Baylor forfeits to UH after positive covid test - UH goes straight to national championship game!
In an absolutely unprecedented occurrence in NCAA March Madness tournament history, Baylor is being forced to forfeit its upcoming Final Four semi-final basketball game against the University of Houston after their star player Davion Mitchell tested positive for Covid-19, sending UH directly to the national championship game Monday, April 5th! UH is now redefining the classic March Madness "Cinderella story" after being the first team to make the Final Four without defeating a single-digit seeded opponent and now skipping right past the semi-final game straight to the National Championship game - just when you thought pandemic craziness couldn't get any crazier!
Baylor is of course completely devastated by the news and trying to appeal, but the NCAA covid safety protocols are very strict and pretty clear. Even if every other player tests negative, there's no way to know if they haven't already been exposed and will develop it before the game Saturday.
UH Chairman and Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta issued a statement congratulating the Cougars on getting to the national championship while offering a generous consolation prize to the Baylor players after their sudden season-ending disappointment: once they clear covid protocols they're all welcome to immediately join the cellar-dwelling 13-34 Rockets as an "obvious and immediate upgrade," according to Fertitta.
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Hope you enjoyed this year's April Fools post ;-D
Here are previous years if you missed 'em and would like a chuckle:
Labels: pandemic, sports
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
The lead item this week is my short piece in the Houston Business Journal on New Zealand adopting the Texas Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) model to encourage more homebuilding in a country with an extremely limited supply of overpriced housing. I helped host a research delegation from New Zealand in 2018 that brought our MUDs model back and successfully crafted and passed similar legislation there - a huge win for our Urban Reform Institute think tank and endorsement of the Texas model for supplying a continuous flow of new, affordable housing.
Moving on to this week's items:
"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)."
"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.”
Labels: affordability, creative class, development, economy, history, home affordability, identity, land-use regulation, migration, pandemic, planning, resilience, sports, tech
Upward mobility report, high-capacity transit deceptions, NIMBYs saving cities? covid moving, and a sports play you have absolutely never ever seen
A few small items this week:
- Our think tank, The Urban Reform Institute - A Center for Opportunity Urbanism, released its newest report on upward mobility, with best city rankings for different minority groups: Hispanic, Asian, and African American. You'd think the deep blue coastal cities would be the best, but in fact it's the opposite (with the exception of well-paying government jobs in DC).
- Antiplanner: High-Capacity Transit Deceptions. "Transit advocates routinely make deceptive claims about the advantages of transit over cars or rail transit over buses. Often those claims deal with the capacity of different modes of transportation to move people. This policy brief will scrutinize some of these claims."
- The American Conservative: Did NIMBYs Save Cities? In many ways, slow-growing suburbs encased in regulatory amber function the way greenbelts or urban growth boundaries are supposed to. Houston is a counter-example to what he’s saying, since we have a pretty free market in both the suburbs and the city and we’re getting good growth in both. Hat tip to Judah.
- Bloomberg: New Data Shows Just How Much Americans Moved Temporarily During Covid. 3 of the top 10 cities gaining new move-ins during the pandemic are Houston suburbs: Katy (#1), Richmond (#2), and Cypress (#7). I suspect they already planned to move but just took advantage of the pandemic downtime and low mortgage rates.
Finally, I have to end with this absolutely unbelievable you've-never-seen-it-before-and-will-never-see-it-again recent video of a Rice kicker hitting all three field-goal crossbars a total of four times! The only thing that could have made it any cooler is if it had landed on the other side of the final crossbar!
Assuming the republic is still intact, I'll see ya again next week (or possibly even if it isn't).
Labels: affordability, home affordability, migration, opportunity urbanism, rail, rankings, sports, transit
NBA playoffs to be held in Houston during April lockdown
Moving quickly to take advantage of another month of national lockdown for the COVID-19 virus, the NBA announced today an unprecedented plan to restart their season with nearly continuous playoff games on TV throughout April. With no other competitive sports and hundreds of millions of bored people stuck at home, TV ratings are expected to set an all-time record.
