Houston as an affordability model for other cities
Affordable housing has become a hot topic in Houston, so this might be a good time to share this excellent piece in Market Urbanism: Houston as an affordability model (Planetizen coverage). It does a great job framing Houston vs. other major metros. Key excerpts with my highlights:
"When market-oriented housing researchers point to Houston’s relatively light-touch land use regulations as a model for other U.S. localities to learn from, its declining affordability may cause skepticism. Houston, however, has fared better than many other cities in housing affordability for both renters and homebuyers.
While Houston is the only major U.S. city without use zoning, it does have land use regulations that appear in zoning ordinances elsewhere, including minimum lot size, setback, and parking requirements. These rules drive up the minimum cost of building housing in Houston. However, Houston has been a nationwide leader in reforming these exclusionary rules over the past 25 years. Houston policymakers have enacted rule changes to enable small-lot development and, in parts of the city, they have eliminated parking requirements. In part as a result, Houston’s affordability is impressive compared to peer regions....
At the least-well-off end of the income spectrum, Houston has the lowest rate of homelessness among major U.S. cities, due in part to its relative abundance of housing and in part to well-administered public and nonprofit services for formerly homeless residents.
"Houston has the lowest share of cost-burdened renter households among comparable Sun Belt markets for households earning 81% to 100% of the area median income."
"Houston's homeownership is also more attainable to residents earning the region's median income compared to the same group of Sun Belt metros shown in the chart."
"More than 25,000 establishments relocated to Texas from 2010 to 2019, bringing more than 281,000 jobs with them and resulting in a gain of nearly 103,000 jobs for the state, data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank shows.
The report said Texas appeals to relocating businesses for a variety of reasons, including its central location in the continental U.S., access to multiple large cities and business-friendly environment...
However, research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that attractive economic fundamentals — like low taxes, low regulations, a growing population, a relatively lower cost of living and less union activity — are far more important than incentive packages when businesses make location and expansion decisions."
Salim Furth at Mercatus: "How much are #Houston's different lot sizes in different eras showing up in real houses for real people? Here are single family houses built in the 22 years before reform, and the 22 years after - same scale." When minimum lot sizes shrank, a whole lot more small-lot houses got built because that's what the market wanted.
"Founded in Houston, Cart moved its headquarters to Austin in 2021, only to return to Houston in November.
The company moved to Austin to hire software developers, says co-founder Remington Tonar. But Cart is a logistics company as well as an e-commerce services provider, and its leaders found the company’s rapid growth required a bigger city with a larger and more diverse talent pool, including skills that go beyond just software development.
“If I’m looking for front-end software devs who can build beautiful tools to perform one task, a place like San Fran or Austin may be better,” says Tonar. “But if I need people who can integrate digital and physical systems, Houston is a lot more attractive, because people are coming out of logistics and energy.”
Google optimizing traffic signals, idea for HTX office to residential conversions, Why Texas is Becoming America's Most Powerful State, NYT on Houston winning vs homelessness, and more
Just catching up on some backlogged smaller items this week...
"Google AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there."
And I'd be happy to help get METRO on a better path while they're at it?...
WSJ: America’s Downtowns Are Empty. Fixing Them Will Be Expensive. - Lonely sidewalks and closed storefronts inspire proposals to recast office districts into neighborhoods where people live, work and raise families. A chart shows over 25% of downtown Houston's office space is vacant and only 7.5% of it could be easily converted to residential. A Hines exec at a GHPartnership event last week said that: converting empty offices to residential creates Class B apartments that don't pencil out. But maybe Habitat for Humanity could make that equation work with volunteer labor for affordable Class B condos?
"Dallas officials were prickly when I toured their city and asked them pointedly why Houston was doing better...
The lesson I take from Houston and Dallas is that success doesn’t come from repeating bromides about how housing is a human right; homelessness is indifferent to earnestness but does respond to hard work and meticulous execution. Houston has succeeded because it has strong political leadership that gathers data, follows evidence and herds nonprofits in the same direction. It is relentless."
Finally I'll end with this really well-done video on the population, economic, and energy boom in Texas, which is on track to pass California by the 2040s: Why Texas is Becoming America's Most Powerful State
More on METRO's Uptown BRT failure, wealth moving south, forensics reality, TX beating CA on homelessness, and more
A few smaller items this week:
More on Houston's BRT Failure with the Uptown Silver Line. Yet they're just going to pretend it didn't happen and plow ahead with the $1.5B Universities BRT line reducing Richmond to one lane each direction?!? 😠
"A Houston bus rapid transit route over dedicated bus lanes is attracting less than 10 percent of the riders that were projected for it. The Silver Line opened in August 2020 with the expectation that it would carry 14,850 weekday riders, but in fact it is carrying less than 900 riders per weekday, about 6 percent of projections...
