Austin Is the New Brooklyn

When Jeni Putalavage-Ross started dating the man who’s now her husband, they were forever schlepping between her one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and his fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side. “Every date had to be an overnighter,” she says. “I felt like a pack mule.” They wanted to buy a place together, but even stretching their budget to $700,000 they could afford only a two-bedroom in the far reaches of Brooklyn. “We started talking about marriage and kids, and we just couldn’t figure out how to make it work in New York,” she says. In 2009 they gave up and ditched the East Coast for Austin, Tex.

There are 92,812 Americans with a similar story. That’s the number of people who moved to Austin from other parts of the U.S. from 2010 to 2013, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Most are refugees from large cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.