Houston

The Future of Remote Work and What it Means for Houston

Tory Gattis — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 12:42:17 -0400

This week I want to focus on a single CSM story, because it's the most insightful I've seen on what post-pandemic work might look like: Remote work is here to stay – and it’s changing our lives. There are so many great nuggets, insights, and excerpts in it, which I'll follow with what I think it all means for Houston:

“What the pandemic made blazingly obvious,” says a Manhattan entertainment lawyer, “is that there is no need for a physical office.” Only a complete lack of imagination, he says, kept the realization from dawning sooner. “Before the pandemic, we wouldn’t have taken the question [of going virtual] seriously. It wouldn’t have seemed possible.” ...

Wrote one top manager in an email posted by economist Tyler Cowen: “Speaking from personal experience as a white-collar Exec, the productivity gains for our highest value workers has been immense. The typical time-sucks and distractions of in-office work have been eliminated.... Mental focus on productive efforts is near constant. Perhaps most importantly, work travel is not happening.” ...

“Even before the pandemic,” he says, “big cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were losing population to suburbs, lower-cost metro areas, and less expensive states in what Zillow called ‘a great reshuffling.’”

The market research firm Forrester predicts a 60-30-10 split among organizations: post-pandemic, 60% will be hybrid, 30% will be all-in-the-office, and 10% will be all-remote. ...

If the expert consensus proves right, Americans won’t go back, either.

“As life at work [when remote] will be less social, people will have to get more of their socializing from elsewhere. So people will choose where they live more based on family, friends, leisure activities, and non-work social connections. Churches, clubs, and shared interest socializing will increase in importance. People will also pick where to live more based on climate, price, and views. Beach towns will boom, and the largest cities will lose.”

Might the center of gravity shift at least somewhat from the office to the neighborhood – back, in a sense, to something closer to a pre-industrial model? What might it mean for our culture if the human contact that offices used to provide is replaced by closer-to-home human connections? And how might that affect the health of local communities and even levels of societal trust? ...

Here Mr. Kotkin quotes Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”

Read the rest of this piece at Houston Strategies.

Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and co-authored the original study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. He is also an editor of the Houston Strategies blog.

Affordably Improving Texas Power Grid Resilience

Tory Gattis — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 13:03:57 -0500

Hope you emerged from this crazy winter storm + power/water outage week relatively unscathed. I certainly learned the value of stockpiling water and draining water pipes (esp. with a power outage), and ERCOT learned that it's a bad idea to cut off power to natural gas pumps across the state during a winter storm. I hope they spend a bit of time doing analysis before jumping to expensive solutions like full winterization of all facilities. It's possible that if they had simply mapped natural gas pumps and compressors across the state and treated them as critical non-blackout facilities like hospitals, we might have gotten away with short-duration rolling blackouts that would have been far more manageable (like 2011).

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Solutions will have to be nuanced and incremental. Winterizing all power plants would be unnecessarily expensive, and so would a complete overhaul of Texas' market design, which is partly responsible for consistently low power prices compared with the rest of the country."

And an excellent idea: "One option could be rewarding liquefied natural-gas processing facilities in Texas to both curtail electricity usage and to redirect the feedstock natural gas for electricity rather than for exports."

And from Forbes - This Blizzard Exposes The Perils Of Attempting To ‘Electrify Everything’. Gas = resilience:

"to equal the 80 Bcf/d of gas delivered during cold snaps, the U.S. would need an electric grid as large as all existing generation in the country, which is currently about 1.2 terawatts."

Unpopular observation: gas-powered cars, trucks, and SUVs were a critical source of resilience during this never-ending mass power-outage disaster by providing heat and recharging. If we all had electric vehicles, this disaster would have been epically worse. A hard truth.

This piece first appeared on Houston Strategies.

Bloomberg's Case for Moving to Houston, URI 2020 Year in Review Video, and more

Tory Gattis — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 11:53:21 -0500

Happy new year everyone. Hope you enjoyed the holidays and the recent amazing weather (while staying safe). A lot of you probably had out-of-town family and/or friends visiting. Next time nonlocal friends or family say Houston is too hot, floods too often, or gets too many hurricanes, here's my recommended reaction: politely agree with them that Houston is not a city for the soft or irresilient - they should probably choose somewhere like California. Texas welcomes the tough.

