Whitmire = Bob Lanier, Vision Zero doesn't work, people prefer sprawl over walkability, and more
Clearing more from the smaller items backlog this week:
This Texas Observer piece on Houston's northside is so scattershot and random and socialist/left-wing biased it's hard to know where to start. Houston is bad because... it has gentrification, inequality, racial tensions, and suburbanization/sprawl like every other city in America?? Because it has the most affordable housing among the nation's major metros, but not affordable enough for the very poorest populations??
At the end, he calls for communities to control their own fate vs. developers, but isn't that what every other over-zoned and over-regulated city in the country has done resulting in a massive national housing affordability crisis?? The fact is that we called it right when we said Houston had the right formula for housing supply and affordability, and the rest of country is finally catching up to that. This incoherent, woke, down-with-capitalism/free-markets rant adds nothing helpful to the conversation.
While walkable neighborhoods like Clarendon offer convenience, they can be expensive and lack living space compared to suburban "sprawl."
Despite the benefits of walkable neighborhoods, surveys show that many Americans prefer the spaciousness of suburban sprawl, especially older, less-educated, and Republican-leaning individuals.
'This seems to be the basic pattern of vision zero plans across the country: impose a bunch of auto-hostile policies, ignore the fact that they don’t work, and then blame others when fatalities rise. As Lewis & Clark law professor Jack Bogdanski says, “the bureaucrats are great at spending money to make life miserable for people who drive cars, but they don’t bother to see if any of their spending actually makes any difference in improving traffic safety.”'
I got quoted! 'In many ways Whitmire is, in the words of longtime Houston blogger Tory Gattis, “the second incarnation of Bob Lanier: focused on running a good city, not caught up in the urbanist dogma"...Apparently, Bayou City voters aren’t chomping at the bit to see their city become the next Portland.” From "These Mayors Understand How to Run a City" in the City Journal.
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.
Here’s (NOT) the Real Reason Houston Is Going Broke
Strong Towns posted "Here’s the Real Reason Houston Is Going Broke" earlier this month, ironically on April 1st because a lot of what they said was absolutely foolish. The core of their argument is the same argument Strong Towns always makes: that sprawl is somehow fiscally unsustainable, despite it being the default form of development since Ford made the Model T for the masses with incredibly few municipal bankruptcies over that century+.
It includes this excerpt:
"That’s 37 feet of street per person, on average. I don’t know the going rate for a foot of street in Houston, but when utilities are included, it must be well into the thousands. That means that part of the wealth of each Houston resident, as collected through taxes and fees by the municipal corporation, is expected to maintain six figures worth of infrastructure. Every single person. A family of four has a generational liability of at least a half million dollars just to maintain essential infrastructure."
This is exactly the kind of hand-waving that makes me lose respect for Strong Towns: somehow 49 yards of asphalt plus a bit of water and sewer pipe is a "half-million dollar liability" for each homeowner instead of easily paid for by 30-50 years of normal property taxes for lifetime replacement?? Somehow it costs more than replacing their entire ~$300k house?? 🤔🙄
And if the suburbs packed full of homes are so uneconomic, then how is every rural county in the country not bankrupt?? They have *way* more infrastructure per person at much lower property values per acre!
The core fiscal problem is not sprawl - it's that it's too tempting for politicians to take money that should be going to infrastructure renewal and siphon it off for other programs, including police and fire raises. Kick the can to the next guy...
All I'm saying is that a bit of asphalt and pipe is a very small expense relative to the cost of building an entire house, and it is definitely affordable to replace it every 30-50 years. Whether politicians manage the taxes properly to do so is another issue...
The Economist on how America's car dependence makes the country fairer and more efficient
The Economist magazine has a fantastic article (no-paywall link) on the upside of America's focus on cars for mobility - and I would argue Houston is at the pinnacle in America for major metros. The whole thing is great, but here are the best excerpts (highlights mine):
In praise of America’s car addiction
How vehicle-dependence makes the country fairer and more efficient
...It seems a classic case of elite opinions (cars and suburbs are awful) diverging from mass preferences (people quite enjoy them). For many, the main attractions of suburbia are lower housing costs and greater safety. Yet recent research sheds light on how cars are a crucial part of the equation, making America’s suburbs both impressively efficient and equitable.
...
Start with convenience. It is well-known that American cities are configured for vehicles, a process that began in the 1920s with the Model T. Car-centric urban designs became dominant throughout the country, involving wide roads, ample access to expressways and parking galore. To varying degrees, other countries have copied that model. Yet America has come closest to perfecting it. In a paper released in August, supported by the World Bank, a group of economists examined road speeds in 152 countries. Unsurprisingly, wealthy countries outpace poor ones. And within the rich world, America is streets ahead: its traffic is about 27% faster than that of other members of the OECD club of mostly rich countries. Of the 20 fastest cities in the world, 19 are in America.
