Houston is a strange place but I mostly love it. I've lived in a suburb north of Houston (literally 30 miles north) for the last ten years or so and really love it up there, but it's really very different (and VERY far away, even at 80 mph) from the city itself. (fwiw, I'm a NY'er and moved here from CA, so I've got some experience in other big cities; Houston's the fourth largest city in the USA.)<p>The strangest thing to me, and a result of the zoning laws (which seem to be a slightly insane form of pure genius to me), is the multiple downtowns that are scattered around aside from the 'real' downtown. Pockets of skyscrapers and tall office buildings are every 30 miles or so. It's interesting and so I'm still finding (huge, significant) parts of the city that I've never seen before. It's so spread out that it make other big cities (like SF) feel distinctly small; going there once makes you feel like "oh, this is tiny compared to, say, NYC", which is, of course, mostly true, but then you find out that you're only looking at one of the 'downtown' sorts of areas.<p>Houston has a surprisingly large arts community. Low costs of living tend to help there. It also has lots of alternative lifestyles, but also (rather small) pockets of religious and conservativism. It also has an incredibly vibrant culture, with more theater seating than any other city in the country, except for NYC. (Yes, even more than Chicago or LA). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Theater_District" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Theater_District</a><p>It's also a great food town. Since it's more ethnically diverse than any other city in the United States, you can find almost any food you want. There's also a very nice part of town that's quite reminscent of Austin's downtown.<p>And I've spoken with other startups -- Houston tends to be attractive to startup engineers coming from the Bay area and in some ways feels alternately like SF or SV, depending on where you are. It tends to be more difficult to attract serious tech startup executives, however.<p>The only significant downsides, at least to me, for the HN crowd: the city is so spread out that it's hard to build a strong community. (I run The Woodlands Entrepreneur's meetup w/ over 300 members, but only about 30 or so are in tech startups of some sort; I also run the Houston AWS and Houston Cloud meetups and most of the AWS users are associated with big oil or big medtech, not tech startups.) Still, there's SO much here.<p>The other downside is the utter lack of VC, and what little is here is not competitive. This alone may be a reason to pick another city. (Austin has a few really great VC's.) .. on the other hand, if you're bootstrapping, you really can't go wrong with Houston. Your runway goes a really long way here.