The plan involves declaring the regular season over early and bringing the 16 playoff teams to Houston to play TV-only, no-crowd games at the Toyota Center. A "safe zone" will be established downtown involving the Toyota Center, GRB convention center, Marriott Marquis and Hilton Americas hotels. They will receive a thorough deep-cleaning and then be strictly quarantined allowing only essential personnel, media, players and their families after passing COVID-19 tests. The GRB convention center will be used for temporary practice courts.
Games will be scheduled back-to-back throughout the days with up to four games a day, with eastern conference games early and western conference games later to take advantage of time zone differences. Since everyone is home anyway, games don't have to just be in the evening hours to draw an audience - essentially every day will be scheduled like a weekend day with a combination of afternoon and evening games.
The NBA considered normal playoff travel schedules to crowd-less home arenas, but ultimately determined the logistics were too complex to guarantee player and personnel safety. Since the games are TV-only anyway, it just made more sense to hold the games in a single well-controlled location, with the added benefit of not losing game days to travel. Different locations were considered, but ultimately Houston was selected because it could offer the easiest, most-compact safe zone with an official NBA arena, top-quality hotels, and practice courts. The central time zone is also helpful in scheduling games that work well for both the east and west coast TV markets.
When briefed on the plans, Houston officials had serious concerns, but these were alleviated when the NBA assured them they would bring their own toilet paper.
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Hope you enjoyed this year's April Fools post ;-D
(although I wish this one was real!)
Here are previous years if you missed 'em and would like a chuckle:
Labels: pandemic, sports
Great quote on Houston, Complete streets not adding value, planning problems, NYT love for HTX, and more
Quite the backlog of smaller items this week:
"After adjusting the two sets of data to make them comparable prior to the time when one group adopted Complete Streets, they found that “Complete Streets policy has no effect on house prices, and therefore we are unable to find a positive amenity value from a municipality-level commitment to Complete Streets.”
"State DOTs should be far more cautious in agreeing to requests from municipalities to convert arterial routes to Complete Streets treatment. Most of the information provided by New Urbanists consists of anecdotes, rather than careful analysis such as Vandegriff and Zandoni have provided."
Rebounding bigger and better after a hurricane
"After Hurricane Harvey, the city is back on its feet and showing off the everything-is-bigger-in-Texas attitude. Four food halls opened in 2018, including Finn Hall, which features up-and-coming chefs including the James Beard-nominated chef Jianyun Ye with a downtown outpost of his Chinese hot spot Mala Sichuan and a taqueria from the local favorite Goode Company. The five-diamond Post Oak Hotel opened in March 2018 with a two-story Rolls Royce showroom, art by Frank Stella and a 30,000-bottle wine cellar. The Menil Collection, known for its eclectic art ranging from Byzantine antiques to 20th-century Pop Art, underwent a seven-month renovation of its main building and opened the 30,000-square-foot Menil Drawing Institute. The low-slung white steel-and-glass building with a trapezoidal roof is the first addition to the Menil campus in 20 years and the first freestanding museum dedicated to modern drawing in the United States. The city’s museum boom continues with a massive expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to be completed in 2020, a newly built location for the Holocaust Museum, which will move in the spring of 2019, and a restoration of the Apollo Mission Center that will open in time for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in July."
"Transit riders are more sensitive to frequencies than to whether a transit vehicle runs on rubber tires or steel wheels. A bus carries fewer people than a train, but that’s a virtue, not a flaw, because it allows for higher frequencies. If Ft. Worth had used buses rather than rails for this route, it could have run those buses every 10 or 15 minutes (instead of hourly), attracting a lot more riders."
"Houston is a city of immigrants and engineers. Function trumps fashion with this no-nonsense crowd that expects to work hard and earn rewards based on merit. Looking at demographics and migration patterns, people voting with their feet consider the Bayou City the most egalitarian of the Texas metro areas."
