Native Houstonians that regret not leaving hometown

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Originally Posted by shytiger

I'm a native Houstonian. Born in '71 when Highway 6 was considered BFE. Katy was a Po-dunk town with a high school football team whose linemen looked like NFL players to me at the time. I'm not disappointed that I never moved away. I'm glad I stuck around to see all the changes...good and bad. It's an ironic fact that Houston used to be a "good-ole boy" town (watch Urban Cowboy with John Travolta), and is now one of the most culturally diverse cities in America, now considered the "prototype" city of the future. I'll state one pro and one con, then be done with this post. Con first. The crime rate has sky-rocketed here. For example...drugs and prostitution are out of control in this city (along with property taxes). I have a friend who works in vice and it is a fact that 90% of it is culture related...ex. the Thai prostitution ring that had been running out of up-scale apt complexes. Heroin shops being set up by south-east Asian gangs....products of an imported generation in the early to mid 70's. I could go on.
Pros...some of the best food anywhere in the world you can experience. I love the fact that I can get in my car and drive five minutes down to Bellaire and quasi-experience the Chinese culture. I feel like I'm in another country just a few miles away from home. Middle-Easterners have always been around in Houston, however at the time in the 70's and early '80s I never realized it. I always though they were Mexican, and spoke in a different accent because they worked at Stop-n-Go or Gulf, my own stupidity at the time...go figure.
I believe as more cities in the US become more culturally diverse, there will be a sort of exodus from Houston, leading to a local recession similar to what we experienced in the early '80s when the oil industry crashed. I don't think it will be as bad since Houston is more economically diverse now. Again, I'm glad I never took off, but sometimes I miss the good old days...I think you would to if your were me.

Your crime comment is a little off to me. Back in the early 1980s Houston was the murder capital of the entire country. Places like the Heights, Montrose, and Midtown were considered to be getting highly sketchy - as in, you're really taking a chance going there after dark. Then crack came in the mid-1980s, and the places that were already rough got even rougher. All those things have improved considerably, even if Houston is still considered high-crime by national standards.

So, within the core of the city, crime seems much improved (though property crime is rampant). I'll grant you that formerly low-crime suburban areas are no longer that way - the middle class suburbs of the 1980s are now mostly sketchy. Maybe that's what you were getting at.