Houston Strategies

GQ: Houston Is the New Capital Of Southern Cool, plus Houston's freeways+employment advantage and oil cluster domination

This week's lead item is GQ's long feature on Houston, which is really well done and has some great excerpts.  It's very cool for Houston to get some good national attention, especially vs. Austin.  Paper City discusses the coverage, as does CultureMap: 5 reasons every Houstonian should read GQ's love letter to our city.  Hat tip to Oscar. Excerpts:

Houston Is the New Capital Of Southern Cool
We’ve been hearing the buzz for a few years now: Houston may, sneakily, be America’s best food city. But when we sent GQ food critic Brett Martin to dive into the scene, we realized that was selling the city way short.
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“At the time, having grown up in Houston in kind of a bubble, I was pretty skeptical about the city,” Odam says. So Odam asked the kid in the black T-shirt why he'd be moving there from someplace as verifiably and undeniably hip as Austin. The kid shrugged. Austin, he said, was a white monoculture of hipsters, yuppies, and techies. (Odam was telling me this story in a Japanese-fusion spot in East Austin, which made it easy to visualize said culture.) In Houston, the kid said, things were happening.
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He gripped the wheel and considered the unspeakable: “Was Houston cooler than Austin? Really?”
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But a good deal of what's happening in Houston feels more organic and idiosyncratic than what an urban-studies expert might devise in a PowerPoint presentation—an energy that feels born of two major factors: one, the growth that has turned the city's diverse but discrete bubbles into a series of unavoidable Venn overlaps, allowing cultures to clash, cohabitate, and collaborate; the other, a pervading sense of independent frontier wildness. 

That trait may not ride in wearing the cowboy costume it does farther west, but it nevertheless feels distinctly Texan. “There are no zoning laws here” is the sentence you will hear more than any other in Houston. This is a key point of identity: the theoretical ability for anyone to build anything anywhere (never mind that it is in part responsible for the kind of development that makes the city so susceptible to damage from natural disaster). People chatter about commercial real estate in Houston with the same mix of envy, romance, and fascination that they do residential real estate in New York or San Francisco: who's developing what project and where; which buildings are sitting empty, waiting for the price of oil to rise; who's erecting what glass tower as revenge for which other guy's glass tower. “No zoning” turns out to be the urban equivalent of the great western myth of “no fences.”
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“Austin is like your young, hip millennial brother who always knows the latest cool thing. Dallas is the metrosexual middle brother that nobody really wants to spend time with. But Houston is the older, cooler sibling—he's got some miles on him, he's been through some stuff, but he totally knows what's cool and what's not. You love all your siblings, but you know which one you want to hang out with.”
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We drove mile after flat mile filled with parking lots and strip malls, fast-food restaurants and box stores, new undistinguished construction cheek by jowl with older undistinguished construction. It is empirically ugly and totally intoxicating. The point isn't that there are beautiful places hidden amid the ugliness; it's that the ugliness itself becomes imbued with a kind of beauty, thanks to the thrum of human energy that takes root there.
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Maybe it's that sense of defiance that ultimately defines Houston's cool—the sense that a city where cool isn't the primary commodity can afford to lie back and let the world come to it, whenever the world catches on. As Matthew Odam's passenger put it, before closing the car door and taking off toward the Menil's lawn and into legend: “Houston is cool because Houston doesn't give a f**k about being cool.”

Just awesome.

On to a few other items this week:

• Bill Gilmer from UH has written an excellent data-backed piece in Forbes on how Houston's energy cluster economy works.  Excerpts:

Proximity Counts: How Houston Dominates the Oil Industry 

..."Once formed, these clusters set up a virtuous cycle that eventually draws in a major piece of their industry: the bigger the cluster, the greater the cost savings; the greater the savings, the more firms are drawn into the cluster; more firms mean more savings … and the industry concentration continues on. These cost advantages are powerful enough to (1) explain why only one large headquarters/technical center typically dominates each industry, and (2) why it is so hard for other cities to challenge these centers for a share of their work. 

Proximity generates the cost savings that accrue to companies operating inside Houston’s oil cluster, and these savings arise in three ways: access to many local companies specializing in oil; large numbers of skilled and specialized employees; and by generating company-specific intelligence on oil markets through its local knowledge loop."

• From the Urbanophile/Aaron Renn's piece on the future of Nashville mentioning Houston's wisdom at our aggressive freeway building vs. Atlanta's missed opportunity:

"The South holds some lessons. Dallas and Houston both built out major freeway networks with multiple rings and connectors. Atlanta stuck with a simple hub and spoke plus beltway system typical of smaller metros and has paid a big price for it. "

"Also, the city of Houston is home to 60.2 percent of the region's jobs. In Miami, Detroit and Atlanta, for example, the city is home to 11.7 percent, 13.1 percent and 17.7 percent of the region's jobs, respectively."

Labels: companies, economic strategy, economy, energy, identity, mobility strategies, perspectives, quality of place, transportation plan

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:33 PM