The best posts from the first 20 years and 2.3 million pageviews
Today is the 20th (!) birthday of Houston Strategies with our 1,412th post. It's hard to believe that two decades have passed since I started this blog, and it's been an incredible journey. It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating 1.5 million pageviews at the 15-year mark. Obviously things have slowed down a bit in recent years (this is my first post of 2025, lol). In honor of this milestone, I've decided to update my best posts from the first 15 years - which is now five years out-of-date - by pulling from my annual highlights posts. As you skim this list, I hope you find some of interest that you missed, forgot, or may have been posted before you discovered Houston Strategies. Enjoy.
For those of you a little put off by the old-style webpage design, I should take this opportunity to mention again that it is sort of stuck, and that's because I have a legacy blogspot template that can't be upgraded to a newer design without either a lot of work outside my expertise or losing my archive of old posts. One of the penalties for being an early blogger, lol. Hope you don't mind the old format. I'm kinda assuming the content matters more to my readers than a slick modern design ;-)
Reflections and Looking Ahead
Reaching 20 years and 2.3 million pageviews is a significant milestone for Houston Strategies. It's a testament to the power of ideas and the importance of ongoing dialogue about how we shape Houston. As I reflect on the past two decades, I'm filled with gratitude for the readers who have joined me on this journey. Your engagement, feedback, and support have been invaluable.
Houston Strategies will continue to explore the ever-evolving landscape of urban planning in the Opportunity City, seeking innovative solutions to the challenges facing Houston and advocating for policies that create a better and more vibrant city. Here's to the next chapter!
“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.
Clean energy entrepreneurship in Houston, densification, welcoming refugees, Dallas TOD failure, ADUs, population gains, rankings, and more
Continuing to clear out some backlogged smaller items. A lot of these I tweeted while I was out of town for much of the summer, but just now getting a chance to bring them to the blog:
“Every day I meet another oil and gas guy who is now a climate entrepreneur. I think there is going to be an explosion of clean energy activity out of the O&G sector, and we’ll be stunned in the next 5-7 years by how many of these problems they handle.”
"Austin isn’t the densest metropolitan area in Texas. That honor belongs to the nine-county Houston region, which increased from 1,560 residents per square mile in 2010 to 1,858 in 2020, an increase of about 19%."
"H-Town exudes Southern hospitality: The pace of life is more relaxed than many major cities, and they're welcoming, polite, and eager to share the delights of their city with visitors...make Houstonians less cliquey and more hospitable towards newcomers."
This makes me proud. Houston's doors are always open to those seeking a fresh start and new opportunity: "Volunteers from Houston Welcomes Refugees showed up with boxes of items to furnish the family’s new home." NYT: From Kabul Airport to a Houston Walmart
"In short, TOD is simply a scam. Like Portland’s light-rail mafia, which guided subsidies to favored developers who would build TODs, Dallas light rail and TODs are merely a way of transferring money from taxpayers to developers."
"There are more than 3,600 ADUs in Houston (according to HCAD data) of which the median size is 530 square feet (max allowed=900sqft). ADUs offer more housing options while maintaining the existing community character."
Niche 2021 Best Cities to Live in America. The Woodlands ranked the #1 Best City to Live in America. Houston gets an A-, not bad for a major metro, pulled down by crime. Hat tip to George.
"Seven decades later, I'm amazed to hear that some still think of Houston as part of "flyover country" when it has become one of the world's great art cities. What would it take to wake people up to all that diverse, sophisticated Houston has to offer?"
“Messrs. Glaeser and Cutler see nothing less than “the rapid-fire deurbanization of our world.”
“Uncontrolled pandemic,” the authors write, poses “an existential threat” to the urban world. Nor is the coronavirus the only problem that cities face. “A Pandora’s Box of urban woes has emerged,” they continue, “including overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes.” These are not disparate problems. Rather, they “all stem from a common root: our cities protect insiders and leave outsiders to suffer.”
In Messrs. Glaeser and Cutler’s view, something has gone deeply wrong with how policy is set in many American cities. Insiders have captured control of how cities operate—and used that control to enrich themselves while providing limited opportunities for newer, younger residents."
I think Houston is better than most cities on these problems, but I'd be curious to hear what you think in the comments...
"Silicon Valley is a perfect example of the long-term problem. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, four counties in northern California—Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara—have per capita incomes over $100,000. Given that extraordinary prosperity, you might think that people would be flooding into the region, as they did after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. Yet they are not. Taken together, those counties’ population grew by only 6.5% between 2010 and 2020, below the average growth rate for large counties. For comparison, Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, has 35% less land than the four California counties, but in the 2010s its population grew 175% faster.
The reason for this is not hard to find. House prices in Silicon Valley make living there prohibitive for all but the very wealthy. Data from the National Association of Realtors show that in the second quarter of 2021, the median sales price for a new home was $1.7 million in San Jose and $1.4 million in San Francisco. In Houston, the median sales price was $307,000. Given the ease of building in greater Houston, house prices there may actually decline once we get through the pandemic. There is little chance that prices will fall in Silicon Valley.
