Meet Jake Bunch
What brought Jake to Houston?
Like many other people that have come to Houston, I came for work. You know, this city has got so much going on and so much growth and I had never thought of Houston as a destination, as a place to live. I never thought of Texas as a place to live. You know coming from the Mid Atlantic, the East Coast, you get perceptions about Texas. I had flown through Houston, only to go through the airport on a connecting flight to somewhere else and never spent any time in Houston. I was working for another company, back East, and wanted to get away from that job because I was on the road constantly. I was leaving Sunday night or Monday morning and coming back on Friday. My son was just born, it was 2002, and I had to get off the road. So I started looking for jobs. When the companies called and I started interviewing with them, I would ask them “what's the travel like”. When CenterPoint Energy called and they said, “we are a Houston company serving Houston, all the work is here in Houston”, I was in. I said this, “it could be Anchorage Alaska”, you know, it didn't matter where it was. That's why I was attracted initially. I remember coming down here for the interview and getting in a cab coming from the airport to downtown. I called my wife and was like, “you wouldn't believe how many trees are here!” It's so great to really get to see a place. When you haven't been somewhere you build up these perceptions of what a place is and to me, Texas was cattle, oil derricks, and tumbleweeds. So, I just remember that. I'll never forget the trip down coming down 59 from IAH and just being struck by how green the place was. I mean the job interview went well and they obviously offered me the job-- that's what brought me to Houston was work.
Why do you think more people don’t recognize how great Houston is as a place to live and work?
As Dr. Kleinberg says, if Houston is going to continue to grow and be what everybody wants it to be, it has to build itself to be more of a destination. To this day in 2021, people don't think of Houston as “oh, that's the place I got to be” but when people get here- because of work or whatever- they realize this is a great place to live for a variety of reasons.
After spending most of your time in Houston’s suburbs, how do you find living near downtown?
Sometimes I feel like kicking myself that we didn't move into the city sooner than we did. When we first moved here, the company put us in temporary housing in Midtown. We were there for about three months while we were house hunting, and we fell in love with the city proper while we were living in Midtown in 2005. But Jackson, at that time, was two years old and we were looking at schools. We could not figure out schools inside the city. It was like this elementary school is good, but this middle school wasn’t, or the middle school was great, but the high school was not. And, we weren't financially in a position to pay for expensive private schools. So, our house hunt just became a matter of looking at school districts in the suburbs. We wound up in the Klein school district, and we were happy with it. We were happy with the schools there; they were good schools. Jackson did well in those schools.
Part of me is kind of glad that we had the space in the suburbs for him to grow up and ride his bike around and whatnot. Unfortunately, it was very homogenous - very male, pale and stale.
In terms of the outlook of things - and since I was working in the city and working with Leadership Houston in the city, I knew the city had a lot more to offer in terms of diversity of experience and people. April and I always knew that we would get into the city when Jackson went away to school. When he decided to audition for HSPVA and he got into the school, it was just time to move. We were always drawn to the city, but now that we are here, I just wish we had decided to come down sooner because there's just so much more to offer than the suburbs. Not to mention the convenience of not having to drive everywhere.
I think there's people who make assumptions about living inside the Loop including the expense. Assumptions are made about crime and different things. Some folks in the suburbs can easily start to think they can't go downtown. I think if I hadn't worked downtown the entire time that we've lived in the Greater Houston area I could have easily fallen into that trap. There are affordable ways to live inside the Loop. It's full of everything new in terms of the diversity of people, thought, ideas and what people are doing. There are different income levels, like any city it's stratified, and it's segregated by income and race and that's unfortunate. Those are problems that any big city faces, but I'd much rather be surrounded by the authenticity of a city than the sterile manufactured environment of suburban master planned communities. That's where I feel like a lot of the stratification of thought, ideas, and politics takes place.
You now live in a community that has changed a lot in recent years due to Houston’s growth. What are your thoughts on the changes in neighbors in the city?
I wish I was more knowledgeable about urban planning and the dynamics of that, but as I was telling you earlier, when I look back at historical pictures of my neighborhood, our neighborhood, there are these beautiful little bungalows and working-class families that lived in them and they lived in these neighborhoods convenient to work and life. I feel somewhat guilty of helping gentrify this space-- that this pretty little bungalow house took up on the corner of the block. It has now been replaced by three three-story townhouses. I'd like to think I didn't displace somebody and that those individuals were well compensated when they were bought out, but obviously it's changing the nature, the dynamics of the neighborhood. A part of me worries that one of the things that's made Houston great up to this point, and will continue to, is kind of the freewheeling nature of zoning and regulation. That allows you to have a church next to a strip center next to a house, and that's a Houston thing that you don't find in other cities that are more restrictive about zoning. And that makes growth easy to do, but you have to wonder what's the cost associated with just unlimited development.
Historical preservation is difficult to do. Thoughtfulness around the diversity of the neighborhood is difficult to do. So, it's a double-edged sword. It's the lack of regulation in zoning that makes Houston a pretty dynamic place in terms of everything that is available to people at different income levels, but it can also be ugly. It can be an eyesore and can also lead to poor city infrastructure because it's just sort of haphazard. Sometimes I wish we had zoning and better historic preservation. But I know that the minute you start introducing those things, you start to reduce the growth that has also contributed to Houston being the cool place it is.
Your son will be graduating high and going off to college soon. Do you think that Houston offers everything that he needs to have a successful career here?
I think Houston has everything anybody will ever need. Obviously, I'm biased for a variety of reasons. But yeah, it has everything. That's what makes it a hidden gem in the country at large. It is affordable from a cost of living perspective. The population is large enough that all the things that are available to somebody that should be in a typical metropolitan area are here. It's just that the city looks different because it's hot, flat, and not as attractive as other cities. But yeah, I think Houston does have everything that any young person that's starting out needs to be successful. Just look at our neighborhoods like Midtown-- once the pandemic is over, Houston is going to be one of the first places to come roaring back to life. It's just got so much going on. It's got so much organic growth. The cost of living is good. There’s a continued growing diversity of industries and opportunities. He's going to go off to school and I'm going to miss him for the next four to 10 years while he's doing all of that, but I'd love to think that he's going to be able to find a career back here. Whether he does that or not, we will see. I grew up in a very rural place in West Virginia and opportunities were scarce; Houston is not that. There's plenty of opportunities here for whatever it is you want to do so. I'm pretty optimistic about that.
