"For a proven reform, look at Houston, arguably the most pro-housing city in the country. It doesn’t have use-zoning, which means that housing — including apartments and other multifamily housing — is permitted anywhere private covenants don’t restrict it. In 1998, Houston policy makers reduced the minimum-required lot size for a house from 5,000 square feet down to 1,400 square feet on all of the land within the city’s I-610 loop. This made it possible to replace a single-family house with three. In 2013, the 1,400-square-foot minimum lot size requirement was expanded to cover the entire city.
Thousands of townhouses have since been built that wouldn’t have been permitted before. Houston now boasts a median home price below the national median in spite of decades of rapid job growth and increasing population. A typical house in Houston costs less than $200,000, compared with nearly $300,000 in Atlanta or a staggering $680,000 in San Diego. In other booming cities, more jobs and new residents have led to skyrocketing prices but few new homes.
On paper, Houston’s decision to reduce minimum lot sizes seems similar to eliminating single-family zoning and allowing more than one unit per lot. The difference is that Houston’s other flexible land-use regulations allow homebuilders to deliver those new units in a cost-effective and desirable way. Houston’s rules ensure that three new units can be spacious, useful and an improvement on the detached houses they replace."
Mercatus: Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston. The whole thing is definitely worth reading, with lots of good details on Houston's history of liberalizing land-use regulations. It ends with this conclusion:
"The experience of Houston reaffirms much of what researchers already know: minimum-lot-size regulations limit urban development, driving up lot sizes and thereby increasing housing prices. By liberalizing these rules, the 1998 subdivision reforms allowed developers to meet a large and growing demand among Houstonians for smaller houses closer to major job centers.
But the reforms also chart new territory: a key element of their success involved allowing homeowners with the most extreme lot-size preferences to opt out of reform, thereby mitigating opposition to the broader reform. Even accounting for this concession, postreform subdivision has been heavily concentrated in neighborhoods that were either middle class or sparsely populated, without imposing an undue burden on traditionally marginalized communities. As planners and policymakers across the country wrestle with the complicated politics of land use liberalization, the case of Houston thus offers an instructive example."
“The suburban demand, driven in part by New York City residents who are able to work remotely while offices are closed, raises unsettling questions about how fast the city will be able to recover from the pandemic. It is an exodus that analysts say is reminiscent of the one that fueled the suburbanization of America in the second half of the 20th century.”
Bloomberg: Thanks to the Pandemic, Luxury Hotels Become Home. This is pretty amazing to read. With the rise of remote work, luxury resort hotels are suddenly leased like long-term apartments. Sounds like waves of New Yorkers are heading to the islands for the entire winter!
"I’ve been fortunate to live in many different cities across the U.S. and Latin America, and I can honestly say that none of them were as friendly, as empathetic, or as inviting as Houston. It’s why I fell in love with this town. People genuinely believe in looking out for each other here."
"Houston comes third in the overall ranking. The Texan city is a reputable talent hub and, according to the 2019 Academic Ranking of World Universities, is home to five of the global top 500 universities, as well as over 30 international baccalaureate schools. This contributed to its achieving third place in the Human Capital and Lifestyle category.
Houston also placed sixth in the Business Friendliness category. The city’s welcoming business environment is clearly a hit with investors, as it recorded 53 expansion or co-location projects between May 2015 and April 2020, representing more than a quarter of its total inward FDI and the second highest out of all locations analysed."
Save America’s Dying Cities. Hat tip to Judah. Summary recommendations, where I think Houston does ok but definitely has room for improvement:
"Yet, under any circumstances, I believe that the state of our understanding is at least sufficient to provide some basic principles for guiding efforts to improve the prospects of dying cities. First, officials of cities hoping to be successful must be seen as dedicated to managing their municipal enterprise in more honest, efficient, and business-friendly ways. Too many cities have experiences similar to Baltimore’s, whose last two mayors and a recent police chief have gone to prison for corruption. One reason, as I’ve argued, is that many big city mayors no longer have business backgrounds. As a result, few know how to manage complex municipal organizations, including the challenge of minimizing opportunities for graft. Corruption-free cities where mayors and city councils are experienced in working the intersection of business and citizen interests, which are most often coincident, experience faster growth rates...
Second, mayors and other urban leaders must focus on developing productive entrepreneurship that will make cities more competitive in the future. My research shows that after two decades of betting on entrepreneurs to generate new economies, few cities appear to have benefited from their investment. Mayors should rethink their expectations of local entrepreneurs and the resources they provide to the town’s efforts to encourage new firms. Emphasis should be focused instead on building partnerships with local engineering schools and firms. My research also shows that persons with engineering educations and experience are responsible for starting the majority of new firms that survive and create demand for new jobs.
