Houston Strategies

The paradox of liberal coastal cities and the real reason for growing inequality, Austin embraces BRT, the freeway of the future is congestion-priced, and our growing density

• An Austin newspaper columnist's farewell column has some interesting transit observations that they're finally moving away from light rail towards autonomous BRT. Hat tip to Oscar.

"And last month, [Senator Kirk Watson] gave a big signal that he’s ready to get involved in bringing a full-fledged mass transit system to the area. 

And that it probably won’t be light rail. 

[Capital Metro's CEO has been promoting] a regional system of autonomous, electric-powered buses moving in platoons along dedicated transit rights of way on or next to Central Texas streets."

Finally, a market urbanism opinion piece with some great excerpts on the disconnect between liberal aspirations and liberal housing policy is killing coastal U.S. cities (written by a fellow liberal):

"The real problem here is that housing is never just a question of “build” or “don’t build.” It’s “build here” or “build somewhere else.”And if you live in a coastal U.S. city, somewhere else is usually way worse for the environment. People don’t disappear just because they can’t move to our cities; they move to the suburbs of Texas, where housing continues to be produced in abundance and, as a result, costs have stayed reasonably low.
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Some of you may remember the hub-bub in 2014 over Thomas Piketty’s book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which examined wealth inequality in Europe and the U.S. over the past few centuries. It was an absolute blockbuster (for an economics book), showing that the share of income coming from returns on capital was increasing over time, which was bad news for those of us who don’t earn most of our money on stocks, property, or other capital investments (i.e., most of us). It was a rallying cry for liberals around the developed world. 

What you may not have heard about was the critique of Piketty’s work by a 26-year-old MIT graduate student named Matthew Rognlie, who basically said that the issue isn’t so much capital in a general sense, but housing in particular. In other words, the growing value of housing relative to other assets (as well as labor income) is responsible for almost 100 percent of increasing wealth inequality in the Western world.
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By doing essentially nothing but letting things happen, conservative America is kicking our ass at providing opportunities for low income and working classes to build wealth and get ahead. Cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Atlanta have managed to stay affordable by simply allowing housing to continue to be built as their populations grow, and the result is that people keep moving there.
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So, this is the paradise we’ve built across the liberal cities of the United States. Are we proud? I’m not. We’ve walled off our cities to those of lesser and greater means, making pathetic, often subtly racist or classist arguments about “character” and “culture.” We’ve destroyed any possible opportunity for low income and working class households to build wealth in the same way as their affluent neighbors, or displaced the poor households so that they’re no longer neighbors at all."

Labels: affordability, autonomous vehicles, congestion pricing, density, home affordability, inequality, land-use regulation, market urbanism, MaX Lanes, mobility strategies, perspectives, rail, toll roads, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:01 PM