Harris County is growing so rapidly because it is a place where housing and entrepreneurship are still largely unfettered. In contrast, coastal California is the capital of insider privilege. In 1982, the economist Mancur Olson published “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” in which he argued that in every society, cliques and special interest groups pass laws that limit competition and prevent change."
"Cities have historically been the gateway to America and our nation’s promise of opportunity and upward mobility. Today, however, many of our nation’s highest profile cities have become ‘luxury products’ affordable only for the highest income earners. Houston and other ‘opportunity cities’ have historically bucked this trend by embracing policies that lower the cost of living, create jobs, and enhance the quality of life for all. But a continuation of this success is under threat from an array of proposed ‘command and control’ policies that will erode our city’s dynamism. Houston’s success is no accident, and it’s future is worth fighting for.
Join the Liberty Leadership Council and the Urban Reform Institute for a vibrant discussion of Houston’s market-centered, ‘people-oriented’ approach to urban policy, planning, and development.
We’ll talk zoning, transportation, infrastructure, housing, and everything in between—all while enjoying views of downtown and toasting the Bayou City."
City Journal: End of the Road for Parking Requirements - They serve as a tax on housing. Houston should pass a plan to automatically reduce parking minimums citywide by 8%/year - enough for real impact over time w/o public blowback. Why keep building parking that autonomous taxis will make obsolete in the 2030s or even sooner?
"Texas is already known for high econ freedom and autonomy from the feds. The more I learn, the more unique it seems on this front. Counties without zoning. Toll roads galore. Limited land handed to the feds. Independent not unified school districts. Separate energy grid. Higher speed limits. And I could go on. The governance here is truly different.
A culture of exceptionalism: Texas wants to be the best, and has built an unapologetic brand around it - “everything’s bigger in Texas.” Coastal urban America used to have that bravado, but is now overcome with Nimbyism and guilt-mongering."
Forbes: Miami Just Rolled Out Its Newest Red Carpet To The Tech World. Are San Francisco And Austin Paying Attention? Hat tip to Judah. I’d heard about the Miami tech push (I think their odds are better getting Wall Street). The REEF model is an interesting one, although probably not for Houston. It seems to be taking advantage of tight zoning in most cities to create new locations for businesses using parking lots, because those businesses can’t find a real location in certain neighborhoods. Houston’s lack of zoning means real locations are readily available in most areas.
"More permits (48,208) were issued last year for new-home construction in the Houston area than anywhere else in the U.S. DFW ranked second (43,884), and Austin held the No. 5 spot (21,653)."
Drive & Listen: Wow this is super cool and mesmerizing. You can set the speed of the vehicle, street noise, music - even change radio stations while driving in 50 different cities around the world, spending as much time as you like in any one of them. Someone needs to do this for Houston!
Finally, we'll end with a little dark humor meme that makes a great point:
Ever-growing layers of bureaucracy are how societies stagnate, and it's the direct cause of increasing unaffordability in cities across the country.
My online event Tues, HTX #1 BBQ and #2 tech growth, R voters moving to TX, post-pandemic city shifts, ATX vs. HTX home prices, housing craziness humor, and more
Before we get to this week's items, just a reminder that my Mercatus online panel event on Land Use without Planning is 2pm CT on Tuesday. I'll be covering some of Houston's land use and zoning history as well as what other cities can learn from Houston. You can learn more and register here.
Moving on to a large backlog of items for this week:
NYT: There’s an Exodus From the ‘Star Cities,’ and I Have Good News and Bad News. Excellent summary of many different analyses forecasting post-pandemic urban geography. I’m not sure they’re right that pandemic migration will push R counties/states more D though. A lot of frustrated Rs are using the pandemic to escape D states and move to R states. For every D techie moving from SF to Austin, I'd bet 2 frustrated California Rs are moving to Texas. Actually, a recent survey found 57% of California migrants to Houston voted for Ted Cruz, which validates what I've been hearing. Here’s the most upvoted comment:
"Kotkin nails it 'Meanwhile, the working class struggles to pay rent, possesses no demonstrable path to a better life and, as a result, often migrates elsewhere.' I mean seriously is there anything worse than being poor in New York City, working a job in food service, barely able to pay your rent, knowing that you'll never own anything but an endless struggle against being evicted? Or you can move to Georgia, live cheaply in a far larger house / apt, and work towards gaining equity of something. No smart poor person would ever stay in NYC."
Excellent analysis video and paper showing that even where the land values are the same in Austin and Houston (i.e. same market demand), Austin houses are far more expensive due to over-regulation. Thanks Kevin!
"Houston ranks second among 14 major U.S. labor markets for the number of relocating software and IT workers between March 2020 and February 2021 compared with the same period a year earlier.
