You used to be able to live an amazing artsy life in Houston for cheap. Is that all gone now?

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I've moved away from Houston and I'm wondering if this is still possible.

Basically: it used to be that, pre-2010, you could have a gigantic social circle, make friends date etc., with the art crowd for as little as $50 a week - which would include going out multiple times. The further back you go in fact, the easier it gets. In the 90's you could get a great spot in the Montrose for a thousand bucks or less.

It's not even the monetary amounts so much as the lifestyle. You could have a relatively low paying or working class job - with a nonprofit, at a coffeeshop. And the places you could go: there were so many. I think they have mostly disappeared now - and the scene as a whole, due to cost, must be gone.

There would be very cheap but very high quality shows all around. Walter's on Washington. Fitzgerald's. Kay's. Mango's. Helios. Any number of places on Washington in fact. A couple of arts collectives, some in downtown. Mostly music, but some art events and literary readings mixed in, or dance (Barnevelder). And some of it was at places that still exist, like Rudz, Poison Girl, Agora. But now there are like 1-2 places, instead of dozens. Even a lot of bars that took spillover or fewer people from that group are gone, like Beaver's and the Tavern.

And the people. There was a huge community of art-adjacent people. Some grad students. Some nonprofit workers. Office workers trying to brighten up their lives. People doing weird art things. Many went to expensive schools, many had part time jobs and a lot of free time. So there were always parties in some corner of the city, and you could go into any one of the places I mentioned above and encounter someone you knew from somewhere else, any night of the week.

The aesthetic was a lot like what you might see at Under the Volcano. But it took very little money: both to dress up for it, and to participate in it. Lots of musicians too, everywhere.

To me it seems like it's gone now because it got too expensive. You can't work a low pressure job and live in Houston on that level; and it also seems like the bars are a lot more segmented by class & income level. Also, COVID. As far as I can tell that scene is long gone; a young person today couldn't live like that, meet so many other people in the scene, or last a week on a budget that today would cover one outing.

I'm curious if other people agree or if I just don't know the places where people do that today.