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Read the article titled What Makes Houston the Next Great American City by Tony Perrottet and write a summary that is approximately 1 ½-2 pages in length and double-spaced. Submit your summary to the Turnitin link by the deadline.
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Smithsonian.com
What Makes Houston the Next Great American
City?
As Houston undergoes an ethnic and cultural transformation, its
reputation grows as a place where people can dream big and succeed
In Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, Tolerance is seven figures—one for each continent—sculpted
of letters from world alphabets. (Christina Patoski)
By Tony Perrottet
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
July 2013
There’s nothing like being mugged to put a damper on a festive evening, which had begun at the lakeside palace
of Farouk Shami, the billionaire businessman and former candidate for governor of Texas. As fine wine flowed
and stuffed vine leaves and other Middle Eastern delicacies were served, some 150 guests spilled onto the
veranda or wandered the gleaming white corridors, admiring the giant aquariums and Shami’s own brilliantly
colored paintings and glass sculptures. Dapper as ever in a suit and cowboy boots, the 70-year-old Shami,
founder of a successful line of hair care products, wove through the cosmopolitan crowd, introducing me to his
Houston friends, including Miss Texas and Miss Texas USA.
I left that wealthy enclave at around 9 p.m. and drove to the Heights, a gritty but recently gentrified
neighborhood, to visit an alternative art center. Lined with tidy 1920s bungalows, the streets seemed quiet and
charming. After parking my rental car in the (admittedly dimly lit and empty) block, I walked about ten yards
and paused to look at street numbers when I noticed two figures coming toward me. One calmly took the iPhone
out of my hand. “It’s only the 4S,” I joked, trying to defuse the situation. “The iPhone 5 is much better.”cha
That was when the taller guy pulled out a gun.
Even through the dreamlike fog of being robbed, I was aware of the irony. I was here to research a story about
“the new Houston” and document how the city is reinventing itself for the 21st century. In the last 24 hours, I’d
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attended a show at Fashion Week, where the catwalk was lined with artists, writers and designers. I’d visited
plush new art galleries. I’d met Houstonians of every origin, from Thai to Nigerian, Ecuadorean, Pakistani and
Indonesian. And I’d spent much of the same evening chatting with Shami, a one-man PR firm for Houston who
insists the Bayou City is the perfect place for immigrants to realize the American dream.
Then, here I was, transported back to the harsh, violent Houston of the 1970s and ’80s. As I held my arms away
from my sides, the shorter guy cleaned my pockets of car keys, loose coins, business cards. Tension rose when
he couldn’t pull the wallet out of my jeans pocket. The wedding ring was even harder to remove, but it’s
amazing what you can do at gunpoint. The moment was so cinematic I found myself wondering whether the
sleek firearm was real. Later, when I mentioned this to locals, they were amused. “Of course it was real! This is
Houston. Everyone’s got a gun!”
***
My interest in exploring America’s fourth-largest city was piqued last year by a study from the Kinder Institute
for Urban Research and the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University. Out of the ten largest U.S.
metropolitan areas, the researchers’ analysis of census data found that the most equitable distribution of the
nation’s four major racial and ethnic groups (Asians, Hispanic people, and white and black people who are not
Hispanic) was not in New York City or Los Angeles, but, surprisingly, Houston (see opposite).
The people behind the study have long been focused on Houston’s ethnic and cultural transformation, which is
more dramatic than that of any other U.S. city in the past century. Stephen L. Klineberg, a sociologist and co-
director of the Kinder Institute, has closely charted the demographic changes in Harris County, which covers
nearly all of the Houston area and then some, since 1982. “Houston was then an overwhelmingly Anglo city,” he
told me. But then the eight-decade-long Texas oil boom fizzled and the city lost 100,000 jobs, mostly among
Anglo oil workers, and was plunged into an economic depression that would completely change its population
patterns. “In 1980, Anglos made up 63 percent of the population,” Klineberg says. “Now they’re less than 33
percent.” Hispanics in Harris County today constitute 41 percent, he adds, African-Americans 18.4 percent, and
Asians and other races 7.8 percent. “The change is even more extreme if you look at the population under 30,”
Klineberg says, “where 78 percent are now non-Anglos.”