Miami grabs the No. 1 spot for the gain in software and IT workers (up 15.4 percent) between the two periods, with Houston in second place (10.4 percent) and Dallas-Fort Worth in third place (8.6 percent), according to the LinkedIn data."
"The big story among the nation’s major metros over the past decade has been the persistence of urban core out-migration and suburban in-migration...Houston had the 2nd-largest gain at 1.2 million, with a 20.8% increase, and remains the 5th largest metro."
"Certainly, Houstonians will be pleased with that result, but the notion that Austin might be Texas' third best city for barbecue will likely cause considerable agita in the state capital." ;-D
"It’s a melting pot, and that’s one of the things that stood out that I absolutely loved about the city. The fact that there’s a lot of positivity going on and people doing great things here, those are really some of the main reasons I stayed in the city.
Their turkey legs are decadent, sure. Like other rodeo-adjacent foods, they’re large, indulgent and full of flavor. They, in essence, are Houston."
Texas and HTX growth secret, what kind of Texan are you? major climate change solution, TX miracle is more than oil, and more
My lead item this week is a comment I made on the Market Urbanism Report Facebook group:
Going beyond all the usual reasons given for Texas' high growth, here's the technical overlooked one that I think is a big key: Texas does not allow unincorporated counties to regulate land use (i.e. create zoning), which creates pretty much a totally free market in development just outside cities. Combine that with MUDs (municipal utility districts) that allow private developers to float bonds to pay for master-planned community infrastructure paid back by property taxes on that development, and there is complete flexibility in the suburban/exurban housing market. And those master-planned communities compete fiercely on price and amenities (far more than incorporated cities do). That, in turn, forces the core incorporated cities to "compete" for private development dollars by not over-regulating - otherwise they'll just jump outside the city limits. It's an overall balance of forces that keeps welcoming development and newcomers with a strong value proposition (high amenities with relatively low costs).
Moving on to some smaller items this week:
I took this Threads of Texas quiz and came out a Civic Pragmatist - not much surprise there, lol. Let me know your own results and thoughts in the comments.
"Civic Pragmatists are optimistic yet pragmatic when they think about a changing Texas. Their ideal Texas is one where the state is a leader in the knowledge-economy industries, as well as a Texas where everyone feels safe and like they belong."
National Review: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Aims to End Single-Family Zoning (hat tip to Bill). Looks like they editorialize against federal intervention to force the elimination of local SFZ, which I would agree is problematic, but not necessarily against all zoning reform:
“The zoning issue is tough and complex. It balances principled libertarian objections to zoning and the interests of developers, on the one hand, against core principles of federalism and local control, on the other.”
I’d say Houston’s secret sauce is less about not having SFZ (deed restrictions are pretty much the same) than allowing pretty much anything else everywhere that’s not single-family: apartments, towers, retail, mixed-use, offices, you name it.
The Federalist: The Texas Miracle Isn’t All About Oil - Given that oil prices remain less than half of what they were at their peak, all those arguing that the Texas model will fail are just wrong.
"In India alone, the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago will have to be developed every year to meet demand for housing. ...
Michael Ramage of the University of Cambridge told the meeting of a 300-square-metre four-storey wooden building constructed in that city. Erecting this generated 126 tonnes of co2. Had it been made with concrete the tally would have risen to 310 tonnes. If steel had been used, emissions would have topped 498 tonnes. Indeed, from one point of view, this building might actually be viewed as “carbon negative”. When trees grow they lock carbon up in their wood—in this case the equivalent of 540 tonnes of co2. Preserved in Cambridge rather than recycled by beetles, fungi and bacteria, that carbon represents a long-term subtraction of co2 from the atmosphere.
If building with wood takes off, it does raise concern about there being enough trees to go round. But with sustainably managed forests that should not be a problem, says Dr. Ramage. A family-sized apartment requires about 30 cubic metres of timber, and he estimates Europe’s sustainable forests alone grow that amount every seven seconds. Nor is fire a risk, for engineered timber does not burn easily."
"So Vyas picked another metropolis that's increasingly become young people's next-best option — Houston.
Now 34, Vyas, a tech worker, has lived in Houston since 2013. "I knew I didn’t like New York, so this was the next best thing,” Vyas said. “There are a lot of things you want to try when you are younger -- you want to try new things. Houston gives you that, whether it’s food, people or dating. And it’s cheap to live in.”
My Land Use without Zoning event, TX #1 for small biz, HTX #1 for diversity, urban transit after covid, sinking I69 in Midtown, and the Be Someone sign is back!
"Zoning and land use policy regulations present the greatest barriers to affordable housing and increased urban density.
Understanding how to navigate and remove these barriers allows for a dynamic housing market and paves the way for successful community development efforts.
The study of the impact of land use and zoning policy began with Bernard Siegan in his pioneering 1972 study, "Land Use Without Zoning." In his book, Siegan first set out what has today emerged as a common-sense perspective: Zoning not only fails to achieve its stated ends of ordering urban growth and separating incompatible uses, but it also drives housing costs up and competition down.
