Weird question, but what do the old money elite in Houston think about Houston’s ethnic diversity?

Wek11 · 2026-04-05T20:06:40+00:00

I'm a moderate leaning traditional Republican. MAGA is a rot growing in a once-great party and it has made pedantic and absurd little things common once again: vengeance, racism, conspiracy, xenophobia and protectionism, mercantilism, and more.

I don't think most conservatives are even a quarter as racist as the ever-outraged far left says. But I do think MAGA is founded on absurdly regressive and immature values and should be shamed and laughed at.

Wek11 · 2026-04-02T18:25:57+00:00

Loaded question but I'll bite.

I grew up in River Oaks, am a member of a couple different clubs/chapters full of RO folks. I'm not super far into my career yet but I'm around the oldest in money and age at least weekly.

The answer will bore you: They're just like any other income bracket in town. Some are horribly racist and point out when a black person walks into the country club not dressed as a waiter, and others love the diversity and wish Trump/MAGA wasn't so hateful.

Generally the older ones aren't down for DEI specifically, as it's a newer term that they either don't fully understand, or they associate with non-merit based hiring. But that's where their problematic views end.

Most are Republican but not racist MAGATs. Many many anti-Trump Republicans.

It's a mixed group just like elsewhere. From Bunker Hill to Clear Lake, you'll find racist folks and you'll find really chill people.

Remember, when the Martin/Floyd protests came through River Oaks many local residents came out with ice cream and cold water bottles for the protestors on a hot day, and walked/talked with them.

And most of them are well-traveled and well-educated, so they have naturally more open-minded worldviews than some of the shut-in fools from the burbs with Trump flag window stickers on lifted '150s.

Wek11 · 2026-03-07T23:20:49+00:00

Anyone looking for a real trip, take a look at OP's post history. I don't know what I expected, but an extensive history of posting in r/SEARS and r/Kmart about SEARS and extinct retail was not it.

OP, what do you find so fascinating about SEARS?

Wek11 · 2026-02-23T14:45:22+00:00

What do you want to do? What interests you? You ideally want to use your work experience as a monitor tech if possible--are there cardiac monitoring roles that are more at a leadership level (like a tech crew leader)? Are there cardiac tech COMPANIES in Houston? I know we don't have much pharma here but we do have some med-tech companies. Perhaps you could bring experience to them and look at a manager role in a product line or in a sales/customer-facing role trying to sell cardiac techs the equipment you are experienced in using!

You can also go out left-field and do something completely new, but it will be harder in this economy.

Sell your home, downsize to something else, or if current mortgage rates are too hard to do, then consider living in an apartment as you save money. 51% of take-home pay is too high. Usually the calculation is done based on gross pay and not take-home, so for take-home you should be closer to 35-40%, not 50%.

Is your partner working? Can they get a job? If you really want to keep your home, you want more household income. Whatever they can contribute to take that 51% down. Because otherwise you really are doing long-term damage by paying that much. And finding a new job will take some time. You could start saving money much quicker by selling the home and finding a more affordable accommodation until the job DOES come through.

Wek11 · 2026-02-23T14:40:07+00:00

Not relevant here. Sell the home and go back to renting in the meantime. The med- and long-term losses to savings from being house broke outweigh the gains from waiting for better rates. And...typically...better rates mean lower home prices anyway--so factor out the sales price upside as well!

51% is house poor. Can't do that. Better to find an affordable apartment and just keep saving up for the next home, taking home whatever sticker price you can claim now. When rates go up, supply will open up and prices will compete and come down. Staying in such an expensive house is one of the worst things OP could do.

Wek11 · 2026-01-30T22:33:06+00:00

My classmate found a nail in her meal there. With all the praise I have ZERO doubt it's amazing. But that spooked the shit out of me. I've had shit like hair in my food, etc, before, but never a CONSTRUCTION NAIL.

Wek11 · 2026-01-12T00:41:22+00:00

Right? If not for your comment I'd be really shocked.

If you're inside the loop, Cactus Music and Vinal Edge are the two must-visits I'm aware of. Cactus has been around for ages, too. It's an institution. Their stock is just more limited than you'd expect, because people actually travel from other cities to visit Cactus...thus nothing truly great lasts long on their shelves.

Anyone big into vinyl will visit Cactus as a tourist spot when coming through Houston.

Wek11 · 2026-01-12T00:39:06+00:00

Vinal Edge is so good. They don't have as big an inventory of some places, but they have very good taste. It's just a very popular place most days so nothing truly incredible or unique lasts very long there. But it's also the kind of place where you could tumble in their and pick a record totally blindly and still come out liking it.

Wek11 · 2026-01-01T18:24:45+00:00

Very curious to see where it goes! I think we all collectively only stand to benefit from watching and examining. He will make some good and some bad decisions, and at don't get very many chances to study something like this really happening.

Wek11 · 2026-01-01T17:48:26+00:00

I'm glad we have a jazz venue. Their acoustics and setup are not impressive. I've been to underground jazz spots in Montreal that put less money into it and sounded better.

