Warren Buffet calls bs on rail, remote work permanence, induced demand idiocy, HTX tech + construction + port growth, Ike Dike, and more
Happy new year everyone! Hope you all had a good holiday season and didn't get caught up in the Southwest airlines chaos. Sadly, I accidentally wiped out all my backlog of post topics and blogspot does not have any recovery functionality (why can't it keep history like Google Docs?!). So I'm combing back through
my tweets to try to find at least some of them:
Richard Florida: “When I started with the creative class, places didn’t care about young people, they were only trying to attract a family with children to the lovely suburbs, and I’m saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’” Mr. Florida said in an interview. “Twenty years later, people forgot about the families. And now here’s a whole generation leaving cities again, for metropolitan or virtual suburbs.” ...
"A few feet away from her, another group of young workers was playing Jenga. One by one, they took blocks away from the structure, making way for the inevitable collapse."
"Bloom provided data showing strong economic incentives for both corporations and their employees to continue the work-from-home revolution if their jobs allow it:
First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.”
Labels: census, creative class, growth, home affordability, land-use regulation, port, rail, rankings, remote work, tech, transit
A simple reasonable home elevation standard, Houston's coolest map, amazing Harvey graphics, DFW+CA rail fails, algorithmic zoning insanity, and more
Before getting to this week's smaller items, two more important items:
First, a random idea on the city's proposed and controversial 500yr + 2ft housing elevation standard, which may raise housing costs substantially in those areas while also devaluing existing housing stock and make neighborhoods look like Galveston beach houses on stilts, even if they've never flooded: why not just make Harvey the standard, since it is a multi-thousand year storm? Don't build anything that would have flooded during Harvey, or any of our other major flood events. Show that your development wouldn't have flooded, and you're good to go. Keeps elevations reasonable, especially in areas that didn't flood. Simple standard, simply enforced.
Second, a bit of a yellow flag from a recent High Capacity Transit task force meeting. Check out
the 17:30 point in the Service concepts video where they aim for an 8-fold increase (from 87 million to 758 million) in transit usage by 2045, with a transit market share increase from 2 to 20% (!). Pretty darn ambitious. I have to wonder where that's realistically coming from, since Dallas, LA and others are
losing overall ridership, and that decline may accelerate with coming autonomous ride share technology. I'm skeptical (especially if the assumption is rail), but looking forward to learning more over time and understanding the model. Maybe this is the potential of MaX Lanes?! If it's based on solid assumptions, it would certainly be amazing, and something no other American city is doing. Hat tip to Oscar.
Moving on to this week's items:
"That means that the loss in bus ridership was nearly nine times greater than the gain in rail ridership."
Finally, ending with a fun item. I recently purchased
this totally awesome 3D laser-etched multi-layer wood chart of the Houston-Galveston area at an art shop in the New Orleans' French Quarter. Super-cool and a steal at only $298 (
order it online here). And I don't get a commission - I just think it's cool.
Labels: affordability, census, demographics, development, growth, home affordability, land-use regulation, MaX Lanes, mobility strategies, planning, port, rail, resilience, transit, tunneling, zoning
Best Cities for Minorities, Global Houston, good moves by METRO, and more
Sorry for not posting last week - I was visiting family in California and missing the flooding drama here (same way I missed Allison - you guys should be fearful when I leave town ;-). Speaking of California, we found your lost rain here in Texas - feel free to come and pick it up anytime.
Some big news this week: our
Center for Opportunity Urbanism has released its first major report,
The Best Cities for Minorities: Gauging the Economics of Opportunity. No surprise - Houston does pretty well. You can read
Joel Kotkin's summary of it at RealClearPolitics here. Key excerpts:
"We found, for all three major minority groups, that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation.
...
There are other policy implications. Blue state progressives are often the most vocal about expanding opportunities for minority homeownership but generally support land use and regulatory policies, notably in California, that tend to raise prices far above the ability of newcomers -- immigrants, minorities, young people -- to pay. Similarly blue state support for such things as strict climate change regulation tends to discourage the growth of industries such as manufacturing, logistics and home construction that have long been gateways for minority success.
Given the persistence of racial tensions, this data begins to give us a clearer understanding of what actually works for America’s emerging non-white majority. Denunciations of racism, police brutality and xenophobia may be all well and good for one’s sense of justice. But if you want actually to improve the lives of minorities, we might consider focusing instead on policies that promote economic opportunity, keep living costs down, and allow for all Americans to enjoy fully the bounty of this country."
UPDATE:
WSJ column discusses the report in the context of Baltimore.
Moving on to this week's smaller items:
- I'm excited about the METRO-Culberson agreement, mainly this part: $300 million in federal funds over three years for buses, Park-and-Ride expansion and HOV improvements. That's the right strategy for improving commuter transit, and great use of federal dollars. An MIT urban planning professor tells me that he has seen the future of urban mobility and it is autonomous self-driving vehicles - taxis, transit and personal vehicles. As I've said before, we need to be including this in our planning, and certainly not sinking billions more into light rail. Bravo and congrats to both sides for getting the deal done. Chronicle story here.