Drawing on the unique example of Houston—America’s fourth-largest city, and its lone dissenter on zoning—Siegan explored the impact of a different approach to land use policy and demonstrated how land use will naturally regulate itself in a non-zoned environment and yield a greater availability of multifamily housing.
While we have gained a greater understanding of the issues created by overly burdensome land use restrictions, these policies still remain in place, restricting the growth of communities and keeping housing costs high. Join us for a discussion of how land use reform battles have evolved over time, how community groups are working to remove these barriers and increase urban density, and how barriers to development can be challenged in court."
Big piece of good news buried in this one - let the sinking and debottlenecking begin!
"Though TxDOT has halted development of many segments, the portion along I-69 from Spur 527 to Texas 288 — which includes Wheeler — remains on pace for construction to start next year."
Reason: Urban Transit after Covid explores what remote work may do to transit. Current ridership is so low cars are actually more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly! Excerpt and conclusion:
"As of December 2020, the most fuel-efficient means of commuting was the car, followed by light trucks—but only because occupancy embedded in the transit calculations was so drastically low. ...
A major premise of the Biden administration’s transportation agenda is to greatly increase federal spending on transit, compared with only modest, constrained increases for highways (with very little scope for adding highway capacity). This approach poses major risks of putting billions of taxpayer dollars into projects that will have costs far greater than their benefits (e.g., light rail systems for medium-sized cities, megaproject expansions of heavy rail and commuter rail systems, etc.).
At the very least, it is premature at this juncture to commit funding for major new rail transit projects before we have some idea of the extent of transit ridership in the first several years after nationwide vaccinations."
Finally, I'd like to end with a small celebration for whoever repainted the iconic Be Someone bridge - love it!
Are we entering the Distributed Age? Plus perspectives on Houston, TX #1 for infrastructure, and more
My leads this week are a couple of great quotes about Houston:
"Houston has actively deregulated, with the result that it's the only major city in the U.S. today undergoing a transformational change from suburban to urban densities. Houston makes thinkable the unthinkable."
-Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Land Use without Zoning book letter
"Once a planning pariah, Houston, with its peculiar lack of zoning, increasingly looks like the future."
-Nolan Gray in the afterword of the newly updated Mercatus edition of "Land Use without Zoning" by Bernard Siegan.
If you're curious about the recently re-released book on Houston, "Land Use without Zoning" by Bernard Siegan, you can find it here.
"Other American cities—notably Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Miami—are challenging NYC’s supremacy in communications, legal and financial services, the arts and business. Political and economic leaders in those cities encourage inclusive growth, development and change."
"No state handles more of America’s cargo than Texas. In fact, no state comes close. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Lone Star State handles around $2 trillion worth of commodities per year. And Texas has the infrastructure to handle it. Port Houston, the nation’s second biggest, has surpassed Rotterdam as the world’s largest petrochemical complex, officials say."
NYT: Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Manhattan May Never Be the Same - New York City, long buoyed by the flow of commuters into its towering office buildings, faces a cataclysmic challenge, even when the pandemic ends. Good excerpts in this one. I wonder if the Distributed Age label will stick?...
“A year after the coronavirus sparked an extraordinary exodus of workers from office buildings, what had seemed like a short-term inconvenience is now clearly becoming a permanent and tectonic shift in how and where people work. Employers and employees have both embraced the advantages of remote work, including lower office costs and greater flexibility for employees, especially those with families.” …
Still, about 90 percent of Manhattan office workers are working remotely, a rate that has remained unchanged for months, according to a recent survey of major employers by the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group, which estimated that less than half of office workers would return by September. …
“We believe that we’re on top of the next change, which is the Distributed Age, where people can be more valuable in how they work, which doesn’t really matter where you spend your time,” said Alexander Westerdahl, the vice president of human resources at Spotify, the Stockholm-based streaming music giant that has 6,500 employees worldwide.
"As Houston prepares for unprecedented population growth in the coming decades, I predict that the versatile ADU concept will continue to help make our inner-city neighborhoods more affordable and sustainable."
"In 1976, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable declared that Houston was “the American present and future. It is an exciting and disturbing place,” one that “scholars flock to for the purpose of seeing what modern civilization has wrought.” In her account the city's distinctive character lay in its decenteredness, its seemingly limitless capacity for shape-shifting, and its utter lack of history. Like many observers then and since, Huxtable was struck by the experience of juxtaposition—of form, scale, type, and space—that was a consequence, in part, of the city's infamous lack of zoning regulations and its unapologetic accommodation of private real estate interests"
The future of remote work and what it means for Houston
This week I want to focus on a single CSM story, because it's the most insightful I've seen on what post-pandemic work might look like: Remote work is here to stay – and it’s changing our lives. There are so many great nuggets, insights, and excerpts in it, which I'll follow with what I think it all means for Houston:
An IBM poll found that 54% wanted to keep working from home post-pandemic, and 75% wanted the option of working from home occasionally.
