"Houston is a top U.S. city for STEM grads and engineering talent with more than 300,000 educated millennials and 240,000 STEM workers. STEM talent powers some of the largest industries in Houston, from energy to life science and manufacturing.
Houston also offers these UHD and other STEM students a top-tier job market. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, Houston is the second best U.S. metro area for STEM workers.
Technology, in particular, is thriving. According to the Partnership's most recent edition of Houston Facts, with more than 223,000 tech workers, Houston has the 12th largest tech sector in the U.S. Nearly two-thirds of Houston’s high-tech workers are employed in industries other than computers and software."
"The Cascade Policy Institute released a detailed study of a road diet plan whose effects include worse traffic congestion, less transit service, and no significant increase in bike and pedestrian traffic that had been projected. The study, “The New Sellwood Bridge: Promises Unfulfilled,” is a valuable case study of how the local politics of transportation and smart growth led to unfortunate outcomes."
The age of winner-take-all cities. Cool graph of metros by GMP. Houston is 5th largest metro by population in the country, but drops to #7 ranked by GMP, getting edged out by DC and SF. Interesting fact: even with substantially fewer people, if you combine SF and San Jose's GMP they're notably larger than Chicago. That's the power of tech.
"The top 25 metro areas (out of a total of 384) accounted for more than half of the U.S.'s $19.5 trillion GDP in 2017, according to an Axios analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data."
Finally, I wanted to end this week's post with Metro's new MetroNext plan overview video, which I think is pretty well done getting it all packed into only two minutes. In particular, they do a good job explaining the MetroRapid BRT rail-like benefits, which the public isn't familiar with. Last week they officially approved the bond referendum for this November's ballot.
"Friday, the Austin-based publication released its list of "The Best Texas Restaurants in Every City" featuring favorites from the past three years of its popular series, "Where to Eat Now."
Of the five cities included in the list, Houston has the most at 12. Dallas follows with eight. Seven Austin made the list, while San Antonio has three and Fort Worth has one."
NYT: With More Storms and Rising Seas, Which U.S. Cities Should Be Saved First? Even though Galveston and Texas City show a misleadingly high cost per resident for seawalls, it's ignoring the millions of people further back that are also protected. Our seawalls are some of the most cost-effective the nation can consider - right up there with NYC - esp. when you consider the massive petrochemical complex of the ship channel.
"Business Facilities magazine agrees with that assessment. In July 2018, it ranked Houston the No. 1 metro area for economic growth potential, stressing that the region's economy has expanded beyond Big Oil and that it's brimming with "innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship."
"Houston has a distinctly favorable business climate. The region benefits from a skilled workforce, world-class infrastructure and transportation system, and a pro-business environment that stimulates rather than stifles business growth," the magazine says."
"His model suggests that for every 100 luxury units built in wealthier neighborhoods, as many as 48 households in moderate-income neighborhoods are able to move into housing that better suits their needs, vacating an existing unit in the process. Somewhere between 10 and 20 of these households are coming from among the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods, vacating units and reducing demand where housing is most likely to be affordable for working families.
This suggests that even pricey new units could free up a lot of existing housing. Accounting for possibilities like units sitting vacant, out-of-town movers filling the units, or units being used as second homes/pied-a-terres/safe deposit boxes in the sky, Mast’s model still indicates that for every 100 new market-rate units built, approximately 65 equivalent units are created by movers vacating existing units. If the migration chain is as robust as this paper finds it to be, as much as half of theses newly vacated units could be in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. This new supply, combined with less demand, could play a major role in easing pressure on rents in the short run."
MetroNext kudos and tensions, HTX traffic is better than you'd expect, road diets kill businesses, the aging affordable housing pipeline, and more
Before getting to this week's items, some thoughts on last week's MetroNext board workshop I attended (presentation slides here). First off, kudos to Metro (and Chair Carrin Patman) for sticking to its guns on the value of BRT over LRT. They can build three miles of BRT for the cost of one mile of LRT, getting more service to more areas more quickly and cost-effectively. People keep asking for fantasyland LRT service everywhere without understanding the economic tradeoffs, and it's good to see Metro have the backbone to say no.
As Dug's Chronicle story mentioned, there was tension on the Hobby line routing between the board and Houston City Councilmember Gallegos. He doesn't want it to come down 75th Street even though that's the most efficient routing with the best service, including bringing people to a renovated Mason Park (he's worried about right-of-way loss, which Metro thinks would be absolutely minimal if any). He's insisting on a longer routing that hits the new botanic gardens but misses shopping and restaurants of Gulfgate, which I guarantee generates 100x the trips the botanic garden does. How often do you eat or shop vs. go to tourist attractions? (probably in about the same proportion as you go to work vs. go to the airport!) Metro's plan includes an autonomous shuttle that would run from a stop near Reveille and Telephone along Sims Bayou to offer connectivity to the botanic gardens at Glenbrook Park, which I think could be an attraction in itself. It makes total sense.
Moving on to this week's items:
Houston #2 best city in Texas behind Flower Mound, and the only major city among the top five. Actually, neither Dallas nor Austin are in the top 100!
Houston is very good at this process of keeping up a steady supply of new housing that eventually becomes affordable older housing: Market Urbanism Report - Why the used housing market should be like the used car market - "As with the car market, the creation of new housing means used housing can filter down, to be bought or rented by lower income groups."
"There’s room for a new politics that recognizes that the path to actual social justice lies primarily in expanding opportunities for a broad range of jobs and housing options. But this can only be done by confronting the current approach to social justice that results in conditions demonstrably unjust."
