Houston dodging more bullets than Neo in the matrix. I'm glad but feel bad for our neighbors.
My lay take here is that the flow of the Gulf Stream tends to bend the storms to the east as they approach the coast, so you get these curveball tracks that, unfortunately, disproportionately seem to smack Louisiana and Mississippi.
Harvey came ashore further south, and so the eastward movement caught us (though that's a gross oversimplification of Harvey's actual mechanics).