"I would be the first to argue that if an economist claims to know of a cure-all policy — a reliable way to relieve a long list of social ills in one fell swoop — common sense tells you to stop listening.
So it is awkward for me to declare that I know of something close to a panacea policy: one big reform that would raise living standards, reduce wealth inequality, increase productivity, raise social mobility, help struggling men without college degrees, clean the planet and raise birth rates. It’s a sweeping reform that Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives could all proudly support.
The panacea policy I have in mind is housing deregulation. Research confirms that there are large benefits in saying yes to tall buildings, yes to multifamily structures, yes to dense single-family development and yes to speedy permitting. The growing YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement already has high-profile wins in Minnesota, Oregon, California and beyond, but even YIMBY devotees rarely appreciate the scope of the merits of loosening rules on housing.
The economic argument for housing deregulation rests on basic supply and demand principles: allowing more construction leads to lower prices. This is evident in historical data, showing that housing prices were relatively stable before stricter regulations in the 1970s, while rising significantly afterwards.
Housing deregulation would directly improve the standard of living by significantly lowering housing costs, which currently represent a significant portion of the average American's budget.
The distributional effects of deregulation would be impactful in reducing wealth inequality, as rising home values have been a key driver of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.
Deregulation would enhance social mobility by removing barriers to moving to higher-wage areas. Current strict regulations often make the cost of living in such regions outweigh any potential wage gains, discouraging relocation for many.
Deregulation would create numerous job opportunities in the construction sector, a large and well-paying industry, particularly benefiting men without college degrees, who have faced challenges in the job market.
Environmental protection is a common rationale for restricting construction, but deregulation can actually lead to more sustainable practices by encouraging denser housing in urban areas, resulting in lower carbon emissions.
While concerns exist about homeowner resistance, the bigger obstacle to deregulation is public misunderstanding of basic economic principles, with many believing that increased housing supply will not lead to lower prices.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans have embraced housing deregulation yet. YIMBY activists lean left, but they are only one voice in the progressive coalition. Republican states usually have less housing regulation, but more from tradition than from principle. Yet, given housing deregulation’s many demonstrated benefits, this policy agenda deserves bipartisan support. Democrats should cheer the effects on equality, social mobility and the environment. Republicans should be delighted to see free markets spreading broad prosperity, creating new working-class opportunities and fostering family formation. In a rational world, the panacea policy of housing deregulation would be a done deal. Hopefully whoever wins the next election will agree."
Bill Reeves sent me a great link to a Marginal Revolution blog post by Tyler Cowen arguing that mobility has been more important than density in shaping American history and its future, which I 100% agree with. It highlights the historical importance of mobility in the US and challenges current urbanist trends favoring density. He makes some key points:
America's success is attributed more to advancements in transportation and infrastructure than to population density.
Historical examples range from horses and ships to modern aviation, showing a consistent focus on movement and connection.
Urban density is linked to lower fertility rates and the potential replication of undesirable political climates.
Mobility, on the other hand, is seen as fostering a stronger national defense and better immigrant assimilation.
Low-speed options like bicycles are viewed as impractical and even dangerous - "low-speed transport is a poor country thing"
The future lies in high-speed, affordable, and eco-friendly transportation solutions, such as self-driving vehicles and improved aviation.
Mobility is one of the secret sauces to Houston's success. In Jane Jacob's world, mobility was fixed and limited but density was variable. In today's world, density is fairly limited (by cars and higher living standards in terms of living space per person), but mobility is highly variable. My own thoughts on this:
"Techstars isn’t the only entity scaling back in Austin, either. In November, unicorn Cart announced that it was moving its headquarters back to Houston after relocating to Austin in late 2021. The company, which describes itself as an e-commerce-as-a-service business, reached a $1.2 billion valuation in June after raising a $60 million Series C round of funding.
Mitch Goulding, director of communications at Cart, told TechCrunch via email that the company had originally relocated its headquarters to Austin “with the explicit goal of attracting more software talent.” But as the company continues to scale (it claims to have seen its revenue climb by 9x since the end of 2021), it decided it needs to “augment other areas of the company,” including HR, finance, accounting and legal.
“We feel the move to Houston will unlock a deeper talent pool in these areas based on its position as a hub for major business,” Goulding said.
It’s also a matter of cost and convenience.
“Costs in Austin are high relative to Houston’s affordability, [and] Houston is also more accessible,” Goulding said. “It is typically easier and cheaper for employees flying in. It also tends to be easier for employees who drive in from across the state.”
