Houston Strategies

Houston: Still Drawing a Crowd

First up, no surprise to those of us living here, but Houston has once again topped Penske's list of America's top moving destinations for 2024. CultureMap highlighted the news, noting this is the fourth consecutive year Houston has held the top spot. People are voting with their feet, and they're choosing Houston. Why? The familiar reasons resonate: job opportunities, a reasonable cost of living (especially compared to those "cool" coastal cities), and the ability to find more space. It seems the fundamentals still matter.

The High Price of "Planning" Utopia

Speaking of that reasonable cost of living, particularly in housing, the just-released 2025 Demographia International Housing Affordability report continues to lay bare the consequences of restrictive land-use planning. Year after year, Wendell Cox over at Demographia points out that a major driver of housing unaffordability globally is policies that try to force density and limit the expansion of housing on the urban fringe. These "smart growth" or "urban containment" strategies, while perhaps well-intentioned in some abstract sense, consistently lead to skyrocketing land costs and, consequently, housing prices that push ordinary families out. They create artificial scarcity. Houston is at a house-price-to-income ratio of 4.3, which is one of the most affordable in the country, especially for a high-growth city.

Pure gold excerpt on Planning and Portland

This brings me to a truly pure gold excerpt I saw recently from Randal O'Toole, The Antiplanner, discussing the failures of Portland's Metro 2040 plan. It's a long piece, but this part cuts to the chase (emphasis mine):

"The 1995 Future Vision called for “housing affordable for all,” “accessible employment centers throughout the region,” “equitable economic progress,” “public safety,” and reductions in poverty. By all of these measures, the region is worse today than it was in 1997, and this decline is almost entirely due to Metro’s 2040 plan. ....

The real problem is that planners can’t accurately foresee the future, so instead of planning for the future they plan for the past. Instead of helping people obtain the future they want, planners become so enamored with their plans that they persuade themselves that coercive tools such as restrictions on things that people want and subsidies for things that people don’t want are all good ideas.

This is why I am an Antiplanner. Planners get so caught up in their fantasies that they completely ignore reality when it is staring them in the face. Even when it is clear that their plans have failed — that “growing up not out” hasn’t made housing affordable, that building more light rail hasn’t gotten people out of their cars — they keep on doing the same thing. Metro, for example, continues to subsidize high-density housing projects and is busy planning at least two more light-rail lines."

Read that again. Decades of top-down planning, restricting what people actually want (like single-family homes with a yard, or the ability to drive their own car efficiently) and subsidizing what they don't, has led to the opposite of its stated goals. Housing is less affordable, and mobility can be worse despite billions spent on transit modes few choose to use for most trips.

Houston, for all its imperfections, has largely avoided this kind of ideological, restrictive planning when it comes to land use. Our "plan" has largely been to allow the market to respond to demand. And what do you know? We're a top destination for people seeking opportunity and a better quality of life, with housing that, while not immune to national trends, remains far more attainable than in heavily regulated, "planner-paradise" metros. Coincidence? I think not.