- OffCite has 10 things you probably didn't know about TXDoT's I45N rebuild proposal, including a nice shout out for yours truly.
- If this isn't crass, I don't know what is: unions fight for higher minimum wages, then give themselves an exception in the law so they can force employers to accept unions to lower their wage bill below minimum wage. Workers actually end up *worse off* with the union, but the unions grow their membership and rake in the dues. Wow.
- GHP has released their Global Houston report. I especially like how it measures Houston against some criteria for a global city (pages 2 and 3). "The report goes beyond the well-known facts about Houston's position as a global leader and focuses on export demand, trends in foreign direct investment, real estate acquisitions and corporate business ties. The report also includes Trade Profiles highlighting Houston’s top 20 trading partners."
- Pretty surprised only 37% of Houston considers itself suburban!
- How's this for evidence of Houston's impressive ability to densify to meet market demand: 4,400 apt units are under construction in Montrose/Midtown/Museum District, one-third of all apartments under construction in Harris County!
- GHP has released a new fact sheet infographic about Houston - lots of good stuff you probably didn't know...
Labels: affordability, autonomous vehicles, demographics, density, development, energy, growth, home affordability, Metro, mobility strategies, opportunity urbanism, port, rankings, transit, world city
Houston the capital of the Sunbelt, ship channel booming, land of liberty, only in Houston developments, top tech exporter, and more
Before we get to this week's misc items, a hearty happy birthday to Houston Strategies, which is 9 years old this week. When I started I had no idea I'd be able to keep it up this long, but now I'm looking forward to another great year and the 10th birthday next year. As always, thank for your readership.
"The clear economic capital of the Sunbelt is now Houston, with some stiff competition from Dallas-Ft. Worth. Houston, the energy capital, now ranks second only to New York in new office construction and is the overall number one for corporate expansions. There are fifty new office buildings going up in the city, including Exxon Mobil’s campus, the country’s second largest office complex under construction (after New York’s Freedom Tower). Chevron, once Standard Oil of California, has announced plans to construct a second tower for its downtown Houston campus while Occidental Petroleum, founded more than fifty years ago in Los Angeles, is moving its headquarters to Houston."
Concluding:
"Combined with basics like lower housing costs and taxes, it’s a common optimism about the future that really underlies the resurgence now occurring from Phoenix to Tampa. The long-term shifts in American power and influence that have been underway since the 1950s have not been halted by the housing bust. Disdained by urban aesthetes, hated by much of the punditry, and largely ignored except for their failings in the media, the Sunbelt seems likely to enjoy the last laugh when it comes to shaping the American future."
"All this doesn't just bring in new arrivals - native Texans aren't leaving the state either. It is the "stickiest" state in the country, according to the latest figures from the Pew Research Center, which suggest that more than three-quarters of adults born in Texas still live there."
"The common refrain made against Texas by those who defend the status quo in Illinois is that the jobs being created in the Lone Star State are lower-paying and less-rewarding opportunities.
But not anymore. Texas is now unquestionably besting Illinois in providing for the middle class.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012 the inflation-adjusted median household income for Texas surpassed that of Illinois for the first time since 1984, when the statistic first started being recorded.
That means the household making the median income in Texas is taking home a bigger paycheck than the household making the median income in Illinois."
Finally, to see a side of Houston most people don't, check out Beyonce's new "
No Angel" music video, filmed mostly around the Third Ward.
Labels: affordability, development, economy, growth, headquarters, home affordability, identity, port
Revising the city charter, low CoL = high SoL, peak sprawl, big exports, big data, and save the birds
Getting back to our backlog of smaller misc items this week:
Finally, a small plug for a good cause. When was the last time you dressed up with the significant other and went to a fun fancy charity gala?
Houston Audubon is having their annual fundraising "For the Birds" gala this Thursday at the Houston Country Club and tickets are still available at $100 - very reasonable compared to most Houston charity galas. You might even get a sweet deal at their charity auction while you're there. Do some good and earn bonus points with the S.O. at the same time - two birds with one stone, so to speak, although the actual stoning of birds at the event is significantly frowned upon... ;-)
Labels: affordability, corruption, economy, governance, government transparency, home affordability, port, rankings, sprawl, technology
More great rankings, an outsider on our Ch.42 revisions, rethinking METRO, and more
My backlog of smaller miscellaneous items is at an all time high (over 50!), so prepare for a deluge as I try to clear it out over the next few weeks:
“Houston has gained broad acceptance as a top-tier market,” said Greg Kraus, managing director at Atlanta-based Invesco Ltd. (IVZ), a global adviser for pension clients including QSuper Ltd., an Australian fund for public-service workers. “It’s reflected in job growth, more gas refineries, more oil out of the Houston port and a true international feeling.”
"Houston, up 4.8%. Texas' largest city is big in the energy industry -- and not just in the traditional areas of oil and gas. It's also seeing gains in newer areas, such as wind and solar. Health care and aerospace are other major industries in town. Houston has an interconnected bikeway network over 300 miles long spanning across 500 square miles, so commuters can get past gridlock while getting healthy on their way to work. In their free time, residents can enjoy a rich, multicultural arts community."
