Learning Houston, the Dummies Version

Brandenberg's "Houston" in black box

Among some of the most hilarious – some might call them "annoying" – freelance articles our research staff uncover are travel articles written by people who've never even visited the destination. Some freelancers specialize in this content, spreading the same second- or third-hand information across multiple websites (see an example). We don't know where today's DotD candidate lives, since it's not in her profile, but one of our staffers knows the city of Houston, Texas, quite well – and he's not all that convinced that Denise Brandenberg did a good job with "Ideas for a Scavenger Hunt in Houston."¹

As Brandenberg relates in her introduction,

"Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States."

Yep, right: with almost six million residents in the metropolitan area and an area of more than 600 square miles, Houston is quintessentially Texan: BIG. So why does Brandenberg like, unfortunately, much of the city's government and media, think that Houston comprises only the "original six wards"? Her list of suitable places for this planned scavenger hunt consists of  exactly four neighborhoods

Downtown Houston Heights  Museum District Montrose And that's it: four neighborhoods, none farther than four miles from City Hall – in a city whose overall footprint spans forty miles east-west and north-south! There's no mention of anything outside the inner loop (I-610); not suburban cities like Katy, Sugar Land or Galveston; not the other fifteen "official" neighborhoods like the Energy Corridor or Westchase, or inholding cities like West University and the Memorial Villages; not parks like Bush or even the all-holy Memorial Park that eats up most of the city's Parks and Recreation budget.

While Brandenberg's information is more or less correct (although some is long out of date), we think her narrow focus on just a few "hot" neighborhoods is evidence of either just passing familiarity with the Bayou City or no familiarity at all; just access to the inner loop-centric mentality that permeates the city's leaders. Either way, her failure to emphasize the city's vast spread across both geography and culture renders her view of Houston useless – and her post a classic Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/list_6383500_ideas-scavenger-hunt-houston.html

copyright © 2016-2022 scmrak

FTR - TEXAS