Editor’s Note: Bruce Nolan is an old hand at the New Orleans Times-Picayune who’s moving to Houston for his retirement, and he penned this explanation on Friday.

Nolan’s by no means the only longtime resident of the Big Easy reaching his limit and deciding it’s simply not livable anymore. At some point we’re going to have to have some sort of intervention and revamp of how New Orleans is governed, or else the story Nolan is telling will be the dominant one.

Friends and extended family:

Today is the last day I’ll wake up in New Orleans. (Spoiler alert: This is not a suicide note.) After 75 years living here, bearing the full cargo of memory and blood that comes with it, today I’m leaving for good – reluctantly, but with firm intent, for…. Houston.

Yeah, I know. So sue me.

In the grind of sorting and packing and planning I have been thinking a lot about New Orleans and its peculiarities, about what I’ll miss terribly and what I won’t miss. About what I’ll gain in Houston. And what I’ll lose.

This is not a hymn to the charms of America’s most European, African, Caribbean city – a place, some wag quipped after Katrina, that keeps 300 million Americans from dying of boredom.

Which is true.

Nor, at the other extreme, is it a frustrated resident’s farewell rant about New Orleans’ continued unraveling of everyday civic competence and descent into disorder.

For that decay is true as well.

But my case is simpler: New Orleans has become a hard city to grow old in. In the span of my adult years evacuations have become a scourge and hurricanes a mortal threat.

This is new, and presents an untenable paradox: Aging in New Orleans, one can become too fragile to stay, and yet too fragile to run.

So it’s Houston, by choice, where two adult children and spouses, all life-long New Orleanians themselves, urgently beckon. A hard, necessary decision of the head, reached two years ahead of the reluctant assent of the heart.

About Houston: After decades of visits to children, extended family and innumerable ex-neighbors in its surrounding suburban corona (I’ve rarely ventured into its older core) I’ve come to see modern Houston as a mirror-image of old New Orleans.

Houston writ large is about prosperity, competence and can-do hustle. By contrast New Orleans’ sluggish metabolism, both economic and psychic, is far lower, its pace more languid, its interests less economic and more sensual.

That exacts a cost; it makes prosperity here thin and uneven.

Sprawling Houston, to its detriment, values growth; landlocked New Orleans, to its detriment, doesn’t.

Yet for all its prosperity Houston has little sense of self. It is vaguely Texan and distinctly Hispanic, but so are San Antonio and a dozen other Texas cities — while New Orleans, the Old World dowager queen of the South, is fiercely self-absorbed to the point of distraction. There will never be a post-hurricane bumper sticker saying, “Be a Houstonian Wherever You Are.”

Houston’s prosperity buys better roads and newer neighborhoods. Its situation as an energy and medical hub makes it a global magnet for exceptional brainpower that lifts the quality of life for everybody.

Its money buys Teslas, manicured neighborhoods and retail opulence. But it is unable to provide a pungent local culture that is organic, deeply layered and able to convey an utterly distinctive sense of place. To a New Orleanian Houston’s bond between people and place seems weak; it lacks a unique street and folk culture expressed in architecture, music or local institutions. No St. Aug band, no Chalmette accent, no gingerbread millwork.

A tiny, telling metric among many: In the part of suburban Houston where we will relocate, “old” counts as anything older than my marriage. And it doesn’t exist. I will be hard-pressed to dine in a restaurant older than me, or one in a family’s hands for more than a generation, or in an old building lodged in a residential neighborhood. Think Domilise’s, Galatoire’s, Mandina’s, Dooky Chase’s.

Yet a family member who spent most of his adult life in New Orleans before moving to Houston told me: “After New Orleans, you’re going to be surprised. Here, when things break, they get fixed.”

Although the logic driving this decision requires relocation no matter New Orleans’ health, after a lifetime here I see the quality of life in New Orleans deteriorating alarmingly.

What to say about a city where carjackings have become a contagion and the police solve only about a quarter of all murders – murders being a horrifying pattern of savagery in their own right. Where a hotel under construction actually collapsed into the street after ghost city building inspectors faked their visits there. Where garbage is picked up only once a week because the city can’t manage two. Where summer thunderstorms routinely force the city to suspend its parking ordinances so residents can save their automobiles. Where public libraries close because of summer heat. And where after years of neglect, passing citizens no longer even register the rotting hulks of the Plaza Tower, Charity Hospital, the Market Street power station and Mercy Hospital.

The best thing about New Orleans is the local culture its people built, the culture of feasts, traditions, family, and the street. The worst thing about New Orleans is the local culture its people built, of violence, disrespect, laissez faire nonchalance and the street. They coexist.

More than ever, to live in New Orleans lately is like navigating an abusive romantic relationship. On Mondays, Wednesdays and weekends the sex is magical, she laughs at your jokes, reads to the kids and bakes for the elderly neighbor – and on the other days she staggers about high and half-dressed, neglects to flush and burns the furniture with cigarettes.

To some degree New Orleans has always borne this kind of contradiction, unashamedly proud that it is emphatically not Houston, not Dallas, not Atlanta. But it is a perilous balance to sustain, a dangerous chemistry that threatens at any moment to tip into ruin.

True, it has been so for 300 years. But in the last five years it feels like something has slipped, at least temporarily. A word comes to mind: Detroit.

I dearly hope not.

Katrina was a collective near-death experience, a heavy axe that fell in a single night. This feels like a dangerous moment, but unfolding slowly. We are frogs in a pot, and it’s been seriously hot for some time. Have you noticed?

I have to go now. I will watch from a distance with love and concern. My email (bruceCnolan@gmail.com) and phone remain unchanged, and we must keep in touch. But as I do not regret my choice or begrudge my new home, I do not begrudge others’ choice to remain. This is personal; we must cut each other slack. For myself, I will build a new community and tell new friends about my cherished old friends. Before I’m half-done they’ll want to know you.

My heart will be on both sides of the Sabine. But it is late and God’s template for me was set long ago. At some level, bro, I will remain a New Orleanian wherever I am.

God bless us all.