Houston Strategies

Houston's cliches, people, image, and fast change; how new luxury units keep housing affordable, battling traffic, The Great Train Robbery, and more

• WSJ: Houston’s World Series Problem: The Phrase ‘Houston, We Have a Problem’. It’s never bothered me, because it frames Houston as a problem-solving city, but I’m not surprised people are tired of it.  I once even did a blog post trying to morph it into a brand/identity for us!  That might be problematic, but the ad I describe would be great!
• Continuing the World Series theme, a great story about the essence of Houston and it's people during the Astros World Series win. Hat tip to George.
• Atlantic CityLab on 5 ways to seriously battle traffic. Good video too. I do disagree with how they characterize the Katy Freeway expansion though. Even though it may now slow down to similar levels before the expansion, it is still moving far, far more people than it did before, and that's ultimately what matters.
• Joel Kotkin argues for localism and local control vs. federal or even state-level control.
• The Great Train Robbery: Urban Transportation in the 21st Century report by Kotkin and Cox 
• How luxury housing becomes affordable. Something I've been saying for a while: building new stuff at the high-end forces down prices all down the ladder.

"Here’s the takeway:  New housing is almost always built for and sold to the high end of the marketplace.  It was that way a hundred years ago and fifty years ago. But as it ages, housing depreciates and moves down market. The luxury apartments of two or three decades ago have lost most of their luster, and command relatively lower rents. And the truth is--that’s how we’ve always generated more affordable housing, through the process that economists call “filtering.”  And the new self-styled “luxury” apartments we’re building today will be the affordable housing of 2040 and 2050 and later. 

What causes affordability problems to arise is when we stop building new housing, or build it too slowly to cause aging housing to filter down-market. When new high priced housing doesn’t get built, demand doesn’t disappear, instead, those higher income households bid up the price of the existing housing stock, keeping it from becoming more affordable.  Which is why otherwise prosaic 1,500 foot ranch houses in Santa Monica sell for a couple of million bucks, while physically similar 1950’s era homes in the rest of the country are either now highly affordable–or candidates for demolition."

• Economist: Modern American elites have come to favour inconspicuous consumption. Book review, Houston excerpt:

“The Sum of Small Things” both unearths evocative differences between big American cities—for example, Los Angeles leads in bottled-water consumption, while New York does in spending on shoes—and makes clear that the “aspirational class” Ms Currid-Halkett profiles is almost exclusively coastal and urban. However, that may yield a lopsided portrait of the top of the income pile: largely absent from her tale are the business-minded rich in politically conservative states. 

The reader learns that residents of Dallas and Houston dedicate unusually low shares of spending to housing costs and to fresh fruit, and a relatively high portion to textiles, furniture and beauty products such as wigs—but not whether the rich among them mimic their blue-state counterparts in seeking to project virtue via heirloom tomatoes and the like. Perhaps a sequel might explore the values of Sun Belt suburbanites, and how this other half of privileged Americans signal status through their spending.

Labels: affordability, home affordability, identity, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:16 PM