The recent call to use the Gulfton neighborhood as a poster
child for imposing city-wide zoning (“I'm an urban planning expert from
Houston. It's time we talk about zoning again.” Houston Chronicle 8/1/25) is
the latest verse in a seductive but dangerous song. Words like “planning” and
“zoning” poll well because they offer a vague cure-all for the complexities of
a dynamic city. It’s an understandable impulse, but it’s a trap—a classic case
of the “grass is always greener” fallacy, where a theoretical, perfect version
of zoning is imagined, while the grim reality of its failures elsewhere is
ignored.
Before we consider dismantling the very system that has made
Houston a beacon of opportunity, we must take an honest account of what that
system delivers. Houston’s status as one of America’s most affordable and
dynamic major cities is the direct result of our unique light regulatory touch.
Our ability to build new housing at a rate reportedly up to 14 times that of
our zoned peers is the core of our success. This is why Houston largely avoided
the catastrophic housing bubbles that devastated other regions and why our home
price-to-income ratio remains the envy of the nation.
The contrast with heavily zoned cities is stark. While Texas has
approximately 90 homeless individuals per 100,000 residents, California’s rate
is nearly five times higher, fueled by a regulatory crisis that can push the
cost of a single “affordable” housing unit to over $500,000. Houston
prioritizes building, which results in a higher standard of living for those
with resources and more humane options for those without.
A critical part of our success has been smart, inner-loop
densification, unleashed by pragmatic lot-size reforms. The resulting townhome
boom created tens of thousands of new homes, the very “missing middle” housing
that has effectively become illegal to build in most American cities. On
expensive urban land that, under a restrictive zoning regime, would either
become a massive McMansion or remain blighted, Houston gets thousands of new
homes affordable to middle-income families.
The city-wide zoning now being contemplated, using Gulfton as an
example, is a recipe for exclusion. It would hand a powerful tool to NIMBYs all
over the city to kill development and force stagnation. This isn’t a guess;
it’s the lived reality of every major zoned city, where restrictions choke
supply, drive up prices, and displace the very people they claim to protect.
Furthermore, this push, like the recent attempt to create so-called
“conservation districts,” is an undemocratic end-run around the City Charter
and the will of Houston voters, who have decisively rejected zoning three
separate times.
The choice is not between chaos and zoning. Houston is not
“unplanned”; it is largely privately planned through a robust system of
voluntary deed restrictions. This provides the best of both worlds: neighbors
who want zoning-like protections can have them, while the city as a whole can
grow and adapt. For specific conflicts, we use surgical tools like buffering
ordinances, not a sledgehammer.
Cities across America are now desperately trying to liberalize
their land-use rules to achieve a fraction of the affordability and dynamism we
take for granted. For Houston to voluntarily inflict this self-destructive
disease upon itself would be a historic tragedy. We are the model other cities
are trying to emulate. Let’s not break what works.
Tory Gattis is the editor of the Houston Strategies blog and a Founding Senior Fellow with the Urban Reform Institute.
Texas Just Launched a Four-Pronged Attack on the Housing Crisis
This legislative session has culminated in a landmark victory for property rights and housing affordability in Texas. Thanks to the tireless work of advocacy groups like Texans for Reasonable Solutions, which championed this entire suite of bills, Governor Abbott has now signed four powerful pieces of legislation that represent the most significant pro-housing reform the state has seen in decades. This isn't a single, timid step; it's a coordinated, multi-front assault on the regulatory red tape that has driven up housing costs and limited options for Texas families.
For years, we've watched major Texas metros grapple with an affordability crisis born not of scarcity of land or lack of demand, but of an ever-growing thicket of municipal ordinances. These four new laws—HB 24, SB 840, SB 2477, and the capstone bill, SB 15—take direct aim at the root of the problem: artificial constraints on supply. Let's break down each of these strategic wins.
1. HB 24: Ending the "Tyrant's Veto"
One of the most pernicious, anti-growth mechanisms in Texas zoning has been the "protest-by-a-small-minority" rule, rightly dubbed the "tyrant's veto." Under the old law, if owners of just 20% of the land area near a proposed zoning change objected, it triggered a supermajority vote (three-fourths) of the city council for approval. This gave a handful of NIMBY ("Not In My Back Yard") neighbors disproportionate power to block new housing projects that a simple majority of elected officials, and likely the community at large, supported.
Championed by Rep. Dustin Burrows and Sen. Bryan Hughes, HB 24 fundamentally restores fairness to the process. The bill targets the most common use of the veto by raising the protest threshold for adjacent property owners to 60% and, crucially, removes the supermajority requirement for those protests.
The result: A small group of opponents can no longer single-handedly kill beneficial projects. This strengthens property rights for landowners who wish to develop housing and empowers city councils to make decisions for the good of the entire city, not just a vocal few.
2. SB 840: Turning Underused Commercial Strips into Homes
Drive through any major Texas city, and you'll see them: aging, half-empty strip malls, vast parking lots, and underutilized commercial corridors. This is what I call "greyfield" land—already developed and served by infrastructure, yet failing to meet its economic potential. SB 840, led by Sen. Bryan Hughes and Rep. Cole Hefner, provides a powerful tool for recycling this land into something far more valuable: housing.
The bill allows residential and mixed-use housing to be built by-right on land zoned for commercial or retail use in Texas's largest cities. This means developers can bypass the lengthy, expensive, and uncertain rezoning process to build multifamily or mixed-use projects. The law builds on the stunning success of similar reforms in Florida, which saw over 15,000 housing units approved in its first year.
The impact is threefold: It unlocks a massive supply of land for infill development, which reduces sprawl and conserves precious farmland. It puts downward pressure on rents by increasing the housing supply where it's needed most. And it revitalizes unproductive commercial areas, turning them into vibrant, walkable neighborhoods.
3. SB 2477: Unlocking Empty Offices for Housing
The post-pandemic world has left Texas cities with millions of square feet of vacant office space. Houston and Dallas have some of the highest office vacancy rates in the nation. This is not a cyclical dip; it's a structural shift. SB 2477, from Sen. Paul Bettencourt and Rep. Jared Patterson, offers a common-sense solution: let people live there.