"The new TomTom Traffic Index puts Houston at No. 204 globally and No. 18 nationally for traffic congestion, as well as No. 2 in Texas.
In Houston, drivers spent an average of 23 percent extra travel time stuck in traffic last year, according to TomTom. The worst day in 2018 for traffic congestion in Houston: October 31 (44 percent). The best: Christmas Day (1 percent)."
"After adjusting the two sets of data to make them comparable prior to the time when one group adopted Complete Streets, they found that “Complete Streets policy has no effect on house prices, and therefore we are unable to find a positive amenity value from a municipality-level commitment to Complete Streets.”
"State DOTs should be far more cautious in agreeing to requests from municipalities to convert arterial routes to Complete Streets treatment. Most of the information provided by New Urbanists consists of anecdotes, rather than careful analysis such as Vandegriff and Zandoni have provided."
"After Hurricane Harvey, the city is back on its feet and showing off the everything-is-bigger-in-Texas attitude. Four food halls opened in 2018, including Finn Hall, which features up-and-coming chefs including the James Beard-nominated chef Jianyun Ye with a downtown outpost of his Chinese hot spot Mala Sichuan and a taqueria from the local favorite Goode Company. The five-diamond Post Oak Hotel opened in March 2018 with a two-story Rolls Royce showroom, art by Frank Stella and a 30,000-bottle wine cellar. The Menil Collection, known for its eclectic art ranging from Byzantine antiques to 20th-century Pop Art, underwent a seven-month renovation of its main building and opened the 30,000-square-foot Menil Drawing Institute. The low-slung white steel-and-glass building with a trapezoidal roof is the first addition to the Menil campus in 20 years and the first freestanding museum dedicated to modern drawing in the United States. The city’s museum boom continues with a massive expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to be completed in 2020, a newly built location for the Holocaust Museum, which will move in the spring of 2019, and a restoration of the Apollo Mission Center that will open in time for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in July."
"Transit riders are more sensitive to frequencies than to whether a transit vehicle runs on rubber tires or steel wheels. A bus carries fewer people than a train, but that’s a virtue, not a flaw, because it allows for higher frequencies. If Ft. Worth had used buses rather than rails for this route, it could have run those buses every 10 or 15 minutes (instead of hourly), attracting a lot more riders."
"Houston is a city of immigrants and engineers. Function trumps fashion with this no-nonsense crowd that expects to work hard and earn rewards based on merit. Looking at demographics and migration patterns, people voting with their feet consider the Bayou City the most egalitarian of the Texas metro areas."
Finally, I wanted to end with a longer set of excerpts from an excellent piece by Nolan Gray in CityLab: "How Cities Design Themselves"
"Sometimes when I read the papers of my fellow urban planners, I get the sense that they think cities are Disneyland or Club Med. Cities are labor markets. People go to cities to find a good job. Firms move to cities, which are expensive, because they are more likely to find the staff and specialists that they need. If a city’s attractive, that’s a bonus. But basically, they come to get a job.
...
Urban planning has an important role to play. With the exception of fire and safety regulation, planners should focus much less on what people do on their plot or in their apartment, and much more on the management of the public spaces, like streets and parks.
Insomuch as urban planners deal with land uses and densities, they should closely monitor trends to be aware of what’s happening. For instance, in New York, household size has plummeted over the past 30 years. Urban planners should be aware of that and address rigidities that prevent the city from accommodating those demographic changes.
An area where urban planners should play a much more active role is mobility, mainly by adapting existing systems to emerging trends. Urban mobility is the key to housing affordability. Improved urban transport makes more land available for housing and therefore allows low-income people to live in areas that are both affordable and accessible to most of the city.
..
In my book, I talk a lot about income distribution curves. Every time urban planners do something, they should ask: Who is going to pay?"
LinkedIn does a cool monthly report on some major cities, including Houston, where they break down what's happening with our hiring, including skill surpluses and shortages. Evidently our biggest shortage is oral communication, which doesn't surprise me in a city of engineers, lol. It also has some good graphs on worker flows between us and other cities.
"According to Best Cities, Houston is the seventh-best metropolitan in the country, based on methodology that looks at the place, product, programming, people, prosperity, and promotion of a town.
"Smart, skilled and soulful, Houston is the American city of the future," the Best Cities website stated in lauding Houston.
The city landed high marks in terms of place, people, and prosperity. It cited Houston's diversity, housing affordability, and leadership in the health care, manufacturing, engineering, finance, and aerospace industries."
"When George W. Bush signed legislation in 2007 to subsidize and mandate the production of biofuels, he cited the urgent need to liberate America from “long-term” dependence on “oil from foreign lands.” Turns out there was an easier, much less expensive way: drill, baby, drill.
The Energy Information Administration announced this month that the port district of Houston-Galveston began exporting more crude oil than it imported for the first time. Houston-Galveston exports in April surpassed imports by 15,000 barrels a day, and by May the difference had grown to 470,000 barrels a day. That port district handles more than half of all U.S. crude exports, which hit a record of two million barrels a day in May.
The export boom is testament to U.S. ingenuity that has driven rapid advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, especially in shale rock. The breakthroughs have lowered drilling costs and put Texas’s Permian Basin at the center of an oil-and-gas drilling revolution that will next year see the state producing more oil than either Iraq or Iran.
Washington also gets credit for removing regulatory hurdles like the oil export ban. Republican leaders in Congress took flak in 2015 for agreeing to extend green-energy subsidies for a few years in return for Barack Obama’s signature on a statutory end to the 40-year-old export ban.
Some conservative pressure groups derided the policy trade as a sellout while liberals complained that ending the ban would serve Big Oil. The real beneficiaries are workers, investors and the overall economy, as well as greater flexibility in foreign policy as the U.S. is less vulnerable to authoritarian oil exporters.
