Transplants Zachary Levi (left) and Stephen Amell Levi: Rich Fury/Kca2019/Getty Images For Nickelodeon Amell: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images “Also not allowed at any park in Beverly Hills: Riding a bicycle, climbing a tree, learning anything from an instructor, using weights … when people ask why we’re moving our kids out of L.A., these are just some of the reasons.” “At the park in Beverly Hills near the house we just moved away from, you were not allowed to fly a KITE,” The Beek groused on Instagram as he moved his family to Texas in November. They’re all coming for the vibe - we’ve got people.”Īmong the newcomers are Zachary Levi (who plans to build a studio on his property in nearby Bastrop), Scott Eastwood, Adrianne Palicki, Adrian Grenier and James Van Der Beek. We don’t have a landmark like Niagara Falls or Disney World or the Eiffel Tower. “I’ve been just waiting for the secret to get out,” drawls Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey, who’s evolved into an unofficial Austin brand ambassador (and, many hope, a Texas gubernatorial candidate challenging Republican incumbent Greg Abbott in 2022). One man, however, is not remotely surprised by any of this.
“It’s like, ‘Do we turn around and sell this house again?’ ” “The market is so crazy - our house we bought in the fall is already worth so much more than we purchased it for,” says actor and L.A.-to-Austin transplant Becca Tobin (who wrote a guest column for this week’s THR titled “Why I left Hollywood for Austin”). During the first half of the year, 1,440 Austin-area houses sold for more than $100,000 over asking (versus 22 houses in the same period the previous year). Tales abound of home sellers being bombarded with all-cash offers the moment a property hits the market. Yet even those accustomed to Austin’s growing pains have been stunned by the pandemic’s fallout, which rocketed housing prices by 43 percent in one year - the steepest climb of any major metro area in the country. (Local joke: What’s the official bird of Austin? The crane!) Add a plethora of festivals like South by Southwest (in which THR‘s parent company, P-MRC Holdings, took a 50 percent stake in April), which draws hundreds of thousands of people from around the globe each March, and even the Great Recession barely tapped the brakes on Austin’s rise.
Natives counter that Austin has been booming to at least some degree since the 1990s, when Silicon Valley companies lured by lucrative tax incentives first began adding Austin offices, and the town began regularly topping “best city to live” lists. The mogul - who is opening a Tesla gigafactory the size of 138 football fields just outside the Austin city limits - declared in February that the city is going “to be the biggest boomtown America has seen in 50 years.” Walker’s Jared Padalecki out for a jog by the Colorado River Musk might have called it.
0 kommentar(er)
