Austin consistently ranks high on the lists of cities with the worst traffic in America. And a recent housing market analysis found a shortage of 48,000 rental units affordable to households earning less than $25,000 per year. Supplies for middle-income families are also increasingly strained.

”I think in the last 10 years, it’s been a real struggle for Austin to keep its identity and keep its soul, as downtown is being razed and converted into condos and high-rises, and you have people like Google and Facebook and Apple taking over the town with these buildings,” said Omar Gallaga, who covered the city’s tech culture for The Austin American-Statesman for more than 20 years. “If you have all the artists and the creative people that make it interesting move away because they can’t afford to live there, then it becomes a different place.”

Few dispute that tech has turned Austin into one of the most vibrant and distinctive capital cities in America. Its other varied cultures — music, military, higher-ed, food, politics, journalism, real estate — are inseparable from its tech culture.

Joseph Kopser, an Austinite who founded and sold a start-up called RideScout, made an unsuccessful but attention-grabbing run this year for a seat in Congress. A longtime venture capitalist, John Thornton, was the founder of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, Austin-based digital news organization that has helped transform Texas journalism. The nonprofit Austin Tech Alliance has launched get-out-the-vote efforts and helped city government shift to paperless permitting. One of the city’s biggest annual cultural attractions, the South By Southwest festival, is now as much a celebration of tech as it is music and film.

On any given day, some of the state’s far-right lawmakers may be rubbing elbows downtown with 20-something entrepreneurs headed to work on motorized scooters — or perhaps, not long ago, passing by Professor Dumpster, otherwise known as Jeff Wilson, the co-founder of the start-up Kasita, who lived in a 33-square-foot dumpster for a year as part of an experiment in minimalist living.

Austin is still weird. It’s just more wired now, too.

“We don’t want to become Silicon Valley — we want to be Austin,” said Joshua Baer, the founder and chief executive of the Capital Factory, launched in 2009 to mentor, finance and support start-ups and entrepreneurs. “What makes Austin really different, to me, is the culture clash. But it’s not a clash. It’s the culture collaboration.”