The U.S. is unlikely to be a net oil exporter soon, since American refineries require heavy crude from abroad. Shale drillers produce lighter grades. But the gap between imports and exports shrank in 2017 to a 24-year low of 6.8 million barrels a day from more than nine million in 2012. The lesson is that American invention and entrepreneurship remain indomitable—when government gets out of the way."
My COU report on Resilient Houston after Harvey now available
Me and a team from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism have been working for several months on a 3-part report about Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and now it's finally available here just before this crucial bond election. An overview:
HOUSTON RESILIENT
How Houston has met — and will meet — the
challenges posed by Hurricane Harvey
This is a three-part report on how Houston has met — and will meet — the challenges posed by Hurricane Harvey. Part One defines the city and region’s trajectory, and its fundamental resilience. The second part addresses Houston’s urban form, and how the right planning choices can provide some solutions to the problems of flooding. The third part lays out specific suggestions for balancing growth with environmental sustainability.
As leaders and policy makers address post-Harvey issues, we present the steps they can take to make Houston more resilient, while still allowing it to retain its character as a region of opportunity. We demonstrate how actions that raise housing costs will make the Houston region less competitive with other parts of Texas, and with the nation as a whole.
Interviewed on PBS News Hour about post-Harvey Houston development and recommendations going forward, New Opportunity Boomtown, Big Houston, market urbanism, and more
Before getting to this week's items, PBS News Hour had a 9-minute segment this week on Houston development after Harvey, which includes about a minute interviewing me starting at the 6:50 point. They interviewed me for about a half-hour on the top of my condo midrise in Midtown on Jan 12th, and it was freezing that day, thus the heavy coat. I think they did a fair job with the sound bites and summary of our conversation – I love that they used my “don’t throw the development baby out with the hurricane bathwater” line (which is my mantra/tagline on all things Harvey) - although I wish they had included the stat about Houston land developed since 1992 would have absorbed less than 0.4% of the water that fell.
Eliminate parking requirements (agree to long-term reductions)
Scale back minimum lot sizes (agree)
Get street design right (disagree on being hostile to cars)
I like that he gives a shout-out to the flexibility and adapatability of our lack of zoning, but I'm not as opposed to development on the fringes as he is. I like that we allow both urban and suburban development and let people choose what works for their lives.
From Market Urbanist Scott Beyer: Richard Florida's book hits, then misses, the New Urban crisis: If spatial segregation is the cause of urban America’s problems, then zoning deregulation is the solution. Maybe not a surprise, but I love this and totally agree!
Another great Market Urbanism post on the history and market distortions of zoning, with something originally aimed at preventing nuisances quickly being abused to be exclusionary.
I've got more, but that's already too much for one week!
"The freeway carried 387,144 average vehicles per day in 2016 at Gessner. I'm assuming that's all the lanes: main, managed and frontage.
If you assume uniform distribution across all the 20 lanes (which of course it not correct, since the main lanes carry most of the traffic), you get 19357 vehicles per day per lane. Two lanes are 38714 vehicles per day. Metro reports 65894 boardings per weekday on all light rail, with the disastrously low 4588 on the Green line and 6769 on the Purple line. Since TxDOT numbers are an average over all days of the week, you can average the Metro data over the week, which lowers it to 55324 average per day.
So the question becomes: what is the traffic of a main lane? I'm thinking the main lanes carry at least 75% of all traffic (but that's just a guess), and then that would be 387144*.75/10=29000 per lane or 58,000 vpd for two lanes. So the two lanes carry about the same number of trips as the entire Metro light rail system, and of course some cars have more than one person, further increasing the highway advantage.
Of course the Red Line has good ridership. A better comparison would be a light rail lines going along a freeway corridor, like in Dallas. The entire 90-mile Dallas light rail system has only 96,300 average weekday boardings. The Red (26,800) and Green (24,900) roughly parallel freeways. The blue (22,200) and orange (22,400) lines are similar. I think those numbers are good for comparison, and a single Katy Freeway lane carries more trips than any of the radial DART lines."
And one lane of freeway is a heck of a lot less expensive than a commuter rail line!
One commenter on Swamplot also makes a good case for Park-and-Ride buses over commuter rail:
"The train isn’t going to travel that much faster than buses, if at all. Also, buses in the Katy corridor make just one stop at most between the burbs and Downtown (the major route is express from the Park-and-Ride lot direct to Downtown). And people play on their phones on the bus (have you never been on one? the park-and-ride vehicles have nice cushy seats and baggage racks). And unless one’s destination is outside the CBD, no transfers are required; you are likely dropped off within a few blocks of your destination, an easy walk. Furthermore, on the highly used Park-and-Ride routes the buses leave every several minutes; you don’t have to time your arrival, the wait time to depart is minimal. Commuter rail never works like that (though light rail can). The assumption that rail is going to provide superior service simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s likely to be worse service for the patrons than what we have now with the Park-and-Ride buses. Especially since most everyone will have to drive to the station anyway, so no difference there.”
Musk said that “public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end?”
NYT and COU on Houston after Harvey + the Transit Apocalypse
Before getting to a big backlog of items this week, my Center for Opportunity Urbanism post-Harvey paper with Wendell Cox got mentioned and linked in the NYT's lead feature story on Houston and Harvey last weekend! The reporter, Michael Kimmelman, spent a week in Houston, and I was able to speak with him a couple of times. Unsurprisingly, a NYT piece is skeptical of Houston's high-freedom/low-regulation approach vs. more centralized planning, but we just have to prove them wrong with a pragmatic response to Harvey that preserves the successful essence of the Houston model while increasing our resilience against future storms.
