We just moved to SD in April after living in Austin for 4 years. We LOVED Austin and it was a big decision to move away, especially when you consider housing. Our upgraded 3600+ sq ft house on a 1/4 acre, built in 2002, backing to conservation land in a great school district & neighborhood, was priced at $360,000. We paid $6000/yr in taxes, but no income tax. We cannot afford to buy a home here, although our income is now well over six figures. We’re renting until the market corrects. Austin is a fantastic, artsy, liberal, geographically beautiful, family-friendly, educated town that is growing incredibly fast, in part due to the masses from CA paying cash for homes. Seriously, of the houses in our neighborhood that changed hands in the four years we lived in Austin, easily half of them were purchased by Californians.
That being said, I lived in Dallas for almost two years and my husband spent the same amount of time in Houston and neither of us would live anywhere in TX other than Austin.