"In Houston, Black-owned businesses have been thriving, with the city now rivaling Atlanta as a destination for Black families and young people.
“Everyone is coming to Houston,” said Victoria Walsh, 30, who moved from New Orleans for a restaurant job in 2018. “There’s a whole lot of jobs, a whole lot of new concepts, a new pop-up each week.”...
The city of Houston has long had thriving Black communities, but in recent years, the new arrivals have driven a kind of renaissance that is fueled, in large part, by who they are: middle-class Black people from other states with good jobs and business ideas. ...
“When you look at other cities, they’re not as diverse as Houston,” he said. “They don’t have as many opportunities.”
"Now, Houston’s transformation to an international hub for a growing number of multinational corporations — backed by one of the nation’s busiest international airports and global shipping ports — has helped propel the city to the top of the second annual FT-Nikkei Investing in America rankings. ...
That reputation has drawn in businesses both big and small. The Houston area is home to 26 Fortune 500 companies, making it the third-ranking metro area in the country. ...
The transition to green energy is helped by the knowhow that made it a centre for oil and gas. Houston boasts unrivalled technical expertise in energy, including manufacturing, engineering, trading markets, and complex industrial project management. It also has a robust energy infrastructure and the nation’s biggest port by tonnage. ...
“Increasingly, people working in the energy transition space are saying, you know, actually where the action is, is here,” says Tudor. “It’s not really San Francisco. It’s not really Boston. It’s Houston, Texas.”
Pros 👍: pleasantly surprised by Houston; plays up affordability, inner loop density, diversity, and the amazing food scene ("strong candidate for best food city in the US")
Cons 👎: bike and anti-car snob, toured Houston on bike in wonderful late October - maybe try coming in August sometime and see how bike-over-A/C'd-car you are then?... 🥵🙄 I've said it before and I'll say it again: Houston was built around the car because it's the only way to bring an air conditioner with you everywhere you go!
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:
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.
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.
This week we have excerpts from an excellent Fast Company article: A bold case against zoning - In a new book, M. Nolan Gray cites Houston as a model for rethinking zoning. These excerpts are great, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing, and even the book if you can!
---
"When the zoned American lands in Houston, they are liable to be struck by parking lots reinventing themselves as apartment buildings, by postwar subdivisions transforming into dense new townhouse districts, by old strip malls being reimagined as new satellite business districts. In the zoned city, any one of these developments would be a major ordeal, the subject of endless permitting and raucous public hearings—in Houston, it just happens.
...
Thanks in part to a lack of zoning, Houston builds housing at nearly three times the per capita rate of cities like New York City and San Jose. It isn’t all just sprawl either: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large. This ongoing supernova of housing construction has helped to keep Houston one of the most affordable big cities in the U.S., offering new arrivals modest rents and accessible home prices even amid seemingly endless demand.
...
Zoning critics rightly dispensed with the comforting myths surrounding zoning—that its purpose was to merely rationalize land use—and zeroed in on its tendency to restrict new housing construction, limit access to opportunity, institutionalize segregation, and force growth outward. Far from being duped, Houston’s working-class residents exhibited a subtler understanding of the purposes of zoning than many contemporary planners and rejected it accordingly.
...
Is this system of publicly enforced deed restrictions “basically zoning,” as some might argue? On the one hand, deed restrictions—like zoning—demarcate specified areas subject to a distinct set of stricter land-use rules. Both zoning and deed restrictions in Houston are enforced by the government, principally with the aim of propping up home values and maintaining a certain quality of life. Many deed restrictions even have rules banning apartments and enforcing a strict two-and-a-half-story height limit.
Yet, the similarities end there, and Houston’s system of deed restrictions is a significant improvement over zoning. For starters, deed restrictions only cover an estimated quarter of the city, largely in areas with low-rise, detached, single-family housing. Industrial areas, commercial corridors, mixed-use and multifamily neighborhoods, urban vacant lots, and yet-to-be-developed greenfields are virtually never subject to their provisions. This means that roughly three-quarters of Houston—including its more dynamic sections—are largely free to grow without anything even resembling zoning holding them back."