In the 1960s, New York and L.A. were already vast metropolises, but Houston was a humble outpost of around
one million. Since then, aided by the ubiquity of automobiles and air-conditioning, its population has leapt by an
average of 20 percent every decade, surging to over four million inhabitants in Harris County and six million
within the Greater Houston Metropolitan Area. Much of this growth would alter the area’s ethnic makeup as
well, because it took place after 1965, when the nation ended its long-running immigration policy favoring white
Western Europeans, and new arrivals were as likely to come from Korea or Congo as Italy and Ireland. In that
sense, Houston is the vanguard, Klineberg says: “Houston is 25 years ahead of the rest of the country. Soon all
of America will look like this city. There is no force in the world that can stop the United States becoming more
Latino, more African-American, more Middle Eastern and Asian. It’s inevitable!”
There are, however, some arguably ominous trends. Perhaps the most disturbing is that, according to the Pew
Research Center, Houston is the most income-segregated of the ten largest U.S. metropolitan areas, with the
greatest percentage of rich people living among the rich and the third-greatest percentage of poor people among
the poor. And the new waves of immigrants are split between highly skilled college graduates (especially
Asians), who effortlessly join the upper echelons of Houston, and poorly educated manual laborers (especially
Latinos), who trim the lawns and wash restaurant dishes. “The great danger for the future of America is not an
ethnic divide but class divide,” Klineberg warns. “And Houston is on the front line, where the gulf between rich
and poor is widest. We have the Texas Medical Center, the finest medical facility in the world, but we also have
the highest percentage of kids without health care. The inequality is so clear here.” All these forces add urgency
to how Houston tackles its problems. “This is where America’s future is going to be worked out.”
If nothing else, the Kinder Institute’s reports underscore how little the country really knows about Houston. Is it,
as most New Yorkers and Californians assume, a cultural wasteland? “The only time this city hits the news is
when we get a hurricane!” complains James Harithas, director of the Station Museum of Contemporary Art.
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“People have no idea.” Its image in the outside world is stuck in the 1970s, of a Darwinian frontier city where
business interests rule, taxation and regulation are minimal, public services are thin and the automobile is
worshiped. “This was boomtown America,” says Klineberg of the giddy oil years. “While the rest of the country
was in recession, we were seen as wealthy, arrogant rednecks, with bumper stickers that read, ‘Drive 70 and
freeze a Yankee.’” Today, he adds, “Houston has become integrated into the U.S. and global economies, but we
still like to think we’re an independent country. We contribute to the image!”
In movies, Houston has served as a metaphor for all that is wrong with urban American life. In the 1983 comedy
Local Hero, Burt Lancaster plays an oil CEO who sits in a glass tower plotting environmental devastation, and
Houston has been the scene for a disconcerting number of dystopian science fiction movies.
A first-time visitor can still be bewildered by Houston’s sprawl: The population density is less than half that of
Los Angeles. It’s the only major U.S. city with no formal zoning code—hence the chaotic and often disheveled
urban landscape. Skyscrapers sprout between high schools, strip joints, restaurants and parking lots, all tied into
the knots of endless concrete highways. And yet Houston has a thriving art scene, with a startling choice of
museums and galleries, and its 17-block theater district claims to have the largest concentration of seats outside
of Broadway. Last summer, Forbes declared Houston “the coolest city in America,” based on indices such as the
number of cultural venues, the amount of designated green space, and, of course, ethnic diversity. It didn’t hurt
that the Houston area has largely brushed off the recent recession, reporting 3.8 percent (non-farm) job growth in
2012, or that the city’s median age is only 32.1, compared with 37.2 for the United States as a whole in 2010.
“We need to reinvent ourselves and improve our image,” says Cressandra Thibodeaux, executive director of 14
Pews, a cinema and gallery in a renovated church, which was set to host the H-Town Multicultural Film Festival,
celebrating Houston’s diversity, in June. “You hear about how Pittsburgh and Detroit are going through a
renaissance, with new immigrant cultures and artists changing the city. But people don’t know about how
Houston is being transformed. It’s still got the old cowboy hat image, a hot, ugly city, where you just go to
work.”
To thwart this stereotype, the first place to visit is the Rothko Chapel. A Modernist masterpiece of religious art,
it lies in a verdant oasis of museums, gardens and outdoor sculptures created in the 1960s by two philanthropists
flush with oil money, John and Dominique de Menil. (The superb Menil Collection Museum, designed by Renzo
Piano, has been a pilgrimage site for international art lovers since it opened in 1987.) The nondenominational
chapel is the most serene corner of this leafy precinct: Mark Rothko created 14 rich black, maroon and plum-
colored paintings for the octagonal space (designed in part by Philip Johnson), which has meditation cushions
for visitors to contemplate the art in silence. On a bench are more than two dozen texts from world religions,
including the King James Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, and Hindu and Buddhist works.
