McNizzle

If we're going to retreat to this sort of discussion instead of trying to be really creative, well, Atlanta has its share of overwrought buildings, and it's my least favorite major skyline (not to mention its partisans have such pretensions about it), but the problem with downtown Houston's architecture (aside from massively stretched geometries having nothing to do with human settlement, from one-tower-per-block deadening street life because single operators don't want to have the density of entry points throughout their building that small-scale owners healthily introduce, and from such giant office towers creating the speculative expectation of future windfalls for property owners and subsequently driving land prices so high that one really *does* have to wait from boom to boom to economically justify any additional land use, instead of having more frequent, flexible yet stable addition of smaller buildings to create a growing neighborhood district) is that because the construction from the mid-70s through early 80s so out-sized everything before or since, the overwhelming impression below the scale of silhouette is merely - all you get, when you finally think about it - a bunch of conflicting systems of grids and stripes. It's not a complementary effect.

The bolded stood out to me. Are you familiar with downtown? There are miles of tunnels that go beneath downtown, FULL of people, businesses/eateries. Hardly any cities have tunnels like this. If these people were all above ground, believe me the streets would be FILLED. You should go check it out sometime. It blew my mind when I first went down there... Partially because I never even knew it existed!

Maceo nailed it on the head.... except for the strip club part.... Houston has got to be the nations strip club capitol lol.

Add all of Atlanta's area counties togeather and they are about to surpass Houston's there counties are much smaller than Harris and Ft Bend.

Anyways, by the next census Harris County will go down to the 4th largest county and Maricopa County, AZ will go up to #3.

Ok, I know i'm really late on this, but i'm at work right now and just came along this thread while browsing google.... City kid: you are probably right that all of Atlantas metro counties will equal more people than Harris and Ft. Bend county, but there is only one problem with that... Houston metro has more counties than just Harris and Ft. Bend. If you compare metro to metro population, Houston will outnumber Atlanta by about 800,000 people. With the Houston metro being one of the fastest growing areas in the country, Atlanta will not catch up to this anytime soon. Atlanta is booming and doing very well, but so is Houston. Both cities are great and are growing rapidly, but until Houston has a horrible economic recession, Atlanta won't come close.