Much like SB 840, this law legalizes the conversion of vacant office buildings into residential housing by-right. It streamlines the process by waiving costly and often unnecessary requirements like traffic impact analyses and new parking minimums that were designed for a commercial-use building, not a residential one. With polls showing 71% of Texans support this idea, it's a clear policy winner.
This is the definition of sustainable growth—recycling existing structures to meet a critical need without using an inch of open space.
4. SB 15: The Starter Home Revolution
The final and perhaps most crucial piece of the puzzle is SB 15. With an overwhelming 90% of Texans viewing housing costs as a problem, the need for more attainable options is undeniable. For decades, many cities have used large-lot zoning requirements as a tool to mandate low-density, high-cost housing, effectively outlawing the construction of more affordable "starter" homes.
SB 15 takes direct aim at this exclusionary practice. In Texas's largest cities (150K+ population in counties of 300K+), the law now limits a city's ability to impose a minimum lot size greater than 1,400 square feet in new subdivisions. It also reigns in excessive setback, height, and bulk rules for these smaller lots, giving builders the flexibility to provide a wider range of housing products.
We don't have to guess at the results. Houston’s pioneering 1998 reform provides a real-world case study, resulting in a boom in townhomes that in 2021 averaged just $310,000 compared to $545,000 for traditional single-family homes. Analysis shows the potential is enormous: Dallas could add over 120,000 starter homes and Fort Worth could add 26,000 on available land under the new rules. This is the kind of sustainable, market-driven solution that encourages infill development, conserves farmland, and boosts tax revenue per acre.
A New Era for Texas Housing
Individually, each of these bills is a significant victory. Together, they represent a paradigm shift. The Texas Legislature and Governor Abbott have sent a clear message: the state will no longer allow arcane local regulations to stand in the way of housing production. By neutralizing the NIMBY veto, unlocking underutilized properties for residential use, and allowing the market to build the smaller, more affordable homes that Texans clearly want, this legislative session has laid the foundation for a more prosperous and affordable future for our state.
The advantages of no-zoning in Houston, The Economist on Dallas, Chicago's fiscal warning
Clearing more from the smaller items backlog this week:
No-Zoning Flexibility (and Complications): The Houston Landing recently explored Houston's lack of traditional zoning (with a leftist bias, of course). While acknowledging it adds some complexity (requiring deed restrictions, etc.), experts cited in the piece note the significant flexibility it provides, contributing to our ability to adapt and grow more dynamically than zoned cities. It reinforces that our system, while different, has tangible benefits.
Houston's No-Zone Recipe Keeps Housing Affordable: Hat tip to Barry Klein for sending The Daily Economy piece that summarizes Houston's success. Judge Glock highlights how our unique approach allows the market to respond quickly to demand, preventing the kind of artificial scarcity and price spirals seen elsewhere. The key elements? No zoning, minimum lot size reform, and a responsive development community. It's a recipe other cities could learn from.
Chicago's Fiscal Woes - A Cautionary Tale: This NYT Opinion piece details the severe fiscal challenges facing Chicago and Illinois, largely driven by pension debt. It's a stark reminder of the importance of fiscal discipline and realistic accounting for long-term liabilities – lessons Houston and Texas have generally taken to heart, contributing to our healthier financial position compared to many older northern cities.
The Economist: Dallas: Utopia for the Trump-curious CEO - The Texan city embodies the allure of small government. The description definitely sounds similar to Houston:
"The city boasts an enviable standard of living. Scorching summers are a small price to pay when a typical house costs a fifth less than in Austin and half as much as in San Francisco. “You don’t need to know some secret handshake to get your kid into a private school,” gushes a banker. Co-workers raise eyebrows when you do not go to your child’s 2 o’clock school play, marvels another.
Best of all, enthuses a venture capitalist, Dallas is “unabashedly American” in its embrace of meritocracy and free enterprise. “If you are successful, any prejudice melts away,” agrees a CEO. The result is a virtuous circle. Business begets growth, growth brings people, people draw restaurants, culture and buzz"
New Zealand learns from Houston, why airport rail doesn't make sense, Tokyo vs HTX High Lines, crazy housing reforms, and more
Some more smaller items this week:
The 2024 Demographia International Housing Affordability reportThe 2024 Demographia International Housing Affordability report is out (Antiplanner discussion here). Houston is surprisingly high at a median price-to-income ratio of 4.4, but still better than other Texas Triangle metros and one of the most affordable growing metros in America (vs. the stagnant ones mainly in the Rust Belt). The more interesting note is that New Zealand's affordability is rapidly improving after adopting supply-side reforms that they learned on a visit to Houston!
Chronicle: Why isn't there a train to Houston's airports? I've made similar points on my blog: it always makes more sense to invest in work transit over airport transit. It's a ridership disaster in DFW. There used to be a fast, frequent nonstop express bus from the downtown transit center to IAH but they shut it down from low demand. ~1-2 riders per bus, which is why even slower multi-billion$ LRT there is a massively bad investment.
"Now count how many times you go to the airport versus how many times you drive or take a bus to the office.
“Even if they use the train for every airport trip they take, that might be eight trips a year,” Spieler said.
Business travelers, some of the most frequent fliers, meanwhile have different considerations.
“They are on expense accounts and not price-sensitive,” Spieler said."
...
Three recent rail projects to airports are illustrative, Spieler said, for how a train's service, location and the layout of the airport make a difference. In Washington, the train to Dulles Airport, which opened in 2022, gets around 2,500 boardings per day, less than half that of the train to Reagan National Airport, which is closer to the metro core but also a smaller airport. In Dallas, fewer than 1,100 riders daily hop on the train to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
The #1 way to revive urban cores, CA attempts the greatest white elephant project in history, Australia's home-building restrictions finally catch up with it, and more
Bill King: Harris County Grew By 1.2% In 2023, But Domestic Migration Continues Slide. The #1 change that could revive urban cores would be school choice vouchers. But in general the far suburbs definitely have a superior value proposition: less expensive newer homes in better school districts with lower taxes and less crime. More of their taxes go directly to services as well instead of public employee pensions and other long-term liabilities built up in the core. That is very hard to compete with.