“What the pandemic made blazingly obvious,” says a Manhattan entertainment lawyer, “is that there is no need for a physical office.” Only a complete lack of imagination, he says, kept the realization from dawning sooner. “Before the pandemic, we wouldn’t have taken the question [of going virtual] seriously. It wouldn’t have seemed possible.” ...
It’s hard to find a management expert who doesn’t judge the work-from-home experiment a resounding – and somewhat unexpected – success. A survey by the recruiting firm Robert Walters found that 77% of professionals believe they’ve been equally or more effective when remote, and that 86% of employers plan to continue remote work “in some form” after the pandemic ends. A January survey by the consulting firm PwC revealed that employer satisfaction had risen even as the year dragged on, with 83% now assessing remote work successful for their company, up from 73% last June.
Wrote one top manager in an email posted by economist Tyler Cowen: “Speaking from personal experience as a white-collar Exec, the productivity gains for our highest value workers has been immense. The typical time-sucks and distractions of in-office work have been eliminated.... Mental focus on productive efforts is near constant. Perhaps most importantly, work travel is not happening.” ...
Among venture capitalists and venture-backed entrepreneurs, 74% now expect their companies to be majority or fully remote. ...
“Even before the pandemic,” he says, “big cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were losing population to suburbs, lower-cost metro areas, and less expensive states in what Zillow called ‘a great reshuffling.’”
The trend has accelerated, Mr. Kotkin says. “In just the past six months, New York City lost almost as many residents as it gained since 1950.” He notes that a recent report by Upwork, a freelancing platform, suggests that 14 million to 23 million Americans are seeking to move to a less expensive and less crowded place. Welcome to the “Zoom towns.” ...
The market research firm Forrester predicts a 60-30-10 split among organizations: post-pandemic, 60% will be hybrid, 30% will be all-in-the-office, and 10% will be all-remote. ...
Experts can point to only one other work style “experiment” like the one caused by COVID-19, though its sample size in comparison was minuscule. When a 2011 earthquake demolished Christchurch, New Zealand, the entire community turned immediately to telework. Then the city rebuilt, renewing its stock of office space. Yet years later a study revealed that Christchurch’s workers continued to operate remotely, away from their freshly available workplaces. “When [the crisis] was over,” said a researcher, “they didn’t go back.”
If the expert consensus proves right, Americans won’t go back, either.
“As remote working has boomed during COVID-19,” summarizes a study by the University of Utah, “the rise in the number of people working from home has prompted many to reconsider where they wish to live.” Which means, as the survey data already indicate, that as many as 40% of office workers could scatter outward from the name-brand cities to places more spacious and affordable. ...
“As life at work [when remote] will be less social, people will have to get more of their socializing from elsewhere. So people will choose where they live more based on family, friends, leisure activities, and non-work social connections. Churches, clubs, and shared interest socializing will increase in importance. People will also pick where to live more based on climate, price, and views. Beach towns will boom, and the largest cities will lose.”
So workers will be more dispersed, and more of their working hours will be spent where they live instead of elsewhere in an office. The question is: Could all this lead to a “reset” of the locus of community in America?
Might the center of gravity shift at least somewhat from the office to the neighborhood – back, in a sense, to something closer to a pre-industrial model? What might it mean for our culture if the human contact that offices used to provide is replaced by closer-to-home human connections? And how might that affect the health of local communities and even levels of societal trust? ...
Here Mr. Kotkin quotes Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”
So what does it mean for Houston?...
Working against us:
Not a classic lifestyle-destination city (think Austin, Denver, Miami) - no mountains or beaches
Big city problems, including traffic and crime
Climate: flooding, hurricanes, heat and humidity
Working in our favor:
Lots of Houston ex-pats that can come home to be closer to friends and family
Industries that are less amenable to remote work: manufacturing, refineries, port, health care, NASA, even energy to a significant extent
The most affordable global city in America - big-city amenities at an affordable price
Strong community culture for such a large, diverse city
High pull among immigrant networks
Overall I'd say we're likely to come out fairly well - not as good as the popular lifestyle cities, but much better than the unaffordable superstar cities like SF and NYC. Would love to hear your own thoughts in the comments...
A simple free solution to TX winter storm blackouts, Houston's reinvention + Texas' future, housing affordability survey, HEB, and more
Our lead item this week is confirmation that a simple bureaucratic fix could have prevented the massive Texas winter storm blackouts and easily prevent them in the future: simply add natural gas pipeline electric pumps to the list of critical infrastructure like hospitals so they don't get their power cut. If the gas had kept pumping through those pipelines, the gas-fired electric generation plants would have stayed online:
"Grant Ruckel, vice president of government affairs at pipeline company Energy Transfer, testified that the biggest failure during the disaster was cutting power to gas pipelines, many of which are not listed as essential services, a designation made for hospitals and other critical infrastructure." ...
