Updated 2 years ago
Pictured: Starck Club entrance, Dallas, TX, late 1980s, designed by Philippe Starck.
I think I can weigh in cuz I lived in NYC and Texas for 20 and 30 years, respectively. This article is meant to throw some cold water on a previous post, where I extoll the virtues of living in the archetypal megapolis.
Texas succeeds exactly where NYC fails.
Texas people are awesome, food is awesome, there’s TREES and plenty of space everywhere, economy is great, plenty of jobs, no graffiti, no trash, no streets dominated by K2 addicts, crime is low, and no state taxes. There’s very little not to like.
Yeah it sucks if yer poor, but that’s true everywhere in America. The welfare state just keeps you dependent and stuck.
If you are liberal, Austin is a next-level liberal mecca. Sure, there’s gun-toting MAGA rednecks, but every state has those. Hell, just go 2 miles in any direction from Manhattan, and that includes you, built-on-garbage Staten Island, and you will find similar.
On the bright side, access to Internet has made having kids in Texas a little genetic lottery, you never know if yer gonna have kids who end up getting indoctrinated by rave music, anime, or the pink propaganda and become a lesbian daughter or, worse, queer son, or even worse, a non-binary transgender that’s gonna lurk in your public bathrooms, or worse of all, an Antifa Hillary lover.
But it’s not just Austin. Texas cities are all solid blue, and that is where the growth is, especially as all the Island of Misfit Toy country kids flow into them.
Unless the GOP becomes the Hispanic party with some token whites, Texas is going blue, it is simply, demographically inevitable.
The only reason I ever left was that when you are young you tend to take for granted where you grew up, and I thought NYC was cutting edge in business, tech, music, and fashion.
That was a myth. It was just big.
The Money Pyramid
From the time Manhattan was sold to the Dutch with a chest full of cheap trinkets, New York is all about money and pyramids of who you know. There is no insular magic endemic to the real estate. It just seems that way because so many of people like you also came there, deluded, just like me. If I can make it here I can make it anywhere.
And Texas…. Texas succeeds in business, tech, and music, if not fashion, but who cares about that, really.
Business
It is easy AF to start a business in Texas, and there aren’t all these braindead regulations like NYC has. DeBlasio and the corrupt NYC government elite hates business, and will keep biting the hand that feeds it until the hand leaves for greener pastures.
Tech
I was used to the omnipresent computers at University of Texas and at Houston ad agencies: Apple and the first incarnations of Windows. When I got to NYC I was clusterfucked by the mainframe/keypunch/how many words can you type mentality. The brontosaurs were not agile.
Music
I grew up in the 80s Texas club culture. I was so spoiled by #s, Visions, Beejays in Houston, and Halls, Cave Club, Planetarium in Austin, Starck in Dallas. All the while, and as graduation approached, I anxiously read about all the new New York trends in Steven Saban’s early reporting in the brand new Details magazine, before it was bought by Conde Nast.
When I finally came to NYC in the early 90s it was a step down, even given Palladium and Limelight. Although there were tons of industrial heads at NYU and FIT, I had to really search for good industrial, then techno and trance. Industrial was so hard to find, couple places in far west Chelsea give or take 10 blocks, and the Batcave. That was it, save for Dave Kendall’s Communion at Limelight, which didn’t last. The rave scene and eventually the trance scene, the latter of which I put my energies into, finally achieved the dream of what I had hoped for in NYC. But even those were squeezed to death, mostly by economics.
Fashion
A bonus for NYC was there whereas before I could only read about Philippe Starck and Jean Paul Gaultier in magazines (and see Philippe Starck and Grace Jones Starck club in Dallas), in NYC I could actually GO to the Starck-designed hotels Royalton/44 and the Paramount with its Whiskey Bar, and see also be able to see Gaultier cavorting like a monkey at gay nights at Limelight. A side benefit was the large number of models floating around, which in retrospect was depressingly problematic if you wanna go into feminist critiques of capitalism!
The Life
New York was bar none the best place to ever rollerblade, both for getting errands done, picking up dry cleaning, and skating your 3 loops around Central Park, even getting refused entry into Trump Tower by stone-faced dickwad guards with little military outfits and littler penises. And that is the most 90s statement you will ever read.
In NYC there is zero chance of ever getting a normal life unless you are very rich, and that’s a warped existence, prone to making everyone neurotic. And these trends worsened in the 20 years I lived there.
The only way NYC truly still dominates is in the cultural melange of many cultures coming together. This cannot be overstated – it is the Trump Card that potentially upends the entire game board – see this article:
The Fin de Siècle New York Psytrance Supernova
New York is a shining beacon, living testament to What Happens When Everyone Appropriates from Other People’s Culture.
Yet even there, Houston is actually by some measures more culturally diverse than NYC. NYC has more Europeans, though, and probably always will. But why settle for a poor man’s version of Europe, and just go to fucking Europe?
But Texas’ general homogeneity is also a curse. Get too many white people in one place, and they start thinking stupid herd shit like Masks and Lockdowns are Bad.
Another unique area NYC excels in that has to be mentioned is that, although having a car is like having a second apartment in terms of cost and parking, everyone has the ability to be drunk or impaired by drugs and not having to worry about driving, at least until self-driving cars become the norm. This is not the best thing to brag about, and can make alcoholics have a very hard road to any chance of recovery – they are literally surrounded by triggers – so let’s keep moving on.
COVID-something
Add in COVID, which like a surgical neutron bomb came in and demolished all the appeal NYC had… and it’s a wonder it will ever recover. In the past 30 years the proportion of income spent on rent has continued to climb, even while the population has steadily dwindled. This has made for a truly brutal life for its citizens, as they struggle to simply get By and Survive, rather than live the life they had in mind when moving to the big city. At least in Texas, it is easier to avoid the madding crowd.
The Bubble
And as long as Big Real Estate and its attendant Collateralized Mortgage Backed Securities continue to make much of Manhattan a ghost town by holding on to empty storefronts for decades, recovery will be elusive.
Although I have always said NYC would be a wonderful place if a bomb could go off and take out about 75% of the population, especially for all the graffiti artists, would disappear overnight and we would somehow avoid having to deal with frozen meat trucks for the corpses, that was hyperbole.
But the NYC real estate bubble needs the bubble popped.
I’ll take the NYC of the 1980s again, if it can just be about 25% the rent it was in 2019.
The forest needs to be burned for it to regrow.
Conclusion
A smart man once advised, when you are young, live in NYC at least once, and when you are old, live in California at least once. I think Texas is an acceptable compromise.
But really, let’s be honest. I am just getting older. And as you get older you have less tolerance for the bullshit, and for stupid people. And you can’t block people in real life.
It’s no surprise urban living is for the young. Everywhere.
