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I was in Austin all last week. Surprised me to see a lot of "Help Wanted" signs in front of restaurants and fast-food places along the roads. Many with the pay posted on the signs. However, they were $10 to $12 per hour. Restaurants in the better areas all busy with customers, doing great. Malls seem busy enough.

Austin's biggest problem is transportation, and it's only going to get worse. Those $10 and $12 per hour jobs you saw? You can't afford to live anywhere decent in Austin proper on that unless you live as frugally as you can and are sharing costs with others, which pushes you out to the suburbs/outer areas, which means you are going to be contributing to an already bad transportation problem.

Going back to the original post, it's not that Williamson County is having problems outside of law enforcement that can't hold their liquor and a crooked DA, it's that people who are working the crap jobs are being forced out of the area.

Austin's biggest problem is transportation, and it's only going to get worse.

Yes, I'll agree with that. Surprises me how large and spread out Austin has become. Takes forever to get anywhere. My daughter lives there. We've seen the same thing in the San Francisco area, where I live. Sky high rents, long waiting lists to rent a place, and the poor living far from the jobs they want. SF is a small city in area with a vertical footprint, unlike Austin, but like Austin, people still commute up to a hundred miles away to get to the jobs. No solution in sight.