One reason why ridership is low is that the line is slow. Schedules say that it takes 27 minutes to go 4.7 miles, which is an average of 10.4 miles per hour. The city’s regular local buses go much faster than that. Metro must have missed the memo that setting aside dedicated lanes to bus rapid transit is supposed to make the buses go faster, not slower.
This is just another example of why transit agencies shouldn’t spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on fixed transit infrastructure. No one can accurately foresee future transportation patterns, so relying on forms of transit that can be kept flexible — meaning buses sharing lanes with other traffic — is the safest and most cost-effective way to go."
"In the last decade, the number of people who are homeless in California has soared, rising more than 40%. Meanwhile, in Texas, they're seeing the opposite trend, with homelessness dropping by nearly a third."
“The numbers tell the story. For the first time, six fast-growing states in the South — Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee — are contributing more to the national GDP than the Northeast, with its Washington-New York-Boston corridor, in government figures going back to the 1990s. The switch happened during the pandemic and shows no signs of reverting.”
"Jews and Israelis who may feel uncomfortable at the rise of anti-Semitic sentiments among those in New York and California might find solace in states like Texas. Despite rising attacks and hate crimes on both sides of the American coast, the Lone Star State has remained unabashedly pro-Israel and open to business for those looking to relocate or expand their companies.
“People just love Israel here,” explained Toba Hellerstein, Executive Director of the Texas-Israel Alliance. “They just love Israelis, love Israel, and Israelis will come here and feel like they're rockstars… There is a real romanticism, whereas in other states you have some ideas around Israeli startups and also have political reasons that make them less interested in working with Israel, in Texas you don’t have that.”
Houston has less kludge and more opportunity, the value of mobility, and more
A few misc items this week:
Every planner should prominently post this quote in their office: “You can’t overestimate the value that mobility has on people’s quality of life and their ability to achieve their full economic potential.”
NYT: American Cities Have a Conversion Problem, and It’s Not Just Offices - Piles of regulations, or “kludge,” and a culture of “no” are limiting the ability to turn building blocks into something new. Houston's greatest advantage is that we have far less kludge than other cities - let's not squander it. Hat tip to George for the no-paywall link.
WSJ: ‘We Hold Our Breath’ Review: On the Banks of Buffalo Bayou - A brief account by a Houston native of the Texas city’s history, uncontrolled sprawl—and, above all, susceptibility to flooding. Hat tip to Tom. This one is less interesting for the book review itself than the comments on Houston:
"It is a great oasis of opportunity, especially for the immigrants, legal and otherwise, who end up there, stay, and prosper. There is a sizeable and successful Vietnamese population, Chinese too. The Hispanic community continues to grow and advance. A construction friend of mine once said, the new arrivals take any job because they can't speak English. Five years later they do and are foremen. In 10 they have their own company. Houston has a wealthy elite that gives unstintingly to its educational and cultural institutions and a great deal to its non-governmental help agencies. One I got to know helped released prisoners transition into work and careers with astonishing success statistics. Denominational schools like Corpus Christi and Strake Jesuit Strake do great work prepping minorities for college. The list goes on. And, Houston is resilient. It always rebuild, usually better."
"We are now retired in Austin (family ties) but despite its airs of superiority, Houston is better. It has what more of what I term real people not pretenders. The attractions there are better, museums, restaurants, entertainment, etc. Along with the real people, the sort of people I grew up and worked with."
“The answer for Houston, as in so many urban places imperiled by inadequate planning and a changing climate, seems to amount sadly to this: We hold our breath, and hope for the best.”
"For such a an awful place, it sure is curious how the Houston metropolitan area continues to be one of the fastest growing in the nation. Hmm. The real canard here is the foolish, unfounded belief that urban planning would make any difference when natural disasters occur. Urban planners are low rent civil servants whose livelihoods are dependent upon the largess of the politicians to whom they answer. The politicians, in turn, serve the greed of the rich and powerful, or respond to the ever changing whims of an ignorant populace. Who is to say which is worse? So, don’t pretend, for even an instant, that urban planning is a solution. Like central planning everywhere and every when, urban planning merely guarantees misallocation of capital and resources."