Chronicle: "The trend of converting old offices and hotels into new spaces is gaining momentum in Houston largely due to the city's lack of zoning laws, which makes it easier for real estate developers to repurpose the land and buildings. The concept of adaptive reuse, which involves repurposing an existing building for a use other than its original purpose, is a contemporary approach to land utilization that has the potential to drastically alter the appearance of Houston in the years to come." (hat tip to Rich)
"Magical thinking caused politicians and the media to back this boondoggle in the first place, and more than 15 years later, incredibly, the spell still hasn't broken."
"The plan admits that the agency expects to spend more on the 171 miles between Merced and Bakersfield than the $33 billion it had projected the entire 463-mile project would cost when voters approved it in 2008. ...
Meanwhile, in light of the pandemic, the agency has modestly reduced its ridership expectations from 35 million trips per year to 27.6 million. This is still more unrealistic than the cost projections. In 2019, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela carried less than 3.6 million riders in a corridor with a higher population than the LA-SF corridor. While California is promising higher speeds than the Acela, the Northeast Corridor has the advantage of really being two corridors anchored by New York, America’s largest city. The California corridor has no similar mid-point metropolis; the Fresno urban area has fewer than 725,000 residents compared with New York’s 19.5 million. Incidentally, to the extent that the 27.6 million turns out to be too high, the supposed savings from not having to expand road and airline capacities dwindles."
"More than 25,000 establishments relocated to Texas from 2010 to 2019, bringing more than 281,000 jobs with them and resulting in a gain of nearly 103,000 jobs for the state, data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank shows.
The report said Texas appeals to relocating businesses for a variety of reasons, including its central location in the continental U.S., access to multiple large cities and business-friendly environment...
However, research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that attractive economic fundamentals — like low taxes, low regulations, a growing population, a relatively lower cost of living and less union activity — are far more important than incentive packages when businesses make location and expansion decisions."
Salim Furth at Mercatus: "How much are #Houston's different lot sizes in different eras showing up in real houses for real people? Here are single family houses built in the 22 years before reform, and the 22 years after - same scale." When minimum lot sizes shrank, a whole lot more small-lot houses got built because that's what the market wanted.
"Founded in Houston, Cart moved its headquarters to Austin in 2021, only to return to Houston in November.
The company moved to Austin to hire software developers, says co-founder Remington Tonar. But Cart is a logistics company as well as an e-commerce services provider, and its leaders found the company’s rapid growth required a bigger city with a larger and more diverse talent pool, including skills that go beyond just software development.
“If I’m looking for front-end software devs who can build beautiful tools to perform one task, a place like San Fran or Austin may be better,” says Tonar. “But if I need people who can integrate digital and physical systems, Houston is a lot more attractive, because people are coming out of logistics and energy.”
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.
Strong Towns is a weird urbanist cult + Tokyo's Houston-like minimal land use regulation
Strong Towns is a weird urbanist cult that can’t produce hard numbers to back up their assertions suburbia is financially unsustainable (how many suburban municipality bankruptcies have you heard of?). If you really think about it, every suburban home has a few tens of thousands of dollars of city infrastructure that go with it (some pavement and pipes), a very reasonable replacement burden from property taxes spread over 30+ years on a multi-$100k home (and most infrastructure will not need to be replaced that often).
“A municipality deep in decline, facing decaying infrastructure and accelerating poverty can hardly afford lengthy legal battles.”
The metro is booming. The City has challenges but is doing ok, especially vs. many other similar-sized municipalities. The accelerating poverty comment is flat-out wrong – immigrants move here, make a life, and move up and out to the suburbs to be replaced by a new wave of immigrants. And many parts of town are positively booming. Property values move up every year and the City laments the tax cap forcing them to cut the tax rate to keep overall revenue at inflation + population growth – does that sound like “accelerating poverty”? 🙄
---
A couple of interesting pieces on Tokyo this week along with some excerpts I pulled.
"The median Japanese tenant spends about 20% of their disposable income on rent (in America it's 30%). Rent for a studio or one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo, which Americans are fawning over as "the new Paris," is a quarter of what it is in New York.
In September, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams unveiled his plan to build 100,000 new homes, he pointed enviously to Tokyo's ability to keep "housing costs down by increasing the supply of housing." "How are we allowing Tokyo to do things better than us?" he asked."
...
"Most American consumers probably wouldn't want to live in the studio or one-bedroom apartments that Japanese people just sort of take for granted," Schuetz said. But, she added, we shouldn't have many of the minimum size regulations we have. Instead, we should let consumers decide what tradeoffs they're willing to make. "Allow the market to build stuff, and the market will figure out what people are willing to pay for," she says.
"As housing prices have soared in major cities across the United States and throughout much of the developed world, it has become normal for people to move away from the places with the strongest economies and best jobs because those places are unaffordable. Prosperous cities increasingly operate like private clubs, auctioning off a limited number of homes to the highest bidders.
Tokyo is different.
In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.
...
But the benefits are profound. Those who want to live in Tokyo generally can afford to do so. There is little homelessness here. The city remains economically diverse, preserving broad access to urban amenities and opportunities. And because rent consumes a smaller share of income, people have more money for other things — or they can get by on smaller salaries — which helps to preserve the city’s vibrant fabric of small restaurants, businesses and craft workshops. (sound familiar? ;-)
...
In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted (this is one of my easy recommendations for traditionally zoned cities). After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.
“In progressive cities we are maybe too critical of private initiative,” said Christian Dimmer, an urban studies professor at Waseda University and a longtime Tokyo resident. “I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative.”
The southern city welcomes the middle class; heavily regulated and expensive Gotham drives it away.