Houston's mini-kaihatsu, sinking false alarm, annexation history, shrinking population, school choice, and more
Several smaller items this week:
Report: Houston is one of the fastest sinking cities on Earth, could 'disappear'. Let's check the math folks. Houston elevation is 79' = 2408cm. Losing 2cm/year x 100 years = -200cm. Sea level rise of 1cm every 5 years for 100y = 20cm. New elevation in 2122 = 2188cm, almost 72ft! Doesn't sound anywhere close to 'disappearing'...
Big NYT fail on road safety: the clear inflection point in the graph is the rise of distracting smartphones, yet they're NOT EVEN MENTIONED ONCE. Instead it's anti-car, anti-SUV, anti-speed, and anti-rideshare. All agenda instead of real problem-solving.
Kinder: Houston, Dallas led metro area growth in 2021 even as their urban cores lost population (news story, hat tip to Oscar). Harris County declining a bit even while the metro grows. I think a lot of people used the pandemic to move out to the nicer newer suburbs (commutes less of a worry in a remote work world), and the backfill immigration into the city wasn’t there as it usually is, especially from international immigrants. Crime spike hasn't helped either. Harris County really has to turn it around before we end up in the same place as Dallas County with significant outflows. Once people and employers flee, it’s a negative reinforcing cycle :-(
Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan, by Salim Furth. The review notes similarities between Tokyo's mini-kaihatsu (a dozen townhomes fronting a small alley) and similar developments in Houston:
Mini-kaihatsu, Houston
"The concept is the same, and it’s no coincidence that both arise in places with light regulation, strong demand, and little public streets funding. As I wrote about Houston:
Houstonians achieve privacy by orienting many new townhouses onto a share courtyard-driveway, sometimes gated, which creates an intermediate space between the private home and the public street…
The courtyard-driveways also provide a shared play space, as evidenced by frequent basketball hoops. Despite what Jane Jacobs may have told you, city streets are not viable play spaces for 21st-century children. But cul-de-sacs can be. Houston’s courtyard-and-grid model may be the ideal blend, unlocking the connectivity of a city while delivering the secure sociability of a cul-de-sac to a large share of homes."
'“Car-oriented” and “sprawl” aren’t the same thing: the word “sprawl” is imprecise. But it surely does not apply to heavily urbanized areas where office towers mingle with multi-story apartment buildings. Easterners are accustomed to a dichotomy between “walkable urban” and “driveable suburban”. Much of Houston’s core is “driveable urban.”
...
Inspired: As a market urbanist, I was already a fan of Houston in theory. But the visit made me significantly upgrade my evaluation of Houston as a place. It is far more interesting than Austin, for one thing. And although it is automobile-oriented, it is definitively a city, with all that implies.'
“After Uptown officials spent $192 million rebuilding the street to develop the line, operated by Metro, to carry 12,000 riders per day, bus drivers are ferrying fewer than 800 on many work days.”
Our URI/COU 2022 edition of the Demographia affordable housing index has been released. Sadly, Houston's median house-to-income ratio has moved up to 4.5, earning the "seriously unaffordable" label, although still much better off than most of the country's major metros (see below).
Finally, if you missed our URI/COU webinar last week on "The Case for Suburbia", you can check it out here. Great panel, and yours truly gets a mention for my work on MUDs.
"Complementing sprawl has also been a long-term trend toward people driving more and taking transit less. In 1960, about 12 percent of all Americans took transit to work. By 2020, it was about 5 percent, and the decline of non-work trips on transit was even faster. Meanwhile, the number of Americans who travel to work by car, especially those who travel alone in a car, continues to increase. The miles driven by car per capita have almost doubled. This is not because of supposed subsidies to cars; according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, cars pay for almost all of the cost of roads through gas taxes and other charges, while transit riders pay barely a third of the cost of their rides, and that ratio is dropping as transit use declines. For decades, in fact, more and more of the gas tax has been siphoned off to pay for increasingly expensive and increasingly empty buses and trains. ...
Perhaps the most important tool for reducing the heat island effect is trees, which provide shade and absorb solar radiation. Suburbs are, almost by definition, more verdant than cities. Famously sprawling cities like Atlanta or Houston have tree cover on more than 30 percent of their landmass, while older, denser cities such as Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago have under 20 percent. Besides reducing the heat island effect, nearby trees have been shown to intercept particulate matter and absorb ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide, thus reducing local air pollution as well. The personal and psychological effects of trees are real too. Studies have shown that the presence of trees decreases stress, increases attentiveness and sense of safety and comfort, and reduces the likelihood that pregnant women will have low-birthweight babies. There is no way to have the same access to trees in dense urban areas.
