Houston Strategies

"Another way to look at population growth in Houston last year:
A baby was born every 5.5 minutes.
A death was recorded every 14.2 minutes.
Someone moved to the region from overseas every 16.3 minutes.
Someone moved to Houston from elsewhere in the U.S. every 8.0 minutes.
All told, Houston's population grew at the rate of one new resident every 3.4 minutes last year."

• Congrats to METRO board member Christof Spieler on his impressive profile in Houstonia Magazine​.  I thought the ending was especially awesome:

"“To be able to say I can make tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people’s lives better every day, that’s meaningful. That’s what actually matters.” 

Spieler grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, he told us, before moving to Houston for college. “I thought Houston was an awful place, but I would put up with it to go to Rice. But by the time I graduated I loved this place.” Our attraction? An openness to new ideas. 

“There are cities which try really hard to block any change. And politically, the questions you get asked are: how long have you lived here? Who were your parents? Who do you know? I never would have ended up on an appointed transit board in a city like San Francisco. This is a city where, if you have good ideas and you’re willing to push for them, people will listen to you. It gives me endless hope for Houston’s ability to keep changing.”"

• Speaking of good transit, excellent free market transit solutions are popping up all over San Francisco.  I'd love to see this happen in Houston and for METRO to encourage it...  Hat tip to Mihir.
• David Brooks' recent NYT column on the level playing field in the 2016 presidential election gave us this shout out:

"When many of these voters think of economic dynamism, they think of places like Texas, the top job producer in the nation over the past decade, and, especially, places like Houston, a low-regulation, low-cost-of-living place. In places like Wisconsin, voters in the middle class private sector support candidates who cut state pensions and pass right-to-work laws, so that economic governance can be more Texas-style."

• The Atlantic says "Americans Love Big Hot Suburbs - Everybody's moving to Texas."  Cool graph of migration by average January temperature - can you guess the correlation?  Best excerpt:

"If you pretend that the United States is populated exclusively by twentysomething graduates of national research universities, you'll develop the sense that everybody is moving to the city centers of New York, Chicago, San Jose, and Boston. In fact, all three of those metro areas have seen more Americans leaving than coming in the last five years. The cities with the highest levels of net domestic migration since 2010 are Houston, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Denver, and San Antonio. Once again, we're talking about Texas. More broadly, we're talking about sprawly metros with fast-growing suburbs in the Sun Belt."