I grew up there and live a couple of hours away. When I visit family, they're in the suburbs and I don't much enjoy the experience. However, I spend a good bit of my time "inside the Loop" where there is a vibrant and positive experience in progress (and has been for many decades). The area has world-class arts, food, entertainment, and (surprise!) geography. It's an incredibly international city with people from all over the world found throughout the city.
Yes, it's big and getting from one side of town to another sucks. But if you're inclined to explore what makes it interesting, there's plenty there to keep your attention.
Honestly I'm slowly becoming one of those "Inside the Loop" people who treats anything outside of it as being in another city entirely.
"You're grabbing dinner in the Heights? I'll see you there."
"Lunch with you at City Center? I wish you told me last week. It takes like two days to get out there!"
Even though, depending on traffic patterns, those trips might be the same length.
I know, I know, having been cured of cancer probably influences my opinion just a bit, but I think Houston's a pretty damned cool town :-)
I think every place has it's own charms, you just have to look for it - in some places you have to look harder than others, sure. I hated NYC the first year I lived there, and later came to really like it. But, I'm the kind of person who'd enjoy living in the Mojave just as much as I'd enjoy living in Manhattan - it's all good, and every day I'm breathing is a great day to appreciate wherever the hell I happen to be.
That said I'm not sure all of Houston is so tough and gritty, especially around the Med Center. If you drive North 2 minutes from the there the 300 acre Hermann park and the Museum District are both gorgeous.
I'll always prefer a city with good mass transit and sidewalks over one with mega-highways.
Points for Dallas: DART is awesome. Houston is expanding and would do well to expand it to be able too reach its airports the way DART in Dallas does.
Points for Houston: The Bikeshare program is freaking huge and they're completely reworking the bus routes to realistic for the first time in ages. Dallas recently opened a Bikeshare.
But as with all things, your life is mostly local. Live in the right neighborhood in either, and you won't have to drive except for a few times a week. Live in the wrong neighborhoods in either, and get used to planning your evenings around traffic reports.
Part of the trouble with trying to arrange your life in that way in Houston (I've never lived in Dallas, so can't compare) is that most of the jobs aren't in places amenable to it. It's just about doable if you work downtown or in the medical center, but that's a minority of Houston-area jobs. At least when I lived there, it was also not where most of the engineering jobs were. The big concentration of oil & gas jobs, for example, are in the Westlake corridor. Another big cluster of engineering jobs are scattered in about a 5-mile radius of the Johnson Space Center, which is itself 25 miles from downtown. And huge numbers of jobs are in just random places off any given freeway: the 45, 10, etc. feeders are lined with office buildings going out every direction.
It's a soulless place, and I was glad to be rid of it as fast as I was able.
Most of the driving that people complain about are people that don't even have Houston addresses, it's a rare day I drive more than 5 miles, and none of the houses in my neighborhood are the same.
It is indeed the model of the future. This fact makes me as an American very sad sometimes.
Europeans are just so charming, aren't they?
First of all, the city itself is huge and sprawling. Her parents lived in a nice suburb where all houses looked the same. You had to drive 10 minutes within the suburb on twisted roads with a 5mph speed limit to get out of it, at which point you'd be on the highway and had to drive at least another 5-10 minutes to get anywhere. Forget walking anywhere - without a car, you wouldn't go anywhere. The highways were quite shocking as well - I've never seen so many lanes on a single road, nor so many stretches of road going over and under each other. Perhaps my memory serves me poorly, but I remember exits with three or four layers of highways going all over one another.
I spent some time downtown, which was a bit better - they had a nice museum, some trees, and even a tramway to get around. Sadly, the downtown area was minuscule, and had no personality. Things emptied out early in the evenings - it was mostly businesses or day entertainment.
Overall, I hold a very poor memory of Houston and one could never pay me enough to live there. I hope for the US's sake that this is not the model of urban development they herald as the future, like the article implies.