Come home, to the Woodlands, it's all here, you just don't know it.

This began as a comment to this entry over on bythebayou, but it veered off track so here it is.

The end point of the entry was:
It's up to the rest of us to think about whether devouring every inch of the land around the city for incredibly inefficient development that dooms us to traffic and bad air is a good thing.

Well, that’s not going to happen. That will require a step change in how people think, and changing people is the most difficult task around. Baby Boomers and many, many Gen-Xer’s raised by them are driven by the notion that more house, more space, more yard, and the perception of better schools and a lack of evil influences are all critical for placing oneself “above” the rest. It all yields better kids through whom one lives vicariously: My kid is more successful than your kid, My kid has been “sheltered” from “bad” things and “nurtured” in an environment of like-thinking people and positive influences. That makes me a great parent. People living vicariously through their children is nothing new, but the intensity and insanity of it has escalated dramatically in the last 15 years, just go to a Little League game.

So where do you go for all this, and still save money for the kids to go to college? Well, usually it’s going to have to be farther out from the city center. How do you make people feel better about living so far away? Give the communities that grand feel through names, gates, and the perception of superiority. This has been warped through time to the point where now people wonder why they would ever want to live “in town”.

I live in one of these planned communities, Kingwood, that I like to call Stepford. I moved here for all the “right” reasons, thinking I could handle it. I was wrong. I’m moving. I've been here 5 years, given it a chance, made the most of it, and it's time to get out. I drive 54 miles to work each way, which is 2:10 a day in the car. The money I spend on gas and tolls, combined with what I might value my time at, pretty much negate the cost savings of living here. Something nobody tells you, by the way, is that stuff like groceries and Starbucks are more expensive here. Must be the import duties at the border.

Anyway, Kingwood is one of the oldest its kind, originally an Exxon-developed community, and is tiered so you can move here young into a cheap house (sub $100K) and reap all the benefits, and then just move around within Kingwood as you become more affluent until you hit the $1Ms. Big fountains greet you, big signs tell you which village you are passing through, and there are miles and miles of wonderful (really) trails. It’s very pretty. It’s very scary. It’s got all the synthetic names and places, like Town Centre, which is just a jaunt away from Mills Branch Village, where I live on Appalachian Trail just off of Rock Springs. Ummm, there are NO rocks here, NO springs, and NO mills. Appalachian Trail? Huh? The nearest mountain is a day’s drive away.

Whatever you could possibly want or need is out here. Really. Chain restaurants, big chain stores, malls, Starbucks. Nothing with a shred of originality or creativity. Just like the TV-driven, mass consumer pop-culture that is devoid of anything of real intellectual or cultural value.

In other words, it’s perfect.

The perfect place to raise your child, teach them to be competitive and do all the right things to get into the right school and have, well, the right life, which is the one they have here. Sheltered, nurturing, protective. Let me tell you something: I know a kid that had a breakdown at 16 because of the stress of it all, and he’s “popular” and all that. I never, ever, see any punk/skater/metal kids – the bar for fitting in here is SO high that there is essentially no “fringe” element. And the theater/creative kids? Well, they don't fit in so they are shipped off to thehighschoolfortheperformingandvisualarts.

Sheltered from the bad nasties of the big city you say? Well, I guess so, since your kid is buying his coke from another white kid. It’s so homogeneous and sickly affluent here that I think many kids really, really, have no concept of what’s out in the rest of the country, let alone the world. More than enough drugs going around this place, more than enough. Lots of meth. These places produce kids so strung out to succeed that they drink a lot, party hard, and do a lot of drugs. And they’re sharp: They hide it all very well from their parents, who give them a Mustang or whatever to drive and plenty of spending money, so they can take care of themselves while their parents are commuting 2 hours a day… so they can live in a place that’s better for their kids.

There's a really pretty girl, maybe 16 or 17, who I saw sitting on a bench on the trails crying. Just crying. I sat down and asked her what troubles her so deeply, and she just replied "I need to leave here, it's crushing me, but I can't".

I hope she can. This too, shall pass.