...
Over even a medium-term time frame, the increasing adoption of hybrid, electric, and autonomous vehicles will almost completely sever the connection between VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and greenhouse gases. Those who are attempting to redesign cities, projects that will take decades or even centuries, merely to reduce the use of gasoline-powered cars are thus engaged in a futile exercise that will only become more futile with time. It would be like attempting to redesign cities in 1900 to reduce horse manure. The technology will change faster than the city will."
'Issuing a challenge, Glock talks of the “Long Triumph of Sprawl,” describing a “clear global and long-term preference,” while the “pandemic has only made the shift toward the modern, sprawling city more rapid and obvious.”
Glock suggest that “instead of warring against sprawling cars, planners and environmentalist should recognize how the green spaces of suburbia allied to autonomous electric vehicles in green single-family houses can provide both the affordability and sustainability most Americans crave.” ...
Appropriately, Glock concludes, “environmentalists should embrace the same future that most Americans have already chosen.”
Reason: "The city of Houston gets it more or less right" on densification vs. sprawl, with a variety of housing types. Free market with deed restrictions, but no zoning and no urban growth boundary.
A great video, although I wish they hadn't shown the beer can house (talk about poster-child for terrifying people about eliminating zoning!) and had used a map less than 50 years old, lol. It didn't even have a completed 610 Loop on it!
"Houston is known for its lack of Euclidean-style zoning, but the city still has various ordinances that control land use. In 1998, Houston reformed its subdivision rules to allow for parcels smaller than five thousand square feet citywide. In this paper, we discuss the unique land-use rules in place in Houston prior to reform and the circumstances that led to reform, including the “opt out” provisions, which mediated homeowner opposition to substantial increases in housing density. We then analyze the effects of reform. After relief from large lot requirements, post-reform development activity was heavily concentrated in middle-income, less dense, underbuilt neighborhoods."
Municipal utility districts seem to work in the Lone Star State. They have increased the housing supply, using lighter regulations, resulting in downward pressure on costs. Now, they may be catching on elsewhere.
Are we entering the Distributed Age? Plus perspectives on Houston, TX #1 for infrastructure, and more
My leads this week are a couple of great quotes about Houston:
"Houston has actively deregulated, with the result that it's the only major city in the U.S. today undergoing a transformational change from suburban to urban densities. Houston makes thinkable the unthinkable."
-Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Land Use without Zoning book letter
"Once a planning pariah, Houston, with its peculiar lack of zoning, increasingly looks like the future."
-Nolan Gray in the afterword of the newly updated Mercatus edition of "Land Use without Zoning" by Bernard Siegan.
If you're curious about the recently re-released book on Houston, "Land Use without Zoning" by Bernard Siegan, you can find it here.
"Other American cities—notably Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Miami—are challenging NYC’s supremacy in communications, legal and financial services, the arts and business. Political and economic leaders in those cities encourage inclusive growth, development and change."
"No state handles more of America’s cargo than Texas. In fact, no state comes close. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Lone Star State handles around $2 trillion worth of commodities per year. And Texas has the infrastructure to handle it. Port Houston, the nation’s second biggest, has surpassed Rotterdam as the world’s largest petrochemical complex, officials say."
NYT: Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Manhattan May Never Be the Same - New York City, long buoyed by the flow of commuters into its towering office buildings, faces a cataclysmic challenge, even when the pandemic ends. Good excerpts in this one. I wonder if the Distributed Age label will stick?...
“A year after the coronavirus sparked an extraordinary exodus of workers from office buildings, what had seemed like a short-term inconvenience is now clearly becoming a permanent and tectonic shift in how and where people work. Employers and employees have both embraced the advantages of remote work, including lower office costs and greater flexibility for employees, especially those with families.” …
Still, about 90 percent of Manhattan office workers are working remotely, a rate that has remained unchanged for months, according to a recent survey of major employers by the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group, which estimated that less than half of office workers would return by September. …
“We believe that we’re on top of the next change, which is the Distributed Age, where people can be more valuable in how they work, which doesn’t really matter where you spend your time,” said Alexander Westerdahl, the vice president of human resources at Spotify, the Stockholm-based streaming music giant that has 6,500 employees worldwide.
"As Houston prepares for unprecedented population growth in the coming decades, I predict that the versatile ADU concept will continue to help make our inner-city neighborhoods more affordable and sustainable."