"Deshotel said he had asked generators how many plants would have gone down if they hadn’t lost gas pressure, and the answer was only a couple."
Our Urban Reform Institute released the 2021 Edition of the Demographia International Housing Affordability last week. Houston scored a reasonable median multiple of home prices to salaries of 4, categorized as "moderately unaffordable", although I'm not sure that's the case with mortgage rates this low. Only 4 cities out of 92 made it to affordable with ratios 3 and under: Pittsburgh, Rochester, Buffalo, and St. Louis. Austin and Dallas tied as the most expensive in Texas at 4.3, which may surprise some people given Austin's crazy housing market. Austin's score gets lowered by factoring in less expensive housing in the metro area (including Round Rock) as well as the higher average (tech) salaries in Austin.
'We surveyed our employees, and the No. 1 concern that people had was quality of life—but also taking mass transit to New York City any time in the foreseeable future.” There's another benefit for the well-paid workers too. They will “see a lateral pay move, which amounts to around an 11% increase in salary because Florida has zero income tax.”'
NYT: The Future of Texas. I like this opening excerpt, but the rest of the story is a bit silly, pretending that if Texas didn't produce fossil fuels climate change would be magically solved instead of just importing more oil from the Middle East. (archive link - h/t George)
"You can make a case that the U.S. state with the brightest long-term economic future is Texas. It’s a more affordable place to live than much of the Northeast or West Coast and still has powerful ways to draw new residents, including a thriving cultural scene, a diverse population and top research universities. Its elementary schools and middle schools perform well above average in reading and math (and notably ahead of California’s), according to the Urban Institute.
These strengths have helped the population of Texas to surge by more than 15 percent, or about four million people, over the past decade. In the past few months, two high-profile technology companies — Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise — have announced they are moving their headquarters to the state, and Tesla may soon follow. As California was in the 20th century, Texas today looks like a state that can embody and shape the country’s future."
WSJ Peggy Noonan: The Old New York Won’t Come Back - ‘The pandemic changed everything,’ we say. But we have yet to absorb fully everything that means. Excerpt:
"Look at the cities. I’m not sure we see the implications of what has happened there. In New York we are witnessing, for the first time in a century and a half, the collapse of the commuter model. ...
A lot of cities, not only New York, are going to have to reinventthemselves, digging down and finding newer purposes, their deepest value. They’re going to have to take stock in a new way: New York has the greatest hospitals, universities, the media, parks. What else?
And they will be doing this within a hard context. Public spending is skyrocketing due to greater need; the city and state budget deficits are through the roof. New York is Democratic and public sentiment will be for tax increases, big ones. ...
The Partnership for New York City reports 300,000 residents of high-income neighborhoods have filed change-of-address forms with the U.S. Postal Service. You know where they are going: to lower-tax and no-income-tax states, those that have a friendlier attitude toward money-making and that presumably aren’t going hard-left."
Does Houston need to reinvent itself as well? Clearly, we have big needs to invest in resilience infrastructure (Build the Ike Dike! h/t Evan ;) and our innovation economy as well as take steps for the energy transition (more than that, we need to actively shape it with better carbon capture technologies). But as a city, our core value proposition is strong: a global culture of Houspitality, opportunity, and resilience welcoming to immigrants (who spread the word thru their networks) while also providing one of the highest standards of living in the world. While the rise of remote work may cause issues for commercial office space (especially downtown, which may have too many new and renovated buildings coming online), the nature of Houston's core industries - energy, medical, industrial, space, the port - do seem to demand enough of a physical presence to keep workers close and the region strong (as opposed to finance in NYC and tech in SF). And here's to hoping remote work permanently reduces some of our worst traffic at rush hours! Overall, I feel fairly good about Houston's position in a post-pandemic world. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments...
My HBJ piece on NZ adopting TX MUDs, Techxodus, video on Houston's identity, future of offices, HTX developments in 2021, Stack City, rich zip codes, and more
"Harris, the most populous county in fast-growing Texas with 4.7 million people, went to six zip codes on this year’s list from just one last year." ...
"Almost half of the richest zip codes, 49 of the 100, are in just seven counties: Manhattan & suburban Westchester County in NY, Connecticut’s Fairfield County, Chicago’s Cook County, California’s LA & Santa Clara counties, & Houston’s Harris County (6)."
Techxodus: The flight of terrified techies from California to Texas marks the end of one era, and the beginning of a new one
"Travel is a part of our lives. Instead of treating it like a cost, we should embrace it, using it to enhance our economic and social well beings. To the extent that government is involved in transportation, instead of trying to limit travel it should do what it can to enable it and to extend the benefits of travel to as many people as possible."
“There are a number of examples of the Texas-style stack in and around our larger metropolitan areas, including Houston, which, because of its large number of stack interchanges, is known as “Stack City””
My first time hearing that nickname - curious to hear in the comments if others have come across it before?