"For the $75,000-annual-income hypothetical family, the highest total tax rate is in Bridgeport, Conn., where the family would pay $16,105, or 21.5 percent, of its income in taxes.
The lowest rate at the $75,000 income level is in Cheyenne, Wyo., where the family would pay nearly $2,808 in taxes, or 3.7 percent of its income.
In Houston, the same hypothetical family would pay $4,333 in taxes, or 5.8 percent of its income, making it 47th in the list of 51 cities.
The tax burden that is looked at in the study includes state and local taxes on income, residential property, sales and vehicles. The vehicle tax incorporates the gasoline tax, registration fees, excise tax and the personal property tax."
Finally, dear readers,
please fill out this Urban Houston Framework survey about what tools the city should and should not use in getting certain kinds of dense, urban development from developers. I found some of the tools reasonable, and some to be overreach, and if you read my blog, you probably have a thoughtful opinion on these topics the city should know about.
Labels: affordability, density, development, economy, growth, land-use regulation, Metro, port, rankings
Houston dominates America's growth corridors and makes the case for the world's highest standard of living
The Manhattan Institute has just released
a new report by Joel Kotkin on "
America's Growth Corridors", which outlines four key corridors that are still growing strongly in an otherwise anemic U.S. economy: the great plains, the Gulf coast, the inter-mountain west, and the manufacturing belt of the southeast. Houston figures into the report quite prominently as the largest city among the four growth corridors. If you don't want to read
the whole pdf, I recommend searching on "Houston" to find the key elements. Here are some of my favorite Houston excerpts:
In Houston, for example, the massive Texas Medical Center is now the largest concentration of medical facilities in the world. [It] now ranks as the country’s 12th-largest business district in terms of square feet, ahead of downtown Los Angeles, with plans to expand so that it will rival Philadelphia’s (the seventh-largest) in size by 2014.
Houston, the clear center of the Third Coast economy, has emerged as one of the country’s megacities. Over the past decade, Houston has had one of the largest increases in employment of any major metropolitan area—up 15 percent between 2000 and 2011.
...
Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Tampa have seen stronger rates of growth in the numbers of educated people moving into their areas, more so than such cities as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco.
...
Houston and Dallas already have a higher rate of international immigration than such traditional magnets as Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia. A recent Rice University study found that Houston now surpassed New York as the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse area.
Today, Third Coast ports Brownsville, Tampa, and Houston have some of the highest rates of foreign immigration in the nation. Traditionally, this migration has come largely from Mexico and Latin America, but newcomers are increasingly arriving from Asia as well. Over the past decade, Houston’s Asian population has expanded by 160,000, or 70 percent, and the city is now home to the eighth-largest Asian population in the nation. Houston’s Asian migration is growing 50 percent faster than migration flows to such established Asian hubs as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
...
When adjusted for cost of living, wage earners in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, as well as most corridor cities, earn much more than residents of New York or Los Angeles.
...
This is particularly notable in Houston, which has had one of the strongest increases in manufacturing over the past decade of any major city
...
The region is now home to several of the country’s leading ports, led by Houston and New Orleans, which also boast the first- and second-fastest growth in custom district traffic among the top five districts, outpacing New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit.
...
In the future, many Third Coast ports will likely increase trade with Asia. The scheduled 2014 opening of an expanded Panama Canal, with double its current capacity, will likely shift some Asian trade from America’s West Coast ports to its Third Coast. Houston will likely benefit most; the city expects a 15 percent jump in Asian trade after the canal expansion project is complete. In contrast to ports in the Northeast and California, virtually all the Third Coast ports—and many on the southeast littoral as well—are in the process of large-scale expansions.
But, by far, the most important and interesting tidbit in the report is
the chart at the bottom of page 15:
As you can see, Houston simply dominates it at #1 with $75k (!!). DFW and Austin are a distant second and third at $63k, and they fall from there. This is reinforced by a similar statistic in a recent
City Journal article on the Texas Growth Machine (hat tip to Jessie), which notes:
"Adjusted for cost of living, Texas’s per-capita income is higher than California’s and nearly as high as New York’s. Factor in state and local taxes, and Texas pulls ahead of New York."
This further backs
my argument that Houston has the highest standard of living in the U.S. (and likely the world) among major metros.
Of course the dominant factor in cost of living is housing, so this strongly validates Texas' free market approach allowing supply to meet demand (if avoiding the housing crash didn't already prove that point). And Houston's very substantial $12k advantage over even other Texas cities points to the incredible value of no-zoning in keeping housing and other costs of living low (including commercial office and retail costs). For more on how that works, check out
my Opportunity Urbanism op-ed here. And that leads me to end with
this awesome graphic that I just love (hat tip to Josh).
UPDATE: I'm often sharing the linklove with
CultureMap, but
they're not sharing back :-(
Labels: affordability, demographics, economic strategy, economy, growth, home affordability, identity, land-use regulation, opportunity urbanism, port, rankings, TMC, world city, zoning
Everything you wanted to know about the Port
Last week I got to attend a
Houston Economics Club luncheon with Captain William Diehl speaking as the President of the
Greater Houston Port Bureau. He not only showed us a very impressive real-time Google Earth image with every ship anywhere near Houston (zoom, pan, flyover - all very cool), but also rolled off a string of impressive facts about the Port:
- Houston is the #1 most active U.S. port with ~8,000 ship movements per year. NOLA is #2 at ~6,800, and both LA and NYC are in the ~4,000 range.
