Another Houston Beatdown

[Sunstar]

Pulled this link off of Houston Strategies. Yet another California newspaper can't get over how much we suck and how we're all about Enron. Letter writers, warm up you pens please.

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,...049597,00.html#

[RedScare]

What both of these writers fail to realize is that a truly great city has BOTH, the economic wherewithal to survive and thrive, AND the culture that makes life worth living. What would bring New Orleans back to its former glory would be to salvage its history, while creating a modern, vibrant economic infrastructure.

Conversely, what would elevate Houston into the pantheon of great cities is to develop it's culture and quality of life to complement its hard driving economic engine. In other words, if some of New Orleans' zest for life rub off on us, we would be much the better for it. In time, I believe Houston will achieve that. It is still such a young city in the grand scheme of things, only having become a force in the last 60 years, as opposed to hundreds for many other great cities.

Both writers make a point, but both missed the point that it really takes both to thrive.

[MidtownCoog]

Any article that mentions both Enron and Haliburton is biased from the begining.

The "creative class" hype is really getting old.

You can't build a city of "creative class" alone. Somebody has to do the REAL work.

[Guest danax]

Houston gets dumped on by Bushaters who associate this city somehow with the Bushes and Enron, which could've as easily been headquarted in Orange Co. or SF. Also, we are associated in California with Reliant, who Californians in particular blame for their ridiculous gas prices a couple of winters ago (Reliant was shown to have been gouging them).

We're just an easy target for these types of semi-fiction writers to make exagerated examples of some very superficial qualities. I doubt if any of these writer/entertainers have lived here. If this guy actually had, he would know that the overall quality of life in CA is declining whereas ours is improving and to me is superior to their's already. Pasadena is up against the mountains and which acts as a smog-sponge so the guy might've been suffering from a bit of carbon-monoxide poisoning when he wrote that.

[Sunstar]

I do like this closing paragraph from Noemie Emery in the daily standard (again, found it on Houston Strategies):

It is now no surprise that Houston is the place where in days they built a new city in and around the Astrodome, that has taken in 25,000 refugees from New Orleans, and is planning to feed, house, employ, and relocate most of them. Houston is the place where the heads of all the religious groups in the city--Baptists and Catholics, Muslims and Jews--came together to raise $4.4 million to feed the evacuees for 30 days, and to supply 720 volunteers a day to prepare and serve meals. If New Orleans was where the Third World broke through, Houston was where the First World began beating it back, and asserting its primacy. Are we surprised that the star of this show has been Texas, home of Karl Rove and both Bushes, widely despised by the glitterati as sub-literate, biased, oppressive, and retrograde? No