The big item this week is Bloomberg Businessweek's "The Case for Moving to Houston" graphic from a recent cover story on high-tech workers leaving the big expensive coastal cities. Click to enlarge, but note Houston in the upper-left pole position of the best bang for your buck, a combination of high average salaries and low cost of living, reinforcing my ongoing argument that Houston has the highest standard of living among major metros in the US and probably the world as well.

The article also has a couple of nice excerpts:

"Consider Phyllis Njoroge, who grew up in Massachusetts. After graduating from Tufts University in 2019 with a degree in cognitive and brain science, she started making spreadsheets of places in the U.S. that had a warm climate, were diverse, and had a reasonable cost of living. Houston won out, and she moved there in March"

Having more remote workers means “wages in Texas are going up,” he says. So are housing prices. “You can’t have a $2 million, 2,000-square-foot house in San Francisco and a $200,000 house in Dallas that are basically the same for very long when there are airplanes and internet connections and Zoom.”

Moving on to some smaller items this week:

New Geography: Texas is the fastest growing state + California loses 70,000 residents in the last year
Houston the 2nd-youngest city in the U.S. behind Salt Lake City (The Mormons have us beat when it comes to cranking out kids, lol ;-)
Houston Chronicle: When COVID trapped me in Houston, I stopped wanting to escape (non paywall link). Hat tip George.
And a similar one: “You’re from Houston? I’m so sorry.” Also hat tip to George.

"I simply say, “no, please don’t be sorry. I love living in Houston. It’s a great place to live and I have a great life there. It’s actually not that place that you might imagine it to be. In fact, it’s one of the country’s most ethnically diverse and progressive cities. My children go to school with kids from all over the world. And the wine and food scene there is great, too.”

Finally, I'd like to end with a great year-end review 1m video our President Charles Blain put together on the Urban Reform Institute - Center for Opportunity Urbanism's work, events, and publications in 2020. Here's to 2021 being even better for our growth and impact!

This piece first appeared at Houston Strategies Blog

Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute – A Center for Opportunity Urbanism, and writes the Houston Strategies blog.

Reason: Toll Agency Politicized in Houston

Tory Gattis — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 11:42:44 -0500

Reason's newest Surface Transportation Newsletter by Bob Poole talks about Harris County's dangerous raid on HCTRA's toll road money, and this is so important I'm reposting it in full here (highlights mine):

Toll Agency Politicized in Houston

"Back in September, the governing body in Harris County, Texas—the Commissioners Court—voted 3-2 to take over the respected Harris County Toll Road Authority (HCTRA). They created a government corporation that will divert toll revenues to things like flood control and help to pay for deepening the Houston Ship Channel. This political move undercuts the widely followed principle of most U.S. tolling: users-pay/users-benefit. Harris County will receive a $300 million lump sum from HCTRA, followed by $90 million a year indefinitely.

Another part of the deal calls for refinancing HCTRA’s $2.7 billion worth of toll revenue bonds to take advantage of today’s historically low-interest rates, with estimated savings of $60 million per year. That’s a move HCTRA could have made on its own, in the interest of delivering better value to its toll-paying customers. And its well-managed counterpart in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metro area—the North Texas Tollway Authority—the same month announced its own debt refinancing, but without any revenue diversions.

The Houston change was decidedly political, with the three Democratic commissioners voting in favor while the two Republicans voting against it. One of the Republicans, Steve Radack, was quoted in the Houston Chronicle saying, “This is a money grab. They are going to use it to pay for things that are normally paid for via property taxes.” Also opposing the takeover was David Hagy, executive director of the American Council of Engineering Companies, who supported the sensible refinancing but not the county’s money grab. And the Transportation Advocacy Group urged the Commissioners to at least use the diverted funds for transportation purposes.

I wonder how the rating agencies will view this politicization. HCTRA’s current bond indenture, as well as state law, limits the use of surplus revenues to non-toll roads, streets, and highways, according to a Q&A provided by the Harris County budget office. If that’s true, there might be grounds for bondholder litigation.