New Yorkers are rightly proud of their city’s renaissance over the last two decades, but when it comes to growth, Gotham pales beside Houston. Between 2000 and 2007, the New York region grew by just 2.7 percent, while greater Houston—the country’s sixth-largest metropolitan area—grew by 19.4 percent, expanding from 4.7 to 5.6 million people. To East Coast urbanites, Houston’s appeal must be mysterious: the city isn’t all that economically productive—earnings per employee in Manhattan are almost double those in Houston—and its climate is unpleasant, with stultifying humidity and more days with temperatures exceeding 90 degrees than in any other large American city. So if those two major factors in urban growth don’t explain Houston’s success, what does?
Houston’s great advantage, it turns out, is its ability to provide affordable living for middle-income Americans, something that is increasingly hard to achieve in the Big Apple...
Housing prices are the most important part of Houston’s recipe for middle-class affordability...
To understand what kind of houses these are, go house-hunting on the Web. In Houston, you’ll find a lot of nice places listing for $175,000, and they’ll probably sell for about 10 percent less, or $160,000. These are relatively new houses, often with four or more bedrooms. Some have over 3,000 square feet of living space, swimming pools, and plenty of mahogany and leaded glass. Almost all seem to be in pleasant neighborhoods—a few are even in gated communities. The lots tend to be modest, about one-fifth of an acre, but that still leaves plenty of room for the kids to play...
You thus get much more house in Houston and pay a lot less for it. This chasm would be just as big if you compared Houston with Los Angeles, where the average house price is a whopping $613,000. Small wonder Houston looks so good to middle-class Americans.
It looks even better once you take taxes into account...
Just as with housing, however, there’s a significant difference in the quality of transportation in Houston and New York. In Houston, the middle-class breadwinner likely will drive an air-conditioned car from an air-conditioned home to an air-conditioned workplace, and take 27.4 minutes to do it, on average. Commuting via New York public transit is more complicated. If you live in Queens, the average commute to midtown Manhattan (if that’s where you work, as we’ll say) is 42 minutes, and longer if you’re coming from Far Rockaway. From Staten Island, the average commute is 44 minutes—and often something of a triathlon, with bus, ferry, and subway stages. Our middle-class New York commuter thus spends at least 120 more hours in transit per year than does his Houston counterpart. And except perhaps for the ones spent on the ferry, none of those hours is as agreeable as sitting in an air-conditioned car listening to the radio...
After housing, taxes, and transportation, the New Yorkers have $26,000 left. The Houston family has $30,500, and those dollars go a lot further than they would in New York...The Houston family is effectively 53 percent richer and solidly in the middle class, with plenty of money for going out to dinner at Applebee’s (??? what Houstonian does this?!🙄) or taking vacations to San Antonio. The family on Staten Island or in Queens is straining constantly to make ends meet.
Don’t forget education. Ordinary public schools would be comparable in Houston and on Staten Island, with average SAT scores of about 950. The Houston family, though, has the option of moving to a slightly more expensive school district, like Spring Branch, which has an average SAT score of 1070, better than that in many New York suburbs...
True, New York boasts fantastic cultural advantages, hip downtown neighborhoods, and pleasures you can enjoy even if you don’t have much cash in your pocket—museums, parks, architecture. But the fact remains that living in Houston on $60,000 a year means a high-quality, spacious home, an air-conditioned commute, low local taxes, education options, and a decent amount of spending money left over. Living in New York City on $70,000 a year means a smaller, older home, a long and arduous commute, higher local taxes, fewer educational alternatives, and scrimping every day. For many middle-class families, at least those with kids, the amenities will be no substitute for a more comfortable life. In a sense, the real surprise isn’t that so many middle-income families are putting down roots in Houston (and in other fast-growing cities with similar characteristics, such as Atlanta and Phoenix); it’s that any of them remain in New York...
And the unavoidable fact is that New York makes it harder to build housing than Chicago does—and a lot harder than Houston does. The permitting process in Manhattan is an arduous, unpredictable, multiyear odyssey involving a dizzying array of regulations, environmental and otherwise, and a host of agencies. Then developers must deal with neighborhood activists and historical preservationists. Any effort to build in one of New York’s more attractive, older communities would almost certainly face strong opposition from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
A further obstacle: rent control. When other municipalities dropped rent control after World War II, New York clung to it, despite the fact that artificially reduced rents discourage people from building new housing. As New York owners converted rental units into coops to escape the price controls, the city then turned to public housing to solve the problem of housing the poor. The city’s strange policy remains to try to increase the (modest) number of subsidized apartments rather than opening the market to more development, which would significantly increase the overall supply of housing at all price levels.
Houston, by contrast, has always been gung ho about development...
Indeed, the city is unique in America in not having a zoning code. Many deeds include land-use restrictions of various kinds, true, but these are voluntarily chosen by developers, not decided on high by government bureaucrats. Occasionally, groups rally to try to institute zoning regulations, but the growth machine invariably beats them back, often supported by some of the poorest people in the city. Houston’s builders have managed—better than in any other American city—to make the case to the public that restrictions on development will make the city less affordable to the less successful...
But Houston’s success shows that a relatively deregulated free-market city, with a powerful urban growth machine, can do a much better job of taking care of middle-income Americans than the more “progressive” big governments of the Northeast and the West Coast.
Houston has less kludge and more opportunity, the value of mobility, and more
A few misc items this week:
Every planner should prominently post this quote in their office: “You can’t overestimate the value that mobility has on people’s quality of life and their ability to achieve their full economic potential.”
NYT: American Cities Have a Conversion Problem, and It’s Not Just Offices - Piles of regulations, or “kludge,” and a culture of “no” are limiting the ability to turn building blocks into something new. Houston's greatest advantage is that we have far less kludge than other cities - let's not squander it. Hat tip to George for the no-paywall link.
