  When I first moved to Houston in 1997, I lived in Montrose and worked at the MFA. In the time since, I've seen Montrose and the MFA alike change significantly. The inspiration for this change was undoubtedly the money that pumped into the city by the barrel, oil barrel, that is. When the oil bust hit Houston in the 80s, a cleansing must have taken place, pushing all the oil money further out to the safe retreat of the burbs and leaving the inner loop to perish. Only it didn't perish. An artistic flare, the type that is financially prohibitive, thrived in Montrose and the wards became communities of celebrated minority heritage. By the late nineties, I found a Houston in the inner-loop that seemed a different world from the Texas around it. In fact, around that time, NYT did an article about the diamond in the rough that was Houston's cultural scene in Montrose. Nuestra Palabra was birthed out of the Fifth Ward, and the Westheimer festival and Gay Pride parades celebrated what had become the single largest gay and lesbian community in the Southwest.
The inner-loop was inhabited almost entirely by ethnic minorities or creative artsy types that weren't even from Texas, not at all the image of gallon hat-wearing oil tycoons the outside might hold. But when I found Houston in the late nineties, so did Enron. Chevron, Exxon, and Texaco also rediscovered themselves here and the technology industry fueled by the internet laid the final nail in the coffin of the richly diverse inner-loop.
By 2001 when I left the MFA, the museum was no longer the replenishing pot for fantastically creative individuals, but rather the purely high class social club of its origins amid a $250 million Capitol Campaign drive, for which it sold its soul. Montrose is all but uninhabitable by a liberal arts major today simply because the price of a rental apartment is well over $1 a square foot, nearly $2 in some places. These people are being pushed out to the suburbs at an alarming rate. My neighborhood, the overly gentrified Sixth Ward, got its first Boycott France sticker just this summer.
Bastions of the old inner-loop still exist in tiny pockets. But they're dying off fast. Barnaby's (the original, not the Shepherd and Gray locations), the Hobbit Cafe, and Niko Niko's, Corazon, and the Guild top the list of survivors. Cultural outposts in an increasingly capitalized world. This was never more true than today when the NYT Sophisticated traveler series urlLink highlighted Houston . The list of restaurants and shops was largely made up of chains. Haunts of George and Barbara Bush were mentioned along super snooty places to buy $175 handbags.
Maybe in New York it is possible to spend that much on a purse and not be Republican, but not in the rest of the country. This leads me to believe the writer set out to find the conservative Houston, and if there is any word that epitomizes best the opposite of what the inner-loop used to be but no longer is, conservative would be the word.
Not just conservative in the political, I voted for Bush way, but conservative in the let's follow the trends rather than set them way. Let's go to safe places that won't attract too many people different than me way. With the exception of the Orange Show mention, this article kept its seat belt on and stayed to the well-lit streets. It's too bad, too, because there really is a fun Houston still out there to be found. 