NYT: The Future of Offices When Workers Have a Choice (archive link) - Some work spaces in central employment districts may become housing, and some housing in residential areas may become work spaces. My prediction is that managers will try to get people back to the office, but it will be very bumpy (not everybody vaccinated, virus continues to circulate at a low level, employers sued by employees that get sick, people unhappy with returning to commute), and talent will start looking for employers that don’t require the commute, even a day or two a week. Also companies will find they can access much more affordable remote talent globally, and those companies will start winning vs. companies constraining themselves to limited, expensive local talent pools. Key excerpt:
“Even before the pandemic, there were signs of trouble with the office market in the handful of cities where the “creative class” had been flocking. In 2018, net migration to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco was negative, while the U.S. economy grew at a healthy 2.9 percent. Creative magnets like London and Paris were experiencing similar declines.
The explanation for the declines — mostly high housing costs because of severe limits on new construction — obscures other forces that were destabilizing the traditional office market. In the middle of the 2010s, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and others started splitting their headquarters into multiple locations. Stripe, one of the world’s most valuable start-ups, went a step further. In 2019, it “opened” a remote hub, hoping to “tap the 99.74 percent of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs” in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin and Singapore.
For the fastest-growing companies, being able to tap into talent anywhere became more important than having all their teams in one place. Smaller cities were good enough. In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been a surprise, despite all the talk about the importance of giant, dense labor markets to fuel innovation. After all, Silicon Valley itself is not a city but a cluster of sprawling towns scattered along a highway.
The defining characteristic of this new version of the creative class may not be where it lives, but its ability to live anywhere it wants. Put differently, people move to certain cities in search of better-paying jobs, but it’s now possible to earn high (if not the highest) salaries from almost anywhere. That has been true in certain smaller cities in recent years (Austin and Denver in the United States, for example, and Manchester and Leeds in Britain). To a lesser extent, it has also been true for people who chose not to live in cities at all.”
Bloomberg's Case for Moving to Houston (but not a city for the soft), URI-COU 2020 year in review video, HTX youth, TX #1 growth, and more
Happy new year everyone. Hope you enjoyed the holidays and the recent amazing weather (while staying safe). A lot of you probably had out-of-town family and/or friends visiting. Next time nonlocal friends or family say Houston is too hot, floods too often, or gets too many hurricanes, here's my recommended reaction: politely agree with them that Houston is not a city for the soft or irresilient - they should probably choose somewhere like California. Texas welcomes the tough.
"Consider Phyllis Njoroge, who grew up in Massachusetts. After graduating from Tufts University in 2019 with a degree in cognitive and brain science, she started making spreadsheets of places in the U.S. that had a warm climate, were diverse, and had a reasonable cost of living.Houston won out, and she moved there in March"
...
Having more remote workers means “wages in Texas are going up,” he says. So are housing prices. “You can’t have a $2 million, 2,000-square-foot house in San Francisco and a $200,000 house in Dallas that are basically the same for very long when there are airplanes and internet connections and Zoom.”
"I simply say, “no, please don’t be sorry. I love living in Houston. It’s a great place to live and I have a great life there. It’s actually not that place that you might imagine it to be. In fact, it’s one of the country’s most ethnically diverse and progressive cities. My children go to school with kids from all over the world. And the wine and food scene there is great, too.”
"I think oil and gas is going to be with us a long time. And Houston has a comparative advantage against every other city in the world.
If you get beyond the rhetoric about the energy transition and projections, what is it really about? It’s about infrastructure. It’s about an investment. It’s about technology. And it’s about scale. And those are all things that the energy industry is good at doing. So I think that Houston and the oil and gas companies here will be very much at the center of that. We’re starting from a point where 84 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels today. So you’re talking about a huge infrastructure of investment and embedded activity that just doesn’t change overnight. If you’re going to power what is an $87 trillion economy that’s going to be a $100 trillion global economy, you’re going to need a lot of engineering and a lot of technology and a lot of equipment. And that’s what Houston and energy companies bring to the table." ...
"...if you did have big restrictions on our domestic oil industry, it would simply mean that we would import more oil. That’s because there’s still 280 million cars in the United States, almost all of which run on petroleum."
Yet another reason to support an OPEC tariff over a fracking ban!
"Americans generally don’t give much thought to energy policy, except when they stop at the local gas station for a fill-up. But if state and federal leaders who want to ban fracking and “transition” away from oil prevail, that complacency will change quickly.
You may not think about energy policy, but it thinks about you. Energy is the foundation of society. Everything—food, clothing, shelter, your iPhone, you name it—requires energy to produce. When it costs more to supply that energy, the cost of everything else increases. The OPEC oil embargoes in the 1970s, for example, ushered in an era of double-digit inflation."
“...the most dynamic cities have been like Tokyo in the post-war decades, in a state of restless metamorphosis.” He later adds that “messiness is something to be embraced, especially for a fast-growing city: it is a dynamic feature of urban development.”