WSJ: ‘We Hold Our Breath’ Review: On the Banks of Buffalo Bayou - A brief account by a Houston native of the Texas city’s history, uncontrolled sprawl—and, above all, susceptibility to flooding. Hat tip to Tom. This one is less interesting for the book review itself than the comments on Houston:
"It is a great oasis of opportunity, especially for the immigrants, legal and otherwise, who end up there, stay, and prosper. There is a sizeable and successful Vietnamese population, Chinese too. The Hispanic community continues to grow and advance. A construction friend of mine once said, the new arrivals take any job because they can't speak English. Five years later they do and are foremen. In 10 they have their own company. Houston has a wealthy elite that gives unstintingly to its educational and cultural institutions and a great deal to its non-governmental help agencies. One I got to know helped released prisoners transition into work and careers with astonishing success statistics. Denominational schools like Corpus Christi and Strake Jesuit Strake do great work prepping minorities for college. The list goes on. And, Houston is resilient. It always rebuild, usually better."
"We are now retired in Austin (family ties) but despite its airs of superiority, Houston is better. It has what more of what I term real people not pretenders. The attractions there are better, museums, restaurants, entertainment, etc. Along with the real people, the sort of people I grew up and worked with."
“The answer for Houston, as in so many urban places imperiled by inadequate planning and a changing climate, seems to amount sadly to this: We hold our breath, and hope for the best.”
"For such a an awful place, it sure is curious how the Houston metropolitan area continues to be one of the fastest growing in the nation. Hmm. The real canard here is the foolish, unfounded belief that urban planning would make any difference when natural disasters occur. Urban planners are low rent civil servants whose livelihoods are dependent upon the largess of the politicians to whom they answer. The politicians, in turn, serve the greed of the rich and powerful, or respond to the ever changing whims of an ignorant populace. Who is to say which is worse? So, don’t pretend, for even an instant, that urban planning is a solution. Like central planning everywhere and every when, urban planning merely guarantees misallocation of capital and resources."
"Ah, the mystery of why people want to live in a city that is prospering, even though it hasn’t been adequately planned by experts in planning and is now susceptible to natural disasters like real hurricanes—unlike, say, New York City, where American zoning was invented but which, nevertheless, had to struggle through a “superstorm”."
"I look forward to reading the book; the review hits on many of the negatives of the city, it's hot, wet, sprawling, mosquitoes, snakes, etc... I'm a life long Houstonian, born and raised in the Bayou City, all those negative qualities do exist but people keep moving to the city. Why? The primary reason is opportunity. All of these opportunity seekers have a hard working, can do, personality, which gives Houston it's magic."
"Lived in Houston 30 years. Loved it! The Texas Medical Center is a treasure. The variety of restaurants and cross section of people from across the world is unequaled. No one cares where you came from, what school you attended who your parents were…just can you do the job. Houston is about “doing bidness”."
Access to Jobs: New Research on Driving and Transit
Readers of this newsletter may recall prior articles reporting on “access to jobs” studies carried out by researchers at the University of Minnesota. The broad conclusion of the series of studies is that in the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, a commuter can reach vastly more jobs in a given number of minutes via driving than by using transit. That is generally due to the dispersed locations of residences and employers. There is also a growing body of international research on the impact of journey-to-work time (or travel speed) on the economic productivity of metro areas.
I’m therefore pleased to report on a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that provides new findings on this subject. “More Roads or Public Transit: Insights from Measuring City-Center Accessibility,” by Lucas J. Conwell, Fabian Eckert, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak was published in Jan. 2023 as NBER Working Paper 30877.
The authors’ innovation is to define “accessibility zones” surrounding the central business districts of the 109 largest U.S. and European cities. For each city, the study defined a set of car accessibility zones and transit accessibility zones. In keeping with established research on a metro area’s economic productivity, a premise of the study is that larger accessibility zones are associated with greater productivity. One broad finding is that compared with European cities, on average U.S. cities are twice as accessible by car as European cities, but are half as accessible by transit. This is obviously due to the much greater density of European metro areas compared with largely suburbanized America, and the corresponding differences in roadway networks and transit systems between the United States and Europe.
To simplify the modeling, the researchers divided commuting times into four groups: 0-to-15 minutes,16-to-30 minutes, 31-to-45 minutes, and 46-to-60 minutes. They defined the central business district (CBD) as the area with the highest economic productivity in the metro area and drew a 1-kilometer radius circle around the defined center. The median U.S. central business district accounted for 28% of all the employment within a 20-kilometer radius. They used Google Maps to construct the accessibility zones, using it to find the car or transit travel time to the CBD from any point in each land parcel. All the land parcels that enable a trip to the CBD in 15 minutes or less make up the 15-minute accessibility zone, and so on up to 60 minutes.
One of the most interesting results is that although Europe’s transit accessibility zones are all larger than those of the U.S., “car travel offers larger overall accessibility across all time distances in both Europe and the U.S.” And that means that “U.S. cities enjoy greater accessibility overall because they have a comparative advantage in car-based commutes.” One reason for this is that, especially for longer-distance commutes, transit provides only “patchy” access. By contrast, car commuters can use a comprehensive roadway network that directly connects every point A to every point B. But that does offer an advantage to bus transit over rail transit.
Although the authors mention in their introduction that larger accessibility (via more possible trips within a given time frame) leads to greater economic productivity, their paper does not attempt to quantify the potential economic benefits of U.S. cities’ much greater accessibility. They do briefly discuss the limited impact that could be expected from “densification” policies. And of course, they discuss how “US cities’ car orientation comes at the cost of less green space, more congestion, and worse health and pollution externalities.” Assuming vehicle electrification continues, the health and pollution impacts should decrease in the coming decades. Also, with greater use of road pricing, urban traffic congestion can be reduced.
While this study would be even more impressive with quantified economic productivity estimates, it should help transportation planners think through trade-offs between highways and transit in the coming decades.
BRT Should Use Shared Not Dedicated Lanes, HTX #1 real estate market, college grads flee the superstar cities, cutting zoning reduces housing costs, and more
A few smaller misc items this week:
BRT Should Use Shared, Not Dedicated Lanes. Everything in here absolutely applies to the planned METRO Universities BRT line, especially on Richmond inside the loop. 'Lite BRT' would be a great option for that line.