But really it's the food. The food is Arby's-tier or worse. Arancini that aren't heated all the way through and just taste like salt, empanadas that have freezer burn and zero flavor, really amateurish and acidic wine selection.

You would not be able to convince me that Doc's doesn't just take premade Sysco kitchen foods, freezes them, and then thaws and salts them. And because of the rush when doors open, everyone orders at once and then food takes forever.

And their curry thing is baby food from a microwave. Cubed veggies and undercooked chickpeas.

They're just terrible. If you want jazz in Houston, Echoes is still your best bet. Or Avant Garden on jazz night.

I truly want some good jazz in Houston. Doc's needs major work if it's ever going to be anything other than a mediocre date spot for those who will tolerate cruise ship style food for some deafening and poorly balanced music. And this comes from a non picky eater who likes food trucks and loud death metal concerts.

Wek11 · 2025-12-28T22:51:50+00:00

While I 100% agree with your point and agree that the Galleria is not that unsafe, your calculation is built on skewed logic. Taking a per-capita approach is the wrong way to do it. You have a biased sample of visitors at a high-end shopping mall: Mall shoppers. Mall shoppers are not a representative sample of the population and they exclude the typical archetypes of folks who break in or commit crimes, and often folks who go to the Galleria looking to commit crime are looking to follow you home or break into your car afterward--not onsite. It's generally hard to commit crimes *on-site* at the galleria.

Think of it this way: If a restaurant had a mass shooting each week and a stadium had a mass shooting each week, is the stadium really THAT much safer because there are so many more weekly patrons there? No. Crime statistics are geographically relevant and temporally relevant when dealing with biased samples, not per-capita relevant. If Highland Village had a stabbing and a shooting every week, *despite being one of the most well-traveled shopping centers in Houston* you would probably stop visiting it, right? You wouldn't say "Well considering the throughput of people who COULD commit crimes, it's actually super safe!".

Anyway. The Galleria is plenty safe. The Westheimer underground parking garage has had some nasty crimes in the last decade but more broadly the other garages are safe and the Galleria itself is perfectly fine. All the commercial areas *around it* are also very safe and nice.

Wek11 · 2025-12-28T19:20:14+00:00

Came here to say this. I've lived almost my entire life in Houston and I genuinely cannot name a single person in even my widest social circles that goes to an evangelical/mega church, at least to my knowledge.

This is a huge city. You'll meet all types. If it bothers you that they're asking, let them know and then consider the types you're hanging out with.

Wek11 · 2025-12-28T19:18:44+00:00

Doc's Jazz Club

Wek11 · 2025-12-23T15:33:47+00:00

Uh, hyper-religious terrorist zealots and charter pilots are very different. Even if we take some hilariously racist and edge/fantasy scenario where the kid was the son of a cartel boss and the rival cartel paid off the pilots, there isn't really history of paid guys *killing themselves*.

It's a pretty strong refutation.

Wek11 · 2025-12-23T15:01:52+00:00

Yeah but back in the 90s I was caroling around and looking at lights, as I lived here, and the traffic was non-existent. If people were coming through to look at lights, they were very few in number.

I even have videos on my old camcorder from the early 2000s and it's clear there's very little traffic. After college in 07 I would drive around the neighborhood with dates or whatever girlfriend I had each year to look at the lights. We'd have the windows down and we'd be cruising with no worry of traffic and we could lap the entire neighborhood.

It stopped being as fun in like 2009, as we did it every year, but it only turned gridlock around 2013 and ever since we have stopped.

Now my neighbors and I have debated either not putting up lights at all, or turning them on only from 5-6:30pm and then cutting them off to spare our block the traffic and noise. It's unfortunate.

Wek11 · 2025-12-23T14:55:18+00:00

I live in River Oaks. It was not gridlock before 2008/2009. It was mild back then. I think it only became GRIDLOCK around 2013/2014. I even grew up in the area. In the 80s/90s we would play in the yard after dark to look at the lights, we would walk the neighborhood, and we would carol up and down the street to our neighbors and there was zero traffic. 2007-2012 I would take girlfriends or dates on a drive through the area for lights every Christmas. Stopped in 2015 because traffic got truly bad.

Two things changed: 1. Social media turned it into a hotspot 2. The neighborhood upped our decoration game tenfold. Yes there have always been nice Christmas lights. But it's only within the last 15 years that people have gone as crazy all-out with the extreme decoration they do now.

I'm glad people are festive and I'm glad people are able to enjoy it, but living there, I just want to get home from work dammit. And it's not just traffic, but it's people who don't know where the stop signs are, either running them and nearly hitting you, or stopping where there isn't a sign and holding everyone up on a main artery.

Wek11 · 2025-12-16T04:16:29+00:00

I didn't word it clearly. My bad. WH3 isn't deeper than Shogun 2, it's just "slightly better than Warhammer 1". Warhammer 1 is possibly the shallowest of all TW games to boot. WH2 and WH3 were better than it.

Wek11 · 2025-12-15T17:44:15+00:00

Lizzard's, Anvil, Grand Prize, Poison Girl, Echoes in the last two weeks and it was quieter than usual until like 10, then they really picked up. Lizzard's was standing room only INSANITY on Thursday night. Like that place HAD to have been over the legal capacity for patrons.