- Houston is #2 in tonnage just behind New Orleans, although they implied that NOLA might be doing a little double counting as ships move up and down the Mississippi to and from Baton Rouge. Texas City is #10 nationally.
- Galveston moves ~1 million cruise passengers a year, and mints money off of the parking for those cruises. Houston recently secured a couple of new cruise ship contracts for the $108m white elephant Bayport terminal.
- Galveston Bay is only 12 feet deep, but they have to dredge the channel to 45 feet deep. Evidently they need $50m a year to keep up the dredging, and send $130m a year in fees to the Feds to do it, but the Feds only send back $20m a year to do the job - much less allocate enough for us to deepen the channel to open it up to larger ships. So, yes, the Federal government is screwing Texas, again.
- 70% of the the containers coming through the Gulf of Mexico go to or from Houston. I was surprised to hear that the imports almost exclusively serve Houston, San Antonio, and Austin - nothing further inland. Even Dallas gets their containers by rail from LA. There is some thought we could seize that opportunity with more rail capacity north to Dallas, but the railroads are resisting because they make more money moving containers longer distances from LA.
- Unlike many other major U.S. ports, Houston has lots of room to grow, and this has been and continues to be attractive to big shippers.
- Houston handles 200,000 barge movements a year. Those barges go all over the eastern U.S. using the inter-coastal waterway and the river network.
- 96% of all imported Volkswagens come through Houston, many from Mexico in addition to Germany. If you've ever driven northbound over the 610 Ship Channel Bridge and wondered about the giant parking lot with thousands of cars to your left, that's what it is.
- 60% of the Port's business is petrochemicals. Cheap natural gas is rapidly growing that business with $10 billion in new projects, while increased domestic oil production is reducing import tankers.
- The Panama Canal expansion will allow 8,000 TEU ships instead of 4,500 TEU ships, which means much bigger ships with lower prices per TEU will be calling on Houston, although probably not more numbers of ships. It will also enable the export of more petrochemicals to Asia.
- Houston and Texas manufactures enough products we can actually fill quite a few containers for return trips to Asia, which is an advantage over CA ports, where ships often return empty.
If that's not enough for you, you can read more about the Port
here,
here, and
here, as well as
take a boat tour here. It's truly an impressive asset for Houston, albeit one most of us non-eastsiders are rarely aware of.
Labels: economic strategy, port, rankings
First class bus, DART declining, big data, big port, debunking creative class, and more
It's been too long since the last smaller items post and the queue has been building rapidly...
- Wow. I'm impressed with Megabus, and glad they finally came to Texas (undermining the case for HSR), but check out this luxury inter-city bus service in India (click thru the pics on the home page, or even watch the over-the-top cheesy video). It's like international business class air travel. Maybe Megabus should consider transforming one of the two decks on their buses to this kind of first class service? (minus the attendant or food service, I'm thinking). Hat tip to Mihir.
- A Dallas Morning News story on the ongoing declines in DART ridership. It doesn't bode well for the future of Metro's budget-busting new lines...
- Forbes on "The Tyranny of Houston" and how we continue to get a larger and larger share of the nation's building permits. Just goes to the power of our more open, no-zoning approach vs. the constrictive building regimes in other cities. Includes a great opening line: "When Houston is the only place America can build things, all things will be built in Houston."
- Speaking of zoning, as you might expect, I'm not a fan of this pro-zoning op-ed at CultureMap. If you want control, live in a deed-restricted community, or add voluntary deed restrictions to yours. The mechanisms are there - just use them. Rather than repeat them here, check out Joshua Sanders' comment at the bottom for a good summary of many of the anti-zoning arguments.
- More from Forbes on Houston, with a nice writeup and a top ranking.
- Eric has a post on a cool new ride sharing mobile app service.
- The power of predicting crime before it occurs using big data analysis. HPD and Harris County should be jumping all over this technology. Hat tip to Jay.
- Continuing the big data trend, here's the WSJ on using new 'big data' approaches to solving traffic and road infrastructure problems, including doing accident and pothole detection via peoples' cell phones.
- A cool global shipping map with ports from Fortune magazine. It puts Houston in context, and it's impressive. But a caveat: this is based on tonnage, which is why Houston (oil) and New Orleans (oil and agricultural commodities) look so impressive vs. LA and NYC. If it was shipping containers, those dot sizes would be reversed.
- A well written debunking of Richard Florida's Creative Class theory. Excerpt:
In his initial critique, Peck said The Rise of the Creative Class was filled with “self-indulgent forms of amateur microsociology and crass celebrations of hipster embourgeoisement.” That’s another way of saying that Florida was just describing the “hipsterization” of wealthy cities and concluding that this was what was causing those cities to be wealthy. As some critics have pointed out, that’s a little like saying that the high number of hot dog vendors in New York City is what’s causing the presence of so many investment bankers. So if you want banking, just sell hot dogs. “You can manipulate your arguments about correlation when things happen in the same place,” says Peck.
