[Ditter]

Houston is not living up to your model. Our inner city neighborhoods are being rebuilt with huge 10,000+ square foot homes and 3 story luxury townhomes. The richer you are the closer to the center of town you can afford to live and a lot of those people do vote liberal. There are formerly nice middle class (50’s and 60’s) suburban neighborhoods that are dangerous places now filled with crime.
Some people have moved very far out into the country but unless you are retired you have to face horrible traffic to get back into the city to work.

We live pretty close in, in a 50+ year old neighborhood that has held together quite well. By that I mean most of the homes are original and have been refurbished, only a couple have been torn down and new ones built on the lots.

[Clemenza]

Ditto New York City. The closer to Manhattan you are, the more expensive the real estate. Housing in Astoria (Queens) and Greenpoint (Brooklyn) is more expensive than exurbia or all but the most upscale of suburbs. The poor have basically been pushed to the outskirts of the Bronx or SE Brooklyn, far from the center of things. In this sense, NYC fits the model of Paris (wealthy folks in the center, with the poor in the outskirts.