Moreover, while short-term thinking would say this is only a small amount of revenue diversion, the real danger is that it sets a precedent and provides no safeguards against future raids on HCTRA’s toll revenues. Transportation professionals know what has happened to the Pennsylvania Turnpike when that state’s legislature imposed Act 44 mandating that the Turnpike divert $450 million per year to the state DOT for transit subsidies. The Turnpike has had to significantly increase its bonded indebtedness, and enact large annual toll rate increases to meet the new debt service. That same fate could await HCTRA’s toll payers the next time Harris County faces budget shortfalls."

This piece first appeared on Houston Strategies Blogspot.

Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Urban Reform Institute and co-authored the original study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. He is also an editor of the Houston Strategies blog.

What Message Is Your City Telling You?

Tory Gattis — Tue, 28 May 2019 11:59:35 -0400

Most Houstonians are familiar with Houston's most famous piece of graffiti, the "Be Someone" message in giant letters on the Union Pacific bridge over I45 north of downtown. It's gone through a lot of iterations and defacement over the years, including recently, but the fact that it keeps coming back is a testament to its popularity. Long ago I did a post here titled "What message is your city telling you?" discussing an essay by Paul Graham (of Y Combinator fame). His basic theme is that each city has its own subtle message it's sending you about what's important and how you should direct your ambition.

Here are some of his examples:

New York: "You should make more money."

Boston/Cambridge: "You should be smarter." (or at least better read)

Silicon Valley: "You should be more powerful." (i.e. change the world)

"Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York's is finance and Silicon Valley's is startups."

SF/Berkeley: "You should live better." (more conscientious, more civilized, better 'quality of life')

LA: "You should be more beautiful and famous."

DC: "You should know more important people."

Paris: "You should do things with more style."

London: "You should be more aristocratic." (higher class - although he says this signal is weaker than it used to be)

Here's the summary list of messages he came up with:

"So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life."

And here's what I came up with at the time for Houston:

"So what about our little town of hard working engineers and entrepreneurs? The city of Canion, Cooley, DeBakey, and a gaggle of energy and real estate mavericks? Well, I think we can rule out style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life. Wealth, maybe a bit, but I think the primary one is economic power - "You should be a bigger player in business."(even the business of medicine) We don't seem to care too much whether you're an entrepreneur, developer, or top executive - just so long as you're a big shot. And if you're not a big shot, the message is to become one by whatever path necessary - whether on your own or through a large organization.

Maybe not the ideal message I'd choose (although not bad), but I think it's an accurate reflection of the culture of the city."

Later my friend Anne suggested maybe "industriousness" is a better ambition message for Houston rather than "economic power", because it's more inclusive of people working hard in all sorts of endeavors, including nonprofits. Both of those certainly fit well with a "Be Someone" motto encouraging people to go out and make a difference in the world.

I think it would great for the city to embrace "Be Someone" as our official motto and start baking it into our identity as a city (cue the T-shirts). It's a great message we could put just about everywhere. A similar example of an inspiring motto is "Live a Great Story". On a practical note, that probably means cleaning up the sign and protecting it from future defacement, maybe with a protective spray-paint-repelling clear coat and/or some sort of physical protective shield added to the bridge. But the real value is beyond the sign itself, but in the collective sense of identity it can unify Houstonians around.

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments...

Visualizing Houston’s Population Density

Brian Shreckengast — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:34:33 -0500

Population density may sound like the most mundane of metrics, a column heading in a city planner’s spreadsheet, but in cities across the U.S. it’s been a source of cultural controversy, guiding where people move and why.

To those seeking a more urban lifestyle, “density” implies walkability, car-free transit, and cosmopolitan culture. To others, “density” equates to crowds, cramped quarters, and the inability to find parking. The debate arises around nearly every planning decision under consideration in cities like Charlotte, often devolving into vicious debate.

Where these debates often breakdown is when it comes to the relative nature of population density: How dense is ‘dense’? Is Houston dense? We should all be able to agree that New York is dense, right? Well, not compared to Paris, let alone Manila.

In order to put Houston’s density in perspective, we put together a series of visualizations showing how large Houston would be if it were as dense as other cities.

If Houston’s population lived as close together as New York’s does, how much space would they take up? Compared to cities like Mumbai, or even Los Angeles, Houston is a sprawl, while compared with Jacksonville and Anchorage, Houston is practically Manhattan.