"Ah, the mystery of why people want to live in a city that is prospering, even though it hasn’t been adequately planned by experts in planning and is now susceptible to natural disasters like real hurricanes—unlike, say, New York City, where American zoning was invented but which, nevertheless, had to struggle through a “superstorm”."
"I look forward to reading the book; the review hits on many of the negatives of the city, it's hot, wet, sprawling, mosquitoes, snakes, etc... I'm a life long Houstonian, born and raised in the Bayou City, all those negative qualities do exist but people keep moving to the city. Why? The primary reason is opportunity. All of these opportunity seekers have a hard working, can do, personality, which gives Houston it's magic."
"Lived in Houston 30 years. Loved it! The Texas Medical Center is a treasure. The variety of restaurants and cross section of people from across the world is unequaled. No one cares where you came from, what school you attended who your parents were…just can you do the job. Houston is about “doing bidness”."
Access to Jobs: New Research on Driving and Transit
Readers of this newsletter may recall prior articles reporting on “access to jobs” studies carried out by researchers at the University of Minnesota. The broad conclusion of the series of studies is that in the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, a commuter can reach vastly more jobs in a given number of minutes via driving than by using transit. That is generally due to the dispersed locations of residences and employers. There is also a growing body of international research on the impact of journey-to-work time (or travel speed) on the economic productivity of metro areas.
I’m therefore pleased to report on a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that provides new findings on this subject. “More Roads or Public Transit: Insights from Measuring City-Center Accessibility,” by Lucas J. Conwell, Fabian Eckert, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak was published in Jan. 2023 as NBER Working Paper 30877.
The authors’ innovation is to define “accessibility zones” surrounding the central business districts of the 109 largest U.S. and European cities. For each city, the study defined a set of car accessibility zones and transit accessibility zones. In keeping with established research on a metro area’s economic productivity, a premise of the study is that larger accessibility zones are associated with greater productivity. One broad finding is that compared with European cities, on average U.S. cities are twice as accessible by car as European cities, but are half as accessible by transit. This is obviously due to the much greater density of European metro areas compared with largely suburbanized America, and the corresponding differences in roadway networks and transit systems between the United States and Europe.
To simplify the modeling, the researchers divided commuting times into four groups: 0-to-15 minutes,16-to-30 minutes, 31-to-45 minutes, and 46-to-60 minutes. They defined the central business district (CBD) as the area with the highest economic productivity in the metro area and drew a 1-kilometer radius circle around the defined center. The median U.S. central business district accounted for 28% of all the employment within a 20-kilometer radius. They used Google Maps to construct the accessibility zones, using it to find the car or transit travel time to the CBD from any point in each land parcel. All the land parcels that enable a trip to the CBD in 15 minutes or less make up the 15-minute accessibility zone, and so on up to 60 minutes.
One of the most interesting results is that although Europe’s transit accessibility zones are all larger than those of the U.S., “car travel offers larger overall accessibility across all time distances in both Europe and the U.S.” And that means that “U.S. cities enjoy greater accessibility overall because they have a comparative advantage in car-based commutes.” One reason for this is that, especially for longer-distance commutes, transit provides only “patchy” access. By contrast, car commuters can use a comprehensive roadway network that directly connects every point A to every point B. But that does offer an advantage to bus transit over rail transit.
Although the authors mention in their introduction that larger accessibility (via more possible trips within a given time frame) leads to greater economic productivity, their paper does not attempt to quantify the potential economic benefits of U.S. cities’ much greater accessibility. They do briefly discuss the limited impact that could be expected from “densification” policies. And of course, they discuss how “US cities’ car orientation comes at the cost of less green space, more congestion, and worse health and pollution externalities.” Assuming vehicle electrification continues, the health and pollution impacts should decrease in the coming decades. Also, with greater use of road pricing, urban traffic congestion can be reduced.
While this study would be even more impressive with quantified economic productivity estimates, it should help transportation planners think through trade-offs between highways and transit in the coming decades.
Reason interviews me on Houston's affordability vs homelessness
A couple months ago Reason sent a crew to interview me on Houston's unorthodox, unzoned approach to land-use regulation and how it reduces our homelessness, as well as my suggested solution for zoned cities (spoiler alert: unrestrict all land outside single-family neighborhoods). Their resulting 26min documentary is now available:
Today, the Lone Star state counts 90 homeless people per every 100,000 residents. In California, the problem is almost five times as bad.
