Houston

MaX Lanes: A Next Generation Strategy for Affordable Proximity

Tory Gattis — Fri, 19 May 2017 01:33:38 -0400

This is the introduction to a new report written by Tory Gattis of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. Download the full report here.

The core urban challenge of our time is ‘affordable proximity’: how can ever larger numbers of people live and interact economically with each other while keeping the cost of living – especially housing – affordable? In decentralized, post-WW2 Sunbelt cities built around the car, commuter rail solutions don’t work and an alternative is needed, especially as we see autonomous vehicles on the horizon.

This briefing explores a next-generation mobility strategy for affordable proximity: MaX Lanes (Managed eXpress Lanes) moving the maximum number of people at maximum speed and allowing direct point-to-point single-seat high-speed trips by transit buses and other shared-ride vehicles today, and autonomous vehicles in the future. It includes a case study of Houston with a proposed network as well as profiles of similar lanes around the country.

Download the full report here.

Taxpayers Need Protection from Dallas-Houston High Speed Rail Bailout? New Report

Wendell Cox — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 01:38:20 -0400

The proposed privately financed high-speed rail line from Houston to Dallas is projected to have a revenue shortfall of $21.5 billion in its first 40 years of operation. This is the conclusion of a Reason Foundation report by Baruch Feigenbaum, the Foundation’s assistant director of transportation policy (Texas High Speed Rail: Caution Ahead). This and other concerns lead the Reason Foundation to indicate: “… we cannot support Texas Central’s proposed Dallas to Houston project.” This is an important development, since the Reason Foundation has been a strong supporter of privately financed transport infrastructure for decades.

“Optimism Bias and Demand Exaggeration”

Feigenbaum explains: “Our analysis indicates that Texas Central is exhibiting the same ‘optimism bias; and ‘demand exaggeration’ that have plagued many public infrastructure projects —and especially high-speed rail projects—for decades. Simply put, Texas Central has exaggerated its ridership projections while underestimating costs.” Feigenbaum adds: “…private sector involvement is not a panacea. A wildly unsuccessful project is not going to become feasible with private financing.”

To any who follow infrastructure finance, these are familiar terms. The sorry record of major infrastructure forecasts has been documented by Oxford University professor Bent Flyvbjerg, along with Nils Bruzelius (a Swedish transport consultant) and Werner Rottenberg (University of Karlsruhe and former president of the prestigious World Conference on Transport Research). They reviewed 80 years of infrastructure projects and found initial cost estimates to routinely be low and demand (ridership) to have been routinely over-estimated (Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition). They found passenger rail project cost overruns to be among the worst, averaging 45 percent. They also found ridership projections to be two-thirds too high in two-thirds of cases.

Reason Foundation and State DOT Estimates

The Reason Foundation report suggests that the Texas project might perform even more poorly. Feigenbaum estimates that the Dallas to Houston line would carry 1.4 million passengers by 2035. He also cites a Texas Department of Transportation analysis estimating annual riders at between 0.7 and 2.7 million trips, by 2035. The Texas Central estimates a considerably higher five million riders by 2025, 10 years earlier.

But the difficulties do not stop there. The costs of construction projected by the Texas Central Railway, at a maximum of $12 billion, may be significantly underestimated. Feigenbaum conservatively estimates costs that are nearly 50 percent higher ($17.8 billion) and suggest that the cost could exceed $20 billion. This is similar to a State Department of Transportation estimate of $18.7 billion, according to the report.

Either of these eventualities, both of which are fairly routine for such projects, would mean that the Texas Central Railway might not have enough money to operate the service, or even to finish construction, unless bailed out. Of course, it is hard to find investors for failed projects, and there would be strong political pressure for government grants and subsidies.

The California Boondoggle

California’s high speed rail project, well into the planning stage and about to lay some track, has already exceeded the Oxford research cost overruns with a vengeance. By 2012, construction costs had risen more than 60 percent compared to those publicized to obtain voter approval of bonds for the project in 2008. Worse, that’s after officials scaled back the system from high speed rail to a blend between conventional (commuter rail) and high speed rail.

As if that were not enough, the first short segment, already under construction, according to a federal report could have a cost overrun of up to $3.5 billion. The segment is approximately two-thirds the Dallas to Houston route length and is similarly flat, in the largely agricultural San Joaquin Valley. The Wall Street Journal referred specifically to the California high speed rail project in a recent editorial characterizing Sacramento as “America’s western swamp.”

The International Experience

Out of all of the high speed rail lines built in the world, only two have avoided commercial losses (“broken even”) until recently (Tokyo to Osaka and Paris to Lyon). Both had very low construction costs, which made it possible to repay , unlike the highly escalated costs that have developed in subsequent projects. These have depended on taxpayer subsidies for their survival.

