Houston Strategies

Houston #1 std of living confirmed, #2 F500 HQs, higher speeds = higher incomes, screwy city metrics, and more

 Continuing to work through the summer backlog of smaller items...

• Visual Capitalist: Unzoned Houston has the highest purchasing power at the lowest cost-of-living in the world... aka the highest standard of living in the world. More cities should use these indexes as their north star metrics of progress.
• Houston is still affordable when factoring out distorted data: 

"Houston has the title of second most popular headquarters city for Fortune 500 firms... with 22 of them headquartered in the city... 

What makes Texas, or Houston for that matter, so appealing for corporations? Mostly the low cost of living and lack of taxes on businesses. Even Exxon has tightened its belt in the inflationary age, though, shedding its “God Pod” and consolidating its upper management’s formerly exclusive luxury suite into its preexisting Houston campus."

"faster cities are faster because they have more roads and are lower in density (which they describe as have a “larger land area”); and that those roads produce benefits by allowing faster top speeds more than by reducing congestion...The authors conclude that cities that want to increase speeds (and, by stated implication, worker incomes) should build more roads. While it admits that won’t be possible in Bangladesh, it should be possible in most cities and countries. Even if, as the anti-road people argue, building more roads simply leads to more driving, building roads that are faster leads to higher overall speeds which should produce enormous economic benefits."

• Chronicle: Why Texas' population growth is whomping California's (Opinion) - A Californian imagines the day when Texas has more people

Labels: affordability, growth, headquarters, home affordability, mobility strategies, rankings, transit, world city

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:39 PM 3 comments

METRO $ needs to support higher City priorities, dropping fertility rates, updated home affordability, better bike safety, and tragic land-regulation consequences in Maui

 Summer blog break is over and I'm back! Quite a few backlogged items:

• Bill King: Houston Metro Riders Pay 4% Of The Cost Of Their Rides. Subsidies have shot up as ridership has fallen post-pandemic. It's clear at this point METRO has way too much money for too few riders, and the City could desperately use that money to be redeployed to much higher priorities like police and street repairs, not to mention just closing the chronic budget gap.
• U.S. Fertility Rates Lowest in History. And this is part of the strength of Houston's growth:

Research shows that higher population densities mean lower fertility rates. High housing prices also lead to lower fertility rates. Further research shows that “living in spacious housing and in a family-friendly environment for a relatively long time leads to higher fertility.” 

In short, if you think that preventing demographic collapse is a good thing, then this becomes one more reason to oppose planners who want to densify American cities. Planners’ efforts to force more people to live in apartments or smaller homes by making housing artificially expensive could be the downfall of the American economy.

• 2023 Demographia US Housing Housing Affordability Study released. Houston is worsening but still better than most of the country, and I think our home price-to-income ratio may be temporarily skewed upward. With high mortgage rates, I think more of the middle and working class are out of the market, so recent sales skew wealthier (not to mention they make up more of the remote/hybrid work employees willing to upgrade moving farther out) – people who might be selling an existing home and paying cash for a new one (or at least a very substantial down payment). This would skew the home price-to-income ratio to make Houston look more unaffordable than it really is. 
• Tragic unintended consequences: Hawaii restrictive land-use law -> reduced housing supply -> skyrocketing prices -> drives away farm labor -> farms bankrupted with flammable grasses left behind instead of fire-resistant native or agricultural plants -> deadly fires in Maui.
• New Orleans Dismantles Bike Lanes:

Rather than create an illusion of safety with bike lanes that increase congestion, bicycle advocates should focus on programs, such as improved intersection designs, that actually do make bicycling safer without necessarily hampering auto driving. Unfortunately, too many city planners and bicycle groups are stuck in the “automobiles are evil” mentality and anything that hurts autos is regarded as a win for bicycles even if it results in more bicycle riders being injured or killed.

Labels: affordability, crime reduction, density, fertility, home affordability, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:01 PM 0 comments