The chapel is a clue that Houston is perhaps a more tolerant and open-minded place than it is given credit for.
Another clue is that Houston is the largest U.S. city to have an openly lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, a
Democrat, who has pressed President Obama to act on gay marriage, which is banned in Texas.
Clearly, a lot more is happening in Houston—nicknamed The Big Heart after the city and its people aided
Hurricane Katrina victims—than concrete freeways. So I sought out four people for anecdotal evidence of the
city’s unexpected new life.
***
Only two miles east of the manicured Museum District lies the Third Ward, for decades one of the city’s poorest
African-American neighborhoods—and the site of Houston’s most ambitious creative project, the brainchild of
artist Rick Lowe.
In 1993, Lowe and others began renovating a block of derelict shotgun shacks into gallery spaces, creating
Project Row Houses. He was inspired by the idea of “social sculpture,” pioneered by the artists Joseph Beuys
and John Biggers, who argued that any way we shape the world around us is a form of art, including urban
renovation. Today, seven formerly abandoned houses, some of which had been used for drugs and prostitution,
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are exhibition spaces for resident artists, who participate in community life. Another row of salvaged houses,
sporting neat lawns and gleaming white paint, is occupied by single mothers. Their success has brought life back
to the neighborhood, and has been a springboard for renovations across the Third Ward. Abandoned venues have
been given practical functions and turned into social hubs. An old speakeasy has been reborn as a laundromat.
The Eldorado Ballroom, where B.B. King, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington played, has been rescued from
dereliction and once again stages music events. “From the 1940s to the ’60s, the Third Ward was known as Little
Harlem,” says Project Row Houses’ public art curator, Ryan Dennis. “There was a tailor’s shop in this building
for musicians. The Temptations flew to Houston just to get their suits cut here.”
When I arrived to talk with Lowe, I found him playing dominoes with a trio of older artists at an outside table in
the sunshine. After he’d finished—the game is a community ritual, he explained, which he never interrupts—we
took a walk through the galleries, which contained sculptures made from antique doors, video installations of
men recounting their romantic lives and a studio where the performance artist Autumn Knight was rehearsing
for her show, Roach Dance. Lowe, who is tall and lean and was raised in rural Alabama, first came to the city on
a road trip in 1984, he said. “Houston is a good place for an artist to stretch dollars. The rents are low, there are
lots of wide open spaces, there’s cheap Mexican food.” Undaunted by the economic depression of the ’80s
(“When you’re poor, everywhere is depressed!”), he found the city’s independent creative spirit addictive. “I
thought I’d stay for a couple of years. It’s 28 now.”
The genesis of Project Row Houses dates back to 1992, Lowe recalls, when he was volunteering at a community
center in the Third Ward and saw city officials being given a bus tour of Houston’s dangerous places. “They
stopped right in front of this row of buildings and were told that this was the very worst spot in Houston.” The
next year, he decided to salvage the same blighted stretch. For Lowe, the city’s lack of regulation and zoning
encourages artists as well as businesses to carry out plans that might seem impossible elsewhere. “This is a
private initiative city,” he says. “If you have an idea and you want to do it, Houston is one of the best places in
America to be, because nobody is going to put anything in your way.” Project Row Houses soon became
involved in erecting new housing in nearby streets, funded by donations from the city, philanthropists and
corporations, including Ikea. (“Just because it’s low income doesn’t mean that it has to look bad,” says Dennis.)
So far, five blocks of the Third Ward have been renovated, with plans to help improve another 80 in the area,
and Lowe has been invited to advise on urban renewal projects from Philadelphia to Opa-locka, Florida, to
Seoul, South Korea. The art critic of the New York Times recently wrote that Project Row Houses “may be the
most impressive and visionary public art project in the country.”
