Houston Strategies

The best posts from the first 20 years and 2.3 million pageviews

Today is the 20th (!) birthday of Houston Strategies with our 1,412th post.  It's hard to believe that two decades have passed since I started this blog, and it's been an incredible journey. It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating 1.5 million pageviews at the 15-year mark.  Obviously things have slowed down a bit in recent years (this is my first post of 2025, lol).  In honor of this milestone, I've decided to update my best posts from the first 15 years - which is now five years out-of-date - by pulling from my annual highlights posts.  As you skim this list, I hope you find some of interest that you missed, forgot, or may have been posted before you discovered Houston Strategies.  Enjoy.

For those of you a little put off by the old-style webpage design, I should take this opportunity to mention again that it is sort of stuck, and that's because I have a legacy blogspot template that can't be upgraded to a newer design without either a lot of work outside my expertise or losing my archive of old posts.  One of the penalties for being an early blogger, lol.  Hope you don't mind the old format.  I'm kinda assuming the content matters more to my readers than a slick modern design ;-)

• Should METRO reconsider eliminating transit fares? (again)
• Induced Demand debunked
• Texas' winning approach to housing supply and affordability
• Houston's blob is about to eat even more of East Texas... and we should embrace it
• Astrodome as the world's largest climate-controlled festival park
• Four drivers of Texas' rapid growth
• A better alternative to channelizing Buffalo Bayou
• A new strategy for securing Houston's economic future
• METRO BRT: 'The most colossal waste of taxpayers’ money in the history of the City'
• A more reliable Texas electricity grid at a lower cost
• Reason interviews me on Houston's affordability vs homelessness
• How to Fix American Capitalism
• The death of Texas high-speed rail (fundamental economics)
• Discouraging panhandling and getting a 'wag brigade' for the airports

1. A new brand identity for Houston: Houspitality
2. MaX Lanes: A Next-Generation Strategy for Affordable Proximity
3. MetroNext's bold moonshot opportunity
4. Elements of an Opportunity City
5. Ten years of Houston Strategies retrospective
6. Maximizing Opportunity Urbanism with Robin Hood Planning (COU White Paper)
7. How Opportunity Urbanism can save the global economy (Part 1, Part 2)
8. The Ultimate Houston Strategy
9. Seizing the Astrodome opportunity to establish Houston's new global identity
10. My TEDx Houston talk, mostly about Houston (a summary of some of my better ideas from this blog)
11. A Pragmatic Approach to Houston’s Future (part 1, part 2)
12. A Map to Houston’s World-Class Future (part 1, part 2)
13. Architects vs. Economists (the planning vs. free-market spectrum)
14. Applying Jane Jacobs' 4 tenets of vibrant neighborhoods to car-based cities (mobility/draw-zones for vibrancy)
15. Why does Houston have such a great restaurant scene?

Labels: economic strategy, highlights, identity, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, opportunity urbanism

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:46 AM