And thus their additional challenges are caused by their absolute neglect of urban planning. If only someone could have predicted that spreading single family housing over hundreds of square miles was going to create a maintenance nightmare.

Berlin including suburbs ("Speckgürtel") is ~1400 square miles.

If you includes the suburbs, the Houston area is roughly 10,000 square miles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston#Geography

So approximately 1/7th the size of the Houston metro area.