Moving to Houston...?

Well Welcome and i hope u will enjoy living in Houston here is a little get to know video about Houston http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7im9ndoTEJg

well on my opinion Spring ISD which is right next to Cy-Fair ISD is one of the fastest growing Distract is trying to be a leader in eduction in the country by providing state of the art technology one of the District's pride and joy is it Career Academy https://academy.springisd.org/construction.asp (just let the slideshow go on its own it's like 5 min) this school is known thought out the Business world here in Houston and from the country we actually give out tours to business people who would like to invest in to Wunsche in fact we have had the owner of Toyota come all the way from Japan just to see our Automotive garage where students learn all about the car business and get to do hands on work on cars

oh and i would recommend living in Spring,Tx just North of the city limits of Houston and South of The Woodlands, Tx

North East of Cy-fair

Cy-Fair schools are excellent schools. However, if you are going to be working "in the city", you could be in for quite a commute. Since Houston compasses 600 square miles, it's hard to recommend a neighborhood to you without knowing your work area. Here is website link to the Houston Realtors Association:

http://www.har.com/

This is an excellent resource to guide you through the process of finding your perfect castle! Good luck!

Bellaire or West-University they are great communities and have good schools.

First, you already have the har.com website...that's your best resource there.

The general rule for Houston Real Esate is you can have it

A)close to work

B) REALLY cheap

C) with great schools

Pick any TWO of the above

First though...Houston does NOT have zoning...(more on that later). Because of that we have several areas that are as big or bigger than most city's downtowns. When you say "the city" you could be working in anyone of them. (I'm going to assume you mean "inside the loop"....)

Which one you are going to be working in matters a great deal, as traffic can be pretty rough, and at $4.00 a gallon ($3.75 if you know where to look) driving gets expensive.http://www.houstongasprices.com/

(BTW "Houston" and "Mass Transit" are not words that can be used in the same sentence, unless you are going for a joke. There is a light rail line which is quite popular and works, but it runs only from downtown to medcenter. There is talk of expanding the system. There are park and ride busses from the Woodlands to Med Center...both these work well... I wouldn't use a bus for anything else.)

As for where you might be working...

We have "downtown", which is mostly lawyers and some of the corporate headquarters. The schools in that area are horrid, and the housing is mostly apartments for single yuppies. Downtown has the courts, the bigger lawfirms, and some of the big oil companies. You don't want to live downtown with kids.

We have Med Center to the south of Downtown...it is the hospitals and is next to Rice University and the West University neighborhood. That is one of the best neighborhoods in Houston, and the schools are great. It has Herman Park http://www.hermannpark.org/, the Zoo, http://www.houstonzoo.org/the museums, http://www.houstonmuseumdistrict.org/default.asp?i... BUT the price per square foot is the highest in the city. The Doctors are required to live within 20 min of the hospital if they are going to be on-call...so that drives up the prices.

That being said..."most expensive Houston neighborhood" means "about average price for San Francisco or one of those ugly cities up in Yankeeland." For example there is a 3brm, 2 bath condo, in Med Center near where we used to live (the wife could walk to work at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center ) 2,800 square feet $395,000. That's not typical... you can find a lot of houses there listed for a million or so. Even a "scrape off" (Old house, shot foundation, sold for lot value alone) runs over $250,000

Both of these areas are "inside the loop" (the 610 loop you see on maps). Except for the slummy parts, real estate "inside the loop" is going to be more expensive that real estate "outside the loop" .

Since we don't have zoning the slummy parts and the nice parts aren't strictly demarcated , but you get a patch of one here, and a patch of the other there. Avoid the area around Univestity of Houston Main Campus though, and Highway 288 is a pretty serious boundary line as well...Med Center REALLY stops at 288. One neighborhood to AVOID (and there are several) is SHARPSTOWN. It was developed back in the early 80s, and was the place where all the young families who were making money off the last oil boom lived and worked and played...then the oil BUST came and everyone went bankrupt and property values crashed and Sharpstown turned into a nasty nasty slum. Sharpstown high school has been rated academically unacceptable for several years in a row......the location is great, the real estate is cheap, but unless you like crime and bad schools, don't go there

Just outside the loop on the West side is the Galleria area, which is also a major buisness center. You might well be working there. Galleria is more about the smaller oil firms, corporate lawyers (as opposed to trial lawyers), corporate headquarters and retail. It is just to the west of River Oaks..River Oaks is where the people who's Grand-Daddy's founded EXXON live. The houses are texas sized, and very expensive. Schools in River Oaks are, of course, fantastic, but in the Galleria area they are spotty.