I'm really impressed with the Haven for Hope in San Antonio, which combines services with temporary housing. And I find it just staggering that California spends $500-$800k per unit for affordable housing in LA!
The Houston section of the documentary starts at 18:47, and my section starts at 22:03 and runs to 24:20, so about an hour's interview cut down to two minutes of sound bites, lol (pretty typical). Their aerial shots of Houston are from the top of my midrise Midtown building where we shot the interview. The video link below is queued up to my section, but I do encourage watching the whole thing or at least the whole section on Houston.
“Although sometimes overshadowed by the cachet of Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, Houston is absolutely a tech hub in its own right, attracting a mix of major tech companies and VC-backed startups to join its already established base of aerospace, defense, and energy companies,” Dice says.
Governing: Few Mayors Connect the Dots Between Zoning and Homelessness. Restrictive codes can severely limit housing development, but a new survey of mayors finds that few take them into account in their plans to address homelessness. This is definitely a major factor in Houston's relative success in alleviating homelessness vs. other major cities. Hat tip to Judah.
The Atlantic: Everything Is About the Housing Market (archive link) - High urban rents make life worse for everyone in countless ways. I expect this “housing theory of everything” to continue to catch on because it’s absolutely right. It’s related to what I’ve been talking about for years with the four factors that go into Opportunity Urbanism, including discretionary income that determine how vibrant a city can be. If you pay too much for your house, you don’t have money to put into other things. That has been covered up for decades now by the wealth accumulated by those homeowners, but that’s a short-term effect that’s diminishing.
"I can’t help but think that Vision Zero is really more about inconveniencing auto drivers than increasing safety. Just three policies — a motorcycle helmet law, bicycle boulevards, and moving homeless people away from major arterials — would save far more lives than anything in the adopted plan."
The Value of VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled), and why trying to reduce them takes our economy the wrong direction:
"There is clear research showing that faster travel speeds means higher per capita incomes because such speeds give people access to more jobs and employers access to a larger pool of workers, which means more people can do the job that fits them the best.
...
Even if it was a good idea, no urban area anywhere has found policies, short of war or natural disaster, that can significantly reduce VMT. Yet planners keep spouting the same rhetoric while ignoring the fact that good intentions are meaningless, if not outright harmful, if they don’t produce actual results.
The lesson we need to stress to public officials is that it makes a lot more sense to make better automobiles and highways than it does to try to reduce driving. Since 1970, automobiles have become 50 percent more fuel efficient, 70 percent less likely to be involved in a fatal accident, and 95 percent less polluting of toxic chemicals. If anything, efforts to reduce driving have made these problems worse by forcing people to drive in more congested traffic where cars use more energy and produce more pollution.
I strongly suspect there is some class warfare going on here. Urban planners are by definition college educated and middle class. They probably drive cars, but the cars they drive are likely to be electrics, hybrids, or other high fuel-economy vehicles. The vehicles driven by the working class are more likely pickups, vans, and other large vehicles, partly because they need such vehicles for their work, but the planners see them as the deplorable enemy. So while planners pay lip service to low-income people and the working class, they want to design a society that has no room for them.
Those who truly care about helping low-income people and building healthy, wealthy urban areas need to take a stand in favor of more automobile ownership, more miles of driving, and better roads for those automobiles to drive on."
“Knowledge workers like me, who move out of the city, make urban spaces more affordable for essential workers who staff hospitals and restaurants. Meanwhile, small towns and cities that were hollowed out by deindustrialization over the last 30 years get an influx of new residents to support their tax base. Again, the majority of jobs don’t allow for remote work, but a great deal of wealth is concentrated among the jobs that do. Empowering or even encouraging those workers to live wherever they want could have a positive impact on the affordability of cities and the economic health of rural communities.”
Finally, a short funny video well worth your time on Houston vs. LA. It's awesome and actually well-balanced. Matches my experience with CA vs. TX (and particularly Houston) as well. My blog readers will particularly appreciate the 3:55 (traffic) and 16:19 points (feeders) ;-) but I really appreciated the point about the purple political diversity. Hat tip to George.
Houston #1 for std of living, housing the root of many problems, solving homelessness, debunking the 15-min city, and more
Our featured item this week is this detailed Stanford study that backs up what I've been saying for years: Houston offers the highest standard of living in the country (discretionary income after costs), especially among growing cities. After opening the pdf, search the word 'Houston' and look at the Consumption column to see how much higher it is than most other cities for households in different income ranges. Hat tip to George.