More recently, the Shanghai to Beijing high speed line became profitable, though its superlatives are well beyond replication by any other project (at least of any planet discovered so far). The line is slightly shorter than the distance between New York and Atlanta, but directly serves a market larger than the population of the European Union (more than 520 million residents) and 60 percent more than the United States. The stations on the exclusively high speed rail line itself serve municipalities with more than 160 million people, more people than live in Japan and 2.5 times as many as residents as in France. Another 360 million residents are served by trains that directly access the Shanghai to Beijing line from outside the corridor for part of their journey.

Whence the Bailout?

Feigenbaum suggests the likely source of a bailout for the Dallas to Houston high speed rail line: “While Texas Central may not be intending to take any public funding, we believe that if construction starts, the project will inevitably have to be bailed out by the taxpayers of Texas, which is unacceptable” (our emphasis).

He also notes that the Texas Central Railway plans to seek Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) program loan from the US Department of Transportation (USDOT). These below market rate loans are guaranteed by federal taxpayers. Of course, taxpayers already know how this works. Just a few years ago, Solyndra defaulted on a $0.5 billion federal loan, leaving taxpayers to “holding the bag.”

A genuine privately funded project would raise sufficient funds from private investors and from non-subsidized commercial financing sources. It would also attract ridership large enough to produce sufficient to pay the loans and repay the investors. The Reason Foundation and the Texas Department of Transportation findings suggest otherwise

All of this is disappointing to Feigenbaum, and also to me. After years of warning of taxpayer risks from such projects (Note ), I had hoped this one would be a genuinely commercial project, as this article from more than four years ago indicates (see: “Texas High Speed Rail: On the Right Track). It looks like it’s too good to be true.

Making it Work?

However, there may be a way to deliver the Texas Central project, while removing all potential taxpayer risk. According to the Dallas Business Journal Texas Central officials indicated that the Central Japan Railway would be the “primary investor”. There is also a report that Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund may invest in US infrastructure, including the Texas high speed rail project. These organizations are more than financially capable of ensuring that there is no taxpayer risk.

The Japanese know high speed rail. They are likely to invest only if they are confident they can recover their money, with a commercial profit. Moreover, any such investment needs to include financial guarantees that ensure there is no potential for either US or Texas taxpayers to be called upon for subsidies to cover cost overruns, operations or anything else. Any other approach could be foolhardy.

Note: These publications include authoring or co-authoring a number of taxpayer risk reports on proposed high-speed rail lines, such as on Florida high-speed rail proposals between the 1990s and 2010s, the Xpress West Victorville to Las Vegas high-speed rail line, the first and second diligence reports on the California high-speed rail line, and a greenhouse gas emissions analysis of the California high-speed rail line. Sponsors included the Reason Foundation, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, Citizens Against Government Waste and the James Madison Institute.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: Texas flag

All Houston Does (Economically) is Win

Joel Kotkin — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:33:38 -0500

Like most big cities that get the nod, Houston has spruced itself up for the Super Bowl, planting flowers and concentrating in particular on the rough stretches between Hobby Airport and NRG Stadium. Yet it’s unlikely the city’s reputation will be much enhanced by the traveling media circus that accompanies these games.

The last time the city hosted the Super Bowl, in 2004, the Washington Post called it “super ugly.” The website Thrillist recently named Houston “the worst designed city” in America, with the usual kind comments about porn shops near offices, lack of walking districts, fat people and awful traffic. For good measure, 24/7 Wall Street named it among the 25 worst cities in America.

Casting shade on Houston is nothing new. In his best-selling 1946 travelogue Inside U.S.A., the journalist John Gunther described Houston as having “a residential section mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches.” The only reasons to live in Houston, he claimed, were economic ones; it was a city “where few people think about anything but money.”

Gunther clearly did not see a great future for the place, predicting that it would have only a million people by now. In fact, the Houston metropolitan area’s population now stands at 6.6 million with the city itself a shade under 2.3 million. At its current rate of growth, Houston could replace Chicago as the nation’s third-largest city by 2030.

Why would anyone move to Houston? Start with the economic record.

Since 2000, no major metro region in America except for archrival Dallas-Fort Worth has created more jobs and attracted more people. Houston’s job base has expanded 36.5%; in comparison, New York employment is up 16.6%, the Bay Area 11.8%, and Chicago a measly 5.1%. Since 2010 alone, a half million jobs have been added.

Some like Paul Krugman have dismissed Texas’ economic expansion, much of it concentrated in its largest cities, as primarily involving low-wage jobs, but employment in the Houston area’s professional and service sector, the largest source of high-wage jobs, has grown 48% since 2000, a rate almost twice that of the San Francisco region, two and half times that of New York or Chicago, and more than four times Los Angeles. In terms of STEM jobs the Bay Area has done slightly better, but Houston, with 22% job growth in STEM fields since 2001, has easily surpassed New York (2%), Los Angeles (flat) and Chicago (-3%).