Lots of townhomes and high rise apartments are going up in the Galleria, and HISD (Houston Independent School District) is quietly making efforts to add a really good school to the area, because the real estate people are building and developing that area like crazy...but they could not get anyone with kids to move in given the abysmal quality of the schools. The new school HISD put up is called "The School at St. George Place" and is so new it doesnt' show up on a lot of the search engines, or even the HISD website.

http://www.greatschools.net/modperl/browse_school/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George_Place

http://www.city-data.com/school/st-george-s-place-...

There are a handful of nice townhomes that are zoned for that school that run around 300k. About a month ago the wife and I were seriously considering buying one. MAKE SURE YOU ARE ZONED FOR THE RIGHT SCHOOL THOUGH!!!!!!!!! This the map for their school zone. http://www.houstonarchitecture.info/haif/index.php...

Use these sites to check the Schools. http://dept.houstonisd.org/ab/abcx_tool/... to find what school each house is zoned too (it is for Houston Schools only, NOT suburbs)

and

http://www.chron.com/realestate/

to see how the school scores on the TAKS (Texas Achievement and Knowlege and Skills) test.

My son went to Roberts Elementary in the West University/Medical Center Area... He was there from K-5 and when he started I was quite suspicious at first...(I went to Catholic and Private schools till I started college). BOY WAS I WRONG!!! I have to say it was an AWESOME school!! Just FANTASTIC. One of the reasons we decided to stay in our rental house and not buy in the suburbs was Roberts...(the other was gasoline prices).

http://www.greatschools.net/modperl/brow...

http://es.houstonisd.org/RobertsES/

Second best choice for schools and inexpensive real estate would be THE WOODLANDS, and I say that is second only because it is less integrated and diverse than the inner loop and it is 35 miles north of Houston, so you have to drive to work. That being said, you can get 4 bdrm, 2 bath 2 car garage, 2220 sq feet for$ 230,000 up there.

The problem is, the Woodlands is 35 miles north of Med Center where the wife works and about the same distance north of Galleria where I work...we couldn't car pool, one of us would have to go in early and then come home to pick up the kids and the other would have to get the kids to school in the morning and go in late...so it would have been 35 miles EACH WAY for EACH OF US, EACH DAY...total commute of 140 miles a day.... or 700 miles a week...50 weeks a year and you are talking 35,000 miles....You do the math on that at $4.00 a gallon and it ads up PDQ. On the otherhand We were looking at a number of 4brm houses, approx 2300 sq ft for under 250,000 with AWESOME schools. http://www.conroeisd.net/ I recomend the Stirling Ridge ARea of the Woodlands if you can stomach the drive.

Third choice would be CLEAR LAKE.. (also Clear Creek and Webster) it is south of town on NASA ROAD 1. NASA Road 1 was carved out of the jungle when they built the Johnson Space Center (where the Astronauts train, they live there too.... live there a while and you will meet a few). Obviously there are a lot of educated people down there (I've seen bumperstickers that say "As a matter of fact, I AM a Rocket Scientist") and they demand that schools be great, so they are. It is near the beach and so it is not just suburban, but also has a bit of a funky beach community feel. I love it to death, but I put it third simply because of the gas cost to commute and the Hurricane threat. Clear Lake is where my wife was raised, but when Hurricane RITA was heading our way and they had a mass evacuation, she evacutated TO the Woodlands (where her brother lives). We figured it was better to live in the area people evacuate TO than where they evacuate FROM. That being said, direct strikes from a Hurricanes are not an every day, or even every decade occurance, so be sure to check it out. House prices would be about the same as The Woodlands, but insurance would cost more.

The far west of town is Katy... it is a bedroom community and the schools are good, the housing is cheap, and the commute times...well they are legendary. I-10 East is under construction to help do something about it, but it is still faster to come down from the Woodlands (they have the Hardy Toll Road). I have heard rumors that time spent driving in on I-10 from Katy counts directly off your time in Purgatory if you are a Catholic. :-)

As I said, Houston does not have zoning so it is really a collection of different neighborhoods that all get along together. Some neighborhoods are good, some are bad, some are VERY rich, some are quite poor. We have a Vietnamese town (Little Siagon, between Downtown and Med Center) a growing Asian (mostly Indian and Pakistani) neighborhood, and other areas... if a culture exists anywhere on this planet, (Montrose is our gay neighborhood, just north of West U but fairly upscale for the most part...though you do get the occasional transvestite prostitute on Friday night...or homeless teen drug addict.) In any case if there are people of a particular stripe anywhere on this earth, there is probably a part of Houston where such people gather.

One last note...Houston is built on what they call GUMBO soil. It's all a big mudflat. This means NO and I repeat NO slab foundation will survive more than a few years...The Foundation Repair buisness is huge down here. http://www.olshanfoundation.com/

So, when you buy a house you MUST, MUST, MUST ask ab