Note that Houston’s city limits were used for this visualization, not the metro area. While some readers may object to the exclusion of surrounding locales, metro areas are not as well defined as city limits and that is often a matter of debate itself.

Applying the Urbanophile's Beliefs About Cities to Houston

Tory Gattis — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:15:28 -0500

Last month The Urbanophile posted his statement of beliefs about cities, and a lot of them resonated with me about Houston. Here are some favorite excerpts along with my own thoughts.

* Great cities, like great wines, have to express their terroir. There is no one-size-fits-all model of urban success. Our cities are as diverse as their citizenry. To succeed, they need to express their own essential and unique character.

This is why you always have to be skeptical when somebody says something like "For Houston to be world class we have to do X like city Y." I believe that especially applies to heavy rail commuter transit in our decentralized, car-based city, but it also applies to recent questions like "Why can't Houston have downtown retail like Chicago's Magnificent Mile or New York's Fifth Avenue?" Because we're not like them, and we already have our pedestrian-oriented upscale shopping district: it's called The Galleria, one of the largest malls in the country, and with plenty of parking and climate control to boot!

* Don’t try to beat other cities at their game. Instead, make them beat you at yours. Cities are unique – yours included. Instead of fretting about measuring up to the planet’s elite metropoli or trying to emulate them, cities should figure out their unique strengths that other places can’t match.

Hear, hear! To quote an old post of mine: "Houston starts the 21st-century with a set of amenities 99% of the planet’s cities would kill for: a vibrant core with several hundred thousand jobs; a profitable and growing set of major industry clusters (Energy, the Texas Medical Center, the Port); the second-most Fortune 500 headquarters in the country (26); top-notch museums, festivals, theater, arts and cultural organizations; major league sports and stadiums; a revitalized downtown; astonishing affordability (especially housing); a culture of openness, friendliness, opportunity, and charity (reinforced by Katrina); global diversity; a young and growing population; progressiveness; entrepreneurial energy and optimism; efficient and business-friendly local government; regional unity; a smorgasbord of tasty and inexpensive international restaurants; and tremendous mobility infrastructure (including the freeway and transit networks, railroads, the port, and a set of truly world-class hub airports)."

* It says something powerful about a city when people vote with their feet to move there, to plant their flag, to seek their fortune. There is no more telling statistic about a place than in-migration. It’s important to know if people are moving into or out of a city–and why.

The most ignored statistic of the creative class city boosters, because their idols - NYC, Boston, Chicago, SF, LA - fail horribly on it.

* Moreover, new blood isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential. In an ever-more globalized, rapidly changing, competitive world, a city’s best interests are not served by being populated with people who’ve never lived anywhere else.

Points for our global diversity.

* But it isn’t just about the best and brightest, either. Attracting the educated is important, but cities are also where the poor come to become middle class, where immigrants come to build a better future for themselves and their families. Their needs must be taken up, too–and equally.

Hallelujah for Opportunity Urbanism (and more here).

* A great city needs great suburbs. To pull our cities up, there’s no need to tear our suburbs down. To be successful in the modern era, its important for every part of a metropolitan region to thrive and bring its “A game”.

* “Building on assets” is a trap. The only reason we have any man-made assets in the first place is that previous generations of leaders didn’t follow that strategy. Only building on assets is a strategy about defending the past, not embracing the future. It is the spending down of our urban inheritance. Yes, leverage assets, but also add totally new things to the pot for future generations.

Absolutely.

* We need to look forward, not backward. There is no more corrosive force than nostalgia. We should know where we’ve come from and what we stand for. But we can’t become imprisoned by a yearning for an imagined past that never really was.

* We need to embrace a 21st century vision of urbanism. Urbanism – Yes, but trying to copy Greenwich Village 1950 is not the answer. To find it, we must boldly re-imagine the possibilities of what a city can be and bravely identify what works today-and what doesn’t.

Yep - time to rethink Jane Jacobs.

* We don’t know where this ride is taking us. We’re at a pivotal time in America’s urban history. So much is changing, and more change is yet to come. For our own sake, we should not assume that we’ve arrived where we’re headed, or that we have the answers. If there’s one thing we should take away from the urban planning failures of the past, it is a strong dose of humility.

"Planning for utopia" doesn't work. Cities need the freedom to evolve organically.