This week's items can all be grouped under the growing theme of "the transit apocalypse" and rail failures as transit ridership continues a sharp decline across the country:
"But the expansion plan, which caused CityLab to once dub Denver “the most advanced transit city in the west,” has yet to translate into greater transit ridership, or even reduced use of cars. In 2006, then-mayor of Denver John Hickenlooper described a hope that the city would reach 20 percent ridership by 2020. But in 2016, only 6 percent of people in Denver used public transit as part of their commute to work."
"Some regions have seen catastrophic drops in ridership since 2010: 30% or more in Detroit, Sacramento and Memphis; 20% to 30% in Austin, Cleveland, Louisville, St. Louis and Virginia Beach-Norfolk ; and 15% to 20% in Atlanta, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio and Washington.
Adding rail service hasn’t helped. To pay for new light-rail lines that opened in 2012 and 2016, Los Angeles cut bus service. The city lost nearly four bus riders for every additional rail rider. Atlanta, Dallas, Sacramento and San Jose have seen similar results. The rail system in Portland, Ore., is often considered successful, but only 8% of commuters take transit of any kind to work. In 1980, before rail was constructed, buses alone were carrying 10% of commuters.
...measured per passenger-mile, the subsidies for transit are more than 40 times as great as for driving.
The transit industry has compounded its problems by going heavily into debt, allowing unfunded pensions and health-care obligations to snowball, and failing to maintain the rail lines they already have. According to the Department of Transportation, the nationwide transit maintenance backlog is approaching $100 billion, causing exactly the problems you’d expect: derailments of New York City subways, slowdowns of Chicago’s elevated train, smoke in Washington metro tunnels, and other operational and safety issues. Even if all the money now spent on new construction were redirected to maintenance, according to the department, it would take 20 years to rehabilitate America’s rail transit systems."
"As transit gets squeezed from the outside by cheap and convenient competitors, transit agencies are buckling under the internal pressure of long-deferred maintenance and underfunded pension and health liabilities.
New York's subway system is looking at a $6.3 billion maintenance backlog. D.C.'s WMATA needs to spend $17.4 billion over the next 10 years to fix the maintenance backlog in Washington's Metrorail system. In 2015, the Federal Transit Administration estimated that the transit industry as a whole had a $89.8 billion backlog, a number O'Toole considers "conservative." ... As a fix, O'Toole suggest that transit agencies "stop wasting money on expensive and noncompetitive transit services and focus on providing basic, cost-effective services for those who need transit the most, while putting their economic houses in order by reducing maintenance backlogs, debts, and unfunded obligations." In other words: Stop building new rail lines, and replace the current lines with bus services as they outlive their usefulness.
Instead of grappling with these long-run problems, transit agencies are exacerbating them by building costly light-rail extensions that fail to attract riders. ... Seattle's $54 billion transit expansion is expected to net around 30,000 additional daily riders by 2040. That's $1.8 million for each new rider." (!!!)
"Back in 1980, Portland transit carried 10 percent of the region’s commuters to work. Since then, the region has increased its population density by 20 percent, spent $5 billion building nearly 80 miles of rail transit lines, and subsidized scores of high-density, mixed-use housing projects in light-rail and other transit corridors. The result is that, in 2016, just 8.0 percent of commuters took transit to work."
I've got a ton of other non-transit items, but this already seems like too much for one post. More next week.
Out of that work came some preliminary recommendations/ideas that aren't in the paper, but I'm interested in hearing feedback on in the comments. I'll be the first to admit that these are very high level, and that people far more qualified than I are looking into many of these at a much deeper level.
FEMA should accelerate programs to buyout homes that flood repeatedly. 7,000 homes could be removed for roughly $2 billion.
Jumpstart the Trump infrastructure plan with a FEMA infrastructure investment bank, since FEMA is best positioned to see the costs and benefits of flood mitigation infrastructure projects.
Review detention regulations, especially the 10,000 sq.ft minimum rule. Also consider increasing the detention standard so runoff is actually reduced by development vs. land left undeveloped.
Instead of an outright ban on floodplain development - which risks government takings lawsuits or very high costs of buyouts – enforce high elevation and detention requirements on such developments. Houston should be confident that every new outlying development is actually reducing the flow of water into downstream bayous.
Review reservoirs for upgrades and improvements. Evaluate the potential for additional new reservoirs and detention parks.
Consider cross-connecting reservoirs and bayous using high-voltage power-line rights-of-way so areas at risk for overflowing can have alternate drainage channels. One possibility would be to connect the Addicks and Barker reservoirs to White Oak and Braes Bayous to reduce stress and flooding on Buffalo Bayou (see power-line RoW map here and note the dotted lines on the west side near the reservoirs connecting to both bayous). If such channels had existed during Harvey, thousands of homes near the reservoirs would not have needed to flood during reservoir releases (as Dallas News exposed in this story about a never-implemented 1996 plan under I10).
Use Harvey as a new modeling benchmark for flooding. Projects can be evaluated on a cost-benefit basis for property value that would have been removed from Harvey flooding.
Reinstate ReBuild Houston, including a new ballot this fall if necessary. Popular support seems assured after Harvey.
Consider relaxing minimum parking regulations in favor of additional stormwater retention. Allow new developments or re-developments to tradeoff parking for additional stormwater retention.
Consider special purpose/TIRZ districts in specific watersheds for mitigation projects in those watersheds. These projects would be paid for by the tax-increment value increase of properties removed from the floodplains.