"Dedicating two of the six lanes on major streets in Chandler, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Tempe exclusively to buses would be a complete waste, says a new report released last week by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and two other groups in the Phoenix area. Each of the lanes that Valley Metro would take for buses typically move roughly three to four times as many people per day as would have taken the bus before the pandemic, and bus ridership has fallen by 50 percent since the pandemic. ...
Instead of dedicated lanes, the report recommends the Valley Metro experiment with “lite BRT,” which means running frequent buses in shared lanes and coordinating traffic signals so everyone can minimize the number of stops they have to make. If these modest improvements significantly increase ridership, Valley Metro could experiment with other improvements, but if they don’t, “then it is unlikely that . . . dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority would do any better.”
"In 2004, Denver voters approved spending $4.8 billion building six new rail transit lines, and the first line opened ten years ago. This was soon followed by four more to the gushing praise of various outsiders.
Inside Denver, however, people are beginning to realize that the whole thing was a miserable failure, suffering massive cost overruns and never attaining its ridership projections. The West line, which had its tenth anniversary last week, never carried as many passengers as were projected in its first year. It’s too bad that the reporters who are questioning this now weren’t asking the same questions in 2004."
"Policymakers have debated whether allowing more market-rate—meaning unsubsidized—housing improves overall affordability in a market. The evidence indicates that adding more housing of any kind helps slow rent growth. "
NYT: Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving, Too (link gets past paywall). Educated workers are increasingly migrating away from the country’s most expensive major metros — and have been since before the pandemic. Really good in-depth article. Lots of stats/graphs. Tide is really turning against the expensive coastal cities, even with educated workers.
Problem, we have a Houston - Houstonians got a free $18k from min lot size reform, METRO 2nd worst for rail crime, The Economist loves Texas, HTX tops std of living, Houston sliding towards zoning? and more
Lots of good smaller items again this week:
Resources for Reformers: Houston’s minimum lot sizes - Problem, we have a Houston (clever twist!) "The lot size reform was equivalent to a one-time gift of $18,000 to every Houston household living in a single-family home. That adds up to about $8 billion."
The Economist: Why America is going to look more like Texas (archive link) - Lessons from the surge of the Lone Star State (followed by the more in-depth article "Texas’s latest boom is its biggest yet" - archive link). Key takeaways: Texas gets 1/3 of all net new US jobs(!), +500k people/year, #1 most Fortune 500 HQs, will pass CA for the #1 state in the 2040s, largest budget surplus ever at $33B (larger than the total budgets of 24 states) without needing an income tax to do it.
"Most of the nation’s major cities face a daunting future as middle-class taxpayers join an exodus to the suburbs, opting to work remotely as they exit downtowns marred by empty offices, vacant retail space and a deteriorating tax base."
"Firms like to open factories and offices in cities with plenty of skilled workers. When choosing between cities, they typically run an analysis to see how many potential employees live within a reasonable commute of a site. Poor traffic shrinks the radius, and by extension the labor pool, hurting a city’s chances of attracting companies."
“Although sometimes overshadowed by the cachet of Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, Houston is absolutely a tech hub in its own right, attracting a mix of major tech companies and VC-backed startups to join its already established base of aerospace, defense, and energy companies,” Dice says.
Governing: Few Mayors Connect the Dots Between Zoning and Homelessness. Restrictive codes can severely limit housing development, but a new survey of mayors finds that few take them into account in their plans to address homelessness. This is definitely a major factor in Houston's relative success in alleviating homelessness vs. other major cities. Hat tip to Judah.
The Atlantic: Everything Is About the Housing Market (archive link) - High urban rents make life worse for everyone in countless ways. I expect this “housing theory of everything” to continue to catch on because it’s absolutely right. It’s related to what I’ve been talking about for years with the four factors that go into Opportunity Urbanism, including discretionary income that determine how vibrant a city can be. If you pay too much for your house, you don’t have money to put into other things. That has been covered up for decades now by the wealth accumulated by those homeowners, but that’s a short-term effect that’s diminishing.
"I can’t help but think that Vision Zero is really more about inconveniencing auto drivers than increasing safety. Just three policies — a motorcycle helmet law, bicycle boulevards, and moving homeless people away from major arterials — would save far more lives than anything in the adopted plan."
The Value of VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled), and why trying to reduce them takes our economy the wrong direction:
"There is clear research showing that faster travel speeds means higher per capita incomes because such speeds give people access to more jobs and employers access to a larger pool of workers, which means more people can do the job that fits them the best.
...
Even if it was a good idea, no urban area anywhere has found policies, short of war or natural disaster, that can significantly reduce VMT. Yet planners keep spouting the same rhetoric while ignoring the fact that good intentions are meaningless, if not outright harmful, if they don’t produce actual results.
The lesson we need to stress to public officials is that it makes a lot more sense to make better automobiles and highways than it does to try to reduce driving. Since 1970, automobiles have become 50 percent more fuel efficient, 70 percent less likely to be involved in a fatal accident, and 95 percent less polluting of toxic chemicals. If anything, efforts to reduce driving have made these problems worse by forcing people to drive in more congested traffic where cars use more energy and produce more pollution.
I strongly suspect there is some class warfare going on here. Urban planners are by definition college educated and middle class. They probably drive cars, but the cars they drive are likely to be electrics, hybrids, or other high fuel-economy vehicles. The vehicles driven by the working class are more likely pickups, vans, and other large vehicles, partly because they need such vehicles for their work, but the planners see them as the deplorable enemy. So while planners pay lip service to low-income people and the working class, they want to design a society that has no room for them.
Those who truly care about helping low-income people and building healthy, wealthy urban areas need to take a stand in favor of more automobile ownership, more miles of driving, and better roads for those automobiles to drive on."
"The draft recommendation characterizes conservation districts as “a more flexible way for property owners to protect their community’s character and address other concerns stemming from redevelopment.” Toward that end, these districts could regulate a variety of elements including minimum lot size; lot width and depth; front, side and rear setbacks; building height; and architectural style."
