re: John Hayes on Finebaum just call Houston "middle of nowhere"

double post

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extremely unattractive, ultra-spread out, and generally grimy.

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All true.

But it has some very nice attractive areas as well. I could say that is probably true with a lot of major cities or towns. It does lack some of the old world big city history because it didn;t become a big city until much later.

As far as grimy, I felt much cleaner in Houston then I did when I visited Chicago, New York, and Cleveland a few years back. Sure some areas were nice, but a lot was just nasty. Plus the people are uglier in the north.

quote:

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But it has some very nice attractive areas as well. I could say that is probably true with a lot of major cities or towns

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The difference between Houston and other cities is that, in other cities, the nice, attractive areas stretch on for miles and miles and the scary, ugly areas are by themselves in a certain other part of town you can just avoid. Houston is block-by-block almost. It's a city made up of islands of prosperity surrounded by seas of 3rd world grossness. I'm from Houston and I'll defend its larger merits to death, but there's no sense in arguing that it's not an ugly, grimy place that's too spread out. It is.

Buffalo Bayou Park is a huge step in the right direction and the perfect example of Houston thinking at the same time - they had that resource sitting there for 100 years, and in any other city it would have been made into what it is now 50 years ago, but Houston just now realized that the Bayous running through its best urban neighborhoods don't have to be treated like industrial waste conduits and essentially shunned and left as wasted space in the middle of town - instead you can encourage people to use the floodplain for recreation and as a bike transit corridor. As soon as it opened as a park it was flooded with people - it could have been that way for decades, but in typical Houston fashion, no one had seen the need to make anything nice.