"In 1976, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable declared that Houston was “the American present and future. It is an exciting and disturbing place,” one that “scholars flock to for the purpose of seeing what modern civilization has wrought.” In her account the city's distinctive character lay in its decenteredness, its seemingly limitless capacity for shape-shifting, and its utter lack of history. Like many observers then and since, Huxtable was struck by the experience of juxtaposition—of form, scale, type, and space—that was a consequence, in part, of the city's infamous lack of zoning regulations and its unapologetic accommodation of private real estate interests"
"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.
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."
Misleading poverty stats, what $250k buys you, density and transit vs. Covid, great HTX murals
A new piece is out examining Houston's increase in high-poverty neighborhoods (Chronicle coverage here - hat tip to Charles). This kind of analysis has always rubbed me the wrong way, because it rewards cities that tighten housing supply and force gentrification and displacement – pushing people out so their “high-poverty neighborhoods” decline. It's a game of hot potato with low-income populations. I like that Houston allows plenty of new supply (almost always at the higher end) so older housing can become affordable (like the “newly poor” and “deepening poverty” neighborhoods in their analysis) - with the prime example being middle-class apartments built during the 70s oil boom that are affordable immigrant housing today – that’s great! Houston always allows even the poorest to come here seeking opportunity rather than blocking them out thru restrictive housing policy.
And their point about rich neighborhoods being next to poor ones is also great! That means there is affordable housing near the jobs (esp. service jobs). Every major job center in Houston has affordable neighborhoods within a 15-minute transit ride. A lot of cities can’t say that. I would say it’s a better model than Dallas, where poverty is concentrated on the south side while wealth is concentrated on the north side, so the south side has very limited access to opportunity.
What this report labels “turned around” neighborhoods would be labeled as “gentrified” in a lot of other reports, and while I’m glad Houston has had a few turnarounds, I’m also glad we don’t have too many because I think that would be an unhealthy sign of too much gentrification because of lack of housing supply in the neighborhoods people want to move to.
What we need is not geographic analysis, but generational cohorts analysis over time: do poor families that move to Houston do better in the 2nd and 3rd generations? I think they do, but data is hard to come by.
NYT: Coronavirus Escape: To the Suburbs - The pandemic has convinced some New Yorkers that it’s time to finally give up on city living. I think this indicates a bigger potential trend in rising exurbs everywhere: people can work virtually most of the time (it has become normalized), but still get into the city when they need to. Big metros will stay healthy, but the balance will shift out more. Will it reduce urban home prices? Will it deflate the impetus for the YIMBY movement?
"For some New Yorkers, it’s time to get out of town for good.
Cooped up and concerned about the post-Covid future, renters and owners are making moves to leave the city, not for short-term stays in weekend houses, as was common when the pandemic first arrived, but more permanently in the suburbs.
While some of the fresh transplants are accelerating plans that had been simmering on the back burner, others are doing what once seemed unthinkable, opting for a split-level on a cul-de-sac after decades of apartment living. Others seem to have acquired a taste for country life after sheltering with parents in places with big lawns or in log cabins.
But there’s also a sense that in today’s era of social distancing, one-person-at-a-time elevator rides to get home and looping routes to avoid passers-by on city streets has fundamentally changed New York City." ...
“I feel sometimes like I am only safe in my car”
Will the pandemic drive the rise of fringe cities in the far exurbs? I wanted to post this comment separately from the main article because I think it opens an interesting new conversation about the "urban-suburban town" as an ideal for a lot of middle-age people, especially those with families. With remote work normalized, people will be much more comfortable living 1-2 hours outside a major city/airport since they don’t have to cover that distance on a daily basis. This goes beyond the suburbs and edge cities. I'm thinking “Fringe Cities” maybe? Examples: Palm Springs, San Ramon, Monterey, Sacramento (for SV), Galveston, Fredericksburg (hill country beyond SA and Austin), Providence, Ann Arbor, Madison, New Haven, Manchester, Boulder, and many others. Would love to hear more ideas for fringe cities with potential in the comments? Here's the comment on the NYT story:
"I lived in the tri-state area for four years. We had a chance to live in New York City and politely passed. The subpar public schools, the insane competition and cost of non-diverse private schools, the constant noise, the grime, and hassle to do normal things were completely unappealing. Not to mention the (over) price of real estate. I went to an event at a $10M Soho loft apartment. It was beautiful, but the owner couldn’t escape the constant noise from the street below. And for what? Access to a new craft cocktail speakeasy that I would never go to anyway? A Michelin star restaurant that’s booked up months in advance? You get the most efficient value of a city like that by living in a close in suburb. We lived in Montclair, NJ where you could get high quality restaurants, bars, independent theaters, unique shops and boutiques, and even concert venues walking distance from your house. A friend lived in Park Slope and we talked constantly about the respective quality of our lives. Most of the things he talked about he never actually enjoyed. Once big cities got gentrified, they lost their edge anyway. The urban suburban town is the city of the future. All of the shops/bars/restaurants in very close proximity, easy access to the city for the weekend/occasional cultural immersion, quality public schools and an overall easier life. Big cities ask too much and return too little in terms of how people actually live beyond the young, single professional or retiree years."
