Startup slowdown?

By some measures, Austin’s rising housing prices and traffic congestion are starting to drag down the city’s once-hot reputation as the one of the best startup cities in America. A new study from FitSmallBusiness.com evaluated 41 metro areas in North America on a variety of factors – number of startups, amount of venture capital investments, growth of the local tech talent pool, population concentration of millennials, gross domestic product, college attainment rate, travel time to work and cost of living – that factor into a startup environment, and found that the Austin/Round Rock area ranks eighth, with Atlanta claiming the top spot. The Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington metro came in fifth overall, besting Austin in terms of venture capital investments, startup community size and affordability. Austin ranked 20th in commute time and 15th in the local cost of living index, of which the price of housing is a major factor. The report’s recent publication doesn’t appear to have factored into the most recent odds posted by Las Vegas book makers on what city will win the location selection process for Amazon’s HQ2 project. The website OddsShark.com has Austin ranked third, behind northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., which didn’t finish in the top 10 of the FitSmallBusiness.com rankings.