More important still, Houston, like other Texas cities, has done well in creating middle-class jobs, those paying between 80% and 200% of the median wage. Since 2001 Houston has boosted its middle-class employment by 26% compared to a 6% expansion nationally, according to the forecasting firm EMSI. This easily surpasses the record for all the cities preferred by our media and financial hegemons, including Washington (11%) and San Francisco (6%), and it’s far ahead of Los Angeles (4%), New York (3%) and Chicago, which lost 3% of its middle-class employment.

Voting With Their Feet

Urbanistas may revile Houston but the metro area’s population has grown more than any other U.S. metropolis in the new millennium, up by 1.2 million between 2000 and 2010. The most recent figures show Houston’s population expanded 159,000 between 2014 and 2015, the most of any U.S. metro area.

Much of this is a result of people moving from elsewhere, roughly 500,000 net since 2000. In comparison, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and even the Bay Area have suffered considerable migration losses.

It may be popular to suppose the new Texans are just a bunch of losers looking for cheap rent and low taxes. But the recent rate of increase in the population of educated 25- to 34-year-old educated people in Houston tops that of the San Jose area, and easily exceeds that of competitors like New York, Los Angeles and Boston. Houston has been getting not only bigger but also smarter.

Like domestic migrants, foreigners like the idea of jobs, particularly decent paying ones. Since 2000 Houston’s foreign-born population has grown 60%, roughly three times the expansion in New York, San Jose and San Francisco, and more than five times that of Los Angeles or Chicago. In the last decennial Census, Houston ranked second, just behind New York, in total numbers of new foreign-born residents.

So, what’s the appeal? Even the most civically minded Houstonians will admit it’s not the weather — particularly the humid, brutal summers — or the topography, which makes a plate seem mountainous. More critical is housing prices. Per demographer Wendell Cox, housing prices in Houston, adjusted for income, are roughly one-third those of coastal California and half those in places like metropolitan New York, Boston and Seattle.

Houston simply offers a more congenial setting for upward mobility than its more celebrated rivals. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Bank Housing Affordability Index finds more than 60% of homes in the Houston metro area are affordable for median-income families, compared with only 15% in Los Angeles, once ground zero for the dream of aspirational homeownership. Overall, when incomes and costs are weighed, Houston ranks at or near the top of places where paychecks stretch the farthest.

Life After Oil

Some have predicted that with the fall in oil prices, Houston would experience a sharp decline, repeating the disastrous experience of the early 1980s. The energy sector has lost some 67,000 jobs but the economy has not collapsed. Patrick Jankowski, chief economist for the Greater Houston Partnership, notes that, unlike the early 1980s, overall employment has not declined. To be sure last year’s gains — some 15,000 net jobs — are meager compared to the remarkable 120,000 increase experienced in 2014. This year Jankowski predicts better, but hardly robust growth of nearly 30,000 jobs.

Though some sectors of the real estate market are clearly overbuilt, notably luxury housing and high end office space, construction remains buoyant, particularly in the lower end of the single family market. David Wolff, one of the area’s largest land developers and former head of the transit agency, Metro, lived through the 1980s crash and frankly expected a harder landing this time. “It’s like being in the middle of a gun battle, and picking yourself up from the floor and being amazed you don’t have a bullet hole,” Wolff says.

The change in administrations has also boosted confidence. “It is nice to have a president who doesn’t hate your major industry, “Wolff quips. He and others also point to the port, which is booming, the massive and expanding Texas Medical Center and anti-business practices in blue states, such as New York and California, as contributing to the region’s increasing economic diversity.

Andrew Segal, head of Boxer Properties, one of the city’s leading owners of Class B real estate, sees little decline in either rents or demand for his buildings. Energy may never regain the prominence it once had, he argues, but other sectors have emerged, and the city itself has greatly enhanced its urban amenities, parks, and educational offerings. “It’s getting more diversified like Dallas and cooler like Austin. The ’80s simply did not come back.”

The Secret Sauce

My Center for Opportunity Urbanism colleague Anne Snyder suggests Houston’s resiliency stems largely from its culture of openness. One of the most diverse metro areas in the country, Houston long has been accessible for newcomers of all kinds. In contrast to more hierarchical, the planning-oriented regimes elsewhere, she writes, “ creative friction – unchaperoned and prescribed – is Houston’s secret sauce."