This piece first appeared at Houston Strategies.

A New Brand for Houston

Tory Gattis — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 17:36:41 -0400

"We've probably spent in excess of $75 million in the past 30 years on image campaigns, and we keep coming back and saying, 'Well, that didn't work.'"

- Former GHCVB CEO Jordy Tollett in the Houston Business Journal

A list of many of those can be found here, including the old standbys "Bayou City", "Space City", and "Energy Capital of the World" (Wikipedia has more here). And despite many of my own previous attempts on this blog, inspiration has struck me again, especially after reading this recent article at Salon.com on why every city needs a brand (and more on that here).

A good city brand works on four different levels:

It attracts tourists.
It attracts new residents, especially highly talented and educated ones.
It attracts expanding businesses.
It inspires the citizens and creates a local identity.

But it's very hard to come up with a single brand that does all four. Even some of the most successful brands don't necessarily hit them all. Two of the most famous city brands are New York's "I {heart} NY" and Las Vegas' "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." And in Texas we're all familiar with "Keep Austin Weird." In this case, I think I've stumbled upon something that can work across all four.

Before I reveal it, I need everybody to drop their cynicism shields. I don't think the most successful city brand in history, "I {heart} NY" could get off the ground today with our snarky cynical culture. Just like new songs, sometimes ideas need time to grow on you. So open up your mind, hold back judgment, and let me reveal some context-setting definitions and the brand first followed by the supporting reasons.

Hospitality

Noun: The friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.

Hospitable

Adjective: 1) Friendly and welcoming to strangers or guests. 2) (of an environment) Pleasant and favorable for living in.

It started with me thinking of "Houston Hospitality", but then the symmetry jumped out at me it became

Houspitality

What the "Aloha Spirit" is to Hawaii, the "Houspitality Spirit" can be to Houston.

Here are some of the key words and phrases people often use when describing Houston and how they fit:

Houspitality for visitors and newcomers: welcoming culture to outsiders, friendliness, hospitality (duh), openness to people from all over the world (diversity), amazing restaurants, museums, arts, and other amenities
Houspitality for businesses: business-friendly taxes and regulation (including no zoning), culture supportive of entrepreneurship, open business culture
Houspitality for residents: friendliness, openness, affordability, ease of living, high standard of living, social mobility, opportunity, open-minded, charitable (especially after Hurricane Katrina), "big small town"

Some additional supporting reasons:

Short and sweet, and people "get it" pretty easily.
Fits well with the Texas Medical Center helping people from all over the world (and the word "hospital" is right there). It also fits well with the airports, port, GHCVB, GHP, and others.
It differentiates us from other big cities (ever heard anybody talk about the friendly reputations of NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, or LA? I didn't think so) as well as tourist destination cities (which tend to become jaded towards visitors).
UH's Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management uses the motto "We are hospitality", and is one of the top ranked schools in the country for that specialty.
Sounds like "vitality", which is another good brand association.
I found a cool, somewhat similar concept here, transforming Humanitarian to Houmanitarian.
I think more and more people today are hungry for real community, which is harder and harder to find. Houspitality is a great brand to convey our real sense of community in Houston.

Finally, I'd like to end with some supportive excerpts from Ken Hoffman's recent excellent column on what Forbes got right and wrong about Houston being America's Coolest City. I think you'll easily see the Houspitality Spirit running through them...

I remember thinking, am I going to have to change? Am I going to have to learn how to write Texan?
I didn't change anything. That's part of what makes Houston cool. You can come here and stay yourself and fit right in.
...
Houston is cool because whoever or whatever you are, you're welcome here. The first two years I lived here, I was burning out the copy machine at Kinko's applying for jobs anywhere else. Now I wouldn't leave here for anything. ...

Where better to get better?
When a congresswoman got her head half blown off, she came to Houston to get better. When Middle East oil sheiks need surgery, they come to Houston. We have the best medical facilities in the world. I didn't think that was cool until I was run over by a lunatic in a van and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
I still have no idea what hospital I was taken to. But they fixed me up. That was cool.
...
We're in this together
And please stop talking about Houston's "diversity." The only thing the word "diversity" does is separate people. Sure, we have ethnic neighborhoods; those are good for a city. It helps in picking a restaurant.
I've never seen a city where people blend more gracefully than Houston.
...
Houston is cool
I thought it was pretty cool when Houston welcomed Hurricane Katrina victims to ride out the storm's aftermath here. I spent a couple of days in the Astrodome, handing out supplies and clothes to Katrina refugees. I learned a lot about Houston after Katrina. The experience changed me, too.
...
Being cool is a city that makes you feel like you belong.

