The jobless rate in Austin is negative 5.6 due to the overwhelming need for busboys in downtown hipster bars.
I think a lot of the services, construction and private equity going into shale gas and fractionation could prove to be misspent or overreaching. Lots of "flipping" where-in people are starting companies with the sole purpose of building gathering/midstream assets contiguous to production and then re-selling to other companies. I don't doubt that's how the whole independent crude industry works upstream. I guess it's good to see large commercial and industrial clients more willing to use gas than other alternatives, and I suppose as long some people think ethanol and CNG vehicles are a good investment, that will keep the demand up. I don't LNG will ever work for anything other than domestic peak demand or glut storage for operators; the importing/exporting turnaround every time prices switch doesn't seem sustainable.
I think "Greater Austin" goes from Georgetown to Cedar Park/Leander to Dripping Springs to San Marcos to Bastrop, and points in between. Something like that. Yeah, it's crazy. I'd been coming to Austin since the mid-'60's when we decided to move here from Houston in 1980. My S.O. and I quit our jobs and took the plunge. We still have no regrets. I thought it had gotten too big in 1980, compared to what I was used to. Boy, was I off! There's still no other city I'd consider living in when it comes to my home state of Texas. edit: Just ran across these remarks by James McMurtry, singer/song writer and the son of novelist Larry McMurtry. It's from the BBC website. Yeah, I read everything. Why I live in Austin "Houston is a city, San Antonio is a city but Austin doesn't feel like that to me," says Texan-born folk singer James McMurtry. "I like it because it's equidistant to each coast so I can get in my van and drive to the west coast and drive around there for three weeks and then come home and do the same on the east coast and still have a life. "It's far enough south that it doesn't get too cold and you don't get many twisters. And it's a blue dot [Democrat] in a red sea." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22649624 At the same link is a nice read listing "10 reasons why so many people are moving to Texas." Just an FWI. My son went to a magnet middle school with James McMurtry's son and they became good friends. I've met James a few times. A nice guy, with a chip on his shoulder, though. The image above captures his personality perfectly. His son is also a musician and a great kid. He lives in Travis Heights with his mother (unless he's moved... very possible), his Mom and James having split a long time ago. I love Austin. There are times that it still feels like that small city made up of essentially UT and the capital, which is how I remember it from over 40 years ago. Sure, I don't get that feeling too often any more, but there are still times that I do.
NPR did a pretty cool story this morning about petrochemical pollution and cleaning up Houston's air. It's not exactly a feel-good story. It's more like a it's-not-as-bad-as-our-reputation story. http://www.npr.org/2013/05/30/185993899/breathing-easier-how-houston-is-working-to-clean-up-its-air [rquoter]Breathing Easier: How Houston Is Working To Clean Up Its Air by Richard Harris May 30, 2013 3:01 AM The Houston area produces about a quarter of the nation's gasoline, and about a third of the plastics that are in our cars, cupboards and just about everywhere else. So it is no surprise that this heavily industrial area has a problem with air pollution. But in the past decade, Houston's air has improved dramatically. How that happened is a tale of good science, new technology and a Texas law that prompted companies along the Houston Ship Channel to disclose their emissions. The channel is a muddy brown body of water that is surrounded by refineries, tank farms and about 200 petrochemical companies. It meanders inland from Galveston Bay toward downtown. Dana Blume is standing on the deck of a fireboat plying the channel. She's been monitoring the air and water for the Port of Houston Authority for the past 14 years. Summer here can bring misery. "It's hot; it's harder to breathe," she says. "I'm fortunate. I don't have respiratory issues. But I do worry about my child and other children who play on days that it's a high ozone day." In recent years, those high ozone days come less often, and they're less intense when they strike. "I can look out of my office window now and almost every single day see downtown. And that wasn't the case 10 years ago," Blume says. To get the surprising back story about how Houston's air got cleaner, it's worth a visit to Harvey Jeffries, at the University of North Carolina's school of public health in Chapel Hill. As this retired professor tells the story, air pollution regulators were on the verge of making a multibillion-dollar mistake. They were going all-in against one of the pollutants that create smog, while downplaying the role of other emissions from the petrochemical plants. Ozone (often called smog) forms when nitrogen oxides react in sunlight with chemicals called volatile organic compounds. Regulators were focusing their efforts overwhelmingly on nitrogen oxides, cranking down on them so hard that compliance would cost $4 billion a year. Jeffries says that was a big mistake. "If you spent the $4 billion, if you did all the cleanup, they were controlling the wrong thing and ... they wouldn't do anything to prevent the true cause of the highest ozone," Jeffries says. He made that argument to the state and local officials. Jeffries said the most bang for the buck would come from cutting back on volatile organic compounds like ethylene, which is used to make polyethylene plastic. Chemicals like these are produced in abundance along the ship channel. "You're talking about billions of pounds of fluids and liquids a day, being produced in Houston. And if you only lose .001 percent of that, it's a massive amount of material, and that was being ignored, totally, completely," he says. Jeffries pointed to a massive scientific study the state of Texas had funded in the year 2000. Results from that showed that volatile chemicals were a big culprit. Happily for industry, they were also a cheaper problem to fix. It turns out that routine day-to-day emissions were not the biggest problem. On occasion, plants put out large bursts of chemicals. That could be when they were starting up or shutting down, or simply trying to avoid a disaster when a process went awry. Ethylene gas is commonly vented to the air. "Ethylene is more explosive than hydrogen, and they're making billions of pounds of ethylene," Jeffries says. "And that's not something you want to fool around with. If there's likely to be a big back-pressure or something like this, you want a safety valve to go off." But when a valve goes off, tens of thousands of pounds of these chemicals can vent into the air in a matter of minutes. If the sun is beating down, and the wind is blowing in the right direction, a narrow plume of smog can form. Because