Low prices and vast landscapes, she notes, allow space for minorities to set up businesses, buy houses, open a dizzying array of shops and restaurants. Houston’s much-maligned strip malls, notes architect Tim Cisneros, are the “immigrant’s friend,” allowing for small businesses to start with lower rents and easy parking.
Not all Houstonians like the way the place works. Local intellectuals and some in the media have been pushing for the Bayou City to renounce its no-zoning policies and embrace the top-down “smart growth” approach that dominate places like California, Oregon and many areas of the Northeast.

And to be certain, there are trade-offs. Although there are some promising walkable districts — both in the city and in some of the planned developments on the periphery — most Houstonians rely on their cars to get around, shop and eat at strip malls. And to be sure, entrenched poverty, inequality and inadequate schools remain all too common, but minorities, at least, are far more likely to own a house there than in more regulated places like New York, Los Angeles or Boston.

Houstonians also show their optimism by making the ultimate bet on the future: children. Per the American Community Survey’s Houston ranks in the top five cities for elementary-age school children per family among the 53 major metropolitan areas, well ahead of places like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, which placed 45th.

Jobs, housing, diversity, and the movement of families have driven Houston’s success. An upbeat attitude, and openness to outsiders, has made Houston a super city, Super Bowl or not.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: Hequals2henry [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The Evolving Urban Form: Houston

Wendell Cox — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 09:55:10 -0500

Houston is a city (metropolitan area) of superlatives. The most recent Brookings Institution data shows that Houston has the seventh strongest per capita economy (gross domestic product) in the world (Figure 1). This places Houston above New York and more surprisingly, perhaps, other cities perceived to have strong economies are far below Houston and outside of the top 10, such as London, Tokyo and Chicago.

The recently released COU Standard of Living Index also ranked Houston just behind San Jose in real pay per job for households entering the housing market (Figure 2).

Distribution of Population Growth

Houston is among the newer of the world’s great cities. It has experienced sustained growth in every decade since the turn of the 20th century. The area constituting its metropolitan region (combined statistical area) has grown at more than 1.5 percent in each decade since 1900. In the 1920s and the 1980s, Houston grow at a rate of more than 3.5 percent annually at has grown an average of 2.2 to 2.3 percent annually since 2000. It took until 1950 for Houston to reach 1 million residents. By 1980, the population was 3.3 million and by 2015 had doubled to 6.8 million.

As is typical for a growing city, the strongest early growth was in the core municipality (Houston) and then gradually shifted to the nearby suburbs and outer suburbs (Figure 3)

At this point, near parity has been reached. The municipality of Houston, the suburbs within the core Harris County (the county also home to most of the city) and the outer suburbs, beyond Harris County have nearly equal populations, at approximately 2.3 million each (Figure 4).

Like other cities that have experienced most of their growth since World War II, most of Houston is suburban. Between 2000 and 2013, the greatest growth was in the Later Suburbs and Exurbs. There was also growth in the Earlier Suburbs (Figures 5 and 7).

Large Centers and Decentralization

There was a similar pattern of growth in employment. The greatest growth was in the Later Suburbs and there was also strong growth in the Exurbs and the Earlier Suburbs (Figures 6 and 7). The central business district (downtown) ranks eighth in total employment in the nation and also experienced growth. The Texas Medical Center is the largest life sciences center in the world. The center is located south downtown and rivals some of the nation’s largest central business districts, larger than Minneapolis and nearly as large as Denver ,, with more than 100,000 employees (see photograph above). There are other large centers, such as the Port of Houston, the Galleria (Uptown) and the Energy Corridor. Houston is one of the best examples of a decentralized city, with major employment centers throughout.

Higher than Average Urban Density

Houston is often characterized as a “sprawling” urban area. In fact, however, Houston has a higher than average urban density for the United States (by eight percent) and an urban density approximately 75 percent higher than Atlanta and Charlotte and denser than Philadelphia and Boston. Even Portland, with its carefully cultivated international reputation for high density is only 18 percent denser than Houston (Figure 8). Of course, all US urban areas are less dense by international standards than their foreign counterparts.

Attracting the Most New Residents

Since 2010Houston has led the 53 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population in net domestic migration. In that time Houston has attracted 255,000 new residents from elsewhere in the nation, followed closely by in-state rival Dallas-Fort Worth (241,000). The four largest Texas metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population were among the six attracting the largest net domestic migration, with fourth ranked Austin attracting 159,000 and sixth ranked San Antonio adding 122,000. Only third ranked Phoenix and fifth ranked Denver were from outside Texas. Eight of the top ten were from the South (Figure 9).

There are at least two important keys to Houston’s attractiveness. Obviously, its strong job-creating economy has opened career opportunities for people from other parts of the country. In addition, Houston’s favorable housing affordability has been an important factor. Seminal recent academic research has pointed to the importance of housing affordability in attracting domestic migrants (such as Ganong and Shoag).

