Bloomberg CityLab: The Questionable Economics of the 15-Minute City - The goals of this trendy urban planning model are laudable, but cities need to be realistic about their ability to place retail, services and jobs close to all residents. Excerpts:
"The economics of the 15-minute city don’t really work...
What hasn’t been said is that the economics of 15-minute city planning go against foundational principles of how urban markets function....
Employment markets are even less localized. The very raison d’etre of cities is as a vehicle for labor pooling and sharing — this cannot happen effectively at the neighborhood scale. Setting up an expectation where people live within 15 minutes of their place of work will at best result in bad matches between workers and jobs, and at worst no matches."
Arpit Gupta's "Contra Strong Towns" critique focuses on challenging the Strong Towns movement's assertion that suburban growth operates as a "Ponzi scheme." Gupta argues that the evidence does not support the claim that suburban development is inherently financially unsustainable. He emphasizes the need for rigorous accounting and empirical data to substantiate such arguments, which he finds lacking in Strong Towns' narrative. Hat tip to Zoabe.
Antiplanner: "But today’s density policies depress fertility rates and the anti-immigration movement make it more difficult to compensate for those policies. Fortunately, some are getting the message that “maybe we should rethink” YIMBYism."
Twitter: "There's a growing consensus on YIMBY Twitter that we need to build a lot of new high density housing in the biggest cities. Maybe we should rethink that idea." Or go with the Houston free-market model: allow lots of high-density housing in the core for those that want it (typically non-families) as well as plenty of low-density suburban housing for those that prefer that (typically families). Best of both worlds.
Could Houston get Google? converting the 59 Spur to a linear park, housing crisis drives socialism, millennials are driving, Houston is the future, and more
Apologies for the delay between posts - I've had some busy travel recently. Before getting to this week's items, a couple thoughts on the City's consideration of turning the Bagby and Brazos portions of Spur 527 off 59 into a park. I live in Midtown, so this affects me directly. I've managed to adapt ok to losing the Brazos exit since the bridge closed for repairs - Louisiana is inconvenient but works - but losing Bagby's southbound entrance is a bigger deal. I've thought quite a bit about this. At first I was totally opposed, then I figured I could live with it via Smith and Louisiana but still moderately opposed (even with the benefits of Bagby traffic reduction). I do think it will substantially negatively affect some of the businesses along Bagby and Brazos that rely on drive-by traffic like Spec's, CVS, and especially the new Midtown Whole Foods (which is already struggling in what was previously a food desert), as well as thousands of commuters that connect between 59 and 45 (which, in turn, will make the already-messy 59-45-288 interchange even worse). In fact, I'd argue the optics look pretty bad: sacrifice the commutes of a lot of working-class folks on the north and east sides commuting to jobs in the southwest so a few wealthy white people in gated Courtlandt Place can have a pocket park. Not a good look. And I think it is very likely that a City-maintained linear pocket park will turn into a homeless camp (sad, but that's the reality these days) - something I hope the neighbors have considered in their support. They may come to really regret it...
Mapped: The Salary Needed to Buy a Home in 50 U.S. Metro Areas. The only top ten metro less expensive than Houston is Atlanta. Texas as a whole does quite well, especially when our incredible growth rate is considered (the least expensive metros tend to also be growing the slowest).
When this guy talks down our downtown tunnel system, my response is that I would bet, five months of the year, downtown workers are willing to travel a lot farther to shop or visit a cool restaurant for lunch if they can use the tunnels than if they had to walk outside. Downtown vibrancy would actually decline without the tunnel system.
“If we keep forcing them to pay for housing and parks, they will go to Houston or Austin.”
I think the advantages for a Google office here would be pretty strong. Tons of oil-and-gas tech/IT talent that’s easy to poach, a city willing to do anything to land them, plus deep expat communities from nations all over the world that could handle some global functions (esp. Latin America). It would also work well if Google is considering any health care plays, with the world's largest med center right down the way in the innovation corridor.