Remote work will increase migration in the U.S. Between 14 and 23 million Americans are planning to relocate as a result of businesses’ increasing acceptance of remote work. As a result, near-term migration rates could be three to four times what they normally are.
Major cities will see the biggest out-migration. 20.6 percent of those planning to move are in a major city.
People are seeking less-expensive housing. More than half (52.5 percent) of those planning to move are seeking a house significantly more affordable than their current home.
People are moving beyond regular commute distances. 54.7 percent of planned moves are to locations more than two hours away from their current location, which is beyond most people’s tolerance for daily commuting.
The highest-priced housing markets are taking the biggest hits. Rental data from apartments.com shows that the top 10 percent most-expensive markets are losing tenants at a much greater rate than markets in the bottom 10 percent.
A new strategy for securing Houston's economic future
Talk has been growing in recent years about Houston's future in a less carbon-intensive energy world. Will we still be the world's energy capital in the coming decades, and what does that mean? The Greater Houston Partnership and Center for Houston's Future have taken the lead on this challenge with their Energy 2.0 and energy transition work, and I hope they're getting traction with it (despite pandemic distractions). We certainly have a lot of expertise here that can work on big problems like carbon capture with the right economic incentives.
Another strategy is growing our innovation and startup ecosystem to build the companies of tomorrow - especially in energy, space, and biotech - and I think there has been great progress made in recent years, including Rice's building of the Ion in Midtown. One area that has not been as successful is trying to attract tech companies building new offices. To be brutally honest, we can't out-Austin Austin.
The energy transition and innovation ecosystem are both great initiatives to help secure Houston's economic future, but I think there's a third opportunity we're overlooking. It plays perfectly to our strengths:
America's most affordable global city (vs. NYC, LA, Chicago, SF, Miami)
Being more attractive to global migrants than domestic ones (which seem to be more interested in places like Austin, Denver, and Nashville)
Large expat communities from countries all over the world
92 foreign consular offices, the third-largest set in the US after NYC and LA
One of the largest ports and industrial bases in the country
A huge United hub at IAH with nonstops covering all of the Americas in addition to European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and ANZ connections.
Put all those strengths together and what's the opportunity? To be the location of choice for foreign companies establishing their branch office for the Americas, especially industrial ones. There are thousands of fast-growing companies around the world that will need to establish a presence in the Americas at some point, and Houston is really the ideal place for them to put it for all the reasons listed above.
I think we already compete for these to some extent, but there's an opportunity to do it much more aggressively with a formal, well-funded program that cooperates closely with all our foreign consulates to identify their up-and-coming companies and start wooing them as early as possible. Without outside influence, they probably tend to end up in the cities that are more obvious and well-known to them like NYC, LA, and Miami. But if we intervene early and show them how much better Houston will ultimately be for both their business and their employees, I think we can win over a substantial number of them. Their expat employees used to small flats and public transport in crowded cities will be blown away by the equivalent home and car they can buy in Houston, Sugar Land, or The Woodlands!
These foreign branch offices aren't as sexy as green energy, tech, or entrepreneurial startups, but over time they could provide a very strong foundational component to Houston's economy with a whole lot less uncertainty and volatility. Even better, we won't have that much competition - it's an opportunity ignored by most cities as they chase the hot tech companies and try to cultivate their own startup scenes. Foreign corporate offices should definitely be the third strategy to secure Houston's economic future in a world increasingly hostile to oil and gas.
Would love to hear additional thoughts and feedback in the comments...
Is historic preservation zoning? Houstonians support each other during flooding, HTX relative economic and physical size, and more
Lots of smaller items this week:
3D Map: The U.S. Cities With the Highest Economic Output. Houston at #7 is not bad, although I've seen it higher when oil is up. We're #5 population but SF tech and DC govt move their GDP ahead (your tax $ at work). The Texas economy is equal to Canada.
"So the three policies I propose to define the “neoliberal agenda” for the 2020s are YIMBYism (support for more housing), support for more immigration, and support for a carbon tax... A “neoliberal agenda” focused on these things would be a club, not a party: you can be a neoliberal Republican, a neoliberal Labourite, a neoliberal priest, a neoliberal Green, or whatever. There are loads of other issues that I think are incredibly important that don’t fit here, but these three policy priorities would get you a huge amount of the potential economic and social progress we can make with public policy besides those. Not only are these, in my view, the core of what modern neoliberals really do care about, they are some of the most powerful of all possible policies we could enact to improve the lives of people around the world."
"a recent study by epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University has concluded that, even after “adjusting for social distancing,” “public transit use . . . remained significantly associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection.” The study found that “NPIs” (non-pharmaceutical interventions, e.g., masks & social distancing) “while visiting indoor and outdoor venues helps reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission.” However, the two exceptions were public transport and places of worship. “Even NPIs may not be possible or sufficient” to prevent the virus’ spread on public transit, the study concludes."
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.