When adding new taxes or fees for drainage funding, consider market-based incentives that give property owners credits to reduce their tax with water retention improvements like green roofs, cisterns, water barrels, permeable pavers, and detention ponds.
Don’t let Harvey’s rainfall make us lose sight of Houston’s high storm-surge risk (especially in the industrial Ship Channel) and the continuing need for the Ike Dike or mid-bay solutions. Evaluate potential financing of these projects with the savings from resulting flood insurance rate reductions. Eric Berger also pointed out that we've grown complacent about the risks from very high winds, since nothing higher than a Cat 2 hurricane has hit us since the early 60s. Construction standards should be revisited.
Harvey exposed the need for elevated roads to help evacuations and first responders get around the city during flood events. As Houston further develops its network of Managed eXpress (MaX) Lanes (see below), consider elevating them to provide this network. This is the quote that made me think of it: "It seems like there would be a way to create an elevated road that helps people get out all the time [rather than rely solely on low-lying, water-conveying roads]." -Wesley Highfield, professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M University at Galveston who specializes in flood resilience in an interview here.
One thing Houston is really good at is engineering, and this is really just a large cost-benefit engineering optimization problem that should be manageable: calculating what $X investment will yield in $Y benefits in terms of property protected from future flooding. Figuring out the right answers should be complex but relatively straightforward. But I acknowledge the politics will be trickier. Fingers crossed our representatives are up to the challenge, even if it involves a few tax increases.
Apologies for the very long gap time since my last post - vacation, eclipse totality, and Hurricane Harvey (with many national journalist phone interviews, including these at WSJ and NYT) followed by a hurricane-level wave of work has kept me more than fully occupied. But I have accumulated a great set of Harvey-related links and excerpts I've been wanting to share for a while. I know this is very long vs. my usual post - just consider it making up for the lack of posts over the last many weeks, so dig in and please enjoy.
"And yet, this week I suspect we’ll mostly see another side of Houston: its scrappy sense of humor, and its extraordinary and very Texan largesse. Houston responds to disaster with fortitude: the city absorbed two hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees in the nineteen-seventies, and it currently resettles twenty-five of every thousand refugees that the United Nations resettles anywhere—that’s more than any other city in America, and more than most countries. After Hurricane Katrina, Houston took in a quarter of a million evacuees, and, aided by Mayor Bill White’s multimillion-dollar resettlement program, as many as forty thousand people stayed... in Houston, Harvey is already showing how an individualistic work ethic and a spirit of collective generosity can and have to coexist."
"Houston – You Are The Change Our World Needs To See - We need to follow Houston’s lead and come together, not only to overcome the storm, but to overcome the oppressive divide we are seeing in our nation."
"Nationally, Houston has a lousy reputation. It's too hot, too humid, and too, well, too sprawly. It is all of those things. And don't tell the Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau I said this, but it's not a great city to visit. There isn't much to do here that's touristy, especially during our sultry summers. But here's a little secret: Houston is a great place to live. It's the opposite of, "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." Rather, Houston may not be a nice place to visit, but you would want to live there. I do."
“If Harvey happened in 1850 instead of today,” added historian Phil Magness on Facebook, “the results would be nearly identical in terms of land flooded…No zoning law or ban on parking lot construction would ever have ‘fixed’ anything about that.”
Magness later added a video from Texas Archive showing Houston’s central Buffalo Bayou after a 1935 flood, at a higher level than it is now, despite the city having far less impervious surface back then."
"Myth #1: Better land-use planning could have significantly alleviated this flooding.
Fact: 50 inches of rain would have devastated any city. Even this article acknowledges that the loss of wetlands from 1992 to 2010 accounted for about 4 billion gallons of lost capacity to absorb storm water. Harvey had already dropped 15 trillion gallons as of two days ago. The total is certain to be far higher."
"And if the region begins to put stricter regulations on building, there is a chance that one of Houston’s great lures — affordable housing — may disappear. This is a concern for Joel Kotkin, the urban theorist and author who has been a great champion of Houston’s lax regulation policies.
“If you put the kind of super-strict planning shackles on Houston, that would be
the way to kill it,” he said. “Why would you live in a hot, humid, flat space if it was
expensive?”
Like many others, he was quick to praise Houston’s energy and optimism, and said the city would recover. The Texas author Larry McMurtry, a former Houston resident, agreed.
“Houston will accept anybody who’s got hustle — it respects energy more than
any place,” he said. “Houston is a very resilient city, and it will overcome.”
"And yet, the pundits have largely given up on casting blame for the disaster — with a few exceptions, of course. And the reason is simple: The example set by both Houston's leaders and its people has been too inspiring.
Houston has always been underrated. It's the energy capital of the United States, the most international metropolitan area in the country and, as we've all now seen, the kind of place where hundreds of people will naturally respond to a major catastrophe by, for example, rescuing random strangers, using their rowboats."
"When a storm of this size hits such a large city — the fourth-largest in America — the financial cost will always be extraordinary. But the courage, neighbourliness and generosity that Texans have demonstrated in recent days are no less so. Nature’s fury may be awesome, but mankind’s resilience is greater still. That ought to be the real lesson from Houston."
"If there’s one lesson I’ve learned as an outsider looking in, it’s that there’s a sense of purpose to these people like I’ve never seen. A central passion runs through Texans unlike any other American identity. Pride percolates here. It’s something people who aren’t from Texas just can’t grasp. We may have a docile sense of civic pride for our hometowns, but nothing like this state demands of its residents.
...
That sense of purpose and absolute unwillingness to bend in their pride is why Texas will only become stronger in the wake of Hurricane Harvey."