"The struggle to solve homelessness is getting harder nearly everywhere. Yet recent years have still seen many more victories than defeats. And the biggest victory is in greater Houston, which over the last decade has cut homelessness by more than half.
Houston’s story holds lessons for Los Angeles. The chief one is that solving homelessness is less about economics than about strategic clarity and execution."
Alain Bertaud, formerly principal urban planner at the World Bank and now senior research scholar at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management as well as the author of 'Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities', critiques the current urban planning fad, "the 15-minute city." Introduction and policy analysis paper.
'Even a prominent urban economist like professor Ed Glaeser has been sufficiently alarmed by the spread of the 15-minute mania that he felt obliged to comment on it. In a blog, he wrote that the 15-minutes city "should be recognized as a dead-end which would stop cities from fulfilling their true role as engines of opportunity."
NYT: Amid a Baby Boom, Texas Gains 1,000 Residents Every Day - A surge in births in Texas comes amid a declining birthrate nationwide. Fits my hypothesis: when housing is plentiful and affordable, fertility stays up. People want plenty of space to raise families. When housing is pricey and small, fertility drops - see Japan, Korea, China, Europe...
The housing theory of everything - Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates. A really long but comprehensive case. Conclusion:
"What matters is that housing shortages may be the biggest problem facing our era, and solving it needs to become everyone’s highest priority....
If we’re right about this, it means that fixing this one problem could make everyone’s lives much better than almost anyone realises – not just by making houses cheaper, but giving people better jobs, a better quality of life, more cohesive communities, bigger families and healthier lives. It could even give renewed reasons to be optimistic about the future of the West."
Finally, a fun item to conclude with: a cool map a friend of mine made with how to fly from Houston to every capital city in the world either nonstop (red) or connections (blue). Almost all can be reached with a single connection except for a few in the South Pacific (thru LAX+Fiji). We are a very well-connected city in the global economy. Click on it to see it larger.
NYC passes LA for worst traffic as people drive instead of riding trains during the pandemic. Houston still a pretty bad #3. We just keep growing, have been less locked down than California, and so many of our jobs require being in-person (industrial, mfg, port, health care).
If you’re trying to buy a home, then you’re probably a grown-up. You deserve a grown-up city—the city of Houston.
"Austin is a fun place, no doubt. Texans from across the state love to hop in the car and spend a long weekend paddle-boarding on Lady Bird Lake, swimming at Barton Springs, partying on Sixth Street, and reliving college memories at Kerbey Lane—as if the city were their personal playground. But playgrounds are for children. If you’re trying to buy a home, then you’re probably a grown-up. You deserve a grown-up city—the city of Houston.
Don’t get me wrong; Austin has some great attributes. The Capitol is a beautiful and historic building. Houston should aspire to have a campus of the caliber of the University of Texas. And Austin summers are somewhat more of a dry heat. But those great Austin amenities that people swear they could never do without—the live music! The outdoors! The progressive attitude!—exist in every other major city in one form or another. And I would argue that Houston’s offerings are better, and more sophisticated, than Austin’s.
...the fact that the city’s leadership can’t find a way to make housing affordable should be an indictment of anything related to self-proclaimed progressiveness. Politics is about power, and if Austin politicians can’t use their power to improve the fundamental living conditions of not only the most vulnerable but also a reasonably privileged middle class, then they should just admit the city is becoming a resort town for celebrities and a techno-oligarchy and spend their time arguing about plastic straws. Say what you will about Houston’s relationship with the oil and gas industry; at least pollution here has abated. Austin still hasn’t figured out how to mitigate the collateral consequences of tech wealth and Hollywood tourism.
...
No doubt Houston isn’t as affordable as it used to be, especially for renters already struggling. But somehow it remains tenable for those upwardly mobile geriatric millennials taking their first steps into homeownership. In the past few months alone, I’ve seen four friends buy their first places: a new townhouse in Oak Forest, a classic eighties townhouse in Montrose, a bungalow north of downtown, and a cottage in the Second Ward. These homes aren’t in far-flung suburbs; they’re in Houston’s inner core, within walking and biking distance to the breweries, restaurants, arts venues, and other hallmarks of a livable, enjoyable city. Some of these are dense housing allowed by Houston’s lax land-use rules. Others are older homes still left standing—and reasonably priced—as new construction soaks up capital like a sponge, saving older neighborhoods from the deluge of wealth that has made Austin so unaffordable. I also know people who moved to the Woodlands.
