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I’m an “inside the Loop” person, an identity that transcends geography. I’ve clung to the notion that my long years of living and working inside Loop 610 — my proximity to the city’s historical core and its major business, educational and cultural institutions — made me, you know, kind of special. For 35 years I worked within walking distance of Market Square and Allen’s Landing, where Houston was founded in 1836. I enjoyed after-work beers in a bar housed in a building where, rumor has it, Sam Houston once passed a night. I took a certain smug pride in telling friends who lived in the suburbs that I could get to work faster on my bike than they could in their SUVs. The neighborhoods I inhabited were cool, diverse, vibrant; my vision of suburban living, meanwhile, was captured in the lyrics of the 1963 Pete Seeger hit: “Little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky; little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same.”

Of course, greater Houston has few hillsides, and a day or so spent driving around The Woodlands, Sugar Land, Pasadena and Clear Lake would reveal significant variety in housing styles and sizes and in neighborhood design, including districts that approximate dense downtowns with high-rises and shops opening to wide sidewalks, and real people walking on them. Nor does the central city have a monopoly on racial or ethnic diversity. The New York Times has even caught on and profiled Phat Eatery, a Vietnamese diner in Katy Asia Town. Moreover, the suburbs must have something going for them, because people keep choosing to live there. I shed many of my misconceptions about Houston’s far-flung neighborhoods when I spent two years writing a twice-weekly column about them.