those goals appear achievable. But as in Austin, a number of other political priorities pose a serious roadblock: the attention of a far-right state government that has no love for its most progressive city. The Tennessee state government banned police oversight boards in 2023 after Nashville voters approved the creation of one; that move came just over a month after the state Legislature expelled two of the city’s state representatives for their part in a protest for gun safety following the mass shooting at the Covenant School.

“You have these big protests following the Covenant School shooting for gun reform, you have these protests when Roe was overturned, and then people feel helpless because the state has a Republican supermajority,” Rodgers said.

That sense of powerlessness has downwind effects – the state has a low voter turnout rate, brazen gerrymandering, and by one metric is the least democratic state in the country. There are issues in the Nashville area as well: though the city has a strong Democratic majority, its surrounding suburbs tend to lean more conservative – bolstered in recent years by a group Rodgers called “cultural refugees,” people who have moved to the area from liberal states like California seeking a right-wing haven in the South.

Within the city, however, the housing issue is dominant.

“Growth outpaced the plan for growth here so much that it almost felt like we’re just getting caught up to people even realizing it,” Rodgers said. “It’s very intoxicating and cool when you’re being called the 'it’ city, and people are giving you these travel write-ups, and Michelin star chefs are moving here to start restaurants and things, and then the sobering thing happens years later when you’re like, how come my rent doubled?”

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Denver

Denver, like so many other Western cities, has grown rapidly in recent decades. The city’s population has increased to about 700,000 people since 2000, with the entire metro region expanding alongside it. Thomas Mitchell, the news editor of Westword, the city’s alternative newspaper, said much of the resulting change has been welcomed.

“We’ve gotten a lot of new things that people like and are proud of, whether it’s Meow Wolf, which came in four or five years ago, or how the South Park guys redid Casa Bonita – there are these things that people who grew up here are proud of and want to see do well, but they’re also, on the other end, contributing to these affordability issues,” Mitchell said.

Those affordability issues are tied to a major housing shortage, with the city facing a shortfall of nearly 19,000 housing units. One of the results of that shortage has been a notable rate of street homelessness, an issue that, at one point, landed Denver in the pages of the New York Post and prompted concerns, Mitchell said, that the city was “becoming San Francisco.” In response, Denver has committed significant resources to an approach that other cities like Austin have also entertained: spending tens of millions of dollars to buy hotels to temporarily house people. The city has also set up what it calls “micro-communities,” clusters of tiny homes, as part of a mayoral pledge to get 2,000 people into shelter by the end of the year.

Mitchell said it remains to be seen just how effective that approach will be in helping people into longer-term housing. In the meantime, even people who own homes in the city are feeling financial pressure.

“Property insurance is actually a really big issue in Colorado,” Mitchell said. “We ran an article pretty recently about property insurance increasing 20 to 30 percent on an annual basis, with no real end in sight for that.”

Mitchell said climate change is a significant part of the reason why the cost of insurance is rising so rapidly, with wildfires and hail posing risks both to Denver and its surrounding mountain communities. Those disaster risks, which mirror risks in California, have injected another point of financial strain into the housing market.

“I live in a condo in the middle of Denver right now, and our property insurance doubled from 2023 to 2024,” Mitchell said. “Our HOA payments more than doubled. That’s kind of on the extreme end, but that is a common problem right now for multifamily units.”

Denver saw significant protests following the murder of George Floyd, but Mitchell said that the overriding sentiment in the city now – both among police accountability activists and supporters of a more robust, powerful police force – is that police should simply “do their jobs more.”

“We have a huge issue with expired plates and cars having no tags at all just driving around everywhere in Denver, and they’ve announced like, 'Oh, we’re going to enforce it for a month,’ but then they do it for a month and it goes right back to the same again,” Mitchell said.

The challenges with policing, like the issues with housing, are connected to the rate at which Denver continues to grow – its reputation secured both by its spectacular mountain setting and accompanying focus on outdoor pursuits as well as its recent penchant for enacting forward-thinking legislation.

“Denver was early to the game on a lot of liberal causes,” Mitchell said. “Marijuana and psychedelics play a role in how Denver is perceived, and when you talk about people who are moving here and all the transplants we get, when you see that momentum around liberal issues, it attracts those types of people as well.”

The city – and Colorado as a whole – has gotten significantly bluer since the beginning of the Trump administration. Barack Obama won the state by just five and a half points over Mitt Romney in 2012; Kamala Harris won it by more than double that in November.

Mitchell said the state Republican Party’s embrace of far-right, Trump-aligned politics haven’t played well with Colorado voters as a whole, and the result is that the state has been able to establish itself as a redoubt of progressive politics in a region where a number of states have passed laws restricting or banning abortion, restricting transgender rights, and restricting voting rights. The state’s abortion providers have seen a significant uptick in demand since Roe v. Wade was overturned, with a number of clients coming from Texas to seek care. Mitchell, who grew up in Arizona, said Denver remains an urban gem in the inner West.

“I love sitting in a dive bar a lot too, but it’s fun having people who love to get outside and do things,” Mitchell said. “For a big city, other than having a coastline, it has all the things you’d want.”

Editor's Note Tuesday, 10:32am: A previous version of this story incorrectly inflated Nashville’s walkability score by including the walking score for Nashville’s downtown (98), rather than the city as a whole (29). The Chronicle regrets the error.