Houston Strategies

MaX Lanes win, #1 for millennials, traffic better than you think, our resilient culture, NYT eats here, and more

A lot of new items this week:

• Houston #1 for attracting millennials.

"By contrast, the biggest winner is Houston, a metro area that many planners and urban theorists regard with contempt. The Bayou City gained nearly 15,000 millennials net last year, while other big gainers included Dallas–Fort Worth and Austin, which gained 12,700 and 9,000, respectively. Last year, according to a Texas realtors report, a net 22,000 Californians moved to the Lone Star State."

• Points for MaX Lanes from Reason:

"I want to call your attention to a new (not yet published) paper on the subject by researchers from Cornell University and McGill University. “A Comprehensive Welfare Impact Analysis for Road Expansion Projects” uses transportation data from the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area to compare, quantitatively, the effects of four possible highway expansion options (in addition to doing nothing): adding a general purpose (GP) lane, adding a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane, adding a priced ETL (electronic toll lane), or converting all lanes to conventional toll lanes. The priced ETL ranked highest in both regional economic impact and improving system-wide travel time, and was judged to produce the greatest increase in overall social welfare."

• You may think Houston traffic is bad, but our pretty robust freeway investments make it not as bad as you think. INRIX just changed their congestion cost calculation methodology, and Houston is not in the top dozen US cities in cost of lost time per driver.  The bad news: Dallas did even better than us - time to step it up Houston! (critical analysis at New Geography, full INRIX report)
• CityLab: The Secret Ingredient of Resilient Cities: Culture.  I think Houston clearly demonstrated this during Harvey.
• WSJ Video: California Home Prices Are Soaring. Here’s Why. The good news for Houston (and most of the rest of Texas) is that we're not afflicted by any of California's problems which are mentioned in the video, therefore housing remains affordable here.
• Pretty cool Bloomberg site on transportation technology. Hat tip to Anne.
• Kinder via the Market Urbanism Report: Some parts of Houston have East Coast levels of density.
• CityLab maps the world's megaregions. I'm not sure how much I buy into the megaregion concept, especially when it crosses state and national borders, but at least we're grouped with the Texas Triangle now (as we should be) instead of separately with New Orleans like we used to be.
• Strong Towns: 8 Things Your Town Can Do to Add More Housing (Without Spending a Dime). Houston is one of the examples for lowering minimum lot sizes. We do pretty well on a lot of these, and - voila - affordable housing!
• NYTimes: A Day in Houston: 3 Meals, 3 Cultures, One City: The 52 Places Traveler follows his stomach through the city of Houston, finding a staggering diversity along the way.

Finally, if you're looking for a high-impact charity to support, I was recently introduced to the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, which does an absolutely amazing job mentoring Texas prisoners back into successful lives after prison (check out the results here).  If you want to learn more, check out one of their events. Hat tip to Jay, one of their top volunteers.

Labels: autonomous vehicles, congestion pricing, costs of congestion, density, home affordability, land-use regulation, MaX Lanes, migration, mobility strategies, philanthropy, rankings, resilience, tourism

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:09 PM