Finally, I wanted to end with a longer set of excerpts from an excellent piece by Nolan Gray in CityLab: "
How Cities Design Themselves"
"
Sometimes when I read the papers of my fellow urban planners, I get the sense that they think cities are Disneyland or Club Med. Cities are labor markets. People go to cities to find a good job. Firms move to cities, which are expensive, because they are more likely to find the staff and specialists that they need. If a city’s attractive, that’s a bonus. But basically, they come to get a job.
...
Urban planning has an important role to play. With the exception of fire and safety regulation,
planners should focus much less on what people do on their plot or in their apartment, and much more on the management of the public spaces, like streets and parks.
Insomuch as urban planners deal with land uses and densities, they should closely monitor trends to be aware of what’s happening. For instance, in New York, household size has plummeted over the past 30 years. Urban planners should be aware of that and address rigidities that prevent the city from accommodating those demographic changes.
An area where urban planners should play a much more active role is mobility, mainly by adapting existing systems to emerging trends.
Urban mobility is the key to housing affordability.
Improved urban transport makes more land available for housing and therefore allows low-income people to live in areas that are both affordable and accessible to most of the city.
..
In my book, I talk a lot about income distribution curves.
Every time urban planners do something, they should ask: Who is going to pay?"
Labels: affordability, affordable proximity, energy, entrepreneurship, home affordability, hurricanes, identity, land-use regulation, mobility strategies, planning, rail, rankings, sports, tourism
The battle for Houston, rapidly arriving autonomous taxis, big success with big sports events, and more
A big backlog of smaller items this week:
"Commuters who use public transit typically use their regular route on the order of 500 times a year. If they also take public transit for non-work trips around the city, the number goes even higher, perhaps 700. In contrast, people who fly only fly a handful of times per year. Frequent business travelers may fly a few tens of times per year, still an order of magnitude less than the number of trips a typical commuter takes on transit."
"Clearly, at $4 per ride, bus-rapid transit is the most cost-effective use of transit dollars. Bus-rapid transit requires minimal new infrastructure, and most of that infrastructure won’t become obsolete if and when driverless ride-hailing replaces transit. Bus-rapid transit also tends to have smaller cost overruns and ridership shortfalls than rail projects.
...
Still, when buses can carry riders for $4 per trip, why are cities planning rail lines that cost $10, $20, or $151 (!!!) per trip? A big part of the answer is the desire to get “free” federal dollars."
"Where the most major neutral-site sports event by city/metropolitan area have been held since the turn of the 21st century or are already booked in the future:
New Orleans (9) – 2002 Super Bowl, 2003 Final Four, 2008 NBA All-Star Game, 2012 Final Four, 2013 Super Bowl, 2014 NBA All-Star Game, 2017 NBA All-Star Game, 2022 Final Four, 2024 Super Bowl.
Houston (8) – 2004 Super Bowl, 2004 Major League All-Star Game, 2006 NBA All-Star Game, 2011 NCAA Final Four, 2013 NBA All-Star Game, 2016 Final Four, 2017 Super Bowl (LI), 2023 Final Four.
Phoenix (7) – 2008 Super Bowl, 2009 NBA All-Star Game, 2011 MLB All-Star Game, 2015 Super Bowl, 2017 Final Four, 2023 Super Bowl, 2024 Final Four.
Indianapolis (7) – 2006 Final Four, 2010 Final Four, 2012 Super Bowl, 2015 Final Four, 2021 Final Four, 2021 NBA All-Star Game, 2026 Final Four"
That's probably more than enough items for one week. More to come next week...
