Trying to find examples of optimized land use in Houston seems to be a bit....um....what is the word for "absurd beyond the point that reason and logic would allow"?
It’s also a wildly diverse multi-cultural melting pot full of interesting entrepreneurs from all over the word, and a place that offers significant upward mobility to millions of people.
Could you expound on this, please? I'm not too familiar with Houston's milieu, and I think hearing a reason why you believe this'd be really interesting.
Yes getting rid of zoning and things (which as the artificial nicely points out means going beyond what Houston has done) is still not enough.
Cars are still uniquely terrible. I'm beginning to view them re development like a gene drive is to geneics: a single piece of technology that upends the careful balance from before and takes over everything.
Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it, still also has increasing returns though. Do a LVT and Carbon tax too to accelerate that.
>Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it
Then why does every billionaire and national newspaper support those things? For that to be true, your definition of "rich" would have to include the approximately 90% of Americans who bought a car and a home in a place that requires driving.
Having a back yard and guest bedroom and driving 15 minutes to the grocery store is preferable to the vast majority of people to living in a small apartment and relying on public transportation. If it wasn't these western US cities would have developed differently.
America has laws (zoning) that almost require a car. Thus people drive and then more car centric areas are built which requires more driving and more cars. It is a loop that reinforces itself. Most Americans do not have a choice of car ownership since it is effectively required because of lack of other options. You say that it is preferable, but that is difficult to say since car ownership is so subsidized and prioritized.
a) We have terrible transit even in places that approve ballot measures about transit, suggesting part of the problem is the administrative state's inability to deliver rather than the fundamental policy preference.
b) Small transit-connected apartments fetch much better prices than many sprawl houses, suggesting that the preferences people express with their wallets and they preferences they speak into the microphone at zoning board meetings are pretty different.
a) Its too late at that point. Denver is a good example of a suburban car-based city that is pouring billions into pubic transportation that can never compete with cars. pick two random spots and compare the driving directions with public transportation. The city would need to be rebuilt as high-density.
b) You have cause and effect backwards here. Apartments are built in those areas because real-estate is already expensive. The real-estate is not expensive because they built an apartment building in the middle of nowhere. Things have to be high-density from the beginning for it to work, and everyone building housing since the automobile has chosen to go low-density whenever possible.
Building a high-density city today would require preventing people from building low-density just outside city limits and driving into town, zooming past all the suckers who bought a cramped apartment waiting at the bus stop.
My local paper regularly rails against an imaginary phalanx of anti-car jihadists. Any dollar not spent in support of automobiles is sufficient evidence of a nefarious anti-car agenda. Meanwhile, pre-apocalypse, mass transit is chronically under funded and over capacity.
Apparently commuters choosing to not drive is an unforgivable affront to Freedom Markets™.
> Then why does every billionaire and national newspaper support those things
1. Most national news, by number of publications leans left. Conservative publications get more eyeballs per outlet, though. Most local news, of course, takes the installation of a single bike lane as evidence that the ghosts of Pol Pot and Stalin have just succeeded in an unholy socialist coup of the local city council.
2. Right leaning billionaires tend to keep their mouths shut more than left-leaning ones.
>People act like suburbanism was forced on people when the reality is it’s preferred by many.
That some people prefer suburbanism does not imply suburbanism is not being forced on a large proportion of the population that prefers affordable housing in cities dense enough to support efficient public transit. When people moved to the suburbs, large corporations followed and built sprawling offices, often in areas with poor public transportation and without sidewalks. When the choice is between an apartment with a hellish commute and a house close to work, of course many opt for the suburbs, but that does not imply that this is their preference. A suburban home and a car are nice to have if it's an option, but too frequently it's a requirement to own a car, and painful to not live near your suburban office.
Who wants to own a car? Between tolls, parking, insurance, maintenance, and the sticker price, it's a large hole in the ground that I throw money into.
I do want to be able to use a car... To go out of town a few times a year.
