45N not a boondoggle, beating gentrification, HTX vs global warming, mixed rankings, and more

A whole lot of items came up this week:

• Very cool animated bar chart race of the top 30 metro populations in America from 1790 to today. Pretty neat to watch some cities like Chicago, LA, DFW, and HTX come in at the bottom and race to the top. 
• Houston ranks #6 for job accessibility by auto, including Houston's heat map. Hat tip to George.
• BlogHouston: METRO Next: Why the building of rail lines and transit guideways to connect activity centers theory is bunk
• Texas named the #1 state to start a business.
• Bob Poole at Reason discredits the incredibly biased PIRG "highway boondoggles" report that listed the 45N project.
• The same newsletter makes the case for connecting up managed lanes/MaX Lanes. Hear, hear!
• Great, realistic strategy profiled in the Chronicle for getting ahead of gentrification - in the Third Ward in this case.
• Houston Chronicle op-ed: Houston, it’s up to us to tackle global warming. This is awesome. Total agreement Houston needs to step up and lead here! My previous post on this.
• The NY Times points out that Texas' boom is uneven across the state.  Well, duh. If your state has the biggest booming metros in the country, they're naturally going to pull more talent out of other parts of the state than happens in less booming states.  I also don't think it's totally out of line for the Texas Triangle with 2/3 of Texas' population to be generating 4/5 of new jobs in our modern economy.
• Houston ranked second best city to live in Texas (behind Flower Mound, lol).
• Well this sucks. Houston ranked #105 out of 116 cities for fiscal strength :-( The bottom two are NYC and Chicago. Why do the biggest cities act so fiscally irresponsible?
• Houston ranked #2 most charitable city. This is one of the things I've always loved about Houston - the community really steps up to support itself.

Finally, a cool video on the ruins of the old Westbury Square, a faux Italian shopping village created in Houston in the 50s. Great aerial drone footage. Hat tip to Chris and Richard.