By charter, zoning is illegal in Houston without being authorized by the voters, but this is an end-run by the mayor and the council around that restriction.
Had this ordinance existed 30 years ago, Houston would not have experienced the wonderful townhome and apartment densification we've had, including the attendant affordability. Central Houston would have instead evolved like West U or Bellaire, with massive expensive McMansions on large lots displacing middle-income families. It would have been a disaster, and it will be now if it passes. It will give a powerful tool to NIMBYs all over the city to kill development and force stagnation on their neighborhoods, and more broadly kill the vibrancy, dynamism, and affordability of Houston itself.
Why Houston is better with TIRZs, our lack of zoning held up as a model for the country, 45N expansion gets support, professionals migrating to TX, and more
Before getting to some smaller items, I want to comment on the Chronicle's investigative report on TIRZs (tax-increment reinvestment zones). While I'll admit they can be a bit of a mess and even a bit wasteful, what the reporters miss is that if the TIRZs were dissolved and the money sent to the City instead, it would just get gobbled up by the public employee unions long before it can do any good in any lower-income neighborhoods outside the TIRZs. As the pieces note, every mayor comes into office thinking they will go after the TIRZs, then realize they can make them work for the city as a whole by delegating projects to them (like improvements to Buffalo Bayou and Memorial parks), and shift City budget money to those neighborhoods outside the TIRZs. Finally, I think Houston's core (and the City as a whole) would be in a much more precarious position if it wasn't for the TIRZs making strong investments in Uptown, Downtown, Midtown, the Med Center, and other key districts to keep them attractive to employers and high-income professionals.
Moving on to a backlog of smaller items, mostly from my Twitter feed:
You may find it hard to believe, but Houston has the shortest CBD commuting times of the major metros due to a high-capacity freeway and HOV lane network with great coverage (Chart 5, page 7).
Video: "Of all the Texas cities - most of which I'm very bullish on - the one that is probably going to have the biggest success story for the next 30 years is by far Houston." Hat tip to George.
The City Without Zoning: "For the most part, Houston’s positives are linked to its lack of zoning, and its negatives are essentially unrelated to zoning."
The Search for Intelligent Life Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting: "In 2018, Frank attended a meeting in Houston whose focus was technosignatures... seek out signs of technology on distant worlds, like atmospheric pollution... “That meeting in Houston was the dawn of the new era, at least as I saw it,” Frank recalls."
Public comment submitted on raising I10 at White Oak Bayou: this project seems unnecessarily disruptive and expensive to keep the freeway open a relatively tiny handful of days every few years, especially given that 610 provides a natural alternative when I10 is blocked by flooding. Additionally, when the city is flooding badly enough to put I10 underwater, most households and businesses are hunkered down anyway, reducing demand. There are better places to deploy TXDoT's limited resources.
"The planned rebuild of I45 in Houston drew the largest number of comments, 382 of the 1,685 TxDOT received through a month-long public comment period. Of those, TxDOT said 299 were supportive of the project while 66 were opposed." (source)
"Houston prioritizes the ease and cost of building housing above almost all else. As a result, residents with money have a higher standard of living and those without have more humane sheltering options. Cities with other priorities sacrifice on both of these." -John Arnold
The American Conservative: How Zoning Paralyzed American Cities: "America should learn from no-zoning Houston, says Gray...What proved crucial to rejecting zoning was Houston’s allowance of deed restrictions, whereby neighbors can voluntarily opt into zoning-like restrictions and design standards...And while neighbors get a say over their neighborhood, Houston as a whole is still allowed to grow. It builds housing at 14 times the rate of its peers and, in the process, has become one of the most affordable and diverse cities in the country.""
"Is Nolan Gray really calling for zoning abolition? Yes, he is. And before you dismiss him—perhaps Houston isn’t your cup of tea, or maybe you simply like your home and its zoning, thank you very much—consider that Houstonians agreed with Nolan’s view in 1948, 1962, and 1993, killing zoning each time it came up for a vote, largely thanks to working-class voters. What proved crucial to rejecting zoning was Houston’s allowance of deed restrictions, whereby neighbors can voluntarily opt into zoning-like restrictions and design standards to ensure whatever character of their community they desire for the next 25 to 30 years. And while neighbors get a say over their neighborhood, Houston as a whole is still allowed to grow. It builds housing at 14 times the rate of its peers and, in the process, has become one of the most affordable and diverse cities in the country."
This week we have excerpts from an excellent Fast Company article: A bold case against zoning - In a new book, M. Nolan Gray cites Houston as a model for rethinking zoning. These excerpts are great, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing, and even the book if you can!
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"When the zoned American lands in Houston, they are liable to be struck by parking lots reinventing themselves as apartment buildings, by postwar subdivisions transforming into dense new townhouse districts, by old strip malls being reimagined as new satellite business districts. In the zoned city, any one of these developments would be a major ordeal, the subject of endless permitting and raucous public hearings—in Houston, it just happens.
...
Thanks in part to a lack of zoning, Houston builds housing at nearly three times the per capita rate of cities like New York City and San Jose. It isn’t all just sprawl either: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large. This ongoing supernova of housing construction has helped to keep Houston one of the most affordable big cities in the U.S., offering new arrivals modest rents and accessible home prices even amid seemingly endless demand.
...
Zoning critics rightly dispensed with the comforting myths surrounding zoning—that its purpose was to merely rationalize land use—and zeroed in on its tendency to restrict new housing construction, limit access to opportunity, institutionalize segregation, and force growth outward. Far from being duped, Houston’s working-class residents exhibited a subtler understanding of the purposes of zoning than many contemporary planners and rejected it accordingly.
...
Is this system of publicly enforced deed restrictions “basically zoning,” as some might argue? On the one hand, deed restrictions—like zoning—demarcate specified areas subject to a distinct set of stricter land-use rules. Both zoning and deed restrictions in Houston are enforced by the government, principally with the aim of propping up home values and maintaining a certain quality of life. Many deed restrictions even have rules banning apartments and enforcing a strict two-and-a-half-story height limit.
