last week
Posted on 04/18/2002 10:10:10 AM PDT by CyberCowboy777
Texas Freepers! I am considering re-locating to Texas from Washington. I want a change in weather, people and politics.
I have lived all across the U.S. but never Texas. Can you give me some ideas as to where to live, Pro's and Cons of Texas?
I am really thinking Houston - I want to be near the Coast. (or at least 2 hours away).
I will want to own at least 5 acres. And my brother and Parents are thinking of moving there as well and will need land as well.
I have three boys and a Wife. I am a Computer Consultant by trade (my father is a programmer and we have our own company here).
I do not care about schools as I will be Home Schooling when my boys are older.
Any info will be greatly appreciated!
The Conroe area is good for getting some land, but if you have to commute into the city, expect about an hour and half each way.
I used to work 12 miles from my job in the Galleria and it was an hour commute. Now my job in on the north side, and it's 15 minutes. :-)
Katie, which is on the west side of town, is also very nice, but again, if you have to commute into town, you are looking at quite the hike.
It's hot and humid in the summer, but I have AC. Today is beautiful, sunshiney, light breeze, and about 75 degrees.
I grew up in Northern California, too, and it's not the same kind of heat. West Texas heat is similar, but there's nothing quite like 95 degree heat with 95% humidity that you find along the Gulf coast.
The liberals have been in control of the city of Austin for a long time. Too many inexperienced students and uneducated poor. The suburbs are mostly not liberal, with some exceptions. Traffic around the city does suck, but probably no worse than Houston or Dallas. Best case is to live and work outside Austin and drive in occasionally for restaurants and entertainment.
SSHHHHHHHH!!!!!! The Yankees are supposed to think it's 110 year round. We've spent generations cultivating that rumor and you let the cat out of the bag. Now there's NO stopping them.
;)
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last week
I lived in Copperas Cove for 4 years just before I retired from the Army out of Ft Hood. My oldest son graduated High School from there, we always had a hard time beating Round Rock in baseball. It was just the right distance from Austin. A beautiful drive this time of year if you take the backroads. If no one has seen Texas bluebonnets this time of year they are doing themselves a disservice by not seeing them.
Oooooops!
It's really a 100 degrees today, the sun is beating down and the car windows are exploding because someone forgot to leave a crack in them. (earnestly correcting myself) ;-)
Dallas is big-city urban, with all that implies. Cleaner than DC but just as crowded and the public transportation is terrible.
There is, I am told, still work there for software jocks like you and I, if you work desktop, web or mainframe. But I work embedded and, with the fall of the telecoms, work is tight.
Ft. Worth is more laid-back and country, "where the west begins" is how they advertise it. Less crowded, less urban, less "shiny", but more real. I'll take the Ft. Worth zoo over the Dallas zoo any day of the week (the late Jimmy Stewart was a long time supporter and fund raiser). Ft. Worth also has the water gardens downtown, some pretty nice parks, the arboretum...
But downtown is a mess because of all the road rebuilding thats going on. Plus, they had a terrible tornado a couple years ago and they're still recovering from that.
Work cratered there about '91 (which was why I left). Lockheed Martin is putting a bunch of people to work out at the bomber plant in the west side. They keep advertising for software people, particularly people with embedded background, but I haven't managed to land an interview.
And, of course, in between you have the Rangers, the Cowboys, Six Flags, and some other pretty good tourist attractions.
The last 3 years, I've been living in El Paso and working in Juarez. It's been mentioned on this thread that Austin is liberal...El Paso is the last great bastion of liberal democrats in the state of Texas, and probably in the whole sourthwest. And it shows...
Property is expensive (unless you find a place in a "colonia", with no roads, no water, no electricity, no sewer, not much of anything, in fact). Property taxes are sky high. El Paso county is one of only 4 counties in the state where you have to do emissions inspections on your vehicles (even though everybody knows that any smoke comes from Mexico and all the ozone comes from the cars sitting for 3 hours trying to cross the border into the US). They do have a couple decent schools but at least half the students are either Mexican kids whose parents bring them across the border each day or they're from New Mexico. Both are illegal and all the politicians talk about how bad it is and how much it costs the school district. But nobody does anything about it.
Don't even get me started on all the free medical care that the hospitals provide for non-residents.
As for jobs, El Paso has more people begging on street corners than any place else I've ever seen. And that includes DC, LA and Mexico City. The average household income is in the neighbothood of $17000/yr. (The average new home cost is in the neighborhood of $120,000. I asked a realtor about that. He said there was a lot of "hidden income" in the area. You figure it out.) The lack of personal state income taxes doesn't quite make up the difference.
If you are well paid, you probably either work for the government (FBI, Border Patrol, INS, Customs, Coast Guard (!!! Yes, I know a couple), Army, Justice Dept., etc.) or you work in one of the maquillas (maquilladora, literally "twin plant") in Mexico.
But they've been hit by the recession, too. I got laidoff in January, along with bunches of others. The odds of finding something else in the area are vanishingly small.
My wife hates El Paso and only went there because of my job. There are some neat things there: I can load up the truck, head for the desert and in 20 minutes my son and I can be target shooting; I've seen coyotes wandering along the road within half a mile of the house.
There is some awful pretty places in Texas. The piney woods in east Texas remind me of the north woods of Michigan (but not so cold or so much snow). The hill country is gorgous. The panhandle is windswept and dusty, the small towns are stereotypically cow towns. The llano estacado stretches west from Ft. Worth for ever (hey, it's 600 miles from Dallas to El Paso). And there is no place else in the world like west Texas.
But the truth is, I'm looking to move back to the midwest. I'm sitting in Michigan right now, where I took a short-term contract until I can find something "permanent". For a software engineer like myself, who specializes in embedded and real-time systems, you can't earn a living in the small towns and the big ones are just too much hassle.
You're 3hrs from Corpus and the beach.
We really only have 3.5 bad months of weather every year. June to the middle of September. October through May are wonderful. Summers brutal. Some summers we'll have 20 or more straight days of above 100 degree weather.
Anywhere north of Conroe you should be able to find acreage for $800 to 3000 per acre. Manufactured homes sell for $70K delivered for 2000 square feet and aren't a lot different from site built houses. In Fact you should be able to find home sites with homes. The drive would be 2+ hours into Houston and another hour to Galveston or Surfside.
Don't believe these Floridians, Texas Beaches are beautiful year round but they are not without their negatives on occasion. Someone like me sees a beautiful beach for months and as soon as a holiday shows up and lot of people are here it will show its ugly side. cb
Used to be a huge field of bluebonnets near the Dell campus in RR. Then corporate progress took over and the field is now covered with buildings and parking lots. :o(
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