What was missing, however, was any actual proof that the presence of artists, gays and lesbians or immigrants was causing economic growth, rather than economic growth causing the presence of artists, gays and lesbians or immigrants. Some more recent work has tried to get to the bottom of these questions, and the findings don’t bode well for Florida’s theory. In a four-year, $6 million study of thirteen cities across Europe called “Accommodating Creative Knowledge,” that was published in 2011, researchers found one of Florida’s central ideas—the migration of creative workers to places that are tolerant, open and diverse—was simply not happening.
“They move to places where they can find jobs,” wrote author Sako Musterd, “and if they cannot find a job there, the only reason to move is for study or for personal social network reasons, such as the presence of friends, family, partners, or because they return to the place where they have been born or have grown up.” But even if they had been pouring into places because of “soft” factors like coffee shops and art galleries, according to Stefan Krätke, author of a 2010 German study, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference, economically. Krätke broke Florida’s Creative Class (which includes accountants, realtors, bankers and politicians) into five separate groups and found that only the “scientifically and technologically creative” workers had an impact on regional GDP. Krätke wrote “that Florida’s conception does not match the state of findings of regional innovation research and that his way of relating talent and technology might be regarded as a remarkable exercise in simplification.”
Perhaps one of the most damning studies was in some ways the simplest. In 2009 Michele Hoyman and Chris Faricy published a study using Florida’s own data from 1990 to 2004, in which they tried to find a link between the presence of the creative class workers and any kind of economic growth. “The results were pretty striking,” said Faricy, who now teaches political science at Washington State University. “The measurement of the creative class that Florida uses in his book does not correlate with any known measure of economic growth and development. Basically, we were able to show that the emperor has no clothes.” Their study also questioned whether the migration of the creative class was happening. “Florida said that creative class presence—bohemians, gays, artists—will draw what we used to call yuppies in,” says Hoyman. “We did not find that.”
Finally, Eric recently interviewed me over lunch for his "Houston, we have a Solution" blog if you'd like to check it out. It's hard to compress the subtleties of an hour conversation into a few paragraphs (ask any journalist that's talked to me - I am not the master of the short sound bite or pithy answer), but Eric does an admirable job of getting to the rough essence of my answers.Labels: deed restrictions, economy, growth, high-speed rail, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, port, public safety, rankings, technology, zoning
Houston leading the rise of America's third coast
Just a few small items this week:
The one thing he grants is truly weird about Austin was the population's hatred of ease of transit, an antipathy manifested by residents' refusal to do anything to alleviate their woes."More highways will make us just like Houston and Dallas!" is the rallying cry, and to be like those towns would not be weird.
But to people who have actually been to all three cities recently, it's apparent that they are already more alike than different. "I cannot truck people who say they don't want Austin to become Dallas or Houston, because it is," says Patoski.
Nowhere is that more apparent than downtown, where the past ten years have been home to a crass real estate boom that would shame even Donald Trump. Austin's downtown was once home to much that was funky, family-owned and attitude-free.
...
Writing on the Web site Newgeography.com, Aaron Renn wonders if they have earned the right to such snobbery. He believes that what they see as progressivism could also be interpreted as "White Flight writ large." Say you grew up in the suburbs of Dallas or Houston and would love to be in the middle of the action of the big city, but places like Oak Cliff or Houston's East End are just a little too real for you, with their methadone clinics, police sirens and 24-hour cantinas.
In Renn's view, that's where places like Austin come in. Why move to or stay in the suburbs of your square city to escape minorities and get slammed as a bigot for doing so, when you can move to some hep place like Austin and win praise for your progressivism?
"They often think that by moving to Austin they have done something great for humanity," notes Youssefnia.
Smugness about their monochromatic progressivism is just one aspect of "Austitude," a collective municipal narcissism shared by so many Austinites. To them, Austin is better, smarter, friendlier and utterly unlike everywhere else in Texas. Austitude is very prevalent not only in Austin but also in California, a prime source of migrants to Austin since the 1990s tech boom.
Tell Austinites that you live in Houston, and some will actually say to your face, "Oh, I'm so sorry." Delia Swanner, a Houston native now living in California, says she is sick of hearing Californians — even ones who've never been to any city in Texas — tell her Austin is the only place in Texas they'd consider living.
...
Today's Houston finds more rising young rock bands choosing to stay here than at any time since the 1960s. Fitzgerald's is back as a cutting-edge venue after years in lunk-core alt-rock purgatory. The Heights, Houston's own mini-Austin, is filling up with fun beer gardens and low-key restaurants, and there are other scattered pockets of cool in Montrose, the Museum District and the East End. Taking in a concert in Discovery Green can trick you into thinking you are in Chicago, only with better weather, and Austin so loved our Art Car Parade, they've attempted to steal the entire concept, just as they've attempted to steal the memory of our Townes Van Zandt/Guy Clark/Steve Earle/Rodney Crowell songwriting history.