Enviable Improvement in Relative Traffic Congestion

Houston has been more successful in controlling traffic congestion than many other cities. In 2015, Houston tied with Boston for the 11th worst traffic congestion in the United States, according to the TomTom Traffic Index (Figure 10). This is a far better rating than in the middle 1980s, when the Texas Transportation Institute ranked Houston as having the worst traffic congestion in the nation.

Since that time, Houston has managed to have spectacular population growth, yet has kept up with it by expanding its freeway and arterial systems, along with traffic management improvements. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, New York, Honolulu, Miami, Portland, Washington and Chicago have seen their traffic congestion become worse than in Houston over the same period. Houston is larger in population than all but three of these nine metropolitan areas (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago), more than twice the size of San Jose and Portland and nearly seven times that of Honolulu. Further, exhibiting the association between greater traffic congestion and higher population density, all cities ranked worse than Houston have higher urban densities.

World’s Energy Capital Poised for Employment Growth

Houston is widely acclaimed as the energy capital of the world. Urbanscale.com says that “The only other U.S. city that rivals Houston’s domination of a single industry is New York’s preeminence in the financial sector.” Of course, Houston’s energy industry has faced considerable challenges over the past couple of years as Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) have driven the price of oil down by producing more oil. However, the “good times” could return soon for Houston, as there are indications that OPEC will reduce its production. Further, and perhaps even more importantly, Houston could benefit from the new Trump administration’s commitment to a more consumer oriented energy policy, appearing likely to generate substantial employment and growth in the newly unleashed sectors.

Photo: Texas Medical Center (by author)

Advancing the Texan City-Building Model

Fanis Grammenos — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:33:38 -0500

Reading the recent report “The Texas Way of Urbanism” promptly reminded me of my status – twice a migrant; from small town to big city (Athens) and from big city to another country. These moves were propelled by a singular motivation: seeking opportunity to better my lot. I knew next to nothing about the cities I moved to: their shape and history, their culture, their social divisions and even language were absent from my viewfinder. All that mattered was the chance for a new start. And that’s how Texan metropolises emerge from the report’s pages – gates to opportunity. I carry this typical migrant perspective as a fact-checker to all discussions about cities – magnet-cities.

It also rekindled an irritation about how warped the conversation about cities often is; as if a group of dilettantes in a pageant give cities points and declare winners. Points are given for: “urban/suburban”, “dense/spacious”, “compact or not”, “grid or not”, “beauty/ugliness” and so on. These arbitrary, spurious abstractions do not register with the migrant – the city’s wealth generator. A professor moves to a post away from home, a multinational corporation executive to another continent, and an oil rig specialist to a small-town with black gold – they are all wealth generators; they move to pursue a goal and, in the process, they build cities unwittingly. They shape them by their actions.

In admitting that Houston “[….]is not beautiful upon first blush, nor does it offer the charm of pedestrian fancy that denser cities boast”, the report affirms that Texan cities have the right approach: first mind how to generate wealth, then empower citizens to achieve the good life. What follows is a city like no other in history, one that reflects its time, culture and values. It is not Paris, or London, or Tokyo, it is Houston or Austin. The model works. And just as all its predecessors, the new city is never static, not a stage set, it’s a movie in slow motion – it evolves.

Evolution means adaptation to new pressures. It does not have a destination, a preordained ultimate goal, or shape. In that light, it is a reactive process, constantly responding to emergent conditions.

The pressure for movement space and its distribution in cities like Barcelona is intense

From that perspective, the model that builds Texan metropolises is neither final or complete. It inevitably misses unanticipated, emergent factors that today play a role in a functioning city. It has, for sometime, incorporated responses to the pressures of a motorized economy by building infrastructure sufficient to move people and goods to their destinations and it does that better than other U.S. cities. But as the combined effects of automobility are tallied up, a new pressure point has built up. It demands an adaptation to the nature and function of non-motorized mobility and its realm – the foot realm. The pressure is not about more “beauty” or “charm” or a nostalgia for old times, it is about space: redressing the imbalance between space assigned for speeds exceeding 20 miles and space for those below. These two spaces are incompatible. A response to this pressure would add functionality to the Texan model of city making.

Redistribution of space with controls

Adaptations to rectify this imbalance need not be invented; they already exist mostly in older cities but also in Texan urban areas. However, they have been mostly sporadic and unsystematic. Nevertheless, all these case-by-case changes nurtured an appreciation for the vast improvement in the quality of the daily city experience, the heightened sociability and the intensified economic activity. In turn, this new appreciation generated greater demand for spaces and places endowed with these qualities.

Two systematic, universal versions of a layout model – call them “hybrid” grids – have appeared; one in Barcelona, Spain and the second in Calgary, Canada. One for fixing built-up areas and the other for greenfield development.