Another thought is, what if you wanted to have a US office where you could bring H1B visa talent from all over the world, and they would be able to afford to live there as well as find a comfortable expat community from their nation? Houston would be a great location for that: huge Asian, Latin American, African, Middle Eastern, and even European communities - many from the long history of the global oil industry here.
This is a fantastic interview with Ed Glaeser that directly relates to COU’s mission. Great short video too. Really gets to how the housing crisis has led to the rise of socialism’s popularity among the young. "The entrenched vs. newcomers."
Government policies limit millennials’ prosperity, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser argues. Will they realize more of the same isn’t the answer?
“The right answer for this is not universal basic income. The right answer is freedom. Allow people to use their property the way they want to use it.”
Millennials hitting road at fast pace - "It turns out millennials don’t hate driving, after all." Remember when everyone thought Millenials were going to avoid driver's licenses and car ownership? Well, they did for a while, then they grew up and started forming families.
"New supply is one reason the median home price in Texas is currently $207,301, while in California, it’s nearly triple that, $605,280. California’s drought in new home production has been caused in part by land-use regulations and the state’s myriad environmental laws.
...
A Zillow-backed survey of economists and housing analysts predicted that in 2020, Texas’s relatively affordable big cities (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and especially Austin) will outperform the market average in home value growth, while overpriced California metros like San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles will fare poorly.
...
The California housing situation, on the other hand, is a multifaceted mess. Prices have skyrocketed. A new apartment in San Francisco costs an average of $700,000 to build—including materials, labor, and land—triple the cost of a decade ago. The average value of a home in Los Angeles County is $635,000—almost double the median price in Austin and nearly triple the median price in Dallas—and many neighborhoods have seen average prices more than double in the last decade. According to the United Way, one in three Californians, or 3.3 million families, don’t have incomes to meet their basic cost of living, and most struggle with high housing costs. The state’s 150,000 homeless residents represent a quarter of the nation’s homeless population. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates it would cost “in excess of $250 billion” to provide affordable housing for all of the state’s 1.7 million rent-burdened households."
Providing additional buses and drivers to handle the additional demand of a 36% increase in ridership from going fareless could cost up to $170m a year on top of Metro's roughly $700m budget, and they simply can't afford that.
The safety risks are substantial with "problem riders", which have been an issue when other agencies have gone fareless.
I was impressed with Metro's thorough analysis of six different scenarios, and satisfied that they came to the right (albeit unfortunate) conclusions. I agree that the cost and safety concerns are just too high for most of the scenarios they analyzed. They are still analyzing additional scenarios and I have suggested it would be interesting to add a scenario with a fixed-price unlimited monthly pass, including for Park-and-Ride riders. I’m not sure what the right price point would be - maybe at the equivalent of two local rides a day? - so $2.50 x 30 days = $75/month? I think that could get a substantial boost in ridership (especially Park-and-Ride commuters) without the safety concerns or major loss of revenue. We'll see what comes back...
"Texas Monthly told a story that a lot of people wanted to hear: loosely regulated housing markets like Houston have long embarrassed ideological opponents of free markets who insist that only rent controls and massive public subsidies can provide affordable housing. There is a ready audience for the argument that Houston’s affordability is a mirage. If you ever find an argument like this tempting, though, ask yourself: is it more likely that you’re mistaken, or that the millions of Americans voting with their feet are?"
Nobody wants to leave Houston! Well, I might be exaggerating a bit, but this CityLab piece shows Houston as the 9th most popular city for inbound apartment searches, but doesn't even make the top 20 for outbound apartment searches (which does include both Dallas and San Antonio). And Houston and Miami were the only top ten metros not on the outbound list - not bad company! I think that's a really nice sign for your city when there's a lot more inbound interest than outbound, even with the oil bust.
Opportunity over inequality, Vision Zero, policing for mental health, peak transit, and more
Several items to get to this week, but first I'd like to highlight this excellent piece (alternate link) by fellow, uh, Fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, Anne Snyder. Fantastic and emotionally powerful story that Harris County and the City of Houston can definitely learn from (please pass it along if you know any relevant people).
Policing With Velvet Gloves This is the story of how San Antonio’s police department helped divert 100,000 people away from jail and ERs, and moved them into mental-health treatment—one 911 call at a time.