The city’s makeshift, unfinished nature fosters a libertarian spirit and home-spun creativity. In the shadow of
Interstate 10 northwest of downtown, the Art Car Museum showcases the Houstonian folk tradition of turning its
ubiquitous motor vehicles into mobile sculptures—giant rabbits or cockroaches, cars covered in plastic fruit, or
bristling with silver spikes, adorned with lurid mannequins or crocodile skulls. “We get participants from all
walks of life,” says the director, Noah Edmundson, a goateed figure in a black leather coat who worked in the oil
fields before becoming an artist. “Doctors, actresses, bank clerks, gas station attendants…” He says the populist
tradition goes back to 1903, when an Oldsmobile dealership started the Notsuoh Parade (Houston spelled
backward), with cars decorated in papier-mâché. “They used to drive to the debutante ball and party for a week.”
On the other side of town, from 1956 to 1979, a postman named Jeff McKissack created a folk-art labyrinth
from mosaics, stucco and found objects like tractor seats, all devoted to his favorite fruit—the orange—and the
spirit of “healthy living.” (The space is still maintained as the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art.) And on
weekends, one can visit a bungalow covered with thousands of flattened beer cans, from which a retired railroad
upholsterer named John Milkovisch and his wife drank over 18 years, starting in 1968. “They say every man
should leave something to be remembered by,” Milkovisch noted of his work.
At the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, a group show was a multicultural spread of works from eight
Houston artists originally from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. “Over 100 languages are
spoken in Houston,” says director James Harithas, formerly of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. “It’s
the oil capital of the world, one of the wealthiest cities on the planet, so it follows that the art scene here over the
last decade has become rich in every way.” According to chief curator Alan Schnitger, artists began arriving in
the late 1990s for the cheap rents, but stayed for the sense of independence. “It used to be that Houston galleries
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just reflected what was going on elsewhere. But now they’ve found their own voice.” The Station is nothing if
not irreverent. “What’s happening in New York these days is more about fashion,” says Harithas. “It’s not
meaningful. We’re anti-corporation, anti-empire, anti-government. We’ll say whatever the hell we want to say.”
One recent exhibition, “Crude,” addressed the power of the oil industry, with oil pumped through giant glass
letters that spelled the words “justice,” “democracy,” and, in an apparent dig at President Obama, “Yes We Can.”
“A lot of our wars started right here in Houston,” Harithas says. “They’re all about oil! And funnily, a lot of oil
executives came to see the show. They seemed to like it.”
***
“Houston loves Chloe!” roared the emcee, as a parade of models hit the catwalk wearing the designer Chloe
Dao’s latest line. “Chloe loves Houston!”
It was the height of Houston Fashion Week, a title that not long ago might have sounded like an oxymoron,
provoking cruel jokes about rhinestone-encrusted denim. But the event is as elegant as anything in Paris or New
York. After the models, the star of the evening emerged to a standing ovation. Chloe Dao, a Vietnamese
immigrant, became “Houston’s sweetheart” when she won the reality-TV competition “Project Runway” in
2006. Her life story itself sounds like a miniseries. At age 5, Dao made a dramatic escape from Communist-run
Laos in 1976 with her parents and seven sisters. Now the poster girl for immigrant success, she is asked to give
inspirational speeches across Houston, such as at the America’s Table Thanksgiving Breakfast.
I met Dao at the somewhat surreal after-party in a pop-up nightclub downtown. The proprietor, Gigi Huang
(whose father had fled Shanghai as the Red Army moved in), had dressed her lithe performers in golden G-
strings, the more athletic of whom were pouring flutes of champagne while actually hanging upside-down from
chandeliers. “Even in Houston, I had a very Asian upbringing,” Dao told me over the pulsing bass. “But I also
had an all-American childhood. I was a cheerleader, I was on the tennis team, I was president of the Latin Club.”
The blend of cultures has served her well: The Ao Dai style of traditional Vietnamese fashion, she says, has
influenced her designs, which have “a very clean aesthetic, with straight lines and high mandarin necks.”
“But you really should meet my mother,” she adds. “She’s the real immigrant success story.”