This piece originally appeared at Houston Strategies.

Houston's Walled Garden

Tory Gattis — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 23:50:42 -0400

My friend Neal and I were in a tall building recently looking out over the city, and noted that there is an interesting phenomenon in Houston. There are now enough tall buildings to almost outline a new zone. If you go from the Medical Center up to Downtown, west along Allen Parkway/Memorial, south along 610/Post Oak, back east to Greenway Plaza, and then southeast to return to the Medical Center (here's a satellite map of the area - sorry I'm not skilled enough to overlay an outline) there is an almost continuous - well not continuous - but a substantial line of skyscrapers. And it's pretty green within that zone, as least from an elevated viewpoint. And we named it "The Walled Garden". Somewhat similar aesthetically to New York's Central Park or Chicago's Millennium Park, but much larger and, of course, not a public park. It does, in my stretched definition, contain the key parks of central Houston: Hermann, Discovery Green, Eleanor Tinsley/Buffalo Bayou, and Memorial (my concept, my boundaries ;). It also contains such key areas as the Galleria, Highland Village, River Oaks, Upper Kirby, Montrose/Neartown, Midtown, the Museum District, Rice University and the Rice Village.

"Inside the Loop" is a very common phrase you'll hear in Houston. I'd like to think "The Walled Garden" could be a similar such phrase describing a narrower zone where young singles want to live (as evidenced by the explosion in apartment construction within it) vs. more family-oriented areas like West U, Bellaire, The Heights, or the various neighborhoods of the east side. It could also be used for branding and attracting young talent to Houston, like the way people talk about the Near North Side/Lincoln Park in Chicago or Santa Monica in LA or Manhattan in NYC. By having a unifying label over the area, it's easier to promote it. And I think "Houston's Walled Garden" has a pretty appealing ring to it.

Now if only they could only fill in the gaps a bit, maybe with a tower somewhere near Ashby and Bissonnet?... ;-)

I'll end with a few small misc items to close out the post:

The Economist on the greening of Houston. Hat tip to Kelly.
Aaron Renn/The Urbanophile on the high-speed rail boondoggle in this country, especially California, which looks to do for rail infrastructure investments what Vietnam did for military adventures.
Texas again ranked as the #1 best state for business
Mayor Parker on the Colbert Report. I think she held her own and promoted the city well.
Take note, Mayor Parker: big city democrats are embracing privatization to cut costs and do more for less (WSJ)

Finally, I completely agree with the recent op-ed in the Chronicle advocating to keep the Battleship Texas at the San Jacinto battlefield (WSJ story). They attract far more visitors as a combination than separate. Trying to get kids to go see an empty battlefield? Boring. Oh, there's a real battleship there too. Cool!

This piece first appeared at Houston Strategies blog.

A Better Plan to Save the Astrodome

Tory Gattis — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:44:04 -0400

Setting aside my own wishes for the Astrodome, and just looking at the plan recently presented by the HCSCC to Commissioners Court, there is a very simple fix that will make saving the Astrodome *much* more likely.

Current Plan

$270m to convert Astrodome into multi-purpose venue
$385m to demolish and rebuild a new Astrohall/Reliant Arena

Net cost estimated to be $523m after tax credits.

MAJOR PROBLEM = getting voters to approve a half-billion dollar bond issue (!)

Better Plan

Tear down an obsolete Reliant Arena and fold whatever functions a new one would have into a renovated Astrodome. It's not like the Astrodome doesn't have enough space. Heck, it could probably do just about everything they wanted to do in it originally and still have room for everything they want to do in a new Arena. We lose a building nobody cares about and preserve a building everybody wants to save at probably less than half the price of the current proposal (something voters might actually approve).

A big win-win, yes? If you agree, please contact your County Commissioner asap and let them know. They're meeting to make some decisions on this plan very soon - possibly this week.

This post originally appeared at Houston Strategies.