What's more, Houston is a city and proud of it. Masliyah loves living in the kind of city where it's easy for her to buy her dressmaking supplies and also to travel the world without leaving home. "The other day I went shopping at Phoenicia and it was like I'd gone around the world," she says. Youssefnia also loves Houston's cosmopolitan atmosphere and realistic sense of itself.
Labels: economy, growth, port, rankings
Houston one of five cities that will rise in the new economy
The Christian Science Monitor recently named
Houston one of five cities that will rise in the new economy, along with Boston, Seattle, Huntsville-AL, and Fort Collins-CO. Not bad company. In fact, they open the main article with us:
In Houston, the Texas Medical Center is expanding so quickly that it will soon become the seventh largest downtown in the US. By itself. The hospital complex brims with restaurants, shops, and hotels, and employs 100,000 people – the population of Billings, Mont.
Later they mention the power of affordable housing to attract young talent. They also have
detailed profile article on Houston with some good excerpts:
...Many say the city is poised to do well because of its ties to the global marketplace. Houston is home to NASA, as well as the largest medical complex in the world, the second-busiest port in the nation, and a strong international business sector.
...“To me, Houston is the perfect intersection of old industry stepping up to advance leading-edge industries,” says Vivante’s founder and president, J. David Enloe Jr. But Houston has much more than energy experience powering its future. It is the largest US port in foreign tonnage and the second largest in total tonnage. (including strong exports)
...
Then there is the Texas Medical Center, which may be Houston’s version of the Great Pyramids, only with windows and an antiseptic smell. More than $3 billion is going into expanding the Med Center’s footprint from 30 million to 40 million square feet – making it larger than the size of the area inside Chicago’s Loop. The complex currently serves up to 65,000 patients a day, says Richard Wainerdi, the CEO.
Still, even with the port, the medical center, and NASA, the petrochemical industry remains the flywheel of the economy – accounting for about half the area’s total output. Eager to be in the vanguard of the New Economy, city officials are trying to redefine Houston as more than just an oil and gas capital. They want it to be an energy capital – including renewables.
Last summer, for example, Houston became the No. 1 municipal purchaser of green power in the nation, with 25 percent of the city’s total electricity load coming from wind energy. (Texas leads the US in wind-energy production.)
The article also includes a couple of nice Houston pictures
here and
here.
Hat tip to Jessie.
Labels: economy, energy, home affordability, port, rankings
The Economist special report on Texas and TX vs. CA
The Economist magazine has a
10-page special report on Texas this week (
pdf), only the second state they've ever covered in such detail (after CA). In fact,
the cover and
lead op-ed is about CA vs. TX.
Yours truly is in the
Sources and Acknowledgments, based on an interview John and myself did with their
U.S Editor Christopher Lockwood over a long dinner at
Beaver's BBQ right after he flew in from London for his multi-week trip through Texas in early May. I have to say, it's quite a challenge to try to convey the essence of Texas to an Englishman in just a couple hours. My tendency was to keep talking about Houston (of course), and I may have had an impact, as Houston gets the most mentions across the 6 articles in the section. Based on a quick pdf word count search:
- Houston 37
- Dallas 20
- Austin 15
- San Antonio 8
- Fort Worth 5
There's a lot here to get through, so moving on to excerpts from
the Leader op-ed on CA vs. TX to open the issue:
Indeed, high taxes, coupled with intrusive regulation of business and greenery taken to silly extremes, have gradually strangled what was once America’s most dynamic state economy. Chief Executive magazine, to take just one example, has ranked California the very worst state to do business in for each of the past four years.
By contrast, Texas was the best state in that poll. It has coped well with the recession, with an unemployment rate two points below the national average and one of the lowest rates of housing repossession. In part this is because Texan banks, hard hit in the last property bust, did not overexpand this time. But as our special report this week explains, Texas also clearly offers a different model, based on small government. It has no state capital-gains or income tax, and a business-friendly and immigrant-tolerant attitude. It is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state—64 compared with California’s 51 and New York’s 56. And as happens to fashionable places, some erstwhile weaknesses now seem strengths (flat, ugly countryside makes it easier for Dallas-Fort Worth to expand than mountain-and-sea-locked LA), while old conservative stereotypes are being questioned: two leading contenders to be Houston’s next mayor are a black man and a white lesbian. Texas also gets on better with Mexico than California does.
It also gets into some of our weaknesses: primary education, health care for the poor, and Tier 1 research universities - also repeated in the special report. The good news is that the Tier 1 problem got addressed in the last legislature, Obama is tackling health care at a federal level (where it belongs), and they have an article on the education solution: a
profile of the KIPP and YES charter schools that started in Houston, and have a 90+% success rate getting poor and disadvantaged students into college. Why aren't we just handing over the failing urban schools to these guys?
My favorite excerpt from the report:
Housing repossessions are still very rare; the state budget is still in surplus even as California and New York teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Unlike those fellow states with large populations, Texas levies no personal income tax, and with almost unlimited space on which to build, its houses are big and affordable.
