This is silly. MSAs have near zero to do with a city. They are not talking about Greater Houston. For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area

This is silly. MSAs have near zero to do with a city. They are not talking about Greater Houston. For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area) It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle". It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same. Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle". Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle". Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best. To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily. It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level. Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world. Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel. In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country. The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.