Labels: affordability, autonomous vehicles, home affordability, Metro, mobility strategies, opportunity urbanism, rail, smart growth, sports, transit
Should Houston promote an annual TAMU-LSU football game? Houston's #1 Winner-Take-All-City Quotient, #2 std of living, innovation corridor, and more
Before getting to this week's items, an idea for Houston as we wrap up the college football regular season: just as UT and OU play each other every year at their midpoint in Dallas with the Texas State Fair all around them (quite the tourism boost for Dallas) - and now that TAMU is in the SEC with a new coach - has anyone considered trying to promote an annual TAMU-LSU game in Houston at NRG Stadium? I think it would have a lot of potential given the numbers of alums of both schools here - high profile for the schools and a good tourism boost for the city. And I could see a whole weekend of festivities around the event centered on downtown and midtown (like a mini Super Bowl). Would love to hear thoughts in the comments... or if you know someone with the GHCVB please pass it along!
Moving on to this week's items:
"For each global city, and for the various categories of global cities, we calculate a “Winner-Take-All Quotient” (or WQ). This is a simple “over-representation ratio” that compares the share of the total amount of economic output, venture capital investment and/or, billionaires in a global city divided by its share of the world’s population.
...
Indeed, the 20 largest global metros (by economic output) account for a considerably larger share of the global economic output than they do of global population (see Table 2). The WQ for these cities range from lows of 1.2 and 1.3 in Mexico City and Sao Paulo to highs of 4.5, 4.7, and 4.8 in New York, Washington, D.C., and Houston."
- Houston is still #2 behind San Jose in our second year of doing the COU Standard of Living rankings, with a cost-of-living adjusted real pay of $58,401 per job.
- Houston is also ranked #2 on this infographic for what size home you can get for $500k: 5,813 sq.ft at $86 per sq.ft. A heck of a lot better than 986 sq.ft in SF or 1,351 in LA! Hat tip to George.
- Post-Harvey update on the Houston housing market
- LA transit ridership losses lead national decline. So much for spending on rail to boost ridership...
- NYT expose on how incredibly dysfunctional their transit agency is. I know there are mixed feelings on METRO here. I've certainly seen a mix of good (original red line, bus routes reimagining) and bad (new rail lines) decisions. This is why I think the right long-term answer to low-income mobility will be subsidies to private transportation-as-a-service providers as autonomous taxis and shuttles become incredibly cheap, just like we do now with food and housing vouchers.
- Michael Lewyn's notes on Houston at Market Urbanism. He finds our street grid, sidewalks, and density generally superior to Atlanta and other sun belt cities.
- Cautionary story about how Columbia Sportswear and other companies are pulling out of downtown Portland because of a growing homeless aggression problem. I don't think Houston is there yet, but we certainly have a growing issue that needs to get addressed, especially in downtown and midtown.
- Regulation runs amok pinching supply and skyrocketing home prices in Toronto, which I think will kill any chances they had of Amazon HQ2. Another cautionary tale. Hat tip to Oscar.
Labels: affordability, density, economic strategy, economy, home affordability, market urbanism, Metro, opportunity urbanism, rail, rankings, sports, transit, world city
Delay renovating NRG, don't incentivize local movies, USA rail beats Europe, Astrodome, anti-zoning PSA, visualizing our density, good gentrification, and more
Quite the backlog of items to get through this week:
"While the gentrification narrative (having rich neighbors makes life harder for poor people) is common, news stories seldom promote the narrative of concentrated poverty (having mostly poor neighbors makes life harder for the poor), which is both more prevalent and demonstrably more harmful."
Finally,
Houston beats Dallas handily for Super Bowl hosting, but we're still not likely to get it again anytime soon. There's just too much new/renovated stadium competition out there. In fact, despite their last disaster, Dallas is likely to get it again before we do because of their palatial $1B stadium. Other cities in the pipeline include Atlanta, Minneapolis, Miami, NOLA, Phoenix, and a $2 billion behemoth being built in LA (count on at least two Super Bowls there after it's built).
If we're going to renovate NRG to make another run at a Super Bowl, it sounds like we need to wait at least half a decade or more for the NFL's hosting backlog to clear out before doing it. Why invest a ton in NRG now when the upgrades may already be out of date by the time our next potential Super Bowl slot opens up??