All this has brought people flooding in and made Texas America’s fastest-growing state. Net domestic inflows have been running at around 150,000 people in recent years, whereas California and New York have seen net outflows. Next year’s national census is expected to show that flourishing Houston has replaced struggling Chicago as America’s third city (an unfortunate error by TE, as we are expected pass the Philadelphia metro in 2010, but it could be decades before we pass Chicago as either a city or metro - see here). Of the ten largest cities in America, three are in Texas.
Those three, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, together with the state capital, Austin, and Fort Worth, make up what the boosters call the Texaplex:
a densely packed triangle, with each side measuring about 300 miles, that is home to roughly 80% of the state’s population of 24m (second only to California’s 37m). This “Texas triangle”, containing America’s third-largest airport (Dallas-Fort Worth) and its second-busiest port (Houston, despite being 50 miles inland), has emerged as one of the most dynamic regions in all of America.
Joel Kotkin, an urbanologist based in California, recently compiled a list for Forbes magazine of the best cities for job creation over the past decade. Among those with more than 450,000 jobs, the top five spots went to the five main Texaplex cities—and the winner of the small-cities category was Odessa, Texas. A study by the Brookings Institution in June came up with very similar results. Mr Kotkin particularly admires Houston, which he calls a perfect example of an “opportunity city”—a place with lots of jobs, lots of cheap housing and a welcoming attitude to newcomers.
He is certainly right about the last point: not too many other cities could have absorbed 100,000 refugees, bigheartedly and fairly painlessly, as Houston did after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. With vibrant Asian communities alongside its balanced Hispanic, white and black mix, with no discernible racial tensions, and with more foreign consulates than any American city except New York and Los Angeles, Houston is arguably America’s most enthusiastically cosmopolitan city, a place where the future has already arrived.
Pretty nice. Moving on:
...Texas’s biggest advantage: its sheer size. Larger in area than any country in the European Union and than any American state bar Alaska, Texas has huge amounts of space into which its cities can expand. This has allowed Houston to sprawl over some 600 square miles; it is probably the most spread-out big city in America and has no zoning restrictions, allowing the market to determine the best balance between retail, commercial and residential uses.
California is constrained by its mountains and the ocean, to say nothing of the demands of environmentalists keen to preserve its remarkable natural beauty. Texas, says Michael Lind, a fifth-generation Texan who writes about demography, identity, history and much else, “is flat and ugly. The Sierra Club is not going to kick up a fuss if Houston or Dallas keeps on growing.” He is being a little harsh; most of central Texas is perfectly nice-looking grassland. But there certainly is a lot of it. (some of that droll Economist humor)
I'm going to take an issue with "the most spread-out big city in America", as
this table shows that 4 of the 10 largest cities in America have lower densities than we do. And if you look at metro areas, Atlanta (among others) is substantially less dense and more sprawling than we are.
Wrapping up with the special report conclusion:
Don't mess with Texas
So Texas has a huge challenge to cope with. But it seems wrong to end on a pessimistic note. Texans above all are optimists, and few of them seem to doubt that Mexico’s proximity is a huge long-term source of strength for the Lone Star state. That optimism, rooted in a profound sense of local pride that can sometimes jar with outsiders, is Texas’s dominant characteristic.
It is the reason why the wildcatter, the independent oilman whose test drillings might come up dry 20 times before gushing in the end, is an enduring Texas symbol. And it explains why risk-taking is admired and failure no disgrace. Most of the Enron executives who lost their jobs when the firm went bust in 2001 quickly found new ones. The company’s offices in Houston were swiftly re-let. Enron Field baseball stadium became Minute Maid Park. “Don’t mess with Texas” was once a slogan for a wildly successful anti-litter campaign. It is now the state’s unofficial motto.
To visit America in the midst of the worst recession for decades can be a disheartening experience, but a tour of Texas is quite the reverse. Since suffering that big shock in the 1980s, it has become a well-diversified, fiscally sensible state; one where the great racial realignment that will affect all of America is already far advanced; and one whose politics is gradually finding the centre. It welcomes and assimilates all new arrivals. No wonder so many people are making a beeline for it.
Labels: density, economic strategy, economy, education, growth, headquarters, opportunity urbanism, perspectives, port, rankings, sprawl
#1 in Everything, State of the County, MetroRail budgets
Judge Emmett gave a good State of the County address at a
GHP luncheon today (
Chronicle coverage,
Examiner coverage). Some highlights:
- The county is financially in good shape, certainly far better than most governments across the country
- "71 percent of all new jobs created in the U.S. in recent years have been created in Texas." Wow. That stat just blows me away every time I see it.
- Big plug for the port as a cornerstone of international trade, which is our future.
- Plug for commuter rail in the Hempstead Corridor and along Route 3 to Galveston.
- Plug for UH Tier 1 status.
- His biggest worry sounds like the Harris County Hospital District, and figuring out how pubic and indigent health care is going to be handled and paid for (details here). I think he's right that it needs to get figured out, but it might make sense to wait until after whatever Obama does on health care.
- Transtar did well did Hurricane Ike, but needs some expansion and improvements to do better.
- Ended with a great story of heroic all-night efforts by tug boat crews during Ike to keep a large ship that came unmoored from crashing into the 610 Loop Ship Channel bridge, which could have brought the whole thing down. He thought their story kinda got lost in the noise during post-Ike recovery. They have been nominated for U.S. Homeland Security Certificates of Valor. "It highlights our greatest strength - private individuals withe a work ethic and a value system that will see us through good times or bad."