...
Driving speed shrinks distance. One fashionable concept among urban planners these days is the “15-minute city”, the goal of building neighbourhoods that let people get to work, school and recreation within 15 minutes by foot or bike. Many Americans may simply fail to see the need for this innovation, for they already live in 15-minute cities, so long, that is, as they get around by car. Most of the essentials—groceries, school, restaurants, parks, doctors and more—are a quick drive away for suburbanites.
The car’s ubiquity has another rarely appreciated benefit. A recent study by Lucas Conwell of Yale University and colleagues examined urban regions in America and Europe. They calculated “accessibility zones”, defined as the area from which city centres can be readily reached. Although European cities have better public transport, American cities are on the whole more accessible. Consider the size of accessibility zones 15-30 minutes from city centres. If using public transport, the average is 34 square kilometres in America versus 63 square kilometres in Europe. If using private cars, the difference is much starker: 1,160 square kilometres in America versus 430 square kilometres in Europe.
...it is precisely such accessibility that has put larger homes and quieter streets within reach for a remarkably wide cross-section of the country. In his analysis of the census from 2020, William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, showed that suburbia has become far more diverse over the years. In 1990 roughly 20% of suburbanites were non-white. That rose to 30% in 2000 and 45% in 2020.
Not that cars are a panacea. Owning or renting one costs plenty of money, and is an especially big burden for the working poor. It is therefore common to hear laments in American cities about the sorry state of mass transit. Yet this general perception, though widespread, is not entirely accurate. Even if primarily built for private cars, roads are a shared resource and can be viewed as the “tracks” for buses. In their study Mr Conwell and his colleagues conclude that bus-based transportation in America is surprisingly effective: public-transit options between distant suburbia and city centres are roughly comparable in America and Europe. Although America could do more to improve its bus services within its urban cores, the crucial point is that cities designed for cars can also support mass transit.
Missing middle land use reform in HTX, Austin copying Houston min lot sizes, surveying home preferences, mapping zoning authority by state, distressed offices, and more
Some smaller items this week:
Who Zones? Mapping Land-Use Authority across the US. TX, OK, and AL are the only states that don't let unincorporated counties zone, which is very good for housing supply and affordability. Hat tip to George.
Vox: The future of cities, according to the experts - Cities aren’t going anywhere, but they do need to change. This is all over the place. “Cities are fine without families but should work to attract families.” 🙄 I do buy the argument young singles want vibrant cities, but I don’t buy the old empty nesters argument - they prefer to stay in place and have plenty of room for the grandkids to visit, not cram themselves in a 1 bedroom apartment downtown.
"Among the 68 Houston-area office properties included in the Business Journals analysis, 57 were flagged for performance issues or concerns over a borrower's ability to stay current on their mortgage."
"Reducing minimum lot sizes has worked elsewhere in Texas to boost housing construction. Houston has significantly increased its housing supply since cutting its minimum home lot size from 5,000 to 1,400 square feet in 1998. The policy change has allowed almost 80,000 new homes to be built on these smaller lots."...
"The Austin resolution draws important lessons from the Houston case that small lot single-family is something that's proven to work well for homebuyers and home builders,"
Affordable Sprawl vs. Costly Walkability. A better survey question would be, “Would you rather live in a large, affordable home with space between you and your neighbors but with multiple stores and other shops competing for your business with a wide selection of low-priced goods within easy driving distance, or would you prefer a smaller but much more expensive home with little space between you and your neighbors but with a limited selection, high-priced grocery store and a few restaurants and cafes within walking distance?” That would definitely be a more accurate description of reality.
'“Car-oriented” and “sprawl” aren’t the same thing: the word “sprawl” is imprecise. But it surely does not apply to heavily urbanized areas where office towers mingle with multi-story apartment buildings. Easterners are accustomed to a dichotomy between “walkable urban” and “driveable suburban”. Much of Houston’s core is “driveable urban.”
...
Inspired: As a market urbanist, I was already a fan of Houston in theory. But the visit made me significantly upgrade my evaluation of Houston as a place. It is far more interesting than Austin, for one thing. And although it is automobile-oriented, it is definitively a city, with all that implies.'
“After Uptown officials spent $192 million rebuilding the street to develop the line, operated by Metro, to carry 12,000 riders per day, bus drivers are ferrying fewer than 800 on many work days.”
