Contrasting Dallas and Houston
A couple of items in recent months have highlighted differences in Dallas vs. Houston to me. The first is this Urbanophile story about a "carpetbagger" critic of Dallas that is having a big influence on the city. It just highlights to me how much more self-conscious Dallas is of its image - it went all-in on an extremely expensive and stupid commuter rail network, and now it's drinking the urbanist anti-sprawl kool-aid. Houston is full of pragmatic engineers not-so-concerned with looking good to the coastal elites. Thank goodness.Next is this article which is not so interesting in itself (typical anti-sprawl), but has some insightful graphs on college-degrees and incomes by the distance from downtown for different Texas cities. Definite 'donut' effects, except in Austin, which is a little odd. But I found it interesting that it shows how much more successful Houston has been at urbanizing with more high-incomes and college-degreed in the core than Dallas. I'd attribute it to our lack of zoning allowing densification to meet demand - more apartments, towers, and townhomes.
(if the formatting of these graphs gets messed up, you can find them here)
Dallas-Fort Worth
While the suburbs still account for most of Dallas-Fort Worth’s population growth, downtown neighborhoods have seen the highest increases in college-educated residents and incomes.
Change in residents with a college degree, 1990-2012
Change in per-capita income, 1990-2012
Houston
Houston’s urban neighborhoods and suburban developments saw increases in college-educated residents and incomes. But there were declines on both fronts in neighborhoods between those two areas.
Change in residents with college degree, 1990-2012
Change in per-capita income, 1990-2012
Labels: density, development, downtown, land-use regulation, sprawl
posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:37 PM
3 Comments:
http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2014/08/dallas-vs-houston-in-two-words-hsr.html Is a good post on the same thing.
http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2014/08/dallas-vs-houston-in-two-words-hsr.html Working Link.
Good memory! I forgot about that one! That definitely nails it: prestige vs. pragmatic.
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