Third, cities also need to create incentives for residents, especially racial and ethnic minorities, to become owners of local business."
Finally, another great episode of Pop Culture Urbanism with really good insights on how tight zoning regulation forced development to be synonymous with evil gentrification and displacement, instead of a good thing of providing more housing for more people. Highly recommended.
“All of that was overblown. We never even got close to capacity,” Delgado stated. “It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy, out of control, overblown stuff. It’s fear, basically. It’s a fear-factor so the patients, particularly older patients, are afraid to death to do anything. There’s elderly people with chest pain staying at home and just dying, or coming in late — someone brings them in — they’ve already had a big heart attack. A lot of that is going on, and it’s really unsettling.” ...
“We always had the idea that we would not be overwhelmed quickly like New York,” Delgado said. “A lot of people got infected very quickly in New York because the population density there is just many orders of magnitude greater than Houston, Texas. That is the problem, the problem is all of them getting infected at a short period of time. That’s the problem, and that’s what screwed up everything in New York. That never was going to happen in Houston.”
Tax and regulatory burden rankings, lot size reform, increasing walkability, superstar cities vs. Covid and Spiderman, and much more
I apologize for the longer delays between what are usually weekly posts. My day job in alternative education and edutech has absolutely blown up with covid and remote learning, leaving little time for blogging. But I'm using a gap hour between meetings today to get this post cranked out, so here are some catch-up items:
Houston passed the new walkable places plan in targeted locations, including all of Midtown where I live. I have not had time to investigate it deeply, but on the surface it looks like it could be really good at encouraging more pedestrian-friendly development. I'll be curious to see before and after permitting numbers in Midtown to see if it's encouraging or discouraging new projects vs. previously strong growth in Midtown.
"Returning to Texas, the Austin Business Journal piece cited a survey that found that Austin was the top-ranked city for tech workers to relocate worldwide, just ahead of Seattle and Amsterdam. That ranking is largely based on past decisions that allowed the city’s housing market to keep up with demand. But unfortunately, Austin’s city council has shifted to the left over the past few years and has become increasingly hostile to both new development and road construction, with the city becoming more expensive and congested as a result. Were it not for the fact that most other tech havens are even further to the left politically, Austin would likely lose its No. 1 ranking."
"Next, we examine how this reform impacted Houston’s neighborhoods. Did developers flock to the most affluent neighborhoods? Or did this shift subdivision activity to lower-income neighborhoods with lower land values? Using both GIS data and regression analysis, we find that the new 1,400 square foot lots were overwhelmingly developed in two types of areas: First, in neighborhoods where there was substantial underutilized former commercial and industrial land, and second, in largely underbuilt middle-income residential neighborhoods.
The scale of this change in much of western Houston is hard to overstate. Many neighborhoods, such as Shady Acres and Rice Military, have been completely transformed. In many cases, this has involved the subdivision of conventional post-war 5,000 square foot lots into three townhomes, effectively tripling population densities. We hypothesize that the wealthiest areas avoided subdivision activity through existing deed restrictions, while middle-income neighborhoods absorbed much of the demand, minimizing redevelopment pressure in low-income neighborhoods.
We draw two lessons for planning practice from this case study. First, allowing the most extreme opponents to “opt out” of land-use reform may help clear a path for citywide liberalization. While planners and policymakers should be prudent, such compromises may make sense where local politics otherwise blocks reform. In Houston, the compromise was deemed acceptable, and the result has been over 25,000 new housing units close to major job centers.
Second, citywide land-use liberalization is likely to direct growth into middle-income and underbuilt neighborhoods, barring other institutional constraints. While this comes with separate risks—such as disinvestment from lower-income areas—it may help to ease concerns regarding displacement."
NYT: Coronavirus Threatens the Luster of Superstar Cities - Urban centers, with a dynamism that feeds innovation, have long been resilient. But the pandemic could drive a shift away from density. The article does a good job looking at all the different forces involved and potential outcomes, but seems to ignore the potential of safer car-based cities to still generate plenty of innovation and support amenities - places like Houston, Austin, and Silicon Valley. Excerpts:
“A survey by the market research firm Reach Advisors found that companies facing high real estate and labor costs were the most interested in pursuing remote work into the future. “The biggest shift away from density will likely be in markets such as the Bay Area and New York City,” said the company’s president, James Chung. By shifting to remote work, “they can dramatically widen their labor pool and evade the labor-wage trap that they are in.” …
"But for a city like New York, he said, Covid-19 offers an opportunity for redemption. “New York was running into a dead end, turning into a paradise for the rich,” he said. “Culturally dead.” Moving back to a cheaper, messier, more diverse equilibrium may carry a silver lining."
An open dialogue on serious strategies for making Houston a better city, as well as a coalition-builder to make them happen. All comments, email, and support welcome.