Our URI/COU 2022 edition of the Demographia affordable housing index has been released. Sadly, Houston's median house-to-income ratio has moved up to 4.5, earning the "seriously unaffordable" label, although still much better off than most of the country's major metros (see below).
Finally, if you missed our URI/COU webinar last week on "The Case for Suburbia", you can check it out here. Great panel, and yours truly gets a mention for my work on MUDs.
"The seeming success of compact cities and the supposed dangers of sprawl to the climate have led to pushback against sprawling, car-dominated cities. Join us as we discuss the environmental case for suburbia."
"In fact, a primary reason Texas is growing so fast is that we tend to stick around as compared to natives of other states, meaning there’s less out-migration to offset the in-migration. About 82 percent of people born in Texas still live here, making it the so-called stickiest state in the country."
American Affairs Journal: Exurbia Rising by Joel Kotkin, packed with great stats. Here's the opening paragraph:
"Perhaps nowhere is the gap between America’s cognitive elite and its populace larger than in their preferred urban forms. For nearly a century—interrupted only by the Depression and the Second World War—Americans have been heading further from the urban core, seeking affordable and safe communities with good schools, parks, and a generally more tranquil lifestyle. We keep pushing out despite the contrary desires of planners, academic experts, and some real estate interests. In 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24 percent of the U.S. population; today, the share is under 15 percent, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2.0 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million."
"Lessons from history and from the relative success stories of the present point to clear priorities for today’s cities:
Get the urban basics right: schools, safety, livability.
Strengthen local anchor institutions in higher education, health care, and other areas.
Invest aggressively in local quality-of-life amenities.
Rebuild and expand critical infrastructure.
Work toward openness, diversity, inclusion, and a welcoming approach to newcomers.
Ensure a high degree of economic freedom.
Emphasize housing affordability and work to build an opportunity-rich physical environment."
WSJ: People Are Going Out Again, but Not to the Office - Only a third of U.S. employees have returned to the office, as workers prefer remote and companies fear ordering them back. Companies that force employees to the office will have to pay more (including office costs) for inferior talent from a more limited local talent pool. Excerpts:
"Elected officials are imploring companies to send workers back to the office.
“Business leaders, tell everybody to come back,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, in remarks before a civic organization earlier this month. “Give them a bonus to burn the Zoom app and come on back to work.”
The gap between public enthusiasm for office return and other activities underscores the wide range of factors other than health considerations that are slowing the return to work. After close to two years of working from home, surveys suggest most employees simply prefer it to the office, which often requires lengthy commutes and gives workers less flexibility in how they spend their days.
Employers have also been reluctant to insist that workers return for fear of driving employees away during a labor shortage, corporate surveys show. Many managers feel remote work disrupts efforts to promote a corporate culture and collaboration, but they aren’t applying much pressure because studies have shown that many workers are as productive—or even more productive—when they work remotely.
“They feel like remote work isn’t perfect, but it’s working pretty OK,” said Brian Kropp, chief of human-resources research for the advisory and research firm Gartner. “There’s not a real urgency to change it.”
Houston #2 for tree cover among major metros (just behind Atlanta) with 30% tree canopy coverage in the metro. Technically it shows Austin as higher (34%), but their number is from the early 90s, and we all know how much development has happened in Austin since then!
"We’re not going to double urban densities, especially when the doing so will fail to eliminate driving anyway. As urban economist Edward Glaeser once wrote (as quoted by Bertaud), the 15-minute city “should be recognized as a dead-end which would stop cities from fulfilling their true rôle as engines of opportunity.”
Finally, I'd like to end with this video on why Pakistanis are moving to Houston (hat tip to George). Although I wish it didn’t have the politics. She has some fair points about parts of rural Texas, but it muddles the video. I also think it completely misses the impact of lack of zoning and development regs that allowed those ethnic suburbs and shopping areas to develop. A lot of more regulated and zoned cities would have subtly (and not so subtly) prevented that from happening.
"Complementing sprawl has also been a long-term trend toward people driving more and taking transit less. In 1960, about 12 percent of all Americans took transit to work. By 2020, it was about 5 percent, and the decline of non-work trips on transit was even faster. Meanwhile, the number of Americans who travel to work by car, especially those who travel alone in a car, continues to increase. The miles driven by car per capita have almost doubled. This is not because of supposed subsidies to cars; according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, cars pay for almost all of the cost of roads through gas taxes and other charges, while transit riders pay barely a third of the cost of their rides, and that ratio is dropping as transit use declines. For decades, in fact, more and more of the gas tax has been siphoned off to pay for increasingly expensive and increasingly empty buses and trains. ...
