THE MORNING RANT: Austin Successfully Killed the Golden Goose, and Its Depopulation Trend is Accelerating

Austin started to lose population in 2023, as the crush of exhausted citizens fleeing the “blue dot in a red state” started to exceed the number of incoming settlers. It wasn’t a huge number, just 2,500 net out-migration that year, but it was still significant in that the net incoming tide of people had been reversed.

“More People Leaving than Coming to Travis County [Austin] for the First Time in 20 Years” [CBS – Austin – 3/26/2024

This resulted in Austin falling out of the list of Top-10 US cities by population.

“Austin falls out of top 10 largest cities in the US” [KXAN Austin – 5/17/2024]

New numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau show that for the first time in two decades more people are leaving Travis County than moving in.

While news of Austin losing population was shocking at the time, the trend has continued to accelerate. There was a net loss of 13,400 people in 2024.

With residents fleeing, there is a glut of houses for sale, and prices are plunging as the real estate bubble bursts. This is also deflating prices on homes in the surrounding suburban and exurban counties.

It is my hope that some of the depopulation is because of blue state colonizers returning to their natural coastal habitats, thus leaving Texas a little bit redder overall. Of course, there is also a steady exodus of regular people from Austin – those who just can’t take it anymore. From personal experience, I know that it is a goal of many normies to leave the oppressive and theocratically woke eco-leftism of Austin, as well as the social disorder it has wrought. My wife and I were among them.

Back when Austin was simply weird, it was a delightful melting pot of politicos, educators, hippies, rednecks, musicians, and regular suburban Texans. Music bound those groups together. I can attest that I spent a lot of evenings in my younger days at joints like the Broken Spoke, Continental Cafe, and Green Mesquite, catching great new acts, some of whom went on to significant success.

Unfortunately, Austin has also been pretty effective in killing off its legendary music scene. Apparently, tech bros and AWFLs just don’t foster a music scene the same way that hippies and rednecks once did, and now even the legendary SXSW Festival is largely ditching the music aspect that got the whole thing going.

“SXSW music festival going through major changes” [KERA - NPR in Dallas – 3/18/2025]

Something was clearly amiss at this year’s South By Southwest music festival. The Austin Convention Center — usually the bustling hub of the event — was practically a ghost town at noon on Friday. The center’s massive Flatstock concert poster art show had already packed up and left, a day earlier than usual. The annual free public daylong concerts on the banks of Lady Bird Lake had been condensed into one day.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, The Austin American-Statesman reported the four-day music-focused portion of SXSW will be eliminated in 2026, with music events folded into a shortened version of the overall festival.

Although I was too young to ever make it to the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin (which closed in 1980) I was able to enjoy its musical legacy. The great Traces of Texas had a recent tweet about the musical confluence of hippies and rednecks in the early 1970s, quoting Eddie Wilson, the owner of the Armadillo, on what led all parties to make peace and find common musical ground. The answer is…hormones.

"It was girls in halter-tops. That’s what caused the petri dish to runneth over. When the rednecks were coming into the beer garden and seeing the hippie girls in their bellbottoms, they’d immediately start missing haircuts. And the hippies were already wearing cowboy hats, because if they wanted to buy a case of beer when they were traveling, they had to put their hair out of sight. The costumes were interchangeable, and the hormones were raging. All those guys with cowboy hats started growing their hair and all those guys with long hair started wearing cowboy hats and pretty soon there was nothing but girls in halter tops standing between them."

You can never go home again, but I’ll always enjoy that musical legacy. Which reminds me, I probably need to put some Rusty Wier or Jerry Jeff on my stereo bluetooth, it’s been too long.

My latest piece at The Blaze has been published, “Tariffs Aren’t Just Taxes – They’re National Defense.”

In it I make the point that even if “tariffs are a tax on consumers” as Principled Free Traders always claim, so what? National defense spending is also a tax on consumers, as is foreign aid, inflation-fueled deficit spending, etc. A tariff to repatriate supply chains that are critical to our national defense is as worthy a tax as those other taxes we are paying.

It’s behind a paywall, but if you have a Blaze subscription, I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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