Family thinking of moving to Texas from Los Angeles.>Need some Feedback< (Houston: house, neighborhoods)

[SuperPollito]

At least you will already be familiar with ridiculous traffic.

[PinkLadyK]

Where will you work? You may find that your quality of life doesn't increase as dramatically as you are hoping when you realize how far out you have to live to get this big house for under $500,000.

[mkwensky]

Originally Posted by curbur

Houston feels like LA in a lot of ways, but in others they seem like they're in different countries. However, with that being said, I think you would overall like Houston. It doesn't have as many tourist attractions or beautiful geography, but it is a very large metropolitan city with many of the same amenities that you've come to expect when living in LA. 500k could get you a 3,000-3,500 sq ft closer into town, (but you'd have to go private more than likely), or could get a 4,500-5,000 sq ft mcmansion out in the burbs where the public schools are good.

I understand that LA is booming as I have seen it myself traveling there for work a lot this year, however, the amount of construction has actually been higher if you can believe that. There's numerous articles you can check online for 2013, 2014, and early 2015 where it states that's the case, like this one. Houston has been going crazy construction-wise the past few years, and will for the foreseeable future, (I count 12 cranes in the downtown area and can see 4 cranes alone from just my balcony in Montrose/Upper Kirby). A lot of investors got spooked right when oil dropped, but are now seeing that the city has resiliently kept growing in the face of the downturn and are back. Not to mention if you catch the right time of the next boom, there's all types of fortunes to be had in the right careers. So I would say Houston, and really any large Texas city for the foreseeable future will be a good career for someone in the construction industry. Houston to me seems it's finally entered that cycle where boom or not it will always have some construction going on, like Chicago and NYC were in the early 20th century.

Lastly, it's possible that in some country bumpkin towns way out in the middle of nowhere you can find some bigotry towards people of biracial or minority descent, but you could say that's true of almost any state in the country including California. Houston itself is technically more diverse than NYC by nationality, even though NYC still feels way more culturally diverse. Point being, race will not be an issue at all in Houston, or any of the other Texas cities for that matter.

I'd suggest visiting several times to get a feel for how the city compares to your current lifestyle. If you have family/friends in the area you can stay with an extended amount of time, say 1-2 weeks, even better.

I've debunked this myth before in another post and am happy to do so again. Basically the claim that Houston is the "most diverse" city in the US is based on a single study conducted by Rice's Sociology Department and their metric for diversity is a math formula that they call the Entropy Index. All that index measures is how evenly the population is distributed between four major "racial" categories: white, "latino", black and Asian. Houston eked out a first place because it had slightly fewer non-Hispanic whites by percentage of population as compared to "Latinos". This study does not measure diversity within the four major categories and definitely does not pay attention to the amount of international presence from every part of the world within a city.

Anyone interested can read the study here: http://kinder.rice.edu/uploadedFiles...rse%202-13.pdf

[PedroMartinez]

Originally Posted by So.Cal. To TX

-

We are coming to get away from this overpriced Disneyland B.S.

(we love Disneyland, but the Park and Hollywood keep the housing prices waaay over inflated.)

I was always under the assumption that the real draw for the majority of people was the weather and proximity to beach and mountains.

Personally, California weather is a little too chilly for me in the evenings which also keeps the water too cold.

Originally Posted by SuperPollito

At least you will already be familiar with ridiculous traffic.

Traffic is still better in Houston than LA.

From time to time I'll think they might be equivalent, and then I'll take a business trip to LA and realize it's still worse. Of course, it's been about a year now since I've been to LA.

Originally Posted by PinkLadyK

Where will you work? You may find that your quality of life doesn't increase as dramatically as you are hoping when you realize how far out you have to live to get this big house for under $500,000.

Actually, you don't have to go that far out to get a really big house for under $500k. Of course "far out" is very subjective.

[curbur]

Originally Posted by mkwensky

I've debunked this myth before in another post and am happy to do so again. Basically the claim that Houston is the "most diverse" city in the US is based on a single study conducted by Rice's Sociology Department and their metric for diversity is a math formula that they call the Entropy Index. All that index measures is how evenly the population is distributed between four major "racial" categories: white, "latino", black and Asian. Houston eked out a first place because it had slightly fewer non-Hispanic whites by percentage of population as compared to "Latinos". This study does not measure diversity within the four major categories and definitely does not pay attention to the amount of international presence from every part of the world within a city.

Anyone interested can read the study here: http://kinder.rice.edu/uploadedFiles...rse%202-13.pdf

Well whether the study was flawed or not or Houston is barely behind or ahead, the point is that it's bashcally on par, which should alleviate OP's concerns about diversity. Keep fighting the good fight though..

[So.Cal. To TX]

Again, all great feedback everyone..thank you

No worries on the traffic, nowhere in the States has worse traffic than we do.