Perhaps the most important tool for reducing the heat island effect is trees, which provide shade and absorb solar radiation. Suburbs are, almost by definition, more verdant than cities. Famously sprawling cities like Atlanta or Houston have tree cover on more than 30 percent of their landmass, while older, denser cities such as Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago have under 20 percent. Besides reducing the heat island effect, nearby trees have been shown to intercept particulate matter and absorb ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide, thus reducing local air pollution as well. The personal and psychological effects of trees are real too. Studies have shown that the presence of trees decreases stress, increases attentiveness and sense of safety and comfort, and reduces the likelihood that pregnant women will have low-birthweight babies. There is no way to have the same access to trees in dense urban areas.
...
Over even a medium-term time frame, the increasing adoption of hybrid, electric, and autonomous vehicles will almost completely sever the connection between VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and greenhouse gases. Those who are attempting to redesign cities, projects that will take decades or even centuries, merely to reduce the use of gasoline-powered cars are thus engaged in a futile exercise that will only become more futile with time. It would be like attempting to redesign cities in 1900 to reduce horse manure. The technology will change faster than the city will."
'Issuing a challenge, Glock talks of the “Long Triumph of Sprawl,” describing a “clear global and long-term preference,” while the “pandemic has only made the shift toward the modern, sprawling city more rapid and obvious.”
Glock suggest that “instead of warring against sprawling cars, planners and environmentalist should recognize how the green spaces of suburbia allied to autonomous electric vehicles in green single-family houses can provide both the affordability and sustainability most Americans crave.” ...
Appropriately, Glock concludes, “environmentalists should embrace the same future that most Americans have already chosen.”
"The urban form has shifted throughout history. This has been critical to its success. Today we are on the cusp of another transition, ushered in by new technologies and changing demographics, and accelerated by a devastating pandemic. Although these forces affect all geographies, the best chance of success and growth lies in what we define as The Next American City.
This newly released report from Urban Reform Institute examines the places that offer opportunity for a revitalized American Dream for more citizens.
The Next American City offers an answer to the problem plaguing those living in and around major cities. Offering a combination of affordability, amenities, and proximity to the large cities, but without the burdensome, heavy-handed regulations of local government or many of the social ills running rampant in our cities, these places – like The Woodlands and Bridgeland – are quickly shaping up to be the urban destinations of the future."
“The Urban Reform Institute, which advocates for market-oriented city planning, recently argued that the new models for American city living are developer-designed suburb and exurb communities such as The Woodlands, Bridgeland and Cinco Ranch, and there are a lot of reasons to suggest they are right. Development ever outward will almost certainly continue, particularly in Houston where there are no constraints and plenty of land.
Adding to the expectation for further suburban expansion are the evolving norms around remote/hybrid work, meaning long commutes will be less of a drawback for some workers. Looking even further forward, technologies such as autonomous vehicles could actually encourage more sprawl, which researchers are beginning to anticipate.
The pandemic certainly accelerated this trend. Based on our estimates from USPS data, tens of thousands more Houstonians left the city than moved here in 2020, and most of the move-outs stayed in the metro area, opting to live in one of the suburbs instead.”
Houston No. 1 in U.S. for home sales in master-planned communities, says survey: "According to a survey by real estate consulting firm RCLCO, 20% of the country’s 50 top-selling master-planned communities last year are in the Houston metro area. In that category, Houston ranks first among all of the metro areas represented on the list"
Great analysis from Kinder on Houston ADUs. Reducing barriers to more is great, but they will always have a hard time competing with the amenities and scale of Houston's super-competitive apartment market.
Bloomberg: The Global Housing Market Is Broken, and It’s Dividing Entire Countries - The dream of owning a home is increasingly out of reach. Democratic and authoritarian governments alike are struggling with the consequences. I've been arguing this for a long time: government housing constraints are popular with voters in the short-term, but come back to haunt cities long-term, which is why Houston's lack of zoning and open housing market is so important and is a critical long-term competitive advantage.
Preventing big infrastructure failures, mass migration to Texas, the Ion, costs spiral with Austin growth, and more
Lots of backlogged smaller items to clear out this week, especially from my Twitter feed (which you may want to follow if you're a Twitter user).
