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Before moving here we had just moved to La Costa from near SDSU - we straddled Encinitas & Carlsbad. I would move back in a heartbeat but my elderly parents and only sibling live in Houston now. We chose Houston because my brother/SIL were here and I knew my parents would never retire to SD due to the high COL. I knew I wanted my children to grow up around their grandparents...so here we are.
Don't hate...but I don't love Houston or the surrounding areas. I just don't have an affinity for Houston. I don't go on & on about SoCal but I do miss it. I made lifelong friends there and miss them terribly. We lived 10 min from Legoland, 8 min from the beach, 2 hrs to the mountains (snow), 3 hrs from Santa Barbara and most importantly - lived in a town with 3 Nordstroms!
That being said, my children are at a great elementary school with very good and caring teachers; we have nice friends and great doctors and I live in an area where I will probably be able to continue earning a living until I'm ready to retire. It's not a bad place to raise a family.
I am glad that I got to spend my late 20s & all of my 30s in SoCal - it's an experience I would never give up.
Good luck making your decision.
Thank you. No offense but LegoLand Nordstroms, the whole SoCal thing intrigues me none. I am much more excited by the post below yours, where the guy is talking about converted warehouses, art galleries and music. I am a musician. I write folk stuff and play. I want to be around real people with a real organic scene. What he posted is exactly what excites me about life and what I was hoping to find in a city as big and culterally diverse as Houston. I appreciate grit and imperfection. SD is probably great for some people, but it feels too "perfect" and planned for me. The more I read these posts the more I am liking the idea of Houston .
Pretty OK? This place has the best art scene in the South by far, and one of the best in the country. Three serious art museums, a few smaller museums like the Museum of Printing and hundreds of galleries. There are multiple openings every night of the week, check out Culture Map if you need verification of what I'm saying, with various art crawls over the year, at least one with free shuttles on the circuit. We had an art festival at Memorial Park weekend before last, simultaneous with Photofest for the whole week which was at dozens and dozens of locations throughout the city. So many old factory buildings and warehouses have been turned into art and performance studios and supporting residential lofts that it makes my head swim and there are at the moment several large examples of this under development right now. Some of these studios support artisan type operations (along side more conventional art studios), where they are turning out furniture, decorative paraphernalia and other kinds of objects like fabulous lighting objects and sculpted lamps. These last operations typically have windows where you can see the workshops complete with welding, machining and finishing/painting equipment.
My girlfriend drags me to all of this stuff and I'm glad she does the research into what is going on. We went to a Chinese New Year's at one of these sites where a couple of large industrial buildings had been converted and several more were in the process, on Summer street. This indoor/outdoor party drew maybe 6~700 people and they served free drinks to everyone, with an ongoing fire spinning/dancing show, and indoor live music. Similar are the rice dryer silos on the eastside, the site of frequent parties attended by the art/music/art car crowd.
The old Heights Theater is now a large gallery. There are also smaller warehouses owned by productive individuals who rent/share space with the Art Car crowd. Also professional type people who buy nice old historical looking warehouses, build a nice multilevel living space at one end and turn the rest into a good sized gallery with frequent openings where we run into all kinds of people we know peripherally and otherwise. Last Friday we went to an opening at a nice old private home on Milford St. at the edge of Southhampton near Montrose. A museum (MFAH) employee lives there and was showing his own work in his own gallery which was his converted unattached garage, next to a literal garden which is his backyard. We left there and went to a Americana style home concert about a mile away attended by a couple of hundred This city is literally art-crazy.
That's great, but I haven't seen
Try doing something like this in California: My girlfriend and I drove down to Galveston one Sunday afternoon and got on the Bolivar Ferry to go over to Crystal Beach. (for a farewell show for Cosmic Pearl, a Janis Joplin tribute act here. Myrna Sanders, fronting the band, was ordered to quit by her physician - vocal chords needed to heal up after years of high-pitched wailing.)
So after the show we drove onto the beach, like I don't remember being able to do in SoCal when I lived in LA in the '70's. There are a lot of beachfront houses, and an occasional vehicles coming by on a Sunday night, but for the most part we had some great privacy, and the moon was out. We went for a dip in the warm water, clothing left back at the car. The houses are far enough back of the dunes that the few houses still occupied on a Sunday night seemed not a detriment to our privacy. Where in California can you drive out on the beach on a moonlit night with a bottle of wine, put the music on and go in for a warm water swim?
You're talking to an interdisciplinary art student here, so please understand I'm coming from a whole different subgenre. I know a decent amount of the art museums and have a few friends that work for some. It's not to sound snooty, it's just that we're just getting to the subversive compared to a lot of other places. (I'm not going to list the other places because then it just becomes whining, right?) It's just simply not my type of art here. So yes, in my opinion, it's "pretty OK." And that's not a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, we have a lot of traditional methods in place here, we get a lot of great exhibits, and we have all of the performing arts. When looking at a creative class though, Houston gets buried a bit. When looking at donor coffers, then we become more attractive. If you're looking for art, we have it. So yes, we are a "top art city," but outside of things like the Art Car Festival and Bayou City Art Festival, you don't find that same general interest in art integrated into the culture here. If you mention food however, you best believe people will come. It's good to have passionate people though. Thanks, groovamos.
Last edited by theSUBlime; 04-08-2014 at 11:46 PM..