"Top state and city officials are already contemplating the need for radically different routines, including transit systems with limits on occupancy for trains and buses. That could require staggered shifts for millions of workers.
“I don’t know that it’s going to be possible to have rush hours,” said Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates commuter trains to and from Manhattan.
My thoughts: I just assumed they would do the Asian protocol with masks and cleaning, but if they’re truly going to cut down the occupancy of the trains (which, to be safe, they do), I’m not sure NYC really works anymore. You can talk about staggered shifts all you want, but office workers already do that naturally, with many spreading out arrivals from 7am to 9:30 or even 10am. Yes, you can stagger shift workers, but I just don’t think there is any reasonable set of shifts that will reduce the crush of office workers. They’ll just have to work remotely for the foreseeable future. And if that’s the case, how many will stay in the city vs. move elsewhere? And then when there is a vaccine, what are the odds they’ll move back?
Try to imagine this in a couple of months: most of the country is operating back to semi-normal with some distancing, but NYC is still in lockdown. Will large employers start to seriously explore moving? Which employees really have to be in NYC? And has that definition of “have to” changed in a video meeting world and electronic trading markets? And if they do move, do they go to the suburbs of NYC, or elsewhere in the country?
Just as Texas has been preying on California companies for a while, you could get a feeding frenzy of cities and states across the country trying to lure companies out NYC. And who wins that game? Florida? North Carolina? Texas?
“The New York urban area (roughly New York City plus Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties in New York plus Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Union counties in New Jersey) provides 45 percent of all transit trips in the United States and, not coincidentally, has seen about 45 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States.”
“For many years we have a lot of aspirations for transit: We want it to beat traffic, fight climate change, and revitalize communities,” he said. “But the two things it has demonstrably done in last half century is provide mobility for those without — whether that’s due to age, income, or disability — and allow highly agglomerated places function. My educated guess is that we will see the rise of transit as a social service.”
That's enough for this week - apologies for the length.
"It should go without saying that evaluation of the COVID-19 spread needs to be objective. This means that it needs to include all potentially factors, even the most “politically correct”, such as density --- especially the exposure density from how we live, work and get around.
The subways are an important part of this in New York City. As Harris notes, “We know that close contact in subways is fully consistent with the spread of coronavirus, either by inhalable droplets or residual fomites left on railings, pivoted grab handles, and those smooth, metallic, vertical poles that everyone shares.”
“A city comes into being for the sake of life,” wrote Aristotle, “but exists for the sake of living well.” This should become the first principle of our next urban renaissance. Cramming poor people into tiny spaces, forcing them to ride crowded subways and taking away many upwardly mobile jobs, may work for luxury developers and those in search of kitchen help, but does not create the foundation for an urbanism that can thrive after the pandemic."
"A commuter from a detached house in Westchester County to a job in Lower Manhattan’s financial district is likely to experience high exposure density. The trip, for the sake of discussion, includes a walk or car to the commuter rail station, a ride on commuter rail to Grand Central Station, a walk through corridors to reach the subway station, a ride on the subway train, exiting through a subway station for a walk to the high rise work location. At this point, the commuter joins others in a crowded elevator, and exit at the 40th floor, walking to an office shared with others."
"Evidence is mounting evidence that urban transit has been one of the main spreaders of COVID-19. New York governor Andrew Cuomo says the virus can survive for days on transit seats and metal surfaces. The head of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority was infected by the virus and the head of New Jersey Transit actually died from it.
In the face of this evidence, anti-auto advocates have given up on their efforts to get people out of their cars and onto transit. As a Huffington Post headline reads, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Forcing Cities To Rethink Public Transportation.”
Just kidding. In fact, despite the headline, the story goes on to tell how anti-auto politicians are using the pandemic to somehow argue that more people should be discouraged from driving."