NYT: Years of Delays, Billions in Overruns: The Dismal History of Big Infrastructure - The nation’s most ambitious engineering projects are mired in postponements and skyrocketing costs. Delivering $1.2 trillion in new infrastructure will be tough. America can't do big infrastructure. Cost estimates are “systematically and significantly deceptive.” The solution is to require private insurance to sign off on budgets and cover cost+schedule overruns. When private contractors and insurance take the risk, these things will get done right, or - more likely - not done at all when they don't make sense! Alternatively, maybe we need a neutral agency similar to the Congressional budget office that would score projects and compare them to the actuals on other similar projects and then come back with a real estimate of cost and time BEFORE it goes through the approval process. Data points and excerpts:
Honolulu light rail from $4B to $11.4B
CA HSR from $33B to $100B
NYC East Side Access extension for LIRR from $2.2B to $11.1B
"Honolulu’s tribulations are far from a lone cautionary tale. To the contrary, they signal the kind of cost overruns, engineering challenges and political obstacles that have made it all but impossible to complete a major, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project in the United States on budget and on schedule over the past decade. ...
Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at the University of Oxford who has studied scores of projects around the world, found that 92 percent of them overran their original cost and schedule estimates, often by large margins — in part, he said, because cost estimates are “systematically and significantly deceptive.” ...
In a candid admission of how the political world operates, Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, once dismissed cost overruns on a transportation hub intended for the bullet train.
“In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment,” he wrote in a guest newspaper column in 2013. “If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”"
“People say over and over again, ‘Oh, the millennials are going to stay in the cities.’ They are not,” said Doug Shepherd, a real-estate broker based in the city of Riverside. …
“California is changing because of a desire of many millions of people to have something that looks like the conventional, traditional California Dream: a house on a lot in a neighborhood of similar houses on lots,” Mr. Waldie said. …
Last year, a half-dozen families left Eastvale for Montgomery County, Texas, a suburb of Houston near lakes and resorts.
Michele Nissen, a former city manager of Eastvale, was among them. She sold her house in June for $910,000, 3½ times what she paid for it in 2001.
Now, she and her husband own a 3,500-square-foot, four-bedroom home surrounded by dozens of trees and down the street from Lake Conroe. They paid $532,500."
"Texas, now, feels a bit like California did when I first moved here in the late 1980s — a thriving, dynamic place where it doesn’t take a lot to establish a good life. For many people, that’s more than enough."
NYT: How Austin Became One of the Least Affordable Cities in America - The capital of Texas has long been an attractive place to call home. But with an average of 180 new residents a day arriving, its popularity has created a brewing housing crisis that is reshaping the city.
"The Austin metropolitan area is on track to become by year’s end the least affordable major metro region for homebuyers outside of California. It has already surpassed hot markets in Boston, Miami and New York City."
WSJ: Samsung to Choose Taylor, Texas, for $17 Billion Chip-Making Factory. Toll Road 130 is becoming the new tech corridor of east Austin with Samsung and Tesla. I35 and Mopac are too congested, so companies go east. Easy straight shot to the airport, which I'm sure will be shipping a lot of these new chips.
"In 1999, Houston enacted new land-use regs that set in motion two decades of the city’s expansion. Developers prioritized multifamily townhouses and encouraged migration from other states and countries. These changes led to a 21% increase in developed land."
Houston's blob is about to eat even more of East Texas... and we should embrace it
I recently submitted this op-ed to the Houston Chronicle:
The Chronicle’s recent article debating the sustainability of Houston’s traditional “build more” approach to growth (“Houston became 'the blob that ate East Texas' by building big. Is it time for that to change?” August 27) frames the debate as if Houston can dictate whether people drive cars in the suburbs or ride transit in the densifying core, when in reality people make their own choices which we can accommodate and thrive or ignore and decline.
The debate completely misses the reality of our post-pandemic world. Remote work is now a permanent part of our economy, and it is creating a tidal wave of suburban and exurban growth as people realize they’ll no longer need to commute into the city on a daily basis. Houston can’t stop it, even if it wanted to. All we can do is try to accommodate it while keeping the core healthy and accessible to attract their dollars for discretionary shopping, restaurants, entertainment, events, health care, philanthropy, office visits, and more. And if we don’t maintain that accessibility - including prudent transportation investments - not only are they unlikely to visit, their employers are likely to leave as well along with their much-needed local property and sales tax contributions.
Houston’s great strength has always been embracing growth - suburban, urban, and the freeways to connect it all together. That formula has kept us the most affordable major metro in the country and always near the top in growth rankings. In other words, we’ve made ourselves extremely attractive to newcomers, especially diverse people of color and immigrants looking for affordable opportunity. We’ve got a product people want. Why would we want to radically change that? Especially to models like California with urban growth boundaries, constrained development, astronomical housing costs, traffic gridlock, and wasteful transit spending (LA has spent upwards of $20 billion only to lose 21% of its ridership pre-pandemic) resulting in a mass exodus of both people and businesses.
