Houston Strategies: America's Housing Crisis, new hurricane surge maps, techies escaping Silicon Valley for Houston, affordable housing, and more

Saturday, March 05, 2016

America's Housing Crisis, new hurricane surge maps, techies escaping Silicon Valley for Houston, affordable housing, and more

Before getting to the big backlog of items this week, I should mention that our Center for Opportunity Urbanism recently held a very successful and well-attended luncheon event to release our newest report on America's Housing Crisis. Chronicle coverage here, and coincidentally it got reinforced by this story at NPR about millennials moving to the suburbs. The report is packed with interesting stuff - definitely worth at least a skim.

Moving on to this week's items:

Just amazing animated maps of different scenarios where hurricanes hit Houston, including some very scary ones. The newest study on dike options is out as well. Let's hope they move forward on some sort of dike plan soon.
Houston #5 for job searches by techies wanting to escape Silicon Valley! Not bad - ahead of Chicago, Dallas, and Portland.
Katie Couric featured Houston in her latest Cities Rising episode, with a pretty awesome 12m video focused on quality of life amenities, the med center, immigrants, and restaurants. Worth watching.
What Liberals Don’t Get About Affordable Housing: Filtering
That theme is also supported by the Washington Post: The poor are better off when we build more housing for the rich
Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning
Despite billions in rail spending, LA Transit ridership has fallen even farther than the LA Times recently reported. Quite the cautionary tale for Houston. This was followed by a story on LA reaching "peak mobility" with the following opening paragraphs:

"When trains start running on 11 new miles of Gold Line tracks this weekend stretching eastward to Azusa, will they carry any passengers? Ridership on Metro's buses and trains has been not just stagnant, but shrinking for nearly two years. At the start of 2014, there were on average 1.45 million bus and rail boardings on weekdays. A year later, it was 1.38 million. By January 2016, weekday boardings had further slipped to 1.27 million.