Yet, the similarities end there, and Houston’s system of deed restrictions is a significant improvement over zoning. For starters, deed restrictions only cover an estimated quarter of the city, largely in areas with low-rise, detached, single-family housing. Industrial areas, commercial corridors, mixed-use and multifamily neighborhoods, urban vacant lots, and yet-to-be-developed greenfields are virtually never subject to their provisions. This means that roughly three-quarters of Houston—including its more dynamic sections—are largely free to grow without anything even resembling zoning holding them back."
“ A paper published this week by two California economists calculated that the mass shift to remote work accounted for 15.1 percentage points of the 24% increase in U.S. home prices between November 2019 and 2021.”
“There are lots of places in America with jobs and lower climate risks or jobs and racial diversity, but if you want all three, Texas will take care of you best,” The NYTimes noted in 2021.
“Many of us move to big cities and spend little time in nature — also not a path to happiness. A study by the economists Ed Glaeser and Josh Gottlieb ranked the happiness of every American metropolitan area. They found that New York City was just about the least happy. Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco also scored low. The happiest places include Flagstaff, Ariz.; Naples, Fla., and pretty much all of Hawaii. And when people move out of unhappy cities to happy places, they report increased happiness.”
And a little humor, lol: "The data-driven answer to life is as follows: Be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex."
And here are the academic paper details behind that excerpt: Unhappy Cities. People are the least happy in some of America's largest cities like NYC, LA, SF, Boston, and Chicago. Oddly, Dallas and Houston are not included, although Galveston scores surprisingly high (#16).
"Abstract: There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across U.S. metropolitan areas, and residents of declining cities appear less happy than other Americans. Newer residents of these cities appear to be as unhappy as longer term residents, and yet some people continue to move to these areas. While the historical data on happiness are limited, the available facts suggest that cities that are now declining were also unhappy in their more prosperous past. One interpretation of these facts is that individuals do not aim to maximize self-reported well-being, or happiness, as measured in surveys, and they willingly endure less happiness in exchange for higher incomes or lower housing costs. In this view, subjective well-being is better viewed as one of many arguments of the utility function, rather than the utility function itself, and individuals make trade-offs among competing objectives, including but not limited to happiness."
Metro's pretty good Inner Katy BRT plan, Ashby's corrective ordinance, induced demand from freeway expansion isn't bad, housing policy failure and success, urban exodus
I attended Metro's public meeting last week on the Inner Katy BRT+Express Bus elevated lanes and was fairly impressed with the plan. One-seat Silver line BRT ride from downtown to uptown. Easy access for 290 and I10W HOV express buses without a transfer. Uses Purple/Green LRT lanes downtown so no new lanes are lost. Good destinations like Memorial Park, POST, Theater District, GRB convention center, and Eado/PNC Stadium. One downside: HOV/HOT vehicles won't have access, and will lose access to existing elevated HOV lanes into and out of downtown. But TXDoT is planning to build their own to extend the Katy managed lanes all the way downtown. Seems a little duplicative to me. I sent this official public comment to Metro:
Just attended the public meeting and am overall impressed with the plan, but non-transit HOV vehicles losing access to the CBD ramp to downtown is problematic and could generate public blowback (I use that ramp myself quite often). As you know, that ramp bypasses a significantly congested traffic bottleneck downtown. Engineering should be possible to allow those vehicles to share the lanes on the portion between the Studemont station and downtown (with ingress and egress just east of Studemont) without significantly impacting the bus service. Or if not, please coordinate closely with TXDoT to facilitate access for those vehicles with an alternate route/lanes, maybe with a shared structure/ramp/bridge?
and got this response:
"Dear Mr. Gattis: Thank you for contacting Metro and thank you for participating in our latest public meeting. METRO is currently working with TxDOT concerning the Katy CBD Ramp. As mentioned during the virtual public meeting, TxDOT plans to tear down the Katy CBD Ramp (one lane in each direction) as part of TxDOT’s North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP). TxDOT then plans to replace the Katy CBD Ramp with managed lanes along I-10 (two lanes in each direction with shoulders) that would accommodate non-transit vehicles.
These managed lanes would go to the east side of downtown and have connections in and out of downtown to the west. During the interim of these projects (TxDOT’s NHHIP and METRO’s METRORapid Inner Katy Project), METRO and TxDOT are looking into the timing and what can be feasibly done during the time gap between these projects. As TxDOT progresses with their projects in the I-10 corridor, they will also hold public meetings in the future to provide additional information concerning the Katy CBD Ramp.
METRO appreciates your feedback regarding vehicular access and will take this into consideration during our coordination efforts. If you have any additional comments or questions, please contact us at crm.RideMETRO.org or visit RideMETRO.org/InnerKaty for more information. Thank you for contacting Metro."
Interested to hear your thoughts on it in the comments...
Moving on to a few smaller items this week:
From Wendell Cox: "The Australian Financial Review (the nation's equivalent to the WSJ) ran a piece suggesting that housing may be the most important policy failure in the nation" (based on our URI/COU Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey). I'd flip that and say housing may be Texas' and Houston's most important policy success!
"All the research suggests housing is a critical determinant of well-being and good community functionality and has long been considered an essential part of the “Australian dream”... Econometric analysis has shown that in some places in Australia, planning restrictions are responsible for 67 per cent of the cost of housing." (!!!)
“Induced demand isn’t necessarily bad or wasted VMT. Being able to get to a better job or access venues that offer better choices and lower costs isn’t bad. Businesses having access to a bigger labor pool and potential customer and supplier bases isn’t bad. Making those supply chains work better isn’t bad. Getting emergency vehicles where they need to go, faster, isn’t bad. Pulling cut-through traffic out of neighborhoods isn’t bad. Using infrastructure to shape development or improve economic competitiveness of given geographies isn’t bad."
"it seems less likely that those who purchased homes in the suburbs and exurbs during the pandemic, motivated in part by new remote work options, will be selling and moving back to cities."
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.