"Put another way, if, as seems likely, higher-income employees simply take advantage of working remotely to fan out more broadly across the country, the housing market and the nature of cities will change dramatically. The peaks in places of high demand will fall. Demand may be spread out, making housing easier to afford. New construction of less-dense housing types may find a place in today’s highest-cost cities, and renovation may take off elsewhere.
Some will argue that this will undermine the intellectual and commercial innovation that has historically sprouted from the close contacts of cities. The popularity of Zoom meetings and flexible hours suggests otherwise.
Without a doubt, though, the coronavirus will have implications for where Americans want to live and work. The status quo ante is unlikely to return."
"The country’s three largest metropolitan areas, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, all lost population in the past several years, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Even slightly smaller metro areas, like Houston, Washington, D.C., and Miami grew far less slowly. In all, growth in the country’s major metropolitan areas fell by nearly half over the course of the past decade, Mr. Frey found.
...
Now, as local leaders contemplate how to reopen, the future of life in America’s biggest, most dense cities is unclear. Mayors are already warning of precipitous drops in tax revenue from joblessness. Public spaces like parks and buses, the central arteries of urban life, have become danger zones. And with vast numbers of professionals now working remotely, some may reconsider whether they need to live in the middle of a big city after all.
Before the pandemic, millennials and older members of Generation Z were already increasingly choosing smaller metro areas like Tucson, Ariz.; Raleigh, N.C.; and Columbus, Ohio, according to Mr. Frey. Also growing were exurbs and newer suburbs outside large cities.
“There was a dispersion from larger metros to smaller metros, from urban cores to suburbs and exurbs,” he said." ...
“The folks that currently live in New York, that stay there full time that aren’t snowbirds, they are going to be like, ‘You know what? That’s it. Density is something we don’t want to deal with anymore.’"
NYT: A Cheaper Roof Over Your Head During the Pandemic?A relatively new arrangement, combining the advantages of renting and buying, could help people keep their homes and help millennials enter the housing market. But hidden within that idea is a danger. This is deeply concerning to me because it means Wall Street will start hiring lobbying firms to block new housing supply so their assets maximize their appreciation. Not good and not healthy for society.
"More generally, increasing the demand for housing cannot resolve the public’s housing affordability woes in America’s expensive coastal cities. Only increasing supply can. Housing costs are high in those cities because for decades strong demand for housing has been met with local land-use policy that severely limited new construction. Even a pandemic, with a recession in its wake, won’t stem housing price appreciation in the long term.
Increasing people’s buying power, even if it emerges from something as significant as giving up on traditional ownership, won’t improve the state of housing affordability. As long as demand is fundamentally strong, building more housing is the only thing that will help."
Governing: Why Can’t We Build Infrastructure Cheaply, Quickly and Well?We have a loose consensus in America on factors that drive costs and time up and quality down. What we don't have is a consensus on how to get those factors under control. Hat tip to Barry.
Finally, has anyone heard of or seen The Gathering Place in Tulsa. Super cool. We need one in Houston! Any big philanthropists want to step up?...
"There’s a quality about Houston, though, that transcends its built pattern: affordability. For decades, Houston has been the nation’s leading example of an “opportunity city”. It has, like coastal cities, high demand—aka fast growing job opportunities and population growth. But unlike those metros, it builds lots of housing, thus stabilizing prices. The median home price is $190,000, which is just 4/5ths the national average, according to Zillow. Midtown’s median home prices are $309,000, extremely low for a centrally-located urban neighborhood. This affordability has made Houston a refuge for expats from expensive states, and for immigrants—it is now the nation’s most diverse city.
The affordability can be tied to both Houston’s density and sprawl. Rather than one being good and the other bad, both forms of growth have helped stabilize prices. But the multi-family infill housing is the most organic outcome to be found in the Houston model. If America had a more market-oriented urban approach, those aspects of Houston—the density and affordability—would be the ones most likely replicated. For this reason, “getting a bunch of Houstons” should be an urbanist goal."
This is pretty much the perfect solution to Houston - and the country's - energy woes. And it should please both the right (nationalism and the economy) and the left (increasing the cost of carbon). Coincidentally, I went to Rice with this guy!
