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Most ruined areas of Texas


WillowBend56

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When you've lived in Texas 50+ years and have traveled the state far and wide, you notice favorite areas blighted by development. To me the San Antonio-Austin corridor is one of the worst. It's become two long strip malls on both sides of Interstate 35. New Braunfels and San Marcos have lost a lot of their identity and charm.

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I can remember when there were miles of open undeveloped space between Katy and the Houston City Limits. It's now one long continuous suburb.

The same thing is happening to U-S 59 from the San Jacinto River north into Montgomery and Liberty Counties. It's now continuous suburb all the way to Splendora, and it won't be very long till it reaches Cleveland.

I'm old enough to remember the scenic two-lane highway that ran from Houston all the way through east Texas to Texarkana. . The ONE good thing I can say about the multi-lane divided highway that 59 has become is that I can now drive from Angelina County to Houston in an hour and a half. It used to take between two and three hours, but we didn't mind all that much because the scenery was so nice. It's good that we can now whiz through quickly. Less time to see the ugly development.

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New Braunfels and San Marcos have lost a lot of their identity and charm.

I dunno, maybe or maybe not. I wasn't around when Aquarena Springs was still a tourist trap and Schlitterbahn hadn't supersized, but after going to college at Texas State its still a fun quirky place. The rivers haven't gone anywhere and are still public parks, and you see all kinds of people enjoying them. New Braunfels has probably only become more fake german over the years, Gruene is still a place, etc. The university in SM has grown and maybe the student culture is different than what my parents said it was back in the early 1980s but name a place that hasn't changed in 30 years.

Personally, I'd say Beaumont or Midland-Odessa. Those places had all-to-short golden years in the 1950s to the early 1970s and today they are pretty ewww. Midland has an abandoned downtown with empty skyscrapers and the Golden Triangle's refineries are rusting. Really despite Texas being a rapidly growing place with a robust economy I'd hate to be marooned somewhere like that, unless you worked in the oil field in which case you'd have a job no problem, it would no better than living in Michigan or Ohio IMO.

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I wasn't sure where this was going when I saw the title. I thought you were going more along the thought of post#4, areas that have decayed or been abandoned. You haven't seen sprawl till you've been to beautiful, "green" SoCal. If I drive my hydrid for 4 hours per day and/or refuse to carpool I must be saving the enviroment, right? :blink:

Seriously though, if we want to reduce sprawl and it's negative impact then we should start by living smaller and/or closer to the center of the city. You can only move out so far to avoid undesirables before you're in Oklahoma or Louisiana. :D

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