Afterward during the press conference, I asked him about congestion pricing on toll roads. It sounds like they might wait a while to open up the new Katy lanes to toll-payers (he implied lack of demand because the free lanes move so well), and even then it will be a fixed-schedule of prices rather than real-time congestion pricing, which does have the risk of congestion and slow speeds when there is extra demand due to weather or accidents. He doesn't think they're ready for real-time. He know of no talks between HCTRA and Metro on HOV-to-HOT lane conversions, where it would make obvious sense to use HCTRA's EZ-tag, billing, and enforcement systems.
Speaking of Metro, I just came across
this Chronicle story today that Metro only got half the federal stimulus funds they expected. They asked for $410 million for the north and southeast rail lines, expected $180 million, but only got $92 million. Given that
those two lines alone are estimated to cost over $1.2 billion, I'm curious what Metro's plan is to fill in the budget gap. Are they just keeping their fingers crossed for more federal money for these lines in future years?
Finally, the item that really jumped out at me at the luncheon was
this page of Houston #1's they included in our packets. It's kind of mind-boggling when you read it.
We've been ranked the best city for living, working, playing, earning a living, keeping your job, buying a home, recent college grads, fastest job growth, hottest labor market, lowest cost of living, largest IT service economy, top U.S. manufacturing city, best cancer hospital, highest population growth, and more. This one came out today calling us
the healthiest housing market for 2009 (hat tip to Christina), and the Texas Triangle cities made a clean sweep of the top five positions. Wow. Are we "world-class" yet? ;-) All, I can say is, be thankful you're in the right place at the right time during this global recession.
Labels: affordability, commuter rail, economy, emergency response, growth, hurricanes, Metro, mobility strategies, perspectives, port, rankings, toll roads
State and local transportation issues, part 1
I spent all day Wednesday at a a statewide conference on "Transportation Infrastructure: Establishing Public Policy Priorities" put on by Texas Lyceum at Reliant Center, with the objective of getting something substantive done at the upcoming legislative session in January. The turnout was impressive - several hundred I'd say. It was a mixed format of round-table "fishbowl" expert discussions and breakout sessions for participation, which I found to be a much more engaging format than the usual sequence of lone speakers with Powerpoint slides.
Rosanna Ruiz's Chronicle article on the event is here, including some quotes by yours truly (we randomly ended up a the same table).
Some observations from the day:
- There was widespread agreement Texas has been chronically under-investing in transportation infrastructure, and the future trends look even worse if something isn't done, mainly around funding.
- Recent hearings around the state indicated that people prefer taxes over tolls, which surprised me.
- Our port has a mismatch problem: the water side is 24/7, but the land/truck side is generally only 16 hours/day because they can't operate when their destinations aren't open to receive the load. My (partial) solution? Determine containers that have long multi-hour drives to their destinations (around the state and beyond), and release those loads to trucks in the middle of the night. By the time they get where they're going, their destination store, factory, warehouse or whatever will be open.
- "Inland ports" were a hot concept to move the congestion away from urban areas and the jobs to underdeveloped parts of the state. One idea from our table: a rail shuttle to move containers from the port into east Texas along the I-69 corridor. Facilities along there would transfer the loads to trucks, which would not go through any congested urban areas in Texas as they head to destinations in the eastern U.S. (as opposed to the cities trucks travel through when they come from south Texas or the port).
- Are we going to be the first generation of Texans to not leave a legacy of generous infrastructure investments to our children?
- "We talk like we want to be California, but we spend like Mississippi."
- Far too many people are on the roads during rush hours that don't need to be (almost half aren't going to or from work). How to we shift that demand to off-peak? Telecom solutions? Road pricing solutions?
- Mary Peters, the U.S. Dept of Transportation Secretary, made some great points about getting rid of the artificial barriers between pots of federal money (like roads vs. transit - let locals decide the best use), that we need move from arbitrary earmarks to strict cost-benefit performance metrics, and that the gas tax has a limited future as we move to higher mileage vehicles as well as those running on alternative fuels (like the coming wave of plug-in hybrids running on electricity for many miles/day). She mentioned a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) tax, but it sounds like a privacy (GPS tracking) or fraud (odometer rollbacks) nightmare to me, as well as discouraging investment in higher mileage cars (which the gas tax does).
- She also mentioned that the congestion-priced lanes on CA-91 in Orange County have 40% better throughput (!!) than the free general-purpose lanes because they keep speeds up. I imagine we'll see similar metrics eventually for our new I-10 Katy Freeway managed lanes. I believe more of these lanes is the best and cheapest thing we can do to get more out of current freeway infrastructure as well as raise critically-needed funds for new infrastructure. With that kind of performance improvement, we should even be seriously considering switching over currently free general-purpose lanes to managed - after extensive public education of the benefits, of course.
That's enough for one post. Part 2 next week on financing and delivery of transportation infrastructure.
Labels: infrastructure, mobility strategies, port, transportation plan
