DaDakota, I've only lived in Austin for around 2 years now, but I can definitely second your opinion of it vs. Houston. I'm not here for school or anything, I'm here to live. And this is where I'd much rather live. Living in Houston for about 18 years showed me that I needed to go elsewhere. Other places since left me unimpressed. Austin has been it. But this isn't about me, DaDa, Jeff, or RMT. It's about Clutch. So, while I'm not too high on cool people bolting Austin for Houston, I guess we should stick to giving advice to Clutch for homes. In Houston, I would definitely suggest somewhere in the 59/Montrose area (where they have those ornate overpasses and no frontage) or any other of the more timeless areas of town. Clutch wants to be nearby, and some of the nicer areas are inside the loop. The advantage of those areas, like the Heights and so forth, is that they have endured the test of time. Such areas have done so without too much of an onset of crime. In essense, your home is guaranteed to not plummet in value. The hotspots in the suburbs often aren't. Cheesy construction, cookie-cutter plainness, one-tree yards...people eventually leave. My parents, for example, bought a house at Eldridge and West Belfort in a cookie-cutter neighborhood. All their kids were going to the local elementary and they didn't want to move them. So they stuck in this neighborhood. Times got hard for them and they were foreclosed on their $100,000 home, like so many others in that neighborhood. Then, instead of moving out of the neighborhood, they stuck in it and bought a $65,000 home. Better house than the previous one just 7 years earlier, but tens of thousands cheaper. But as a diclsaimor, that same house they bought for $65,000 is now surrounded by the encroaching Sugar Land-esque homes and has a value of over $130,000. So screw the 'burbs. Go with a timeless neighborhood. The only place to find that is nearby, and that's what you want anyway.
