3x our freeway capacity, everyone to TX, Interesting Times, and more
Some smaller items this week:- Houston and Texas dominate job growth rankings for the last 5 years: HBJ, CultureMap
- Hallelujah for Houston: Study says self-driving cars could increase freeway capacity 273 percent! You know how California has created their own environmental regulations for automakers? Maybe Texas should do the same thing for self-driving cars to accelerate the transition?... ;-)
- In the future, everyone will live in Texas (at least vs. California). Hat tip to Jessie.
- Why is Texas so awesome? (click on TX ;-)
- Unstoppable! Report projects Houston will grow faster than any other metro area.
- Small but mighty. Houston has the second largest number of small businesses in Texas.
- More than oil and gas, Houston is a kaleidoscope of creativity.
- Move over Google, new grads want to work for energy firms.
- We're on the cutting edge: Forbes ranks Houston firms among the most innovative in the world.
Finally, the short, 24-min Rice documentary on Dr. Stephen Klineberg, the Houston Area Survey, and Houston is now available on YouTube ("Interesting Times"). Very well done, highly recommended. And evidently this is a secret, unlisted link to it. Can't find it with search. I've heard Rice would like to keep control of the video, so watch it soon before they take it private...
Labels: economy, energy, growth, identity, mobility strategies, perspectives, rankings
posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:02 PM
5 Comments:
Tory,
Wish I had gotten the chance to tell you how much I appreciate your blog. I have a friend in the fed that I hadn't seen in a few months.
Today was a lesson in how to give a presentation filled with bad economics badly. It seemed 90% of his facts were actually meaningless, the other 10% actually went against his point.
I wish I could beat this into everyone's head
congestion->higher land values-> density
and not the other way around.
Otherwise we could make land in Hempstead valuable just by plopping down a couple of skyscrapers.
Thanks! No worries. I definitely found myself questioning cause and effect at many points in the presentation. That said, I would certainly like to see more of the walkable developments he talked about happen in Houston - I'd just like to see them happen thru free market mechanisms and reduced regulation than any sort of forcing or heavy incentives.
So Texas' population doubled from the Great Depression to 1970, doubled again to 2000 and will double again in a generation or two before it plateaus. I don't see how this future tracks significantly differently than California's, where population was the same as ours at the depression and twice ours at 1970 (before doubling once more and plateauing). To get even more specific, the demographic and economic shifts that Klineberg so remarks are ones that Los Angeles blazed in very similar form. In its case the cliff happened in its aerospace defense industries instead of energy, but books like "An Empire Wilderness" cover its transformation into a world crossroads. I don't think we have the proper humility to avoid the pitfalls they've already shown us. At any rate I don't see that something significant is being done in Texas to turn out differently. I would very much like to pitch some initiatives. Neil
I honestly don't know if Houston will smartly handle the transition to a post oil and gas era, but I feel like Texas will expand for a long time to come (the rest of the state is not that oil and gas centric - quite diversified). LA ran into geography barriers. CA is a beautiful state and has a very strong environmental lobby that has basically shut down almost all greenfield development (as seen in the graph). That doesn't really exist in Texas. I think the mega-cities will just keep on growing out into the nondescript scrub, so to speak, with the possible exception of the hill country (which I think will get more and more protected).
As long as the rest of the world still values oil and gas, Houston will have a place.
So much of the oil and gas work in Houston is for work happening around the world for energy that will not make it back to U.S. shores. Even if the environmentalist ban all fossil fuel extraction in the U.S., Houston will still have a thriving oil and gas industry. There is too much intellectual capital and talent base in Houston that the world comes here to develop their energy resources.
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