I recently moved from Rochester after having lived in the city since 1990. I lived in Houston for several years before that, so I thought I'd respond to Mary Anna Towler's essay on why Rochester isn't Austin. Here's a short list of reasons:

To use a Southern expression, much of Texas is butt ugly. Austin, by contrast, is in the hill country, one of the most beautiful parts of the state. People don't like butt ugly.

Many a Texan lives in Austin as a student, which endears him or her to the region. Rochester has neither an in-state student population nor is it in the most beautiful part of New York, which is, on average, much more beautiful than Texas.

Texas is a RED state, and I mean REALLY RED. Austin is one of the few less-than-red-to-slightly-blue regions, which many find a liberal haven. Rochester does not have the same drawing power.

Austin is a regional-national center of country music. Rochester has no comparable popular music industry.

Austin is not in the rust belt. Even though Rochester might be "better off" than other Upstate cities, outsiders lump it in the same category as Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany.

Austin concerns itself with the future. Rochester focuses way too much on its (nonetheless illustrious) past.

Austin DOES have better weather and lower taxes. Sorry, but that does make a difference, especially when the city school system is seen as an intractable failure and waste of money.

I left Rochester to be closer to family in Atlanta and because the home-grown, once-upon-a-time-up-and-coming company I worked for had spent the last decade dismantling itself to India while merging and purging the remaining staff with a recently purchased division elsewhere in the US.

Rochester needs a unique, geographically dependent, artistically oriented industry to provide a jumpstart. Why not sell the area as a diverse photogenic portfolio to the film industry? Except for desert scenes, almost every kind of vista is nearby. Midtown Mall could be turned into a huge sound stage. Eastman House has a huge film archive that could be leveraged somehow. RIT could get in on the computer-generated stuff.

Somebody call Phillip Seymour Hoffman!

TOM ELSTON, DULUTH, GEORGIA