smog forms over the course of a few hours, often these plumes appear in the suburbs, miles from the ship channel. Usually, a bad-air day in Houston is caused by one of these narrow plumes. It's often not a citywide miasma, as you find in Los Angeles or Dallas. Scientists linked those plumes of smog to chemical "burps" thanks to a Texas law that required industry to report unexpected events in a public database. "And as soon as all of this became visible, voila, it got cleaned up," Jeffries says. Just a few years after Houston had won the title of the worst air in the country, residents finally tasted success. Beginning in 2005, when new standards went into effect, peak ozone concentrations started dropping sharply. And in 2009, Houston — for the first time in 35 years — met the federal air quality smog standard, Jeffries says. A new technology helped tremendously. Regulators and companies bought cameras that "see" in infrared light. Invisible chemicals like ethylene show up as gray clouds in this camera. "We did some flyovers of the ship channel," says Jason Harris from the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality. "We attached [an infrared] camera to a helicopter and flew over the industrial areas and saw some pretty eye-opening things." Barges carting chemicals up and down the channel were leaking chemicals that contribute to smog in the air. And some types of storage tanks were leaking as well. Steve Smith from the chemical giant LiondellBassell says his company didn't want to lose its products to the air, so it bought nine of the infrared cameras, at about $100,000 apiece, to find its own leaks. "We are able to fix things sooner and we're able to fix the right things," Smith says, since the cameras easily pinpoint leaks. "And therefore we can do the right thing sooner and obviously have lower emissions and a cleaner environment." This also saves the company money, by reducing its pollution taxes and potential fines. Larry Soward was one of the commissioners on the Texas environmental board during those critical years when Houston's air improved. He says getting industry to this point wasn't quite as painless as you hear tell these days. "Early on they came kicking and screaming because it meant either major investment for technology or it meant major operational changes," he says. Gradually, many companies came to realize that tightening up their leaks and reducing accidental releases gave them a competitive advantage. But there is still work to be done. Houston, the nation's fourth largest city, still doesn't meet the federal smog standard most of the time. And getting there will involve more than industry. In February, we met up with Matthew Tejada, who was head of the region's only nonprofit organization dedicated to the issue of clean air: Air Alliance Houston. (Tejada has since taken a job as director of the Office of Environmental Justice at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.) Tejada drove us through the sprawling city. He said if you add up all the gas stations, print shops and dry cleaners, they actually put more smog-producing volatile organic compounds into the air than the refineries do. "The unique thing you have to remember, though, especially when you're talking about ozone, is a print shop can't release 100,000 pounds of VOC in five minutes," Tejada says. "One of these facilities on the ship channel can." So the little guys and the big guys will both get a hard look as regulators search for ways to ratchet back smog. So will transportation. Cars are much cleaner than they used to be, but they're still a major source of smog for Houston. And people drive everywhere — public transportation here is not much of an option. Tejada says even if Houston can do more to reduce emissions from industries, businesses, cars and trucks, the city still won't be able to meet the ozone standard. The federal limit is currently 75 parts per billion — and there are days when air blowing into Houston is already loaded up with 50 or 60 parts per billion of ozone. "We're going to have to go out and find out where that ozone's coming from and make them clean up," Tejada says. What's more, the city's population is expected to double by 2030, which means there will be many more sources of pollution. And, with the recent boom in natural gas in Texas, the petrochemical industry is poised to grow rapidly in the next decade. "What's the bigger picture for the Houston region if in the next 10 years we build five new gas processing facilities?" Tejada asks. "What's that going to do for our air quality picture? I think we're very slow to look at the holistic implications of what that will mean for the Houston region." But in a city that is dependent on the petrochemical industry, those questions get asked only as an afterthought.[/rquoter] (For a moment, I thought I should truncate the quote so NPR can get it's page views. Then I realized they don't make money on ads on their website, and that I already paid for this content with my donations. So, I think we're square.)
This comment bothered me a bit. I don't think our economy is as tied to the commodity price as it used to be. Since the last big bust in the 80s, we've moved a bit away from that. According to this article, energy was 87% of jobs that exported goods and services out of the area in the early 80s, and only 50% now. And then, even among energy companies, I think (though I don't have a source for this one) more of our business comes from value-added products and services as opposed to the E&P companies that feast or famine on the commodity price. For example, many of the big electricity retailers and independent power producers have headquarters or major offices in Houston, and they aren't sensitive to the price of oil. So, maybe we're not so diversified as New York (couldn't find a source to say either way), but energy is an industry that won't go away easily, and I just don't think we have the commodity-price-driven volatility that we had in the 80s.
i find this to be partly true in all honesty... i have a lot of friends in austin but only a few who have what i would call good-to-great jobs. a lot of folks perfectly happy making $45k a year - not that there's anything particualrly wrong with that. on weeks like this where i've gotten my teeth bashed in at work that really doesn't sound like a bad thing haha. due to towne lake, the greenbelt and hill country there's definitely a quality of life there that houston can't match.
The 1.8 million value is for the Greater Austin MSA which includes Round Rock, San Marcos, and probably a bunch of small towns around the Austin area. I think the DFW MSA was in the upper 6 millions and the Houston MSA was around 6 million. MSA's can be goofy, though, since I think DFW's MSA includes parts of Oklahoma. lol.
I believe all the big cities in TX are doing well right now -- I know Austin is absolutely booming right now.
Family is here. Friends are here. Kids' friends are here. Church is here. Wife's business is here. Rockets are here. Even filthy rich, it'd be pretty disruptive to up and leave.