Labels: Astrodome, density, development, economy, rail, sports, stadiums, zoning
Super Bowl kudos, Houston keeps winning, Texas HSR questioned, and more
First the Super Bowl items this week, which was the biggest NFL comeback/collapse since... well,
this, which I remember all too well. From everything I've seen and everybody I've spoken to, we pulled off the hosting with flying colors. Congrats and thanks to everyone involved for their hard work. Unfortunately it could be quite a while before we get another one - too many cities are building new stadiums or upgrading old ones (Miami, NOLA) - each guaranteed at least one Super Bowl - and I'm betting the
$2.6+ billion behemoth in LA will get more than that.
And moving on to the non-Super Bowl items:
"I sat down with Angela Blanchard last year at a coffeeshop in the Third Ward, a historically black neighborhood about two miles from her house. She had walked there to meet me, so I brought up the concern of some self-appointed urban advocates who want to redesign Houston to make it “walkable.” She laughed:
'I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to roll my eyes, but everyone is trying to create these precious neighborhoods. I remember being at a conference and someone said the thing we need to do with poor neighborhoods is make them walkable. I thought this was absolutely hilarious. If you’re in a poor neighborhood, your neighborhood is walkable. It might not be a nice walk or a fun walk, but you walk. … I actually love Houston for its total, messy, sprawling randomness. I get invited to conferences where people talk about Houston with frowns on their faces. People haven’t been able to figure out our city and how to make it smart and precious like other cities that no one can afford to live in. My biggest concern for this city is that it remains a place where you can start at the bottom and work your way up. Where it’s a good city to begin in, and where if you have a dream and water it with hard work, it amounts to something.' "
Labels: aviation, economy, growth, high-speed rail, identity, mobility strategies, rankings, sports, stadiums, tourism
Super Bowl! more MaX lanes, paying for infrastructure, affordability ranking, pension fix, autonomous vehicles vs. rail, Texas Urbanism, and more
Lots of items for Super Bowl week in Houston!
And some non-Super Bowl items:
“To improve transit in the region, auditors called for increasing the number of HOV lanes in the Houston area.”
"If President Trump wants to seriously improve American infrastructure spending, he should champion a new federalism for transportation, in which infrastructure is funded by states, localities and especially the users themselves. Too often, public debates devolve into a simplistic argument of "more" infrastructure versus "less." In many ways, America's infrastructure is woefully deficient, but we have also wasted billions on bridges to nowhere and highways in the middle of nowhere. The right question is how to get better infrastructure.The best decisions are made when decision-makers bear the costs and reap the benefits."
Hear, hear!
"Houston owes its police, fire, and city workers about $7.8 billion, and it doesn’t exactly have the cash on hand. Their hard-fought solution could serve as a model for the rest of Texas, and the nation."
Finally, "
Self-driving cars could spell revolution for Houston--or not" (hat tip to Julia). I do think they help make the argument that Houston could get rid of parking minimums (
like Buffalo recently did) and let the market naturally reduce parking over time as autonomous vehicles ramp up.
In addition, the City's Public Works department may not have too much to consider, but METRO certainly does with their new long-range plan. If we’re about to make point-to-point vehicle transportation far cheaper, safer, and more convenient, then what’s the impact on transit? I for one would argue that further rail investments will get nowhere near the ridership they expect and are likely to be horrible investments. This month's Surface Transportation Innovations newsletter from Reason concurs:
How Will Autonomous Vehicles Affect Public Transportation?
"A final point for transportation planners and transit managers to consider is the impact of these technologies on long-range planning for infrastructure. Here is the most relevant paragraph:
"Numerous communities across the country are planning for or evaluating major capital fixed-guideway public transit investments whose success may be impacted by the presence of alternative mobility options. The criticality of reflecting on these issues relates to both the magnitude of the cost of these commitments and the fact that these assets are very long-lived. These fixed-guideway commitments may well have extensive economic life remaining at points in time when new travel options compete with them, potentially cannibalizing their markets and rendering the investments less productive than envisioned in the planning stages."