"Beyond not segregating uses, Houston’s approach to planning is unique in that it doesn’t artificially limit densities or throw up barriers to dense urban redevelopment. This is generally good if you care about housing affordability or racial segregation, since it keeps NIMBYs from blocking new multi-family housing. Unlike San Francisco or Boston, Houston lacks a lot of the discretionary reviews and “neighborhood vetoes,” making it much easier to convert single-family homes in high-demand areas into apartments or townhouses. This also makes dense infill redevelopment much easier, which allows cities to grow up and become more dense. Where the zoning in most cities pushes new development out into the suburbs, Houston keeps it easy to add more housing in desirable urban neighborhoods. Ironically, if we are concerned about destructive greenfield development, Houston’s lack of zoning almost certainly helps more than it hurts."
Actually, I've got even more, but I'm going to cut it off here and save them for next week. We're also working on a COU briefing on Harvey lessons which I will share as soon as it's published.
DART eviscerated, tolls vs sprawl, transit apocalypse, build the Ike Dike, top rankings, and more
After my last post which included problems with DART, a reader sent me this Dallas Observer story that's even more damning of the utter failure of DARTs commuter light rail strategy while subtly endorsing Houston METRO's approach:
"Since the founding of DART in 1983, the city has been shackled to the suburbs in the creation of what has become the nation’s dumbest mass-transit system.
Instead of investing money where it could actually make a difference — in the dense, urban core where people might be talked out of their cars — DART has spent billions of tax dollars building a kind of amusement park ride. DART has squandered our resources and our time building a slow-poke, light rail, surface-running system that screws up traffic, takes forever, attracts miserably few riders and, as a result, operates at an ungodly subsidy. Its real purpose has been to serve as an amenity and sales-pitch bauble for suburban apartment developers. ...
DART, as presently constituted and designed, is a massive failure that sucks up scarce resources we need to spend on smarter things. If DART were a horse, we'd shoot it."
In other news, I find it amusing that anti-toll forces have joined with anti-sprawl forces to oppose new suburban toll roads, like the extension of 249 past Tomball. In theory, anti-sprawl forces should vigorously support toll roads because they better price somebody's decision to live far out and commute in. The problem with the anti-sprawlers is that they realize even fully priced with toll roads, people prefer affordable suburban living and will still live out there, so they prefer to kill the roads by any means necessary, even if that means aligning with the anti-toll people, who want the road, they just want it to be free (the opposite of what the anti-sprawlers want!). The unfortunate bottom line is that the anti-toll crowd has gotten politically powerful enough the politicians have to go with it, but TXDoT and rational officials realize it's not toll vs. no-toll, it's toll vs. no-road, so they're going to keep building them because they keep filling up with demand as fast as they're built!
"Isn't the more likely explanation that people who spend a lot on housing don't have much money leftover for transportation? And those who do have affordable suburban houses have plenty to spend on high-end vehicles? Is it really fair to say a suburban house has a "high cost of transportation" because people are buying high-end trucks, SUVs, mini-vans, and luxury cars, when they just as easily could buy a cheap used Honda Civic or Toyota Prius if they were really concerned with keeping their transportation costs low?"
Moving on to make a dent in the huge backlog of smaller items to share...
"Boasting affordable living costs and a large number of incubators, Houston takes the title as the number one best city for minority entrepreneurs. The city has one of the most diverse populations and its bustling startup scene is full of minority-owned business ventures. It also comes in fourth place for the most economic opportunities for minorities."
Houston, Texas Texas' most underrated big city does almost everything right. City population: 2,167,988 Cost of living index: 90 (10% lower than US average) If you lament your city's poor planning, crumbling infrastructure, and careless corporate community, look to America's fourth-largest city for examples of how all that should be done. Not gonna lie: The traffic can be a drag, and the swampy summers are a slog. But overall Houston has its shit together better than any city its size.
Even though the oil industry isn't the king it once was, health care, construction, education, and tourism are bringing people to Houston by the tens of thousands. With them have come new sports stadiums, new neighborhoods like the artsy EaDo or the hipster-historic Montrose, and a worldly food scene that extends waaaay beyond the usual barbecue and Tex-Mex (though, obviously, both of those are great too). Through public-private partnerships, Houston has developed America's premier museum district, plus stunning urban green spaces like the 160-acre Buffalo Bayou Park, and it's only adding each year. In terms of perceived "coolness," H-Town is still in Austin's overinflated shadow, but in a state this hot, the shade is a pretty good place to be. Improving quality of life while still rapidly growing? Take notes, Austin. -- M.M.
A New Yorker rediscovers Houston, Ike Dike case, 2004 vs. 2017 Houston, and more
This week's items:
A Tale of Two Super Bowls: Houston in 2004 vs. 2017. Some pretty cool statistical comparisons, like nearly double the hotel rooms, ~25% more airport flights, 67% more restaurants (!), and the Galleria has almost doubled its annual visitors! And how crazy would it be if the game is an exact rematch? But here's to hoping it's the Texans instead, which are looking pretty solid with a 3-0 preseason.
"In 2004, the New England Patriots defeated the Carolina Panthers 32-29 at Reliant Stadium. According to sports analysts, we could see this exact same matchup in the newly renamed NRG Stadium in 2017. Will Cam&Crew have a major chance at redemption? Only time will tell…"
Most of the country’s new apartments are going up right here in Houston. Almost a quarter of all apartments under construction in the country are in Texas, and Houston has the most in the state, which I would at least partially attribute to the lack of zoning, which often tends to be anti-apartments in most cities.
Finally, a longer but great piece in Thrillist, "Houston Has No Problem" by local that moved to NYC and has been amazed by how the city has matured since.
