Priced out of Austin, artists and musicians are fleeing for small-town Texas life in Elgin
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“As far as Austin itself, I just kind of …” Mann trails off. “Yeah, I'm not talking to it right now.”
Mann joins a recent trend of young artists and musicians defecting from Austin to nearby towns like Elgin, Bastrop, and Lockhart in the wake of rapidly increasing city living costs. A December 2021 report showed that Austin home prices increased 28% year-over-year, compared with a 10% bump nationwide. For a city that bills itself as a place for creatives — the Live Music Capital of the World no less — it’s impossible for those artists to compete with transplants making all-cash offers or invoking bidding wars.
"It's completely unattainable," says Caleb Dawson, who moved to Elgin in 2016 while still drumming in Roky Erickson’s band. "I don’t think for young artists, or even old artists, that it’s possible to own a home in Austin at this point."
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Elgin has become a refuge for musicians like Mann and Dawson. Twenty years ago they would have happily lived the sleepy Austin dream, now they welcome Elgin's rural landscape and comparatively cheap home prices. Call it Elgin City Limits. The young artists and musicians who live here praise the open space, the slower lifestyle, and the small, close-knit community that for decades made Austin so special.
As for the cultural fabric of America's 11th largest city by population, Dawson says that it hasn't so much changed completely as evolved, leaving behind an echo of what it once was.
"It still has the illusion of old Austin," he says. "Some of that vibe is still there, but it's becoming less of a place that people flock to from your big hubs like L.A., San Francisco, New York ... and it’s just becoming one of those cities."