Labels: autonomous vehicles, home affordability, infrastructure, MaX Lanes, Metro, opportunity urbanism, pensions, rankings, sports
Another outsider loves Houston, top rankings, Super Bowl mobility, reducing rents with supply, insane rail costs, and more
Apologies for the posting delays - quite the backlog of items to get through:
"Another list recently heralded Houston as one of the best places in the U.S. to start a business — the Bayou City ranked No. 6 around the country. Houston ranked as fourth-best city in the U.S. for young entrepreneurs, and Texas was rated No. 2 on CNBC's "Top States for Businesses" list."
- This article does a great job explaining the absolutely *insane* infrastructure costs in NYC for new subway lines, stations, and a bus terminal. $2 billion per mile for new subway?! $4 billion for one new downtown station?! $10 *billion* for a new bus terminal?! The equivalent of *thirty* NRG stadiums! Are you kidding me?! Just pull out these numbers next time anyone complains about TXDoT spending a couple of billion completely rebuilding a spoke freeway in Houston... it's a relative bargain!
- Speaking of insane rail costs, just in from the LA Times: California's bullet train is hurtling toward a multibillion-dollar overrun, a confidential federal report warns.
"California’s bullet train could cost taxpayers 50% more than estimated — as much as $3.6 billion more. And that’s just for the first 118 miles through the Central Valley, which was supposed to be the easiest part of the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
A confidential Federal Railroad Administration risk analysis, obtained by The Times, projects that building bridges, viaducts, trenches and track from Merced to Shafter, just north of Bakersfield, could cost $9.5 billion to $10 billion, compared with the original budget of $6.4 billion.
The federal document outlines far-reaching management problems: significant delays in environmental planning, lags in processing invoices for federal grants and continuing failures to acquire needed property.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority originally anticipated completing the Central Valley track by this year, but the federal risk analysis estimates that that won’t happen until 2024, placing the project seven years behind schedule."
"Denver is spending billions of dollars building more than 100 miles of rail lines. When all the lines are done, promoters project they will reach just 26 percent of the region’s jobs. Since most people won’t live near a rail line, only about 2 or 3 percent of commuters are likely to use it.
Even most of the people who live near it won’t ride light rail because it is so slow. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s Transit Fact Book, the average speed of light rail is 15.6 mph while streetcars average just 7.3 mph. Not much accessibility benefit there."
"Houston, perhaps America’s least-regulated metro housing market, is the simulacrum of this 21st-century urbanism in all its messy brilliance. The fast-densifying greater downtown area has good Walk Scores and could legitimately be called "urban"; a half-dozen similar job centers--from random edge cities to tasteful towncenters--dot the metro; makeshift settlement communities pop up to house incoming immigrants; and, of course, haphazard single-family and multi-family housing sprawls in every direction. This willingness to build is why Houston can accommodate large population influxes, remain cheap...and perform so well economically."
I've got more, but that's more than enough for this week's post. See ya next week.
P.S.
Memo to the Texans: get Romo. Whatever the cost (although he should be willing to take a pay cut to get on a team with a real shot at the Super Bowl). With him and a healthy JJ Watt, next year's Super Bowl is very, very possible...
Labels: affordability, development, economy, high-speed rail, home affordability, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, sports, walkability
A New Yorker rediscovers Houston, Ike Dike case, 2004 vs. 2017 Houston, and more
This week's items:
- A Tale of Two Super Bowls: Houston in 2004 vs. 2017. Some pretty cool statistical comparisons, like nearly double the hotel rooms, ~25% more airport flights, 67% more restaurants (!), and the Galleria has almost doubled its annual visitors! And how crazy would it be if the game is an exact rematch? But here's to hoping it's the Texans instead, which are looking pretty solid with a 3-0 preseason.
"In 2004, the New England Patriots defeated the Carolina Panthers 32-29 at Reliant Stadium. According to sports analysts, we could see this exact same matchup in the newly renamed NRG Stadium in 2017. Will Cam&Crew have a major chance at redemption? Only time will tell…"
Finally, a longer but great piece in Thrillist, "
Houston Has No Problem" by local that moved to NYC and has been amazed by how the city has matured since.