In New York City, I noticed the difference over the years. It went from people saying “Why would you ever go to Houston?” to “I wanna check that place out!”
It does an amazing job extolling Houston's virtues and what makes us a great city. It'll make you a proud Houstonian all over again. Highly recommended.
"When trains start running on 11 new miles of Gold Line tracks this weekend stretching eastward to Azusa, will they carry any passengers? Ridership on Metro's buses and trains has been not just stagnant, but shrinking for nearly two years. At the start of 2014, there were on average 1.45 million bus and rail boardings on weekdays. A year later, it was 1.38 million. By January 2016, weekday boardings had further slipped to 1.27 million.
Even given transfers and round-trips, it would appear that upward of 130,000 Angeleno commuters have abandoned mass transit."
Forget the Ike Dike - love will save us from a hurricane
Over the years, I've noticed a phenomena that maybe you've noticed too: some issue becomes the "hot" issue of the moment (terrorism, Ebola, etc.) and then people jump on the bandwagon for that issue by trying to link it to whatever their pet issue is, no matter how tenuous the connection may be. "If you support my pet issue X, it will reduce the problem of hot issue Y." If they can successfully link the issues, maybe public support (or, better yet, taxpayer dollars) will swing behind their pet issue. Sometimes the connection gets stretched so far as to become utterly absurd. And that brings me to Exhibit A: this op-ed in the Chronicle ("How to protect our city against storms? First, make it lovable. Dikes and levees are secondary. What they protect matters more.") saying the key to our hurricane resilience is not something so pragmatic as a dike, but really about making our city more walkable and lovable. Wait... what? Really? Evidently, New Orleans' big failure with Katrina had nothing to do with being a city below sea level with substandard levees, but it wasn't walkable and lovable enough. Uh-huh...
Let me address some of the specific arguments in the piece:
Levees can fail: Sure, anything can fail, but how many times have levees and dikes successfully protected New Orleans or the Netherlands vs. the number of times they failed? Does one failure mean dozens of other successful protective events don't have value? And the nice thing about Houston over New Orleans is that we are *above* sea level, so if there is a failure, it will just drain right out as the tide recedes, as opposed to stagnating in the big bowl of below-sea-level New Orleans.
Levees cause stuff to be built where it shouldn't: Sorry Netherlands/New Orleans/Houston, you built stuff where you shouldn't have because once a decade mother nature is going to come at you with wallop. Rather than protecting yourself, you really need to just shut it all down and move somewhere else - nevermind the trillions of invested infrastructure. Wait, you say, it's kinda hard to operate a port without being connected to the ocean. Well, I'm sure you'll figure it out.
The key is lovability/walkability: I'm pretty sure New Orleans had that in spades, and it doesn't seem to have saved them from Katrina. Nor did it help the quaint walkable sections of Galveston during Ike. And I'm sure the Dutch will be disappointed to learn they could have saved billions on dikes over the years if they had just loved their country more, maybe with just a good handholding and kumbaya singing session every time the North Sea threatened?
His calling out of my op-ed with Joel Kotkin: "Walkability is not some concept being forced down our throats by elitist planners from the East Coast, as some suggest. (See, for instance, "Economic diversity helps Houstonians live well" by Joel Kotkin and Tory Gattis.)" Actually, if you look at the stated goals of those smart growth planners, they *are* trying to force dense urbanism down our throats, and they specifically call for restricting or eliminating suburban development. We are not opposed to walkability and walkable development like town centers, but we are opposed to forcing it on people by restricting other forms of development which leads to unaffordable housing, widening inequality, reduced opportunity, and a weakened middle class. I totally agree that some people love walkability (including myself), and we need to loosen any regulations that make it hard to develop (agreement with him on this point), but let the market decide how much demand there is and how much and where to build - not central planners.
"People in Houston currently spend as much on transportation as they do on housing. " Lies, damn lies, and statistics. As I've pointed out here before, when you have affordable housing like we do in Houston (albeit rapidly getting less so), people tend to splurge on very luxurious cars, trucks, and SUVs - but that does not mean that's the cost of transportation here. Everybody can get around Houston quite affordably in a Honda Civic, Toyota Prius, or plenty of other cars - they just choose not to. The 2013 C2ER ACCRA Cost of Living index takes this into account, and rated Houston 95.6 for transportation costs where 100 = the national average, so we're 4.4% below the national average. New York is at 110, Chicago at 124, DC at 106 - so much for dense transit cities reducing transportation costs.
"Spending less on transportation would mean you could afford more durable construction." While I agree we should have strong construction standards for wind, how does one build more durable construction for a tidal wave surge of water? Should we build everything on stilts? How incredibly expensive and inconvenient would that be, not to mention not very walkable? Maybe we should, um, build a dike so we don't have to worry about the surge in the first place and can build simply at ground level?
"Walkability means you might see your neighbors more often. Knowing who your neighbors are is a key element of resilience. Social capital is the glue that holds communities together, and places that have it back from catastrophe much faster." Does anybody else remember all the stories in Houston after Ike of people helping each other out and throwing block parties to grill meat before it spoiled in unpowered fridges and freezers? Does anybody remember our amazing response to the Katrina refugees? I think we're doing pretty well on the social capital front. And I'd like to point out that the most dense and walkable city in America, New York, is not exactly known for its friendly "social capital".
"Many people in New Orleans died because there was nowhere to run in a vast unbroken sea of single-family homes" Actually, the people that were stuck in New Orleans for Katrina where the ones without cars who relied on transit and walking. Just about everyone with a car got out successfully.