So we all meet a couple of days later in Houston’s new “Chinatown”—which is no longer really a district but an
endless Asian mall extending along a highway west of downtown. (“You never have to speak English out there if
you don’t want to,” Dao said. “You can go to a Vietnamese doctor, a Vietnamese dentist, a Vietnamese
hairdresser…” Its counterpart in the Indian community is the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Hindu temple, an
enormous complex of gleaming limestone towers, pillars and domes in Stafford, a city in the Houston metro
area.) At the boisterous Kim Son Buffet restaurant, I greet Chloe’s mother, Hue Thuc Luong, a neatly coiffed
businesswoman. Chloe had never asked her mother for the full details of their escape from Laos, and over the
next hour, they prompt one another’s memories. Hue Thuc Luong explains that, soon after the Communist
takeover in 1975, she began planning the family’s escape to Thailand. The family began growing rice in fields
outside their village, near Pakse, and pretended to the revolutionary cadres that all eight daughters were needed
to work them. The father, Thu Thien Dao, who was experienced as a cobbler, sewed $200 into the soles of each
girl’s sandals. (“We used them as pillows at night to make sure nobody stole them!” Chloe recalls.) One dusk,
the whole family slipped from the rice fields into the jungle, for an all-night hike in the darkness.
“I thought I was going to die,” Chloe says. “We were all terrified, and our mouths were white from thirst.” In the
morning, they paid smugglers to canoe them across a river into Thailand, where they were promptly arrested.
They spent three days in a jail with prostitutes (“They were very nice to us!” Chloe recalls. “Eight little girls!”)
before being transferred to a refugee camp. Hue Thuc soon started up her own business there, selling vegetables
hut to hut. “I had to do something!” she says with a laugh. For two years, she carried 20 pails of water a day
from a nearby river. “I’m very strong,” she says, offering her flexed biceps. “Feel my arm muscles!”
When, in 1979, the United States accepted the family as part of a refugee resettlement program, they knew
almost nothing about Houston. Assuming all of America was wintry compared with Laos, Hue Thuc knitted
each of the girls a red woolen sweater; wearing the sweaters when they arrived in the Texas heat, they nearly
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collapsed. “I was more worried than excited,” the mother remembers. “I went to the supermarket to buy
American candy and grapes, and I sat in my room and ate them all!” At the time, the Vietnamese community
was tiny, with only one small grocery store. As she took on three jobs to feed her eight daughters—on weekends
dragooning the whole family to operate a snack bar at a market with Asian delicacies—she never imagined that
Chloe would one day study at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York or return to Houston to run a
popular boutique.
Mother and daughter maintain a close working relationship. “I always run my designs by my mom,” Chloe says.
“She has an excellent eye.”
***
In Houston, food is a barometer of change. True to its culinary roots, there is no shortage of traditional barbecue
venues in the city. But now chefs from all corners of the world are offering much more exotic fare.
“Have you ever eaten grasshoppers?” Hugo Ortega asks me, in the middle of a conversation about immigration.
“They’re a real delicacy.”
Ortega’s high-end Mexican restaurant, Hugo’s, with its soaring ceiling, exposed wooden beams and bustling
ambiance, is a surreal place to hear about his beginnings. His arrival in the city in 1984, at the age of 17, could
not have been less auspicious. It was his third attempt to enter the United States, crossing the Rio Grande in an
inflatable boat. The first two attempts had ended when he and four friends, led by a coyote who was promised
$500 a head if they made it to their destination, had been caught by U.S. border patrols, cuffed and sent back to
Mexico. On the third attempt, they managed to hide in a freight train to San Antonio, where they were smuggled
to Houston with 15 others crammed in a remodeled Chevrolet Impala, with Ortega in the trunk. (“It was pretty
scary, because I was smelling fumes,” he recalls.) By the time the friends were dropped off in downtown
Houston, Ortega’s cousin could barely recognize them. “We had been going 17 days since we left our village,
and we were so dirty and skinny,” Ortega says with a rueful smile. “I remember my cousin’s face, he didn’t
believe it was us!”
Ortega spent almost four years bouncing from place to place in Houston, staying with different relatives and
even sleeping on the streets for two weeks, until some friendly immigrants from El Salvador took pity on him
and gave him a place to stay. They also got him a job as a dishwasher at the Backstreet Café, run by Tracy
Vaught, the young Anglo restaurateur he would eventually marry. In the 1980s, interracial romance was still
contentious, and they kept it secret from Vaught’s parents. Finally, he met her family one Thanksgiving in the
starchy River Oaks Country Club—including the matriarch, Vaught’s grandmother, who was very warm and
welcoming. (“I was the only Mexican there. At least the only Mexican being served!”) Ortega gained his green
card during the amnesty of 1987, put himself through cooking school and today he and Vaught operate three
leading Houston restaurants and have a 16-year-old daughter.
