2025 Highlights
Happy New Year! Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2025, with this year featuring as many (or more!) great posts from Oscar as from me. If you missed them earlier this year - or just didn't have time to read them then - hopefully the holidays are a more leisurely time for perusal.
I'd also like to thank
MyBestPlan for their ongoing generous support. They always have the best and cheapest electricity plan for your Texas home. They have saved me a ton of money on electricity, and I suggest you
contact them for a free, no-obligation savings estimate. Mention “HS” or "Houston Strategies" so they know you’re with us.
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
2025 marks 20 years of Houston Strategies! As always, thanks for your readership.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in the best posts from the first 20 years and 2.3 million pageviews.Labels: highlights
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 In honor of this milestone, I've decided to update my best posts from the first 15 years - which is now five years out-of-date - by pulling from my annual highlights posts.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 ;-)
Reflections and Looking Ahead
Reaching 20 years and 2.3 million pageviews is a significant milestone for Houston Strategies. It's a testament to the power of ideas and the importance of ongoing dialogue about how we shape Houston. As I reflect on the past two decades, I'm filled with gratitude for the readers who have joined me on this journey. Your engagement, feedback, and support have been invaluable.
Houston Strategies will continue to explore the ever-evolving landscape of urban planning in the Opportunity City, seeking innovative solutions to the challenges facing Houston and advocating for policies that create a better and more vibrant city. Here's to the next chapter!
As always, thanks for your readership.
-Tory
Top posts and big ideas from the last five years15 absolute all-time favorites from the first 15 years- A new brand identity for Houston: Houspitality
- MaX Lanes: A Next-Generation Strategy for Affordable Proximity
- MetroNext's bold moonshot opportunity
- Elements of an Opportunity City
- Ten years of Houston Strategies retrospective
- Maximizing Opportunity Urbanism with Robin Hood Planning (COU White Paper)
- How Opportunity Urbanism can save the global economy (Part 1, Part 2)
- The Ultimate Houston Strategy
- Seizing the Astrodome opportunity to establish Houston's new global identity
- My TEDx Houston talk, mostly about Houston (a summary of some of my better ideas from this blog)
- A Pragmatic Approach to Houston’s Future (part 1, part 2)
- A Map to Houston’s World-Class Future (part 1, part 2)
- Architects vs. Economists (the planning vs. free-market spectrum)
- Applying Jane Jacobs' 4 tenets of vibrant neighborhoods to car-based cities (mobility/draw-zones for vibrancy)
- Why does Houston have such a great restaurant scene?
I also want to acknowledge Oscar Slotboom's deeply analytical and wonderfully insightful guest posts over the last few years:
Thank you again!
Labels: economic strategy, highlights, identity, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, opportunity urbanism
2024 Highlights
Happy New Year! Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2024, with this year featuring as many (or more!) great posts from Oscar as from me. If you missed them earlier this year - or just didn't have time to read them then - hopefully the holidays are a more leisurely time for perusal.
I'd also like to thank
MyBestPlan for their ongoing generous support. They always have the best and cheapest electricity plan for your Texas home. They have saved me a ton of money on electricity, and I suggest you
contact them for a free, no-obligation savings estimate. Mention “HS” so they know you’re with us.
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
2025 marks 20 years of Houston Strategies! As always, thanks for your readership.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in the best posts from the first 15 years and 1.5 million pageviews.
Labels: highlights
2023 Highlights
Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2023, with this year featuring as many great posts from Oscar as from me. If you missed them earlier this year - or just didn't have time to read them then - hopefully the holidays are a more leisurely time for perusal.
I'd also like to thank
MyBestPlan for their ongoing generous support. They always have the best and cheapest electricity plan for your Texas home. They have saved me a ton of money on electricity, and I suggest you
contact them for a free, no-obligation savings estimate. Mention “HS” so they know you’re with us.
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
As always, thanks for your readership.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in the best posts from the first 15 years and 1.5 million pageviews.
Labels: highlights
2022 Highlights
Hope everyone survived the arctic blast for the holidays. Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2022, with this year featuring more great posts from Oscar than from me. If you missed them earlier this year - or just didn't have time to read them then - hopefully the holidays are a more leisurely time for perusal.
