The sprawling mess of Houston has ostensibly contributed to its very low housing costs. A lot of the other problems in the area begin to melt away when everything is ridiculously affordable.
The golden path is to live in the Houston area while working remotely. This helps you to avoid the worst aspect of the region while maximizing the best aspects.
A million dollars buys you an incredible length of runway in the Houston market. You could buy a very high end home in the woodlands in cash, put a Porsche in the garage, and still have enough to go for a decade before you had to find a source of income again.
What you are proposing is far out of reach for most Americans.
“Put together a million dollars” and “work remotely”? The biggest employer in Houston by a huge margin is the oil and gas industry - most of those jobs are not going to be remote and a lot of those jobs are not a pathway to $1 million. What about people who work in hospitality, roughly 10% of the workforce?
You’re describing this as relatively simple/achievable but for a lot of people it simply isn’t. Houston has one of the highest poverty rates in the country with 1 in 5 living below the poverty line - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/houston/202...
> The biggest employer in Houston
It seems that we have different definitions of "remote".
I am talking about what jobs people in Houston actually have as well as the socio-economic realities of the city. “Just get a remote job and make $1 million“ is not serious advice.