What Houston’s formula needs is tweaking, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. For example, with growing concerns about flooding, the answer is not banning new development, but tightening runoff regulations on new suburban developments so they don’t flood us downstream. Every new development should have enough detention that the land releases even less water during a hard rain than it did undeveloped - then every new development would actually reduce flooding!
And when it comes to transportation investments, yes, many freeways are reaching realistic width limits, but that doesn’t mean we should give up growth for perpetual congestion or old, slow transit. We’ve proposed - and TXDoT is planning - an innovative next-generation mobility strategy: a network of MaX Lanes (Managed eXpress Lanes) 'moving the maximum number of people at maximum speed' by allowing direct point-to-point single-seat high-speed trips by transit buses and other shared-ride vehicles today, and even higher-speed zero-emission autonomous vehicles in the future. The network would enable Houston’s seven core job centers to scale from 626,000 jobs today to over one million jobs in the future while drawing employees from all across our ever-expanding region with a reasonable commute (even if they’re doing that commute less often in a remote work world). This is the type of climate-friendly innovative mobility solution that could attract substantial federal funding while also embracing suburban and exurban trends rather than hopelessly fighting them.
Finally, Houston’s unzoned urban core can continue to naturally densify as it has been doing successfully for at least two decades now - not because we’re trying to force it to, but because people - especially diverse young people - choose it. They choose it because we allow the free market to build and cater to that demand, including townhomes, apartments, residential towers, and walkable mixed-use complexes.
Which brings us full circle to Houston’s secret sauce: building what people want rather than what academic urban planners deem the ‘right’ way to live and get around. That strategy will always be a winner.
Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Urban Reform Institute - A Center for Opportunity Urbanism, and the Editor of the Houston Strategies blog.
Reason: "The city of Houston gets it more or less right" on densification vs. sprawl, with a variety of housing types. Free market with deed restrictions, but no zoning and no urban growth boundary.
A great video, although I wish they hadn't shown the beer can house (talk about poster-child for terrifying people about eliminating zoning!) and had used a map less than 50 years old, lol. It didn't even have a completed 610 Loop on it!
"Houston is known for its lack of Euclidean-style zoning, but the city still has various ordinances that control land use. In 1998, Houston reformed its subdivision rules to allow for parcels smaller than five thousand square feet citywide. In this paper, we discuss the unique land-use rules in place in Houston prior to reform and the circumstances that led to reform, including the “opt out” provisions, which mediated homeowner opposition to substantial increases in housing density. We then analyze the effects of reform. After relief from large lot requirements, post-reform development activity was heavily concentrated in middle-income, less dense, underbuilt neighborhoods."
Municipal utility districts seem to work in the Lone Star State. They have increased the housing supply, using lighter regulations, resulting in downward pressure on costs. Now, they may be catching on elsewhere.
"For a proven reform, look at Houston, arguably the most pro-housing city in the country. It doesn’t have use-zoning, which means that housing — including apartments and other multifamily housing — is permitted anywhere private covenants don’t restrict it. In 1998, Houston policy makers reduced the minimum-required lot size for a house from 5,000 square feet down to 1,400 square feet on all of the land within the city’s I-610 loop. This made it possible to replace a single-family house with three. In 2013, the 1,400-square-foot minimum lot size requirement was expanded to cover the entire city.
Thousands of townhouses have since been built that wouldn’t have been permitted before. Houston now boasts a median home price below the national median in spite of decades of rapid job growth and increasing population. A typical house in Houston costs less than $200,000, compared with nearly $300,000 in Atlanta or a staggering $680,000 in San Diego. In other booming cities, more jobs and new residents have led to skyrocketing prices but few new homes.
On paper, Houston’s decision to reduce minimum lot sizes seems similar to eliminating single-family zoning and allowing more than one unit per lot. The difference is that Houston’s other flexible land-use regulations allow homebuilders to deliver those new units in a cost-effective and desirable way. Houston’s rules ensure that three new units can be spacious, useful and an improvement on the detached houses they replace."
Mercatus: Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston. The whole thing is definitely worth reading, with lots of good details on Houston's history of liberalizing land-use regulations. It ends with this conclusion:
"The experience of Houston reaffirms much of what researchers already know: minimum-lot-size regulations limit urban development, driving up lot sizes and thereby increasing housing prices. By liberalizing these rules, the 1998 subdivision reforms allowed developers to meet a large and growing demand among Houstonians for smaller houses closer to major job centers.
But the reforms also chart new territory: a key element of their success involved allowing homeowners with the most extreme lot-size preferences to opt out of reform, thereby mitigating opposition to the broader reform. Even accounting for this concession, postreform subdivision has been heavily concentrated in neighborhoods that were either middle class or sparsely populated, without imposing an undue burden on traditionally marginalized communities. As planners and policymakers across the country wrestle with the complicated politics of land use liberalization, the case of Houston thus offers an instructive example."