I'd also like to thank
MyBestPlan for their ongoing generous support. They always have the best and cheapest electricity plan for your Texas home. They have saved me a ton of money on electricity, and I suggest you
contact them for a free, no-obligation savings estimate. Mention “HS” so they know you’re with us.
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
As always, thanks for your readership.And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in
the best posts from the first 15 years and 1.5 million pageviews.Labels: highlights
2021 Highlights
Hope everyone is enjoying the abnormally warm holidays. Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2021, with this year featuring as many great posts from Oscar as from me. If you missed them earlier this year - or just didn't have time to read them then - hopefully the holidays are a more leisurely time for perusal.
I'd also like to thank
MyBestPlan for their ongoing generous support. They always have the best and cheapest electricity plan for your Texas home. They have saved me a ton of money on electricity, and I suggest you
contact them for a free, no-obligation savings estimate. Mention “HS” so they know you’re with us.
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
As always, thanks for your readership.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in
the best posts from the first 15 years and 1.5 million pageviews.
Labels: highlights
2020 Highlights
Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays. Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2020 - overall an uneventful, not-very-memorable year (right?! ;-) If you missed them earlier this year - or just didn't have time to read them then - hopefully the holidays are a more leisurely time for perusal.
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
As always, thanks for your readership.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in
the best posts from the first 15 years and 1.5 million pageviews.
Labels: highlights
The best posts from the first 15 years and 1.5 million pageviews
Today is
the 15th (!) birthday of Houston Strategies with our 1,280th post. Wow, time flies. It's hard to believe I've been doing this for 15 years. We're also up to more than 1.5 million pageviews, which is an amazing acceleration given that we just hit one million page views only three years ago at
the 12th anniversary, and that's not counting views at
the Chronicle,
URI/COU, or
the Google Group email distribution list. In honor of those milestones, I've decided to update
my best posts from the first dozen years - which is now over three years out-of-date - by pulling from
my annual highlights posts. Since 15 years is still a lot of highlight posts, I've created an even shorter list of my fifteen all-time favorite 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 ;-)
As always, thanks for your readership.
-Tory
Absolute all-time favorites: 15 posts from 15 years (out of 1,280)
- A new brand identity for Houston: Houspitality
- MaX Lanes: A Next-Generation Strategy for Affordable Proximity
- MetroNext's bold moonshot opportunity
- Elements of an Opportunity City
- Ten years of Houston Strategies retrospective
- Maximizing Opportunity Urbanism with Robin Hood Planning (COU White Paper)
- How Opportunity Urbanism can save the global economy (Part 1, Part 2)
- The Ultimate Houston Strategy
- Seizing the Astrodome opportunity to establish Houston's new global identity
- My TEDx Houston talk, mostly about Houston (a summary of some of my better ideas from this blog)
- A Pragmatic Approach to Houston’s Future (part 1, part 2)
- A Map to Houston’s World-Class Future (part 1, part 2)
- Architects vs. Economists (the planning vs. free-market spectrum)
- Applying Jane Jacobs' 4 tenets of vibrant neighborhoods to car-based cities (mobility/draw-zones for vibrancy)
- Why does Houston have such a great restaurant scene?
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
Labels: economic strategy, highlights, identity, opportunity urbanism
2019 Highlights
Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays. Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2019. Looking at the list, I think it was a very good year relative to most of my others. Hard to believe we're coming up on the 15th anniversary of this blog. I'll have to do a big retrospective post in March for that.
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
As always, thanks for your readership.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in
the best posts from the first dozen years and million pageviews.
Labels: highlights
2018 Highlights
I recently realized I forgot to wrap up 2018 with a highlights post! Well, better late than never, and as a bonus I can even sneak in a couple of key posts from the beginning of 2019 ;-)
These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box at the bottom of the right sidebar. An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar (I'm a fan of Feedly).
As always, thanks for your readership.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in the best posts from the first dozen years and million pageviews.
Labels: highlights