That the city of Barcelona would propose a model for transformation might have been expected. It has an expansive, regular grid that is under perilous pressure: extremely dense, congested, mired in emissions and all its surface space taken for motorized movement and parking. The only option was to reallocate the available space. And that reassignment is now underway.

A team of Barcelona planners have started the implementation of the “superilles” (superblock) model to the classic Barcelona square grid, (see drawing). The principles underpinning the concept are simple and intuitive:

• No through motor traffic means that streets at the walking scale (400x400 m) serve as capillaries only; they occupy the lowest rank in the network hierarchy, where circulation essentially stops. They serve the residents of a “quadrant” (or “quartier”) only, are unmistakeably local and, thanks to lighter traffic, can be made narrower, freeing up space for other functions.

• Full accessibility for active transport within the quadrant: people circulation is switched “on” while motorized transport is “off” by means of looping cars back to its perimeter. This preferential filtering manages the permeability of the quadrant to its residents advantage. Additional switches, such as card-activated bollards and the scheduling for entry, parking and deliveries, would add accuracy and flexibility of the “on-off” switching and refine the filtering.

• Surface space gained from the circulatory function is then assigned to nature and to recreational/social activities thereby strengthening cohesion within each quadrant.

These typical modular layouts are then applied to the entire grid of the city with appropriate modifications for circumstantial conditions.

Houston and Austin are two among many U.S. cities that sport square grids just like Barcelona’s. Houston in particular has inherited exceptional 80-foot right-of-ways that offer considerable design flexibility for rearrangement.

The adaptation that will address the imbalance between vehicular and non-vehicular space in a city is here awaiting adoption. Texan cities can advance their already effective city-building models to a higher state of completion and of responsiveness to current pressures.

Fanis Grammenos heads Urban Pattern Associates (UPA), a planning consultancy. UPA researches and promotes sustainable planning practices including the implementation of the Fused Grid, a new urban network model. He is a regular columnist for the Canadian Home Builder magazine, and author of Remaking the City Street Grid: A model for urban and suburban development. Reach him at fanis.grammenos at gmail.com.

Top image: Augustus Koch (1840-?). [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Houston, City of Opportunity

Anne Snyder — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:38:34 -0500

This essay is part of a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism titled "The Texas Way of Urbanism". Download the entire report here.

Creative friction – unchaperoned and unprescribed – is Houston’s secret sauce.

At a time when Americans’ confidence in all major U.S. institutions – minus the military and small business – has sunk below the historic average, and only about 20 percent of Americans say they spend time with their neighbors, one would expect pessimism to be universal. But come to the concrete sprawl just north of the Gulf and you’ll find a different vibe, one that other cities would do well to emulate.

Of course things aren’t perfect in Houston, and the region is taking it a bit on the chin due to the drop in oil prices. But look over the mid- and long-term and the place has consistently lured people from around the country and the world.

People continue to move to the flat and humid city in higher numbers than any other metropolis. According to the United States Census Bureau, from 2014-2015 metro Houston attracted 159,083 total and 62,000 net domestic migrants, topping the Census list on new metro area residents. Critically, the newcomers represent those population groups most telling of a metro’s future: millennials, immigrants, and families.

“The American Dream is still alive here,” say those migrants, one after another. 81 percent of Houston residents rate the city as a good or excellent place to live, according to the 2016 Kinder Houston Area Survey. That’s up from 70 percent a decade ago. And despite the recent economic slowdown, 62 percent of Houston-area residents rated the local economy as “excellent” or “good.”

Even the most conventional of popular figures have begun to figure this out. “Houston will surprise you,” wrote Katie Couric when she stopped here on a nationwide tour of up-and-coming cities. It was a more iconic statement than perhaps she realized. Outsiders often misperceive Houston as politically conservative and totally dependent upon the energy business, but the city consistently busts internal expectations, too. In Houston, you don’t have to drive far to run into unexpected languages, unexpected restaurants, a huge informal economy and just a pervasive – and bracing – sense of random.

“It’s a cat city,” says Bill Arning, director of Houston’s celebrated Contemporary Arts Museum. He moved here in 2009 from Boston. “If you arrive without a tour guide, without a friend who knows the city, it’s hard to figure out where things are. There are no landmarks. Whereas Austin is a dog city – you know where the beautiful people are – Houston is a cat city. Its charms are there, but you’ve got to come to it. You’ve got to take a little time.”

What sets Houston apart? What about the city makes so many residents confident they will find their version of the American dream here? If it is indeed a city of opportunity, what lessons might other cities absorb and weave into their own policies and cultural fabric? Through many interviews, data sleuthing and the everyday experience of living here, I found five traits that define Houston: affordable proximity, multipolarity, social deregulation, an active future orientation, and humility. What follows is a tour of the city that knows no limits.

