No, that is completely fair. Not only is it not very walkable, Houston is anti anything that is not a car. Several years ago they were on the right path and began putting in bike lanes, however, the ones they put in didn’t go anywhere. You had to weave and go far out of your way just to get from the Astrodome area to downtown. Then a few months later the city removed the lanes promising to replace them. Years later, no bike lanes.
I do like living here and enjoy the climate much more than I would somewhere like Michigan, but this whole area has a long way to go to before it becomes a world class city.
I don’t see walkability as being a useful standard. Any city is going to expand outward as it grows unless there is some geographic situation (like in Manhattan, Boston, or Montreal) which limits its expansion.
Being able to get around on foot is a big plus if you can avoid traffic hassles, and there are neighborhoods in Houston (Rice Village comes to mind) where there’s a lot to offer and you could conceivably do without a car for much of your needs.
Doing much walking in Houston during the hot season can be hazardous, though. I remember a medical resident who told me of going out for a walk with his family one fine July day (he was from Bangladesh, so the heat was nothing unusual for him), and having the police stop and ask if they were alright (the implication being that no one in their right mind would be out strolling in the sunshine in July and maybe their car had broken down or something).
Walkability is what makes a city a city. If you have to drive everywhere, you’re not really in a city, you’re in a suburb that is dressed up like a city.
I’d argue the opposite. If you can walk around the community you live in, it’s just a town. A city is a community that’s too big for you to walk everywhere.
But just because a city is large doesn’t mean there can’t be places to walk to. I think the worst thing to happen to cities was the idea of zoning. I realize Houston has no zoning, but the mindset is still the same. You have residential areas, business areas, shopping areas and nothing that connects them. It’s the way the city is designed that is the problem, not the fact that it covers a large area.
Like a lot of other cities, you might drive to an area and walk around that area of interest. In Seattle, you would drive (or take a bus, etc) to the Pike Street market and walk around there. We don’t have anything quite as awesome as a Pike Street Marketplace, but we do have plenty of areas worthy of getting there and walking around in them.
There are also plenty of areas that are totally not interesting- huge blocks of apartments or neighborhoods full of houses (bedroom communities) with very little else going on in them besides the occasional grocery store and a couple of school/park combo properties.
Then there are areas like mine that are very comfortable. I can walk or bike to 2 grocery stores, many shops and restaurants, two gyms, the library, a couple of parks. I’m only 3 blocks from the elementary school, etc. My neighborhood does have bike lanes, and I see more people walking around here than in other areas of town, for sure. These things influenced my decision to move to this particular area.
Houston can be pretty ugly, though. The freeways are lined with businesses and giant billboards. Some cities hide their business districts from the roads behind a wall of trees or green space. We did not do that in the past, but many of the newer areas seem to be including that kind of thing.
I just want to be clear that I’m not in any way bashing Houston, I’ve never been there and I always think it is healthy for people to have civic pride about where they live. I love cities and I hate it when people who don’t live in DC dump on it (but dumping on the city is a perfectly acceptable hobby for residents of the city, it’s our right).
I imagine that a big factor in Houston is the heat, in the summer it probably really dictates what you can and can’t do outside.
Never been to Houston. In terms of gay community/nightlife, I’ve heard Dallas, Austin and Houston are it with the addition: “Houston is actually a lot cooler than people think!”
I dunno, whoever told me that probably got well laid while visiting Houston.
I’ve been to San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and was stationed in San Angelo for a little while. If I had to relocate to Texas, I’d probably go for Dallas, but definitely visit Houston and give it a good looking over based on what I’ve heard.
I don’t think of Houston as being redneck Texan. I tend to imagine it a bit like south Los Angeles.
I have been there a few times for meetings - Downtown and the Woodlands - but did not get out much. The colleagues I know that have been transferred there could not wait to leave. A few from California have made note of the high cost to live in Houston, which surprised me since my preception was the opposite.
I’ve travelled there on business a number of times and my primary impression is that the city sucks.
It sprawls out forever, it takes a half an hour to get anywhere, it’s actively anti-pedestrian, it’s literally dangerously hot during the summer and it doesn’t have any cultural identity.
It has awesome Mexican food, it’s got a great pro-business attitude and it promotes freedom more than most places, but that all doesn’t make up for its overall awfulness.
I’m an Austinite who lived in Houston for two years in the mid-90s. Can I first say that we also have shitty public transportation in Austin? Actually, there is a bad-ass two-car light rail line that travels from the northwest 'burbs to downtown, but you’re SOL if you don’t live near the single line. We don’t have bus lanes, so public transport just means you get to sit in traffic with your B.O. laden buddies. It doesn’t get you anywhere quicker, which I thought was a major selling point of public transportation.
Houston was an incredibly affordable place to live. I lived in a non-suspect apartment on San Felipe, just inside 610, near the Galleria, and paid next to nothing for a two-bedroom. I was a teacher in HISD and got paid less that $30K, and was able to live decently. I later moved to West Main, and then Richmond & Alabama, so very close to the Menil and other cultural centers like Montrose.
That said, Houston’s traffic, weather, and pollution absolutely suck, and the strip-mall-itis evident when you travel on 59 south of downtown depressed the hell out of me. The surface roads were shitty back then too, no doubt because of the ridiculous rainfall/humidity/scorching heat.
I haven’t been back to Houston for more than a day since returning to Austin. I think it’s fine for a visit but I wouldn’t want to live there again, unless I could live in Rice Village, or near the Menil, or the Heights. And God willing, be within walking distance of my workplace.
Your colleagues our oughtta their ever-loving minds. One thing that Houston really does have going is that it is cheap. I guess if your friends were from Bakersfield or some super rural, depressed part of California, maybe they could have a point. Compared to places like LA and the Bay, Houston is insanely cheap. $1200 would get you a nice, reasonably central 2/2 apartment. Would $1200 even buy half that in San Francisco?
It’s true that the summers are rough, very hot and very humid with lots of mosquitoes (except last summer when it was hot and dry, so most of the mosquitoes were gone) but today it’s 75 degrees with low humidity and a clear, blue sky. Couldn’t be nicer!
As I recall, the surprise was the property taxes and utility bills. The families that moved to Houston - from central Contra Costa county - elected to buy homes rather than rent. They bought homes of comparable size to their CA residencies that were near downtown, and had a yearly property tax bill of around $ 23,000 and utility bills that averaged around $300 a month. The property taxes in their CA houses were more like $5000 a year and utility bills were perhaps $50 a month.
There were other things - schools, gas, etc. - that were also surprises but when they added everything up on a monthly basis, they did not see significant cost differences between Houston and the Bay area and were happy to transfer out.
