I'm a native Texan (recently moved away to Washington State but with fresh memories) and most of what you described was also my experience. Texas has all of th

I'm a native Texan (recently moved away to Washington State but with fresh memories) and most of what you described was also my experience. Texas has all of the same societal problems as the rest of the country, for sure, but the deep cultural divide really stands out to me. Most Texans, of all stripes, can be some of the kindest and most giving people you've ever met...as long as you're deemed "deserving" of that treatment. Woe be you if you are not. I still remember somebody running for District Attorney (the title is used for the head criminal attorney in each county) who swore he would work hand-in-hand with his unofficial running mate--the person running for District Court judge in my part of the county--to make sure "those people" never see the light of day. His mailer was straight-up showing black men being led, in handcuffs, into the county jail. The Commissioner's Court--the head of county government--could just never seem to find the money for public health services in the county (that's why we didn't have a public hospital but Dallas County did; so we just shipped all of our indigent patients from the private hospitals there down to Dallas) but money for parks in the posh new water-district-funded[1] parts of the county? Oh, sure. > Every landlord used the same lease: a huge, crazy contract written by a state trade association. I was told that the terms of this lease couldn't be negotiated, because <something about state law??>. Ah yes, the Texas Apartment Association (TAA) lease. TAA leases are some of the most one-sided leases I've ever read. Nobody will "negotiate" the lease with a tenant for two reasons: 1) the license agreement with TAA prohibits it; and 2) Justices of the Peace automatically assume that TAA leases are binding and correctly done so the tenant is at a huge disadvantage in court. The TAA lease did help me one time: A landlord got cheap and dropped out of the TAA. I wanted to end my lease early and happened to discover this while looking up his contact information on TAA's site. Any TAA lease signed by a non-TAA member becomes voidable at the tenant's option if the landlord stops being a member or never was in the first place. 1 - Water districts in Texas are a special level of shady. For the longest time, developers would just pay an existing water district a few hundred bucks an acre to "annex-deannex" the developer's land, thus forming a brand new taxing district that can issue millions in bonds. John Oliver, of course, recently did a segment on special districts that is very instructive.