Affordable Proximity

“There’s always been a haphazard nature to the city, from the beginning,” says Sanford Criner, a native Houstonian as well as vice chairman at CBRE, the world’s largest real estate firm. “Where Chicago – which was founded the same year [1836] – had an economic reason for being the day it was founded, Houston was a real estate play. These guys came down from the northeast – New York, Pennsylvania – and they bought some land and sent out flyers.

“I’ve seen some [of the flyers], and they’re hysterical,” Criner continues. “‘Salubrious environment!’ said one. ‘Well-watered!’ said another. They’d have this picture that looks like a little Swiss valley, with chalets up the hill, and there wasn’t a house here! It was a scam. But that’s how we now date the founding of our city.”

Where others saw only wilderness along the banks of Buffalo Bayou, Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen saw promise, and convinced people to take a gamble and move. This rambunctious “come one, come all” attitude continues to define the city’s development, 180 years later.

The city of Houston is famous for its no zoning policies, the fruits of which are visible in the hodge-podge of commercial and residential hubs evident on a first drive in from one of the two airports. The apparent haphazardness may dizzy outsiders, but for Houston residents it’s a gift that my colleague Tory Gattis calls “affordable proximity”: the ability to live near one’s place of employment while keeping the cost of living affordable. It’s a challenge that has become onerous in many cities, but one that Houston manages to tackle with surprising efficiency.

“It’s definitely true that it’s easier to build things here than elsewhere,” says Criner. “We’ve been able to build things relatively inexpensively and rapidly that have generally benefited everybody.”

Since 2010, Houston has expanded its housing stock to issue construction permits for 189,634 new units, paralleling the population growth. This is in sharp contrast to competitor cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and the Bay Area, where construction tends to lag behind population.

Houston is uniquely able to create housing to meet demand. The populations in both New York City and Houston have grown significantly in the past six years, but New York, like many big cities, has not come close to meeting demand. A lot of this has to do with sheer land availability and willingness to expand outward, but Houston’s light regulatory touch has crucially allowed developers to be in sync with consumer need and preference, without the red tape that slows other cities’ building and adaptability. A key result has been a greater level of affordability, and of choice.

In April of 2016, The Wall Street Journal highlighted groundbreaking research by Issi Romem, chief economist at real-estate site BuildZoom, showing that the cities that have expanded geographically have kept their house prices more affordable.

According to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Bank Housing Affordability Index, more than 60 percent of homes in the Houston metro area are now considered affordable for median-income families, compared with only 15 percent in Los Angeles, once ground zero for the dream of homeownership. According to Zillow, renters in New York spent 41.4 percent of their income on housing in 2015, whereas the share for their Houston counterparts was just 31 percent.

The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey provides ratings for all major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and Houston consistently ranks as more affordable than cities like Portland, New York, San Francisco and San Jose, all of which have more restrictive regulations.

Houston’s housing is also diverse. Houston has become the national leader in new multifamily units, helping to preserve and expand access to urban living. At the same time, the Houston metro has led the country in new single-family houses.

Availability of affordable land and a lighter regulatory environment allowing for outward expansion has made it possible for many to afford a residence near the city’s dispersed job centers. In addition, as City Observatory recently reported, a series of reforms adopted in 1999 shrunk the required residential lot size from 5,000 square feet to 1,400 square feet, enabling town home development in high demand areas proximate to jobs.

Proximity to work is especially appealing to millennials, who have moved to Houston in droves. The U.S. Census Bureau showed a 25 percent increase in millennial residents between 2000 and 2013, with millennials currently making up 24 percent of Houston’s total population. Many of these new adults want to reduce their commutes, or even ditch their cars for the sake of enjoying a more seamless transition between professional and personal life. Houston offers this possibility across urban and suburban areas, the multipolarity of business centers providing flexibility to carve a nice triad of work, residence, and play.

Despite the impression of endless freeways, Houston’s commute times are better than those in metros of comparable populations. One-way commutes were 28.4 minutes in 2014, according to the American Community Survey, making Houston the fourth best out of nine comparable cities.

Houston also does very well on an international scale with respect to traffic congestion, according to TomTom in 2015. The region ranked fifth out of the 38 urban areas that have populations over 5 million.

None of this suggests Houston lacks room for improvement in mobility, but it’s credit to the city’s decision to dramatically increase roadway capacity and arterial streets that it has managed to improve its ranking in traffic congestion while experiencing a huge increase in population. According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, in 1984 and 1985 Houston was ranked with the worst congestion in the country, even worse than Los Angeles. Now Houston is ranked 10th, even as it’s nearly doubled its population, from 3.5 million in the mid-1980s to 6.5 million today. Only Atlanta and Dallas can boast similar mobility improvements.

