Reply To: Where to move

[Anonymous]

Houston is a very sophisticated, under-represented city.  It’s the stepchild of Texas.  After Broadway in New York City, we have the largest collection of legitimate theater and musical troupes in the country.  We have the largest medical complex in the world which employs close to 100,000 in itself.  The Port of Houston is the largest in the world in terms of foreign tonneage.  We also have a HUGE eastern side of Houston that is involved in plastics, petrochemicals, etc. We also have a world class museum district.  MOST, but not all, of the people who embrace cowboy culture are tourists (in the same way that most of the people who go to Times Square for NYE are tourists).  

I briefly worked in oil and gas.  Many, but not all, oil and gas companies are based in Houston and they are housed in shiny glass skyscrapers.  Please do a little research on the industry.  We do not have giant drills left and right like the Dakotas, Canada, and elsewhere.  There are many different components to an umbrella of industries: exploration, extraction, transportation, marketing, upstream, downstream, etc.  Just because a brain surgeon is a doctor doesn’t mean he can easily do child psychology.  Energy, like medicine, is an umbrella of many different industries connected and disconnected.  

I am an urban planner who happens to do a lot of site design.  I study cities for a living, and as my professional opinion as a planner I find absolutely no connection whatsoever between one and the other.  It’s very sad that an outsider would lump Houston and North Dakota together.  I guess it means that my new home has a long way to go in educating outsiders benefits of living here.