Moving on to this week's items:
Are we approaching (or have we already passed) peak transit? Transit ridership is declining all over the country (see example below), and especially markedly in cities making large rail investments. Coming super-cheap self-driving taxis are likely to be the final nail in the coffin...
"If you have a population increase and you don’t increase housing, people will get pushed out," says Beyer. “If Miami decides to get tight on its land use regulations like New York, then Miami will have the same problems. Right now, regulatory burdens and the process of getting new buildings in New York approved is so lengthy that it doubles the cost of a unit. Consider Houston. Houston has a faster growing population than New York City and San Francisco, but it’s affordable because they have rapid construction rates.”
I finally got to read the new Vision Zero plan, and here are my thoughts: Do I support improved safety and think there's a lot of room for improvement? Absolutely. Do I want a city of 25mph speed limits, road humps everywhere, and police pulled from real crime to writing streams of traffic tickets? Absolutely not. The problem lies where the safety goals gets mixed up with the anti-car vision of many urbanists - "if we can just make driving a car painful enough, people will be forced into density and transit" - as articulated here. Improved safety is great, but we can’t co-opt peoples’ real mobility and economic productivity.
What would my #1 solution to traffic safety be? It would be at the federal level: require all new cars to require a breathalyzer test to start after 10pm at night, when the vast majority of drunk driving accidents happen (these sensors can be very low cost at scale). But it's also probably less than 1-2% of total trips, so most people most of the time would not have to use it. And I know this is unpopular and politically impossible, but I'd also support bringing the red light cameras back to reduce intersection collisions, which are some of the most dangerous (but only to enforce intersection crossings, not right turns on red where there is a lot more room for judgement on turning safely).
My final item is a response to Chris Tomlinson's column in the Chronicle questioning Houston's reputation as a city of opportunity: I think a few things are getting mixed up here. Houston has high inequality because we have high-paying industry clusters like energy and medical, as opposed to a more average big city like Phoenix or Tampa. That's most definitely a good thing - if we lost those industries, that would certainly be a bad thing, but inequality would drop. We also haven't driven out the poor by making housing unaffordable - like the coastal cities - so our inequality stats will look relatively worse.
What makes Houston a city of opportunity is not low inequality, but 1) having a ladder of middle class and working class jobs, including industrial and manufacturing ones - as opposed to coastal cities that tend to be a barbel between high paying jobs and low paying service jobs with nothing in the middle, and 2) having affordable housing, so a middle and working class family can afford a home and build equity, as opposed to being lifetime renters (like, again, the expensive coastal cities). The question is not "does Houston have a lot of poor people?" - we absolutely do, because opportunity cities attract the poor who want to move up, especially immigrant populations - but "do they do well and move up once they're here?" Based on Klinberg's Houston Area Survey's consistently high scoring optimism around working hard and doing well in Houston, I'd say we do well on that score - the residents certainly seem to think so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations to Annise Parker on her win last night, becoming, as she pointed out, the first Rice alum to become mayor of Houston ;-). Between her and Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the Rice mafia now controls this town. Nerds rule, literally in this case. I'm hoping for my appointment call any day now... (hint, hint)
She faces a difficult financial situation at the city, and obviously her first priority will be getting that under control. In addition to those short-term pressures, there are the long-term financial issues of city employee pensions and Metro's solvency, with rail cost estimates spiraling upward and revenue shrinking. If she does nothing else in the next two years but fix those financial problems and get the city and Metro on a sustainable financial path (without raising taxes), she'll have one of the most accomplished mayoral terms in city history and will more than deserve two follow-on terms.
But that's no reason to limit our ambitions. I went through my highlight posts from the last five years to find some good strategies for the next few years, with an emphasis on low or no-cost ideas:
"The lesson of High Point is that you can reduce crime by making credible threats, without having to lock up so many people. To deter, a punishment must be swift, certain and severe....Mr Kleiman suggests several other promising, non-macho approaches to curbing crime. Raise alcohol taxes. Start school days later to prevent after-school crime. Force probationers to wear GPS tags, thus making probation a tough (and much cheaper) alternative to prison. Americans should experiment with such ideas, he says, and if they are serious about justice, the object should be to cut crime, not to make criminals suffer."
