which would be a damn shame. look at wimberly, too... decent amount of shops and restaurants, beautiful scenery, close to austin and san marcos. in fact, wimberly is awesome... we used to drive out that way on nice days when i was going to school in san marcos... nothin like cruising through devils backbone on rr12 heading towards wimberly, windows down, jamming some REK or allman brothers, smoking a j with a couple of friends man those were the days!
I don't blame you for not wanting to live in Houston -> I haven't lived there since I left to go off to UT like 11 years ago. But I did spent the next 10 years in Austin and there are some great neighborhoods there, so there's no need to move out to the boonies. I think DaDa lives in Circle C, which is only like a 20-30 min drive to downtown. Aside from that, you can look into places like Round Rock if you're into the suburban life.
Alot of people live in Leander and Cedar Park. They have a train now going to Austin. http://allsystemsgo.capmetro.org/capital-metrorail.shtml
Just like my pastor has said many times, you can't live on a island. Houston has a lot of great neighborhoods and some bad ones also. Austin is the same as is all cities over 80k. Its all about making your community better. I grew up in LaMarque and when when I graduated, it was a really nice place with a highly regarded school, but that was 1990. Now its ghetto as hell and I live in league city now that have great schools and sub divisions. I still go back to see my folks and I go do motivational speaking and talk to students a lot. Eventually I'm going to start putting more effort to bring it back up. If you feel good about being in the country, go ahead, but the close proximity of austin might lead one to believe that eventually growth will spread there.
Lakeway is extremely suburban-y. No small town feel at all. It's a beautiful area, though. I think the main problem out there is there is no direct access to Austin. You have to go around the lake one way or the other.
Don't retreat from it. Work to change it. And if you can't find a nice neighborhood to live in within the general Houston area, you're not looking hard enough.
