* Economy comes and goes with natural resource boom bust cycle.

* America's most obese city

* A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation

There are other cities that match some of those qualities that I don't much care for, but I can see why a lot of people wouldn't mind and go for the cheap housing there as a decent trade off.

But in my original comment, my only point was that you can't judge how great a city is based on how cheap its real estate is (and the correlation often goes the opposite way).

I think you're imagining all Houston real estate as cheap/affordable, when in reality the city has lots of extremely expensive real estate. It just also has affordable housing due to widespread construction of townhomes, apartments, and condos. Something like Gary just isn't comparable.

I wonder what sinking into the Gulf of Mexico is going to do for property values.

I'm not sure how the criteria are different, the above is looking at big cities. The other list seems to have a bunch of small cities (e.g. Jackson MS). The difference could also be in study year. Neither list is very surprising to me.

> * A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation There are only a few cities in the U.S. that have good public transportation and while it's really nice it's also super expensive to live there.

Look there is no reason to live in Houston if you're rich. It's much nicer to live in a nicer city with great public transit and driving distance from some amazing natural features.

But if you're not rich and you want to be able to raise a family, own a house, and experience nice entertainment on 50k a year, Houston is a wonderful city.