Finally, in the more experimental category, I think there is a real opportunity to truly open up government to enable more engagement by citizens (including innovation and finding much-needed efficiency improvements), in the same way the open source movement works with software on the internet. But that's a topic for a whole 'nother blog...
Houston a green capital? plus top rankings, reducing crime, and elevated busways
Some smaller items for your reading pleasure when escaping the relatives or shopping of Thanksgiving break (or work, if you're stuck there this afternoon or Friday).
"The Daily Beast set out to definitively sort the best and the worst, undertaking a comprehensive study that heavily factored in on-time arrivals and departures, and also examined safety records, tarmac nightmares, airport accessibility, the baggage process, security waits, and amenities."
Innovative ideas on crime reduction in the Economist, mainly through deep relationships in the community. Excellent ideas for Houston to try under our new mayor and chief of police. I'm particularly a fan of GPS tags to prevent recidivism.
"The lesson of High Point is that you can reduce crime by making credible threats, without having to lock up so many people. To deter, a punishment must be swift, certain and severe. ... Mr Kleiman suggests several other promising, non-macho approaches to curbing crime. Raise alcohol taxes. Start school days later to prevent after-school crime. Force probationers to wear GPS tags, thus making probation a tough (and much cheaper) alternative to prison. Americans should experiment with such ideas, he says, and if they are serious about justice, the object should be to cut crime, not to make criminals suffer."
In No. 2 city San Antonio, home to four military bases, and Austin, our third-ranked city and the state seat of government, municipal jobs supplement Texas' robust energy sector. In Dallas (No. 6), it's a thriving tech industry that buffers it from energy highs and lows. Although Houston (No. 8) is invested mostly in oil, it has diversified its energy industry beyond oil rigs into refining and chemicals manufacturing.
What's more, the state's housing prices never ascended to the unsustainable levels the rest of the country hit at the peak of the housing bubble. Thus, it didn't crash as hard. These factors have toughened the local economy against a recession that is inextricably tied to real estate.
"Texas didn't have as big of a boom," says James P. Gaines, research economist at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. "So we're not having anywhere near the kind of bust."
Neal has an interesting post on the potential for elevated busways as a superior transit solution in Houston vs. at-grade rail. I think it could make a lot of sense in certain corridors (depending on the economics), esp. if it could be tied in to the HOV lanes so express buses could make seamless transitions to local distribution. Maybe Post Oak would make a good candidate? Or something through the medical center? Would love to hear your suggestions in the comments.
Houston #1 in green home construction. Dallas is #2. We certainly have the climate and electricity prices to make it a worthwhile investment. Yet another hat tip to Jessie (I promise I do find material through other sources too ;-).
"Houston actually makes a lot of sense. Unlike many places in the country, Texas’ electricity grid isn’t under stress, for starters. And from an environmental perspective, it’s fairly clean, with a lot of juice coming from wind farms and natural-gas fired plants.
Electricity-guzzling cars that up the demand for natural-gas for power generation could even make the region’s fossil fuels industry happy, says says Kenneth Medlock, an economist at Rice University. And since most cars would charge at night, Texas’ booming wind-energy industry would find new customers, too.
In the end, America’s fourth-largest city epitomizes the country’s love affair with the car. Unlike in green urbs like San Francisco or Seattle, it’s all but impossible to live here without wheels—so they might as well be electric. It will probably be cheaper and easier to electrify urban sprawl than rein it in altogether.
Who knows? Maybe in a decade Houston’s famed ArtCar parade will be a largely electric affair."
(as I've been saying on this blog for a while: transit will not take over more than a tiny percentage of trips, the personal vehicle is now a permanent part of society, it will just change propulsion technology)
Speaking of being a green capital: algae fuel is picking up momentum, and biofuels are Houston's best bet for leveraging our energy infrastructure skill base to lead the next generation of energy technologies.
That's it for this round, but keep 'em comin' Jessie (and everybody else).
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.
