First of all, the city itself is huge and sprawling. Her parents lived in a nice suburb where all houses looked the same. You had to drive 10 minutes within the suburb on twisted roads with a 5mph speed limit to get out of it, at which point you'd be on the highway and had to drive at least another 5-10 minutes to get anywhere. Forget walking anywhere - without a car, you wouldn't go anywhere. The highways were quite shocking as well - I've never seen so many lanes on a single road, nor so many stretches of road going over and under each other. Perhaps my memory serves me poorly, but I remember exits with three or four layers of highways going all over one another.
I spent some time downtown, which was a bit better - they had a nice museum, some trees, and even a tramway to get around. Sadly, the downtown area was minuscule, and had no personality. Things emptied out early in the evenings - it was mostly businesses or day entertainment.
Overall, I hold a very poor memory of Houston and one could never pay me enough to live there. I hope for the US's sake that this is not the model of urban development they herald as the future, like the article implies.