Hi. Anyone familiar with Sugar Land, Texas? Good place to live?
Houston's a pretty diverse city, but expect that you'll need to drive anywhere you want to go. Traffic still exists during rush hour, so you'll still want to keep commute in mind relative to where you're going to be working.
Assuming you're choosing Sugar Land for its schools and population, you'll want to mostly look around Clements High, as it's the best in FBISD. The two middle schools (First Colony, Fort Settlement) that go to Clements are both about the same, and any of the elementary schools are okay (Colony Bend, Colony Meadows, Commonwealth). The area itself is ~40% Asian, and pretty evenly split between east and south Asians. It's basically your usual quiet upper-middle class suburb filled with chain restaurants and dead by 9 PM.
Coming from SoCal, all housing will seem cheap and spacious, but keep in mind that the grass there
grows, and so lawns do actually need maintenance. Most hire Mexicans to do it once or twice a week, as needed; I think my parents were paying ~$1000 annually for it. It's a master-planned community, so HOA can be pretty severe. Texas has no state income tax, but counties have much higher property taxes instead (3-5%), and unlike California, where the taxes are based on your original purchase price, property taxes in Texas increase as it's adjusted annually to match the estimated market value of the home.
Most of the community was built in the 1980s, but there are a couple of newer developments added later: Avalon (late 1990s), and Telfair (late 2000s). You can get a house there for about $200-300k, something pretty nice for $300-400k, and some outstanding homes for $500-600k. Anything above $600k in Texas will get you a ridiculous house.
Katy is another big suburb to the west of Houston that's been blowing up as well, and it seems to be where more younger families are moving to now, but -- in my opinion -- it's more remote than Sugar Land and still in development, so the crowding is only going to get worse.
Feel free to PM or email if you want to talk about it in more detail.
Edit: added Commonwealth, knew I forgot one of them