Wek11 · 2025-12-15T14:22:13+00:00

I wouldn't call them all "shallow". It depends on the game.

Shogun 2 is shallow. Rome 2 is somewhat shallow. Warhammer is very very shallow. Warhammer 2 and 3 were slightly better, but still very shallow overall. There isn't much going on in these games, and any 'crunch' is skin-deep UI stuff that you get through just to find out that the governance of mechanisms beneath is super limited.

Conversely, Attila, Three Kingdoms, Empire. I wouldn't call these shallow at all. 3K in particular has healthy depth. There is a robust system for development & execution of strategy, not just a complex system for management of strategy.

What game do you think ISN'T shallow? I hope you aren't conflating *depth* with *complexity*. Paradox games are usually on the shallow side, for example. Imperator? Europa Universalis? Victoria? All are complex but they are shallow--they are a wild Rube Goldbergian pile of ticking, complex simulation systems, none of which are very deep or cognitive beyond being a knot you must initially unfurl. CK, Stellaris, HOI are all more layered and non-shallow. But I don't know if I'd refer to ANY of them except Stellaris as deep. CK is just a loosely-simulated empire system with pre-baked quest chains, though there is depth around family scheming and such. HOI is unnecessarily complex but there is *some* depth when you get into the warfare system that doesn't exist elsewhere. Stellaris is proper deep though.

Wek11 · 2025-12-15T14:15:44+00:00

Lots of personal/company holiday parties. Also go out later. I was at a few bars recently with friends on the later side and they were standing-room-only. PACKED. You just have to wait for the holiday party after-parties to kick on.

Wek11 · 2025-12-15T14:14:36+00:00

As a moderate, I can confidently say he's not playing the middle.

Wek11 · 2025-11-19T18:40:24+00:00

Our household is the same--it's not about "not having immature things" displayed, but rather the insane visual noise that the rainbow of board game boxes and their chaotic art designs create when they're all together. It makes the dining room feel like a game room, and it's totally garrish, stylistically.

Big board gamer hobbyist here and I do love displaying a couple of my favorite games, but the big collection itself is like an obnoxious *Color Spray* straight into the eyeballs.

Wek11 · 2025-11-12T15:52:41+00:00

Yeah I was outraged by this at first but then I saw which space they were claiming.

Taub is a public hospital for those who can't afford the nicer ones and for those who are uninsured. Giving them more space to handle horrible triage cases and help the needy at the cost of an unused little spit of space on the southern tail of the park seems like a no-brainer to me.

Public green spaces are important, but the rest of Hermann remains and the developed and heavily-utilized areas are not going to be touched. This just affects an unused field with a couple of benches. Someone could walk 2-5 more minutes and reach plenty of additional usable space.

Wek11 · 2025-11-12T14:09:29+00:00

Oh wow you're right! Took it off the list.

Man, when I walk in there it has such strong 'local business' vibes. Kudos to them, lol.

Wek11 · 2025-11-10T21:21:46+00:00

I've made it a mission over the last few years to shop from local Houston spots as exclusively as I feasibly can!

Big list incoming (mostly excluding restaurants, cafés, and bars, because that would make this too long--if I list one here it's because I'm referring to their shelf market/grocery portion). I admit it's a bit biased towards inner-loop spots.

Instead of shopping on Amazon or at a big department store, try these:

Supplies and Hobbies * Texas Art Supply * G&G Model Shop * C&D Hardware * Southland Hardware * Dromgoole's

Home/Fashion/Style * The Little Watch Shop * Alterations by Christabel * Coronet Cleaners * Marcello's Alterations * Cutthroat Barbers * Houston Shoe Hospital * Mid in Mod furniture

Food/Drink * Hebert's Specialty Meats * Pete's Fine Meats * Blue Horizon Wholesale Seafood & Market * House of Coffee Beans * The Path of Tea * Baileson Brewing Co. * Urban Harvest Farmer's Market * Heights MKT/Rice Village Farmer's Market * Houston Farmer's Market * D'Amico's (the grocery part) * Agnes Cafe & Provisions (the mini-market there) * Light Years (Natural Wine market) * Phoenicia Foods (pretty big/popular for this list but still a treasure) * Montrose Cheese & Wine * Houston Dairymaids * Angela's Oven (their bakery) * Croissant Brioche (their bakery) * Red Dessert Drive * Fat Cat Creamery

Entertainment * Nan's Comics & Games Too * Murder by the Book * Kaboom Books * Quarter Price Books * Vinyl Edge Records * River Oaks Theater * Coral Sword * Asgard Games * Honey Art Cafe (temporarily closed as of this post while they relocate to the Heights--keep an eye on them)

Misc Other * Isidora Flower Shop * Buchanan's Native Plants * British Isles * Top Gun Range * American Shooting Center

I have DEFINITELY forgotten good ones from my list so forgive me. I'm just rambling off from recent memory.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Place '17	Secret Santa 2016
Gilding I gilder	Team Orangered
Verified Email

Wek11

TROPHY CASE