The golden path is to live in the Houston area while working remotely. This helps you to avoid the worst aspect of the region while maximizing the best aspects.
A million dollars buys you an incredible length of runway in the Houston market. You could buy a very high end home in the woodlands in cash, put a Porsche in the garage, and still have enough to go for a decade before you had to find a source of income again.
“Put together a million dollars” and “work remotely”? The biggest employer in Houston by a huge margin is the oil and gas industry - most of those jobs are not going to be remote and a lot of those jobs are not a pathway to $1 million. What about people who work in hospitality, roughly 10% of the workforce?
You’re describing this as relatively simple/achievable but for a lot of people it simply isn’t. Houston has one of the highest poverty rates in the country with 1 in 5 living below the poverty line - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/houston/202...
It seems that we have different definitions of "remote".
They spent far less to basically completely solve their street homelessness problem compared to "model" cities like SF, so...
This article is the spitting definition of drawing a bullseye around an arrow. Houston’s secret sauce of preventing mass encampments is a combo of sprawl and police brutality. There aren’t as many dense areas to congregate compared to CA, and there are more places to hide away or squat to avoid notice.
Enjoy your flavoraid though.
I also find it pretty horrifying for someone to actively advocate for “police brutality.” By definition it is immoral and should not be desired. You can’t even be bothered to say “strong policing“ and pretend you don’t want law enforcement to abuse people who already have enough problems? You actively want them going out and hurting people? Please correct me if I’m wrong because it really comes across that way.
We have less homelessness because we put up signs saying "don't feed the homeless" (yes, real, and yes, real traffic signs) and put spikes under bridges. Oh and then the police here can basically do whatever they want.
Houston was one of the first major cities to transfer chronically homeless individuals from encampments to one-bedroom apartments with almost zero friction (no intermediate shelters, no drug testing, no requirement to find a job). This was a highly successful program under Turner that had little to do with sprawl or police brutality.
The extremes is a pretty weird trip to do comparisons of since most people go from the outskirts into the centers to work and play and then go back to the outskirts.
The question becomes... once you get to your destination, can you get anywhere else without having to hop back into the car?
In cities like NY or Boston you can ride into town, hit a restaurant, go to the show, grab a few drinks then hit the clubs all without getting back into your car or just by taking short stints on readily available public transportation or taxis.
Can you have that same experience in Houston? I don't really know. Maybe. Where I'm from it's not concentrated like that so you go to your friends house... then you get in a car and go down to the bars... then you get in the car again to go to the arena for the show.
Everything's very dispersed. I personally like that much less.