“I’ve come full circle,” Ortega says. “When I first arrived in Houston, I missed my grandmother’s cooking so
bad! She would make tamales, mole, tortillas. And now here I am cooking the same food I had as a child.” He
hands me morsels of octopus charred in lemon and chile, and escamoles, which are ant eggs, sautéed in butter
and eaten with tamales. “God put me in this position. He said: This is your reward.”
***
Farouk Shami, who was born in a village near Ramallah on the West Bank of the Jordan River , arrived in the
United States in 1965 at age 23 with, he recalls, $400 in his pocket. While working as a hairdresser in Houston
he began to realize that he was allergic to hair dye. Though his family objected to his involvement in the
industry, which they regarded as effeminate, he was spurred to create the first non-ammonia hair coloring
system, a breakthrough in “cosmetic chemistry” that would lead to his own beauty product line, Farouk Systems.
His privately held company, which he has said is worth a billion dollars, manufactures some 1,000 hair and spa
products that are distributed in 106 countries. In 2009, he made national headlines by going against the
outsourcing flow, closing a factory in China and building a new facility in Houston, which created some 800
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jobs. The next year, he became the first (and so far, only) Arab-American to run for governor of Texas. Despite
being defeated in the Democratic primaries, Shami spiced up the political debate by saying he preferred to hire
Latino workers because Anglos felt above the menial work on factory floors and by criticizing the Israeli
occupation of the Palestinian territories, where three of his eight siblings were killed in 1955 when an Israeli
bomb they were playing with exploded.
Shami told me his story while we relaxed in an office in his sumptuous mansion, beneath a framed photograph
of his father. He is still full of energy—he was preparing to leave for Istanbul the next morning—and is one of
the most active members of Houston’s Arab community, the nation’s fifth largest. “Actually, I never felt
discrimination until I ran for governor in 2010,” he says. “I was a Texan, but in the media I was always referred
to as a foreigner—‘born in the West Bank.’ I’ve paid more tax than most Texans, helped the country more than
most Texans!” In speeches to Palestinian immigrant youth groups, he encourages integration. “My theme is: Be
an American! Unfortunately, the minds of many young Palestinians are still back home. When in Rome, do as
the Romans do. Go participate in American life! Go vote! They need to be mobilized.”
Shami’s political partisanship aside, the role of ethnic diversity in Houston politics intrigues scholars as well as
politicians. “Why Texas still keeps voting Republican is a mystery,” Klineberg says. “Every election, there are 3
percent fewer Anglos on the rolls. Immigrants, who traditionally support the Republicans far less, aren’t
registering as fast here as in other states.” But the tide is turning, he says, which he thinks will cause hard-line
opponents of immigration reform to moderate their views.
“Not everyone is happy about the transitions over the last few years,” Klineberg says. “For most of its history,
this was a biracial Southern city, a racist city, part of the Confederacy. But human beings adjust their opinions to
suit circumstances they can’t control. Our surveys show that more and more Anglo residents are accepting the
inevitable, and even saying that ethnic diversity is a source of strength for Houston.”
For Klineberg, the major social issue is education. He has seen Houston change from a city relying on natural
resources such as oil, cattle and lumber to one whose prosperity is based primarily on skilled white-collar jobs in
fields such as computer programming and medicine. But as long as a top-quality education remains a privilege
of the rich, social inequalities will grow. “The public school system has largely been abandoned by middle-class
white people,” he says. “The question is, will aging Anglos be willing to pay to educate poor Latinos? If not, it’s
hard to envision a prosperous future for Houston.”
Still, Klineberg is optimistic. “Houston is in a better position to cope with all these challenges than Los Angeles,
Miami or New York,” he says. “The DNA of Houston, ever since it was founded, has been pragmatic: What do
we have to do to make money? From the 1860s, we made Houston the railroad hub of the West. Then, to exploit
the oil fields, we built the second-biggest port in the U.S., even though it was 50 miles from the sea. The same
practical thinking needs to come into play today. How do we turn our diversity to advantage? We invest in
education. And we make Houston a more beautiful city, so talented people who can live anywhere will choose to
live here.” On that front, voters last November approved a $100 million bond that will be matched by the
Houston Parks Board and private donations to create 1,500 acres of green space along the city’s bayous over the
next seven years.
The other issues will be tougher. “Luckily, in Houston,” Klineberg adds, “ideology has always been less
important than prosperity.”
About Tony Perrottet
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Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times
and WSJ Magazine, and the author of five books including , .
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