Other cities boundaries end where Loop 610 is located, thus allowing them to be judged based solely on their pre-war contents, which are, as you know, very hip things these days. To put it in geographical perspective, pretend to start talking about how great Williamsburg is, and mention that it’s on Long Island, and you start to see how large boundaries tend to obfuscate the good and bad that is present in any metropolitan area. To play reverse psychology, we would have to start saying “Webster, We Have A Problem.” Compton would be judged as a neighborhood of LA and not as an independent bedroom community. So why do we judge Houston on that which is really not “Houston” but Cinco Ranch, Kashmere Heights, Greenspoint, South Park, and Klein? We look at the Houston area’s smog, its menacing freeways leading to freeway spurs and limited-access parkways, we look at its religious nutbags, we look at its poverty-stricken industrial neighborhoods, and we insist we can’t see the Menil Collection, the joggers in Memorial Park, the universities, the theatres, the housing, the bayous, and we do ourselves a disservice.

If one is to look at the sense of ‘place’ and ignore the political sharpie maneuvers that make up American suburbanization, Houston stands on its own. It’s not the BEST city in the US, and most of what everyone accepts as truth is in fact truth. But what’s also true is that Houston has neat stuff, too, not “neat for Texas” but unique.

To be fair, Houston is a live and let live city. If you can handle the flat terrain, checkerboard development, and if you can handle a city that repeats its own basic recipe over and over in 8 directions, then you can enjoy the fruits thereof — affordability, flexibility, mobility. It’s laughable to say that Houston resists urbanization, true urbanization, when Houston’s generally eager to please and let itself be the largest test grounds for suburbia. Big lots, small lots, McMansions, tax abatements, great rooms and phase III’s, they form a type of classification all their own — suburbia’s sub-suburbs.

But Houston loves skyscrapers, and puts them wherever it can fit them. If you want a 40-story tower, Houston assumes you must need one if you’re asking to build one. If you want a rowhouse downtown, or a high-rise with a view of another downtown, Houston has a place for you. It’s not picky, and it has one of everything just in case.

It is a place of Southern gentility, of art deco chutzpah, of black families between railroad tracks and power lines, of black families in colonials, of Republican businesswomen who dine with their gay “best friends” at a restaurant that allows you to park in front.

I like Houston, and I don’t know why more people don’t. You won’t find a catchy disco theme song with TV’s Patrick Duffy in the credits, and you might be hard pressed to catch Renee Zellweger proudly professing her nostalgia for Katy.

But I’ll profess my nostalgia for the Katy Freeway, the now 26-lane-wide freeway that makes straight lines and cruise control seem like a conveyor belt to a suburban death squad, priced from the 180’s. This is Houston’s Champs-Elysees to many who reach Houston from a western approach. It is ugly, but it is also AMAZING. You drive it wondering what was below the main lanes before they were added; was it a frontage road, a pine tree, a warehouse, or was it just an empty lot like all the other empty lots in Houston? It is a driving tour of what America sometimes feels like to the old-world provincial — bewildering, seemingly unncessary, brash, brutal and overly functional, but serving a perverse function at that, evacuating middle class money as far away from downtown as possible.

But then you look at the other side of Katy Freeway and you see people in smaller cars, people with Obama stickers, people with parking garage tags to places between traditional downtown and traditional exurbia, places with phase numbers and building numbers and small, discreet corporate logos on the top right margin. It works both ways in Houston, including rush hour, commuting, new money and old money. People get to go where they want to go in Houston — they can live downtown and work downtown, or live downtown and work in the Woodlands, or they can live in the Woodlands and work in Conroe. If you want a 15 minute commute, you can have one. If you want a huge huge huge house, you can have one (but you might not have a 15 minute commute.) You may escape blacks and Latinos, once living in Sharpstown, but then the blacks and Latinos move up too, and then someone else takes over. Houston reinvents parts of itself in a modest way that is never showy.

Houston is nothing if not daring for carrying a speculative and deregulated environment to its most literal conclusion. I like Houston despite its blatantly ugly appendages, and despite its curried favor by Republicans with duallys and minivan-driving Vietnamese women who hiss at you under their breath.

I feel like I fell in love with the only one who’d accept the ring when I say that I like Houston and might consider moving there. I do know that I could take my pick of high-rise, low-rise, garden apartment, or loft and work in the energy industry, in the shipping industry, in the tech industry, in the puppy boutique industry, in the French business magazine industry, in the widget industry, or in the heroin trafficking industry. I can take my pick in Houston.