I agree with you. I'm here because this is where my wife is from. She's a Houston native and wants to be near her parents. Mine are dead and she and our children are my family, so it works for me.

Socially, Texas is a backwater. The culture here is fairly homogeneous. The cities are a little better, but not by much. Austin is touted as a more progressive city, but really it's not. I've attended a number of tech conferences there, done work in the area, and it's largely the same as Houston. Keep Austin Weird is their mantra, but what it really amounts to is we will not arrest the homeless, illegals, and occasional dope smokers. Every other aspect is the same. Austin lives and dies because of UT, 6th Street, and the live music scene. That's it.

Were I to suddenly come into money, I could see myself buying a plot of land and building a house in Vermont near a lake.

Just a nit pick. It doesn't necessarily mean fewer people want to live in Texas. SF and the Bay Area in general have a hard constraint on city size, limiting the available inventory (and pushing up prices). In Texas cities can spread indefinitely, thus keeping costs down.

It also could be that fewer people with lots of money want to live in SF and bid against each other.