Houston's healthy residential core
Harvard's recently released report "The State of the Nation's Housing 2005" has this very positive comment on the health of Houston's inner core housing.[During the 1990s] only 9 of the 91 largest metropolitan regions saw an increase in the number of [housing] units built within the dense parts of the five-mile inner ring around their CBDs, and only 7 saw gains in the five-mile infill share of metro-wide new construction. Atlanta, Buffalo, Charleston, Houston, Knoxville, and Seattle were the only places with both numerical and share gains.Certainly a diverse set of cities in that list. I think Atlanta and Houston's relative lack of development restrictions make it much easier for the core to redevelop. They've also kept a lot of their big employers in the core by investing in good freeway access to the suburbs, which creates the demand and financial incentive to construct housing in the core.
posted by Tory Gattis @ 10:33 PM
1 Comments:
...and it could get a lot healthier, too.
We'll likely continue to be on that short list of metropolitan areas with increasing city center housing units for many years to come. A key reason is that we have so much under-developed/under-utilized land within that five mile inner ring. Between downtown, midtown, the area east of downtown, and the Hardy Yard area just north of downtown, I'm guessing literally hundreds of thousands of housing units could be added if the market supported it.
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