To sum up, walkable development is great, and we should certainly enable and encourage more of it, but it is absolutely no substitute for protecting our region from a direct hurricane hit with a strong physical barrier. Let's not mix up our priorities here. We know what we need to do - we just need the political and financial will to do it (and here's how to pay for it).
xkcd does a pretty cool graphic on the worst hurricane to hit each part of the country. As you can see, Katrina and Ike dominate pretty wide swaths. But then you can see large parts of the coast where it has been decades since their big hurricane, which I think partially explains the slow response to proposals like the Ike Dike - fearful memory of these events can fade quickly and it can be a long time until the next "big one", so people and politicians get complacent. We've got to find a way to keep up the political will to make the Ike Dike happen. It will pay for itself with a single even semi-direct hit.
The Austin American Statesman does an in-depth piece on the pros and cons of light rail in Portland and what lessons Austin might learn. I think it does a reasonable job on balance, but I do think they left out a major factor: Austin’s summer heat and what that does to the misery of walking, biking, and transit. It's also worth pointing out that the rail feature pointed out by the Intel employee they interview - he can work productively vs. driving - also applies just as well to bus service, including express commuter buses.
Finally, a great 10m video from Reason.TV that starts out talking about experiments with tiny houses in DC vs. their oppressive zoning regulations and bureaucracies, but then transitions to talking about the creativity and freedom allowed in Houston and Victoria. If you want to jump to the transition about Houston, it starts at the 3:50 point with NYC. Hat tip to Joel.
Rebutting the pro-rail op-eds and how to fix Houston's top issues
I wanted to focus this week's post on the GHP's new "No Limits" branding campaign for Houston, but multiple op-eds in today's Chronicle need an immediate response, so it'll have to wait a week. I'm referring to both of the pro-rail ones (here and here) as well as the board editorial calling out Houston's leadership on multiple issues.
"It's got strong public support" - The 2003 referendum passed by 52% to 48% and that was when the budget estimates were one-half or less of what the spending has actually turned out to be. If you're so confident in public support, run the referendum again (or heck just take an unbiased poll with real cost effectiveness numbers). It will get slaughtered, and they know it.
"Millennials/knowledge workers/surveyed Houstonians love transit and density" - That's great - when the existing and newly opening lines are absolutely packed with high-density transit-oriented development around the stops and we need to build more rail to accommodate demand, get back to me and we'll look at building some more. Given trends around the well-routed Main St. line, I'm guessing we might have that conversation in the 2030's or 2040's, if we're lucky. In fact, I really hope that development does happen, because the only way I see these new lines adding enough value to justify their insane cost is if they spark a massive new housing supply on the north and east sides to reduce the relentless upward pricing pressure on Houston housing, which is putting our much-vaunted affordability advantage at risk.
"We can do everything, including light rail" - Let me introduce you to the concept of opportunity cost: if we spend $150+ million per mile (!!!) for light rail, we lose the ability to spend that money on other things. What other things might we spend it on? Certainly better local bus service would be great, and I applaud Metro's re-imagining plan designed to fit within the existing budget. Imagine how much better it could be if it had that rail money available, with more frequency on more routes to more places connecting more people? But even more critical for Houston is expanding our suburban express bus transit network to all of the job centers in the city with a much more comprehensive express lane network. I agree we can't build enough freeway capacity to keep up with growth - we can't afford it and there isn't the right-of-way available even if we could. But if we don't make it easier for suburban employees (who are out there for nice affordable houses in good neighborhoods with good schools) to get to their employers in the core, more and more of those employers are going to give up on the city, pull an Exxon, and head out the 'burbs with a nice campus in The Woodlands, Katy, Sugar Land, or Pearland.. And that will leave Houston with a deteriorating core and tax base. A great core light rail network does no good if all the employers move to the outer rim. They'll let the young single 20% of their employees that live in the core reverse-commute while the 80% families have a much easier local suburb commute. This *will* happen if we don't address the suburban commuter problem, which we can't do right now because massively expensive light rail is sucking all of the air out of Metro's budget.
You heard it here first, note it for posterity: when Google's little driverless taxis are running around all over the place a decade from now, whisking people from anywhere to anywhere at the touch of a smart phone button for 50 cents/mile, we will look at all the white elephant rail lines we built and wonder what the heck we were thinking given that the technology trends were so utterly obvious at the time, yet we still thought sinking $150+ million a mile into light rail was a good idea?!
Finally, my thoughts on some of the issues brought up in the board editorial that I didn't address above:
Pensions busting the budget: the Mayor needs to go nuclear on this. By that I mean stop all city contributions to the pension plans until the legislature gives her the authority to fix them. It will generate massive much-needed media attention and legislators will have to explain why they won't give the city the power to fix its own budget. In her last term with no higher-office aspirations (that I know of - but unlike her successor, I'm sure), she is our last hope to stand up to the police, firefighters, and city employees and get this fixed. If she doesn't, then I foresee an epic failure of an attempt to raise tax revenue followed by massive cuts to city services followed by a long, slow, Detroit-like decline. All of the city's public and private leadership needs to be focused on this, and most especially you, Madam Mayor, backed up by the GHP lobbying machine.
Fixing HPD and its budget: Total agreement with Bill King's op-ed today calling for a detailed investigation into how the department is run. The numbers simply don't add up and imply massive mismanagement. Note to Bob Harvey at the GHP: get a McKinsey team on it!;-)
Hurricane risk and the stalled Ike Dike plan: Think creatively on funding it: it should reduce home insurance rates dramatically, so why not just tax those insurance plans equal to the savings to pay off the dike and come out ahead? Nobody pays any more than they already are, and we go ahead and skip all the death and destruction.
End venting. Looking forward to your thoughts in the comments. I'll be back next week to discuss the city branding campaign.
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.