Pretty OK? This place has the best art scene in the South by far, and one of the best in the country. Three serious art museums, a few smaller museums like the Museum of Printing and hundreds of galleries. There are multiple openings every night of the week, check out Culture Map if you need verification of what I'm saying, with various art crawls over the year, at least one with free shuttles on the circuit. We had an art festival at Memorial Park weekend before last, simultaneous with Photofest for the whole week which was at dozens and dozens of locations throughout the city. So many old factory buildings and warehouses have been turned into art and performance studios and supporting residential lofts that it makes my head swim and there are at the moment several large examples of this under development right now. Some of these studios support artisan type operations (alongside more conventional art studios), where they are turning out furniture, decorative paraphernalia and other kinds of objects like fabulous lighting implements and sculpted lamps. These last operations typically have windows where you can see the workshops complete with welding, machining and finishing/painting equipment.
My girlfriend drags me to all of this stuff and I'm glad she does the research into what is going on. We went to a Chinese New Year's at one of these sites where a couple of large industrial buildings had been converted and several more were in the process, on Summer street. This indoor/outdoor party drew maybe 6~700 people and they served free drinks to everyone, with an ongoing fire spinning/dancing show, and indoor live music. Similar are the rice dryer silos on the eastside, the site of frequent parties attended by the art/music/art car crowd.
The old Heights Theater is now a large gallery. There are also smaller warehouses owned by productive individuals who rent/share space with the Art Car crowd. Also professional type people who buy nice old historical looking warehouses, build a multilevel living space at one end and turn the rest into a good sized gallery with frequent openings where we run into all kinds of people we know peripherally and otherwise. Last Friday we went to an opening at a nice old private home on Milford St. at the edge of Southhampton near Montrose. A museum (MFAH) employee lives there and was showing his work in his own gallery which was his converted unattached garage, next to a literal garden, his backyard. We left and went to an Americana style home concert a mile away attended by a couple of hundred plus. This city is literally art-crazy with music on top, and I've played music for pay at a couple of artcrawls.
Try doing this in California: My girlfriend and I drove to Galveston one Sunday afternoon and got on the Bolivar Ferry to go to Crystal Beach. (for a farewell show for Cosmic Pearl, a Janis Joplin tribute act here. Myrna Sanders, fronting the band, was ordered to quit by her physician - vocal chords needed to heal up after years of high-pitched wailing.)
So after the show we drove onto the beach, like I don't remember being able to do in SoCal when I lived in LA in the '70's. There are a lot of beachfront houses, and an occasional vehicles coming by on a Sunday night, but for the most part we had some great privacy, and the moon was out. We went for a dip in the warm water, clothing left back at the car. The houses are far enough back of the dunes that the few houses still occupied on a Sunday night seemed not a detriment to our privacy. Where in California can you drive out on the beach on a moonlit night with a bottle of wine, put the music on and go in for a warm water swim? BTW ITL resident here.
I have a friend from San Diego. She misses is a lot and I think would return if she could afford to. Houston will never be anything close to SD. Our beaches are the most ugly I have seen in my life by a large margin. I avoid them at all costs. If you want to go to a beach you have to fly to one.
The gulf waters in this part of the state are silty from the rivers. Thus the sand has more silt than further south so I don't understand avoiding at all costs something natural. You don't have to fly to a beach either. If the silted waters and sands somehow damage your eyes you can go at night like I have, and go for a swim or a glass of wine and listen to the gulls and the waves; your eyes won't know the difference. The waters are cleaner than a lot of lakes and rivers.
Or if you want whiter sand/bluer water you can drive to Corpus. I took a friend of mine and her two kids. She grew up in Florida and appreciated the beach down on the national seashore below Malaquite, plus some huge dunes around there, seemed 30 feet high. So I don't understand the flying bit either.
This is just a reminder that California (and Texas) is so vast. People love one part of the state and dislike another. A lot of people don't realize that while a large portion of people live in Coastal California, many of the people live inland.
Are you trying to say that Amarillo and South Padre Island are different?
(same distance than Chattanooga, TN to Miami, FL)
The middle paragraph is what I value (other than the conservative part lol).
It's the conservative part that helps keep the cost of living lower. With more government spending, taxes rise. When you increase regulation costs, companies and the jobs they provide may look for other places to do business.
Location: The land of sugar... previously Houston and Austin
5,429 posts, read 14,841,754 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Schumacher713
Our beaches are the most ugly I have seen in my life by a large margin. I avoid them at all costs. If you want to go to a beach you have to fly to one. There is no beach life here. Galveston is a ghetto dump.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jfre81
Have you been there lately? (i.e. post-2009)
It's not a bad little town these days. Ike took out the trash, just like Katrina did in NOLA.
Eh, let them keep saying that. Keeps Galveston less crowded for those of us who love visiting.
Most of them are concentrated in the Montrose and Heights neighborhoods, inside the loop. I know Bohemeo's in the East End holds open mic nights, and Bacchus in Montrose (one of my personal favorites) has tango and salsa dancing on different days of the week.
Let us know or pm me if you'd like a list of places to check out when you come visit, so we can point you in the right direction based on what you're looking for.
It's the conservative part that helps keep the cost of living lower. With more government spending, taxes rise. When you increase regulation costs, companies and the jobs they provide may look for other places to do business.
Texas has a built in natural resource (oil) which will always keep its economy relatively stable. California's natural resource is predominantly its people (entreprenuers, silicon valley, entertainers). So, our state has to tax the upper 1% earners to keep up with the constant demands of infrastructure, etc. Any fluctuation in that % of our population really hurts our economy. Without researching, I would guess that Texas taxes oil to some degree, just like we tax people. Every state is going to get its money from somewhere .
It's the conservative part that helps keep the cost of living lower. With more government spending, taxes rise. When you increase regulation costs, companies and the jobs they provide may look for other places to do business.
Disagree, but it would take me too long to make my point
BTW, before the Great Depression we had 3 conservative president that lowered the top marginal tax rate (taxes rich people pay) to less than 1/2 what it was before.
Spoiler
Last edited by Dopo; 04-09-2014 at 11:16 AM..
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