Where, specifically, and by what measures, and pleasant for whom? E.g., would they be pleasant for raising non-White, non-evangelical Christian families with one or more trans children and one or more LGBTQ adults?
Personally, having lived in a rural setting in the peace corps for three years, where everyone around me thought, dressed, ate, and behaved in ways surprisingly different, transformed how I see others. It's the quality of a person's "soul" (define it as you will), that matters, not tribal allegiance.
I don't know about trans kids as I don't have any direct experience with that but I can't imagine it being an issue any more than any other city.
I'm often disheartened hearing tired tropes about Texas just being rednecks, klansmen, and bible thumpers. Yes, they do exist, as they do in California or Oregon or New York. But they are not anything like common. I can't even remember the last time I saw a confederate flag outside a historical reenactment context.
Well, its Texas, so the AG’s opinion on gender affirming care as child abuse and Governor’s order to the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate families for such care [0] have effect (while it has been challenged and enjoined in some specific cases, the Texas Supreme Court struck down the statewide injunction against investigations based on the rationale in the AG opinion and Governor’s orders, so only those families currently in litigation are protected from further CPS action while it proceeds without new litigation.
And then there are the enormous pile of anti-trans bills filed by the majority party in the Texas Legislature this session and currently pending. Not all of them will pass, but some of them seem pretty likely to.
> I’m often disheartened hearing tired tropes about Texas just being rednecks, klansmen, and bible thumpers. Yes, they do exist, as they do in California or Oregon or New York. But they are not anything like common.
And yet, your state government – legislative and executive branches, with the judiciary a little more mixed – is consistently, on multiple different issues, at the tip of the spear on right-wing culture war issues nationally for many years. Which suggests that those types of people you don’t want to be associated with are more common – or disproportionally politically influential – in your state. That is very much not the case in California or Oregon or New York, as much as you would like to pretend that there is no difference.
The particular suburb I live in, is dead average for the country in violent crime. Ironically, I could do a lot better in that regard if I was working private sector tech and commuting from the peripheries of the Bay Area, scary “coastal bubble” that it is, but “dead average” isn’t anywhere close to “the most violent”.