In New York City, I noticed the difference over the years. It went from people saying “Why would you ever go to Houston?” to “I wanna check that place out!”
It does an amazing job extolling Houston's virtues and what makes us a great city. It'll make you a proud Houstonian all over again.
Highly recommended.
Labels: autonomous vehicles, development, growth, history, hurricanes, identity, rail, sports, zoning
Why the Texans should draft Johnny, light rail pros and cons, HTC, and more
Before we get to this week's smaller misc items, my case for why the Texans should draft Johnny Manziel if they feel he's at least in the ballpark of similar potential to the other available quarterbacks in the draft: the Texans are in competition with the Cowboys for the hearts and minds of Texans (citizens, not players). When the WSJ recently had their national county-by-county loyalty map, it was very clear the vast majority of Texas supports the Cowboys more than the Texans. If the Texans want to make progress in that battle, drafting Manziel is a great way to suddenly get every Aggie in the state to start caring about their games, and that's the kind of thing that shifts team loyalties over time. Signing Case Keenum was a similar much smaller nod in that direction for UH alums. I'm not saying they should draft him if they think there's a much better talent they should go after, but if they think it's a tossup or very close between several candidates, he should be their man as a very formidable weapon not just on the field, but in the ongoing mindshare battle with the Cowboys. How's that for a Houston strategy?... ;-)
Moving on:
- Atlantic Cities on "Can Houston learn to love light rail?" I think it's a reasonably well-balanced article on the pros and cons, with a fierce debate in the comments, but the concluding paragraph is not very optimistic:
"Wandering this neighborhood, now a ten-minute train ride from downtown, I came across Del's Ice Cream, a small shop one block from a brand-new light rail station. Owner Delfina Torres has a front row seat for Houston's transit experiment, but she has doubts. "Houston is a vehicle town," she says. "They love their cars. It's going to be a long way coming to a city with less driving and more walking." Though it is now a direct light rail trip from her home to the Houston Rodeo, eight miles away, she says she can get there and back faster in her car."
If you can't even attract people with direct point-to-point service, what are the odds with long walks and connections?
"Houston's rise follows its success in many areas. The city's growth rate led to placement on a list of "super cities" based on economic success. Houston has also placed highly in rankings for best places for young families and best places for graduates to get jobs."
- According to this survey and op-ed, overall a majority of people prefer single-family suburban living, but most cities are still not providing enough multi-family housing to meet the demand - mainly because of zoning/building restrictions. Fortunately, Houston does not have such restrictions, and you can certainly see the construction everywhere inside the loop as developers race to meet the surging demand for inner core living. Chalk up another win for no-zoning.
Finally, I was recently given a short tour of the
Houston Technology Center by their president, Walter Ulrich. They're doing great work supporting entrepreneurship in Houston, including partnerships with NASA in Clear Lake to build up aerospace entrepreneurship in Houston during tough times at JSC. If you're not a corporate sponsor now, you should seriously consider it. Check out these stats:
"The Houston Technology Center works day in and day out with emerging technology entrepreneurs in energy, life sciences, IT, nanotechnology and NASA related space. The companies that we have worked with have created over 4,500 jobs that generate over $680 million in annual economic activity. They have enjoyed investments and financial transactions in excess of $1.5 billion. A back of the envelope calculation shows that a Gold Sponsor at the upcoming gala Celebration of Entrepreneurs adds $1,670,000 of economic activity and gets to enjoy celebrating with Apache Founder (and WWII Bomber Pilot) Raymond Plank, Nobel laureate Robert Curl, and Houston icons Dr. Red Duke, Dr. Bernard Harris and Morrie Abramson. Some of our largest sponsors contribute $20 million in economic activity thanks to their generosity."
Labels: development, economic strategy, entrepreneurship, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, NASA, rail, rankings, sports, zoning