"A farsighted leader, argued Andy Karsner, a former U.S. assistant energy secretary, “could have imposed a variable U.S. tariff or fee on imported oil, which would be easily absorbed while prices are now slumping.” Such an import fee “could dynamically and automatically kick in incrementally if prices fell below an agreed floor, say $40 to $50 a barrel — the price that U.S. producers need to stay in business and supply America. The fee would disappear if prices jump above the agreed level. Brent crude is now around $31.”
If we guaranteed U.S. oil producers a predictable price floor to enable the least indebted and most productive of them to survive, Karsner told me, it would pay multiple benefits: “It would raise money for us to invest in infrastructure; prevent job losses for skilled engineers and multibillion-dollar bailouts for U.S. oil companies; keep manageably low gasoline prices for U.S. consumers; and strengthen our energy security from predatory efforts by Russia and Saudi Arabia to wipe out our domestic oil industry.”
But, most important, it would accelerate our clean energy transition, by shielding our electric car industry from foreign-manipulated gasoline prices and our wind and solar industries from temporarily suppressed natural gas prices."
"Several experts are advancing another explanation, too: Features that have long been viewed as liabilities — the state’s solitary car culture and traffic-jammed freeways, a dearth of public transportation and sprawling suburban neighborhoods — may have been protective.
“Life in California is much more spread out,” said Eleazar Eskin, chair of the department of computational medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Single-family homes compared with apartment buildings, work spaces that are less packed and even seating in restaurants that is more spacious.”
Many scientific studies have found a correlation between population density and the spread of flu and other infectious diseases, something that may exist for the coronavirus as well."
"Imagine Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile discovered that, no matter how much they expanded their cell-phone networks, people kept buying new smart phones and using those networks. Would they decide to stop expanding their services for fear of turning too many people into smart-phone junkies? Of course not; so long as revenues covered their costs, they would happily expand to meet the demand.
The point is that almost anyone would consider that an investment leading to increased use to be a sign of success. Yet Transportation for America sees it as a sign of failure. Would T4A have us stop building libraries, hospitals, and schools because the ones we build get used by readers, patients, and students?"
"Houston Public Works has pulled proposals to permanently close the Brazos Street bridge and implement new pedestrian features around a corridor threaded between the Montrose area and Midtown.
“Please be advised that the Houston Public Works Department along with Mayor Turner has made the decision to resume the project with the original design,” reads a Public Works notice sent to stakeholders on April 2."
"Of the 10 counties with the largest population growth in the country between 2010 and 2019, six of them are in Texas. Harris/Houston had the 2nd largest population increase adding more than 620,000 people just behind Maricopa/Phoenix."
"Large metro areas had the steepest decline over the course of the decade, Mr. Frey found in an analysis, with the growth rate down by nearly half. Rural areas, in contrast, grew slightly by the end of the decade, though that followed several years of declines.
Places that had once been popular destinations for young people — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — ended the decade with some of the biggest declines. New York began losing population in 2017, and last year it registered a loss of more than 60,000 people, the biggest population decline of any American city, Mr. Frey found.
The housing market collapse of 2008 and the rising prices in suburbs prompted millennials to move to big coastal cities. But that pattern reversed by mid-decade, Mr. Frey said, as millennials fled rising rents and home prices.
Places with the biggest gains for the decade were Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Medium-size metro areas, like Las Vegas, have also moved up the ranks of gainers, as have Charlotte, N.C.; Seattle; and Austin, Texas.
"The experience of Los Angeles County — with its dense urbanization and ideal weather — should be a warning to those, in California and elsewhere, who assume that high density, “transit oriented development” and substituting transit for driving alone naturally go together. In fact, they do not."
Stop the Bagby closure, oil import tariffs, Inner Katy MaX Lanes, virus vs density vs heat, HTX #1 home values, and more
Apologies for the long gap between posts - I wanted to give the 15-year anniversary post extra time as the lead post on the blog. But in the meantime we've accumulated a whole lot of news items to get out, only a few of which related to the coronavirus (maybe a good thing?).
Harris County #3 on the list of worst counties for drunk driving. Half of all auto-fatalities involve a drunk driver! That's your real target for Vision Zero. I think we should start with any DUI conviction requiring passing a breathalyzer test to start their car for a decade+.
{NYC} Mayor de Blasio has scoffed at the “road diet” idea that traffic will melt away if fewer lanes are provided. “We have to be careful,” he told Gothamist recently. “If we say, ‘Hey, let’s reduce the amount of lanes,’ that’s not a guarantee people get out of their cars; it is a guarantee of traffic jams and other problems.”
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.