Plenty apparently. Like I said, the public transportation is great here but owning a car is very popular. No more waiting for transit. No more trips that take 30 min that you can drive in 15 min. Easier to cart your kids around.
And it’s not cheap at all (import tax of 100%), yet people are more than willing to pay it.
This is mentioned in the article. The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s. But, that wouldn't have undone decades of too-large lots for SFH and lot size so large THs were completely untenable.
All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc.
> The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s.
Only inside the loop, which is a small fraction of the city's area. They also point out the pervasive use of restrictive convenants, which make most of the suburbs much like their counterparts in other cities.
One thing they didn't mention is that some parts of the inner loop are not getting any kind of development; mostly the south west loop. As always it's complicated but there are socioeconomic and race issues bundled up in it. At least that was true a dozen years ago.
> All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc.
The problem is that Houston is extremely lacking in offering any transit-based options for people, which means the "solution" is going to be extremely biased towards whatever is most comfortable to people who travel exclusively via single-occupant vehicles.
If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's because you need the density. No one puts an apartment building down that size in a ghost town.
Odds are good that density is still desired across the street. Or maybe one step down into something more mid-rise. A single family home uses an entire lot to house a single family, maybe just 1-2 people.
It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
> If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's because you need the density
Who is "you"? The way your sentence is structured is from the perspective of a city planner zoning a city or a powerful central authority actually building these structures.
In Houston, "you" is an individual and if you are placing a 16+ storing housing building down, you're doing it because you think you can make money renting or selling the units. The idea of relaxed land use regulations (zoning) is to allow demand to plan the city.
> It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people. If it was, we'd all live in dormitories and eat in the cafeteria because private bathrooms and kitchens are wasteful. I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?
You means the developer. If a developer has decided to put a big building there, it's because there is demand. Obviously there's no central planning authority, just developers building where they can.
I should have been more specific in 'need the density'. Yes, in today's climate that means 'because someone thought it would be profitable. That's because they saw there was demand for housing there.
> Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people.
You've constructed a strawman position I don't hold. There's clearly a difference between "we should live in dorms" and "maybe we should discourage single family homes holding the land that could be use to house hundreds of families in apartments or condos."
> I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?
Speculators are buying houses and renting them out in hopes that the land prices will skyrocket as demand for city life increases. By holding the stock of single family homes near urban cores in reserve, they are preventing the land from being used to build large housing developments. Because there is a lack of large housing developments, housing costs are higher than they would be if speculators instead sold all their lots to developers for developing low/mid/highrise housing.
This illustrates the issue (IMO) at the heart of all of these discussions:
Is personal ownership of land like other property ownership (like a chair), or is it somehow different? To what degree does society at large retain some ownership rights to all land, and a say in how it should be used?
It's different, but similar. We do actually care about other property ownership -- we tax various parts of its production to encourage the outcomes we want. That might be taxing based on country of origin, of materials used, of cost to dispose of, etc.
But land is intrinsically tied to housing and food production. We should be strongly discouraging allowing usable land to lie dormant because someone wants to speculate on it. Land should be taxed in a way that encourages maximizing housing/business/service utilization. A city block dedicated to surface parking provides almost no utility compared to placing a forty story mixed use residential building on the same lot. Even worse are property speculators who purchase abandoned sites and do nothing with them for years in hopes that property values will rise considerably in an urban core.
Land is something that comes in an (essentially) fixed supply, and is (almost never) human created.
Chairs are created by human (or machine) labor.
Since the provenance of the owned thing is entirely different in each case, it seems likely the legal/social/moral understanding of ownership in each case would be quite different.
The land under the single-family home might carry a tall building that would bring much more business into that city block. A city might incentivize that through a land value tax, which would be high for this lot.
But Houston has relatively little urban fabric; to me it looks mostly like a really large suburban agglomeration, a place where you cannot get anywhere without driving a few miles in a car.