A Chronicle story by Mike Snyder that ran on Thursday got really close to being insightful before veering off in a sadly predictable direction. The money excerpt begins with the lede:
For years, the thought of living in Houston was distinctly unappealing to native Texan Brit Davis.
“Houston, to me, was kind of the armpit of Texas,” said Davis, 36, an information-technology professional who spent part of his childhood in Dallas and has visited Houston often for business.
But when Davis returned to Houston recently in response to a job offer from an energy company, he found that his attitude had changed.
He appreciated the stately live oak trees, the diverse ethnic restaurants, the friendly people and other aspects of life in Houston that he’d previously failed to notice.
Davis and his girlfriend, Melissa Milios, 30, will move to Houston from Los Angeles later this summer.
As college graduates young enough to be open to new experiences in new places, they are part of a group that’s being aggressively courted by employers in Houston and other major cities.
“These people are more mobile. They take more risks. They have less to lose,” said Carol Coletta, the president of CEOs for Cities, a national coalition of urban leaders that commissioned a recent survey to gauge the attitudes and preferences of these coveted workers.
These people?
A guy who’s 36 and married is typically someone who is thinking about settling down, and maybe even starting a family. They are the sort of people for whom quality of life tends to be defined more by a good housing market, a solid job market, public safety, well-maintained roads, quality schools perhaps, and affordable utilities than really cool downtown bars and nifty sidewalk cafes and zippy light rail trains.
Lo and behold, the married 36 year-old in the story who used to think Houston was an armpit suddenly changed his tune when he got a job offer from the armpit (and compared home ownership in the armpit and in LA).
But that’s not really the lesson the author or editors of this story want readers to take away:
To encourage more young workers to give Houston a shot, the city’s leaders are working on several fronts to raise and improve Houston’s national profile, with an emphasis on qualities that appeal to young professionals.
This is particularly evident in green space initiatives such as a planned downtown urban park and the Sabine-to-Bagby Promenade that opened June 10 along Buffalo Bayou.
One rather doubts that large numbers of twentysomethings are going to change their minds about Houston based on the latest gimmicks from Mayor White and Jordy Tollet.
Quality jobs and housing, on the other hand, are likely to remain the mainstays of the city’s growth and health. But even though jobs are a big attraction (as this story illustrated before veering off into “world class” cheerleading territory), it’s going to be hard to attract sensible people to a city with a skyrocketing murder rate thanks to HPD’s manpower shortage (and questionable leadership at the very top of HPD), no matter how many gimmicks (like the new downtown urban park/hobo hangout, the new better-than-the-riverwalk bayou park, muni wifi, etc.) that Mayor White continues to throw out there, with the help of the Chronicle, in the hopes that Houston may one day be “world class.”
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