...
In contrast, Houston, a place without pretension or zoning, will gleefully tear down its past if that makes the present more appealing—anything to give you the freedom to grow. You won’t be restrained by outdated notions of what the city should be. You’ll be empowered by hopes of what the city can be. We’re improving our parks, adding more bike lanes, and expanding the mass transit system. And we don’t listen to NIMBYs who want to block affordable housing. Forty years of the Houston Area Survey show that we’re a city perpetually, even irrationally, optimistic about our future. Houston thinks there are better days ahead, while Austin worries it is past its prime.
The choice is clear: You can rage against the dying of the light in Austin and spend 50 percent of your income on housing, or you can be reborn a sweaty, home-owning phoenix in Houston."
Debating deed restrictions and zoning, office vs. remote work, transit radio show, and more
I've actually been accumulating items faster than I've been posting them, and it's gotten out of control, so this will be a long post to do some catching up.
The featured item this week is I got in an active debate with the Market Urbanist Scott Beyer on the value of deed restrictions vs. zoning, which you can read in the comments at the bottom of his piece on deed restrictions here.
Moving on to the rest of this week's items:
Dispersion in US metros increases even before Covid-19: New Census estimates. Houston growth has slowed a bit since the oil boom days, but still ahead of most other big metros. We just crossed 7 million metro population, which is an impressive achievement only 4 other US metros have accomplished (NYC, LA, Chicago, DFW).
"New York City has withstood and emerged stronger from a number of catastrophes and setbacks — the 1918 Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the 1970s financial crisis and the 2001 terrorist attacks. Each time, people proclaimed the city would forever change — after 9/11, who would want to work or live in Lower Manhattan? — but each time the prognostications fizzled.
But this moment feels substantially different, according to some corporate executives.
The economy is in a sustained nosedive, with unemployment reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. Many companies are in financial trouble and may look to shrink their real estate as a way to cut expenses.
More fundamentally, if social distancing remains a key to public health, how can companies safely ask every worker to come back?
“If you got two and a half million people in Brooklyn, why is it rational or efficient for all those people to schlep into Manhattan and work every day?” said Jed Walentas, who runs the real estate company Two Trees Management. “That’s how we used to do it yesterday. It’s not rational now.”
“We have a lot of millennial buyers who are already used to working remotely. They don’t know how long this (pandemic) is going to last, and they’d rather be here (Tahoe),” Bednar told the Tribune, “The people I’m talking to are looking for a simpler life, a close community. They want the outdoors and don’t want to be stuck in places where there’s a health problem.” ...
“People are starting to ask themselves, ‘Why do I have to live in such an expensive area and drive an hour to work every day, or rent out an expensive office space when everyone can work remotely?' If you don’t need to live in the city, why would you?” Bednar said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic forcing those who could work from home to do so has led to a surprising result — improved productivity. U.S. workers were 47% more productive in March and April than in the same two months a year ago through cloud-based business tools, chat applications and email, according to an analysis of 100 million data points from 30,000 Americans by workplace-monitoring company Prodoscore.”
...
“Our salespeople meet five to eight customers a day now [via videoconferencing] versus the one it took them three days [to see in the past] because of travel,” he added.
This gets reinforced in the comments of a pro-office op-ed in the NYT, which are at least worth skimming. Even though the author makes a case for some of the benefits of the office, the overwhelming sentiment in the comments is “screw that, I love working from home and not commuting!” for all sorts of reasons, including less office drama/politics and fewer worthless meetings. It’s clear to me that both overwhelming sentiment, as well as simple economics/costs, work against offices. I think they will go into a significant decline. One other point the author misses is that you can separate the social aspect from the work aspect with the rise of coworking spaces, which are exploding everywhere: a shared space where there are others you can interact with, but everyone works for different companies. Still get the networking and socialization without the long commute to one central office with all of your company’s other employees.
"An important step is simply to permit more housing in more locations. We should put an end to zoning policies that restrict building to single-family homes and stop mandating that lots meet large minimum-size requirements, leading to sprawling, sparsely populated neighborhoods. Ending such restrictive zoning doesn’t have to lead to the construction of towering apartment buildings. Rather, we should encourage cities to permit more homes on existing single-family lots, allow apartments in retail districts and near transit, and dedicate excess or underused public property like surface parking lots in downtowns to new housing. All of this can be done without materially changing the look, feel and experience of a place.
