Houston is a super dynamic place and always has been, especially since the end of WWII. Oil and space exploration and aviation all have a great tradition there. Lots of new money and new blood and a great sense of being able to remake and redo.

It is among the ugliest American cities I've ever been to though. It's shabby looking. It's hodpodge. There seems to be no zoning laws there.

There are cow pastures next to strip malls next to churches next to strip clubs next to high end housing developments. It's all very thrown together feeling. Are there any sidewalks there?

And the relentless humidity doesn't help anything either. All metal surfaces seem rusty, all wood warped. Every building seems to have a brick facade which is pulling away from the building and threatening to crumble.

This is not to say that there are not nice things there. There are. But they are thrown together with a lot of ugly things.

With all due respect, your post seems to say as much about you as it does about Houston.

Cow pastures next to strip malls? Heaven forfend! I'm not exactly sure why this is a problem, unless the cows get ideas and VISA cards.......

The rest of what you describe seems actually very city-like, and not necessarily completely undesirable. Different types rubbing elbows..if they coexist relatively peacefully, what is the problem?

But after all, we must put like things together, like income levels together, otherwise how will there be any order? How will we all be able to tell who we are from external signals, rather than what we actually know about ourselves?

I actually lived in Houston for two years, on Coral Gables drive which is right near the Buffalo Bayou. I was a little kid and remember very little about the city when I lived there.

I have visited my good friends who live there a few times. I don't hate it, but I do find it ugly. It seems very slapped together without any kind of plan to it. Those empty lots or cow pastures right next to say, a dress shop, are not pretty. And the bugs, my God, the bugs!

Mind you, I've spent most of my life in Los Angeles, the king of urban sprawl. And there are a lot of ugly places in LA.

I must say, however, that Houston is a good dining city. They have the best tasting beef down there, and I love a Mexican place called Molina's. And I like the ice houses.

"There seems to be no zoning laws there."

EXACTLY!!

Because of the lack of zoning laws (and the expanse of usable land that surrounds the city), darn near anyone in Houston can own a home. The same was true just a few years ago when the "bubble" was still blowing up elsewhere in the country. Where else can you buy a 3000+ square foot home for less than $500,000 and still live in the city's interior ("Inside the Loop" to Houstonians).

Yes, there are some odd juxtapositions around the city, and Houston is not for everybody. It is not a haven for artists, though it is a great place for them (particularly Latin Americans) to sell their wares. If you consider strip malls to be eyesores, then prepare to feel blighted. And there's no spin for the heat/humidity punch of summer.

Think of us as America's engine room: noisy, hot, ugly but incredibly productive. If you want to look on us with disdain while you sit in your comfy drawing room, that's fine by us. We'll just be down here making money.

"Think of us as America's engine room: noisy, hot, ugly but incredibly productive."

That's a very good description.

I don't look with disdain on the city or the people there. I just am struck by how unpretty and disorderly it is.

My family lived there from '66 - '68 because the economy was so great. I was a toddler and started learning to speak there, and my parents, Midwesterners, were horrified to hear me develop a Texas twang.

Zoning makes it so only upper middle class ( hmm 571k for a 1200sq foot house in California...) so only upper people can afford a house. It creates an artificial monopoly and results in blocks of empty buildings in New York.

But... please stay away. Houston is growing too fast and has been for 20 years. We need to slow down the growth a bit.

Yes, I see your point about the downside of zoning. Lack of it does make for a pretty haphazard city though.

I live inside the the loop. Montrose, The Heights, River Oaks, Memorial Dr., Allen Parkway, The Museum District, Rice, and even Midtown are anything but ugly. Our skyline is one of the most striking I've seen in an American city. I really wish people who live in the ugly strip mall suburbs (20 miles from downtown) would stop saying they live in Houston.

As a gross generalization,. people who live in the loop are either

1) Rich (River Oaks, Bellaire, Fancy downtown apartment)

2) Rich and colorful (the Heights, montrose, no-do/so-do/west dallas and all those other places where they built lofts)

3) A student

4) Requiring long-term health care

5) Living on the east side of town and suffering from the gentrification of 1-4

Houston could not survive without the massive daily grind of people who live nowhere near downtown and commute to someplace far away, not always downtown (I know people who commute from baytown to katy, others who commute from friendswood to humble, and yet a third group who commute from spring to galveston) These people are the key to Houston.

Houston is doing great now, but from 2001 to 2006 things were pretty dicey, ditto for from 1986 to about 1993. One of the things Houstonians seem to have learned since 1980 is: be flexible about where stuff goes, and where you commute.

In general, the way you describe things doesn't bother me that much--heck, what passes for zoning in my city put my house within earshot of a steel mill! My first reaction to "church next to strip club" was to call it old-time religion. And the proud one earlier made a good point about the dangers of careless zoning.

Add to that, though, the legendarily-bad Houston traffic and your comments about the heat and humidity's effects on the buildings. To what extent is the sloppy zoning one symptom of a lack of planning? No planning where things should go, no planning for traffic and other infrastructural needs, no building to withstand the local climate?

Hey cranky, I just checked craigslist, you can still get apartments in Heights/Montrose for like 400 dollars a month. Of course they will be older buildings with GIANT FLYING COCKROACHES

FYI there's a ton of planning for traffic. The roads are all planned out well in advance and any developer who owns land with a route crossing it has to build that road.

Traffic is bad in places like Katy because no one predicted those were going to blow up like they have. Inside the loop everything usually clears out by about 5:30.

Aw, c'mon. We resemble that remark!

Actually I think of Houston as built on money stolen from the S&L scandals of the Eighty's.

Yeah, there was the Sharpstown scandal involving that Ben Barnes character who saw to it the Dubya flew in the National Guard instead of over Hanoi.

Superlawyers like Joe Jamail and Marvin Belli were pretty good at redistributing wealth so that it was stay here as well. Then there were the Enron asshats who, as the 21st Century rolled around, pretended it flowed to offshore banks and business ventures.