“The suburban demand, driven in part by New York City residents who are able to work remotely while offices are closed, raises unsettling questions about how fast the city will be able to recover from the pandemic. It is an exodus that analysts say is reminiscent of the one that fueled the suburbanization of America in the second half of the 20th century.”
Bloomberg: Thanks to the Pandemic, Luxury Hotels Become Home. This is pretty amazing to read. With the rise of remote work, luxury resort hotels are suddenly leased like long-term apartments. Sounds like waves of New Yorkers are heading to the islands for the entire winter!
"I’ve been fortunate to live in many different cities across the U.S. and Latin America, and I can honestly say that none of them were as friendly, as empathetic, or as inviting as Houston. It’s why I fell in love with this town. People genuinely believe in looking out for each other here."
Tax and regulatory burden rankings, lot size reform, increasing walkability, superstar cities vs. Covid and Spiderman, and much more
I apologize for the longer delays between what are usually weekly posts. My day job in alternative education and edutech has absolutely blown up with covid and remote learning, leaving little time for blogging. But I'm using a gap hour between meetings today to get this post cranked out, so here are some catch-up items:
Houston passed the new walkable places plan in targeted locations, including all of Midtown where I live. I have not had time to investigate it deeply, but on the surface it looks like it could be really good at encouraging more pedestrian-friendly development. I'll be curious to see before and after permitting numbers in Midtown to see if it's encouraging or discouraging new projects vs. previously strong growth in Midtown.
"Returning to Texas, the Austin Business Journal piece cited a survey that found that Austin was the top-ranked city for tech workers to relocate worldwide, just ahead of Seattle and Amsterdam. That ranking is largely based on past decisions that allowed the city’s housing market to keep up with demand. But unfortunately, Austin’s city council has shifted to the left over the past few years and has become increasingly hostile to both new development and road construction, with the city becoming more expensive and congested as a result. Were it not for the fact that most other tech havens are even further to the left politically, Austin would likely lose its No. 1 ranking."
"Next, we examine how this reform impacted Houston’s neighborhoods. Did developers flock to the most affluent neighborhoods? Or did this shift subdivision activity to lower-income neighborhoods with lower land values? Using both GIS data and regression analysis, we find that the new 1,400 square foot lots were overwhelmingly developed in two types of areas: First, in neighborhoods where there was substantial underutilized former commercial and industrial land, and second, in largely underbuilt middle-income residential neighborhoods.
The scale of this change in much of western Houston is hard to overstate. Many neighborhoods, such as Shady Acres and Rice Military, have been completely transformed. In many cases, this has involved the subdivision of conventional post-war 5,000 square foot lots into three townhomes, effectively tripling population densities. We hypothesize that the wealthiest areas avoided subdivision activity through existing deed restrictions, while middle-income neighborhoods absorbed much of the demand, minimizing redevelopment pressure in low-income neighborhoods.
We draw two lessons for planning practice from this case study. First, allowing the most extreme opponents to “opt out” of land-use reform may help clear a path for citywide liberalization. While planners and policymakers should be prudent, such compromises may make sense where local politics otherwise blocks reform. In Houston, the compromise was deemed acceptable, and the result has been over 25,000 new housing units close to major job centers.
Second, citywide land-use liberalization is likely to direct growth into middle-income and underbuilt neighborhoods, barring other institutional constraints. While this comes with separate risks—such as disinvestment from lower-income areas—it may help to ease concerns regarding displacement."
NYT: Coronavirus Threatens the Luster of Superstar Cities - Urban centers, with a dynamism that feeds innovation, have long been resilient. But the pandemic could drive a shift away from density. The article does a good job looking at all the different forces involved and potential outcomes, but seems to ignore the potential of safer car-based cities to still generate plenty of innovation and support amenities - places like Houston, Austin, and Silicon Valley. Excerpts:
“A survey by the market research firm Reach Advisors found that companies facing high real estate and labor costs were the most interested in pursuing remote work into the future. “The biggest shift away from density will likely be in markets such as the Bay Area and New York City,” said the company’s president, James Chung. By shifting to remote work, “they can dramatically widen their labor pool and evade the labor-wage trap that they are in.” …
"But for a city like New York, he said, Covid-19 offers an opportunity for redemption. “New York was running into a dead end, turning into a paradise for the rich,” he said. “Culturally dead.” Moving back to a cheaper, messier, more diverse equilibrium may carry a silver lining."