The second important step is to reduce the cost and uncertainty of getting a housing project built. It often takes years to get permission to build. Local government processes often allow multiple “bites at the apple” of public comment and hearings for a plan. Sometimes, even when there is a vote to approve a project, a neighbor or special interest can sue to stop the approval, resulting in further significant delay. These delays add cost and risk, driving up the price of new homes and sometimes stopping projects in their tracks entirely.
...
These types of actions, which can be taken now, will lay the groundwork for a broad and shared prosperity. When denser housing is allowed, workers can live closer to their jobs, help save the planet by driving less and pay less in rent or mortgage payments because a bigger housing supply will lead to lower costs. Research shows that children tend to be more successful in neighborhoods with access to high-quality schools. In restricting building, more-affluent Americans are shutting lower-income families off from economic opportunity.
Now is an especially good time to reduce restrictions and allow for denser housing. Construction is hit hard during recessions, and opening up more building opportunities would be a stimulus for the industry, and it doesn’t require any extra funding. This would get workers back to work, provide safe and affordable living for those hard hit by this pandemic and get property taxes and other revenue flowing back to local governments for the services communities need. It would be a win for everyone."
"Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.
Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction, and it is not a coincidence that they also are the most expensive. Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared."
Finally, I'd like to end with a radio show I did with Bill King along with Carrin Patman and Tom Lambert of METRO on what's happening with the past, Covid present, and potential future of transit. Apologies for my bad body language - I didn't even realize I was being videoed until over halfway through, lol. I was just focused on my notes and getting the audio right.
Discouraging panhandling, airport wag brigade, 6-figure incomes, Grand Parkway size, TAMU TMC growth, and more
Big Idea of the Week before getting to our smaller items: I think the City needs to hang signs over major panhandler intersections saying:
"Please give to charity, not panhandling."
I think this could make a major positive improvement in the city over time, both at the intersections and among the panhandling population which would have to go to charities with real comprehensive services rather than just unsafely collecting dollars in the middle of busy roadways from intimidated motorists and doing who-knows-what with it.
One key: making sure to hang them high up near the traffic lights. If they're down low, the panhandlers will either tear them down or deface them.
Moving on to this week's items:
Houston has the 9th-most six-figure jobs in the country, 8th if you combine San Francisco and San Jose. We're the 5th-largest metro, so we're punching a little below our weight, with Boston, Seattle, SF+SJ, and DC pushing us down. On the plus side, we still edge out DFW even though they're a bigger metro than us.
This is pretty freaking cool: See how big the Grand Parkway is compared to other land formations. "Grand" is an appropriate label. Almost all of London, Paris, Chicago, DFW, Mexico City, Rhode Island, DC-Baltimore, or the SF Bay Area - among others - would fit inside! Towards the end, they compare Texas to other landmasses. Spoiler alert: it's big.
Finally, can we *please* get a wag brigade at Houston airports?! Get a small army of these cuties wandering the terminals and it will give Houston a PR buzz that money can't buy. It would also encourage more people to connect on flights through Houston as well, which would stimulate United and Southwest to add more service.
Three perfect days in HTX, growth forecasts, increasing our density, reducing homelessness, protesting property taxes, and more
Happy New Year/Decade everyone! Hope you enjoyed your holidays as much as I did (OC/LA w/ family). Lots of backlogged smaller items, but before we get to them, a short word about our sponsor: if one of your new year's resolutions is to save big money on electricity this year, My Best Plan is incredible at absolutely optimizing the lowest-cost electricity plan for you. I've known David over there for years (fellow Rice MBA), and his optimization algorithm is the best, bar none. And completely unbiased too, which can't be said for some of the other optimizers out there that have been uncovered as fronts for electricity marketing companies. Send him (or me) your latest electricity bill to get an estimate of your potential savings - it's free, and you have nothing to lose while potentially saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars (as he's saved me over the years).
On to this week's items:
The Greater Houston Partnership has released its 2020 Employment Forecast. Only time will tell if their vision is 20/20... (sorry, couldn't help myself! ;-)
Speaking of density, the City is moving forward with plans to allow more density (reduced setbacks and parking) near transit, but Michael Skelly doesn't think they're going far enough. I think it's a modest start that can be expanded incrementally to minimize opposition.
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.
