Houston Strategies

Flood regs burdening the poor, how Harvey made us stronger, Houston's worker flows and oil export boom, and more

• Atlantic City Lab: Work Habits Are Changing: Cities Need to Keep Up. Houston is well positioned to adapt to this because of our lack of zoning.
• LinkedIn does a cool monthly report on some major cities, including Houston, where they break down what's happening with our hiring, including skill surpluses and shortages. Evidently our biggest shortage is oral communication, which doesn't surprise me in a city of engineers, lol. It also has some good graphs on worker flows between us and other cities.
• Denver Joins Seattle and San Francisco as a Tech Hub with More People Looking to Move Out than Move In. Houston has relatively minor outflows, with a focus on Austin and - strangely - Chicago (I'm guessing Midwesterners that moved here and are homesick). Cool interactive map at the bottom where you can dig into Houston's worker flows. We draw a lot from the expensive coasts. Hat tip to Oscar.
• Texas ranking only #21 in freedom by Cato. I would have expected higher.
• Backing up our COU report on Houston after Harvey: Houston’s new floodplain rules will place ‘unbearable burden’ on poor, report says
• Houston ranked in top 10 of best cities in US, ranked No. 31 in top world metros. Our biggest negative? Lack of promotion - the national media just doesn't talk about us. Excerpt:

"According to Best Cities, Houston is the seventh-best metropolitan in the country, based on methodology that looks at the place, product, programming, people, prosperity, and promotion of a town. 

"Smart, skilled and soulful, Houston is the American city of the future," the Best Cities website stated in lauding Houston. 

The city landed high marks in terms of place, people, and prosperity. It cited Houston's diversity, housing affordability, and leadership in the health care, manufacturing, engineering, finance, and aerospace industries."

• I love these! 5 ways Houston is stronger after Harvey, as told by Mattress Mack
• Great short op-ed from the Wall Street Journal: The Oil Export Boom - Houston-Galveston exports exceed imports for the first time.

"When George W. Bush signed legislation in 2007 to subsidize and mandate the production of biofuels, he cited the urgent need to liberate America from “long-term” dependence on “oil from foreign lands.” Turns out there was an easier, much less expensive way: drill, baby, drill. 

The Energy Information Administration announced this month that the port district of Houston-Galveston began exporting more crude oil than it imported for the first time. Houston-Galveston exports in April surpassed imports by 15,000 barrels a day, and by May the difference had grown to 470,000 barrels a day. That port district handles more than half of all U.S. crude exports, which hit a record of two million barrels a day in May. 

The export boom is testament to U.S. ingenuity that has driven rapid advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, especially in shale rock. The breakthroughs have lowered drilling costs and put Texas’s Permian Basin at the center of an oil-and-gas drilling revolution that will next year see the state producing more oil than either Iraq or Iran. 

Washington also gets credit for removing regulatory hurdles like the oil export ban. Republican leaders in Congress took flak in 2015 for agreeing to extend green-energy subsidies for a few years in return for Barack Obama’s signature on a statutory end to the 40-year-old export ban. 

Some conservative pressure groups derided the policy trade as a sellout while liberals complained that ending the ban would serve Big Oil. The real beneficiaries are workers, investors and the overall economy, as well as greater flexibility in foreign policy as the U.S. is less vulnerable to authoritarian oil exporters. 

The U.S. is unlikely to be a net oil exporter soon, since American refineries require heavy crude from abroad. Shale drillers produce lighter grades. But the gap between imports and exports shrank in 2017 to a 24-year low of 6.8 million barrels a day from more than nine million in 2012. The lesson is that American invention and entrepreneurship remain indomitable—when government gets out of the way."

Labels: economy, energy, hurricanes, land-use regulation, migration, rankings, zoning

posted by Tory Gattis @ 9:43 PM