[newlymarried]

I'll comment just on the diversity issue... my husband is Filipino and I'm white. Our son is mixed. In the 10+ years we've been together, we've gotten a couple of random dirty looks that we had to assume had to do with race (but maybe these people give dirty looks to everyone... who knows?) But nobody's ever said anything overtly or covertly racist to us.

That being said... In our brief forays to the West Coast, we do fit in a lot better. A lot more people look like we do, so nobody pays attention to us and makes the assumption that we are a couple. We both have commented about the sense of "anonymity" that we don't have in public in Houston. That works for us or against us. In Houston, if we go to a restaurant for the first time and come back a couple of weeks later, the staff remembers us because we're "different." But sometimes it's presumed that we're not together because we don't look like we "fit." (The wait staff at a restaurant tried to seat us at different tables once.) People always apologize and it's fine, but it's there. It's a minor thing, and something that we don't even think about regularly, but I think it would be a change for you.

Also... there is a Filipino community in Houston, but it's not very cohesive or easy to find in our experience. There are a couple of restaurants, but my in-laws seems to think of them as the Denny's of Filipino food and generally avoid them. If you're Catholic, there are large Filipino communities in some churches. But if that community is something that's important to you, you'd really need to research how to create it because there isn't a critical mass that you'll find just everywhere.

[curbur]

Originally Posted by newlymarried

I'll comment just on the diversity issue... my husband is Filipino and I'm white. Our son is mixed. In the 10+ years we've been together, we've gotten a couple of random dirty looks that we had to assume had to do with race (but maybe these people give dirty looks to everyone... who knows?) But nobody's ever said anything overtly or covertly racist to us.

That being said... In our brief forays to the West Coast, we do fit in a lot better. A lot more people look like we do, so nobody pays attention to us and makes the assumption that we are a couple. We both have commented about the sense of "anonymity" that we don't have in public in Houston. That works for us or against us. In Houston, if we go to a restaurant for the first time and come back a couple of weeks later, the staff remembers us because we're "different." But sometimes it's presumed that we're not together because we don't look like we "fit." (The wait staff at a restaurant tried to seat us at different tables once.) People always apologize and it's fine, but it's there. It's a minor thing, and something that we don't even think about regularly, but I think it would be a change for you.

Also... there is a Filipino community in Houston, but it's not very cohesive or easy to find in our experience. There are a couple of restaurants, but my in-laws seems to think of them as the Denny's of Filipino food and generally avoid them. If you're Catholic, there are large Filipino communities in some churches. But if that community is something that's important to you, you'd really need to research how to create it because there isn't a critical mass that you'll find just everywhere.

Very interesting take, but do you mind if I ask if you live in Houston proper or a suburb? The suburbs do tend to be a bit more homogenized in some areas, (which is also true of NW LA).

[curbur]

HAIF is a treasure trove of information on Houston construction that I frequent, and is where I found this link to the current development map for downtown alone: map. What's striking to me is that even though so much construction has gone on there that there's still so many vacant lots to build on. I suspect in 15 years time there will be virtually none. Keep in mind Houston is multinodal in the way that LA is, so this by no means represents all the construction. Hell, it's arguable that uptown/galleria area already rivals downtown in size and will one day be much bigger. Not to mention the Texas Medical Center (largest composition of hospitals and medical office space in the world) is another node full of density and buildings, Midtown across the freeway from downtown is starting to get high-rises, (very old picture and Midtown is rapidly developing so it actually looks nothing like this anymore, but it gives you an idea of the location and TXDOT is proposing to remove the elevated freeway barrier between it and downtown), there's plenty of ample land along buffalo bayou that's ripe to add to the high-rise developments already there (again pic does it no justice just couldn't find a good one, and several more smaller clusters of urbanity around the metro I haven't even listed, (Greenway Plaza, The Energy Corridor out in Memorial, (yet again pic does it no justice but couldn't find a better one), or the waterway cluster out in The Woodlands to name a few).

[newlymarried]

Well, we did a little of everything.

When we started dating, we both lived in the Champions area. We were there for several years.

Then we moved to Montrose, then to Woodland Heights, and now reside in Oak Forest.

And we still travel to the burbs regularly (1-2x/wk) to see extended family, so we're often in exactly those homogenized areas (Spring, Memorial, etc). (And who wouldn't want to do all their shopping in the suburbs where it's all together and easily laid out-- so sometimes we're out there just because.)

I didn't and don't see a difference in reactions to us in any location within Houston.

But it takes a little longer to figure it out than if we all looked like we came out of the same box. So they need to watch longer and see that I refer to my husband as "Honey" or that we're making joint decisions about bathroom fixtures and then the context fits.

And in most cases, people figure out how we're related and move on... because then we're just three more people buying Cheerios. It's not that interesting.

And when we have our son with us, actually the dynamic shifts. People can do the calculation faster, and we go back to being more anonymous.