"There’s a quality about Houston, though, that transcends its built pattern: affordability. For decades, Houston has been the nation’s leading example of an “opportunity city”. It has, like coastal cities, high demand—aka fast growing job opportunities and population growth. But unlike those metros, it builds lots of housing, thus stabilizing prices. The median home price is $190,000, which is just 4/5ths the national average, according to Zillow. Midtown’s median home prices are $309,000, extremely low for a centrally-located urban neighborhood. This affordability has made Houston a refuge for expats from expensive states, and for immigrants—it is now the nation’s most diverse city.
The affordability can be tied to both Houston’s density and sprawl. Rather than one being good and the other bad, both forms of growth have helped stabilize prices. But the multi-family infill housing is the most organic outcome to be found in the Houston model. If America had a more market-oriented urban approach, those aspects of Houston—the density and affordability—would be the ones most likely replicated. For this reason, “getting a bunch of Houstons” should be an urbanist goal."
This is pretty much the perfect solution to Houston - and the country's - energy woes. And it should please both the right (nationalism and the economy) and the left (increasing the cost of carbon). Coincidentally, I went to Rice with this guy!
"A farsighted leader, argued Andy Karsner, a former U.S. assistant energy secretary, “could have imposed a variable U.S. tariff or fee on imported oil, which would be easily absorbed while prices are now slumping.” Such an import fee “could dynamically and automatically kick in incrementally if prices fell below an agreed floor, say $40 to $50 a barrel — the price that U.S. producers need to stay in business and supply America. The fee would disappear if prices jump above the agreed level. Brent crude is now around $31.”
If we guaranteed U.S. oil producers a predictable price floor to enable the least indebted and most productive of them to survive, Karsner told me, it would pay multiple benefits: “It would raise money for us to invest in infrastructure; prevent job losses for skilled engineers and multibillion-dollar bailouts for U.S. oil companies; keep manageably low gasoline prices for U.S. consumers; and strengthen our energy security from predatory efforts by Russia and Saudi Arabia to wipe out our domestic oil industry.”
But, most important, it would accelerate our clean energy transition, by shielding our electric car industry from foreign-manipulated gasoline prices and our wind and solar industries from temporarily suppressed natural gas prices."
"Several experts are advancing another explanation, too: Features that have long been viewed as liabilities — the state’s solitary car culture and traffic-jammed freeways, a dearth of public transportation and sprawling suburban neighborhoods — may have been protective.
“Life in California is much more spread out,” said Eleazar Eskin, chair of the department of computational medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Single-family homes compared with apartment buildings, work spaces that are less packed and even seating in restaurants that is more spacious.”
Many scientific studies have found a correlation between population density and the spread of flu and other infectious diseases, something that may exist for the coronavirus as well."
"Imagine Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile discovered that, no matter how much they expanded their cell-phone networks, people kept buying new smart phones and using those networks. Would they decide to stop expanding their services for fear of turning too many people into smart-phone junkies? Of course not; so long as revenues covered their costs, they would happily expand to meet the demand.
The point is that almost anyone would consider that an investment leading to increased use to be a sign of success. Yet Transportation for America sees it as a sign of failure. Would T4A have us stop building libraries, hospitals, and schools because the ones we build get used by readers, patients, and students?"
A couple of items in recent months have highlighted differences in Dallas vs. Houston to me. The first is this Urbanophile story about a "carpetbagger" critic of Dallas that is having a big influence on the city. It just highlights to me how much more self-conscious Dallas is of its image - it went all-in on an extremely expensive and stupid commuter rail network, and now it's drinking the urbanist anti-sprawl kool-aid. Houston is full of pragmatic engineers not-so-concerned with looking good to the coastal elites. Thank goodness.
Next is this article which is not so interesting in itself (typical anti-sprawl), but has some insightful graphs on college-degrees and incomes by the distance from downtown for different Texas cities. Definite 'donut' effects, except in Austin, which is a little odd. But I found it interesting that it shows how much more successful Houston has been at urbanizing with more high-incomes and college-degreed in the core than Dallas. I'd attribute it to our lack of zoning allowing densification to meet demand - more apartments, towers, and townhomes.
(if the formatting of these graphs gets messed up, you can find them here)
Dallas-Fort Worth
While the suburbs still account for most of Dallas-Fort Worth’s population growth, downtown neighborhoods have seen the highest increases in college-educated residents and incomes.
Change in residents with a college degree, 1990-2012
Change in per-capita income, 1990-2012
Houston
Houston’s urban neighborhoods and suburban developments saw increases in college-educated residents and incomes. But there were declines on both fronts in neighborhoods between those two areas.
Change in residents with college degree, 1990-2012
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.