Multipolarity and Economic Diversity

Most Americans think of Houston as an oil and gas town. And while energy still undergirds much of the city’s economy, Houston boasts many other assets as well: the world’s largest medical center, one of the world’s busiest ports, the third largest manufacturing hub in the country, a booming technology sector and a wide range of small to medium-sized businesses, including a thriving informal sector of immigrant-run businesses. This has led to demand for labor at all skill and education levels, unique among the top ten largest cities.

“Best Online Programs in 2016,” said U.S. News & World Report about the University of Houston. “Top Cities for Competitiveness to Attract Investment in Chemicals & Plastics,” said Conway about Houston in 2015. “Best Hospitals for Adult Cancer – University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center” said U.S. News & World Report in 2015. “Top Blue-Collar Hot Spots,” said Forbes in 2014. “Most Favorable Metro for STEM Workers [Nationally],” said WalletHub in 2015.

Houston is no stranger to “Best Of” lists that today’s mayors scour. But what’s notable is the cross-sector nature of the superlatives. According to a June 2016 report from the Texas Workforce Commission, 20.3 percent of Houston’s workers are in Trade, Transportation and Utilities, 15.5 percent are in Professional and Business Services, 12.8 percent in Government, 12.7 percent in Education and Health Services, 10.2 percent in Leisure and Hospitality, 8 percent in Manufacturing and 7.4 percent in Construction.

The city has learned from its mistakes. The 1980s, which saw a slump in oil prices much greater than that in 2015, bulged in profligate building and overconfidence. According to the Greater Houston Partnership, from 1982 to 1986, developers built more than 100,000 single-family homes, many of them without a signed contract from a purchaser. Even when the region lost more than 200,000 jobs, office developers continued to build, including adding more than 71.7 million square feet of office space while companies were laying off staff and declaring bankruptcy. Today, the office market is tighter, banking is better regulated and better capitalized, and few homes are built without a signed contract. Most importantly, the region is creating jobs that aren’t in energy, including in health care, business and professional services.

Social Openness: A City for Everyone

Houston is deregulated economically, but it’s of greater note that it’s deregulated socially. People come here from many walks of life and culture, and the relative youth of the city combined with its scrappy DNA means that there really isn’t a dominant Establishment, certainly not one that wants to block the efforts of ambitious newcomers.

“If you talk to [old] Houstonians about social mobility,” says Sanford Criner, “they kind of give you this quizzical look. Like, ‘what do you mean?’ Like, ‘Sure, of course.’ It seems obvious.”

This city’s always been a mixer; you just have to be willing to share what wakes you up in the morning. Marlon Hall is an African American filmmaker and native Houstonian who started Folklore Films, a documentary production company created to “tell better stories to our city about our city.” He and fellow filmmaker Danielle Fanfair have featured former Mayor Annise Parker, arts patron Judy Nyquist, internationally recognized musical artist DJ Sun and other community figures. As the Folklore Films crew has gotten better acquainted with Houston residents from across the social spectrum, Marlon locates the vocational “why” as central to the city’s currency.

“Houston isn’t driven by who you know,” he says, “but by how you want to be known. It isn’t about what pedigree you have received, but about the possibilities you want to bring to bear.”

This kind of invitation has attracted the motivated from all over the world, with the city now pulsating with 145 languages. An international city since the day it was founded, now more than one in five Houstonians are foreign-born, with the 2014 American Community Survey reporting that 63.9 percent of the foreign born population were Latin Americans, 25.2 percent were Asian, 5.1 percent were African and 4.6 percent were European. As of the 2010 Census, Greater Houston does not have a majority racial or ethnic group.

People come to Houston seeking opportunity, and because they sense in the visible randomness the potential for surprise ingredients to leaven the traditions they’re bringing with them. This is as true for immigrants as well as domestic migrants, with the city’s celebrated restaurant scene born out of the unexpected merging of flavors from cultures that don’t typically mix. Underbelly’s Chris Shepherd, Bistro Menil’s Greg Martin and Lucille’s Chris Williams all cite Houston’s diversity as a major factor behind the city’s flavorful palate, in both story and succulence.

“This is edible history,” says Chris Williams, the founding chef at Lucille’s, a restaurant that takes a modern approach to Southern classics. “The food that we do here pays homage to my great-grandmother, who was a chef and a pioneer and an American icon.”

It’s not soul food, but Southern. With a rustic European style, and a multi-generational American story at the heart.

“Like all chefs in [my great-grandmother’s] time, your style of food was defined by what was available to you. What you could afford to work with. The flavors that I grew up with…married with the techniques and the flair that I picked up working in Europe for four years. Everywhere from London to Lithuania. …I’m influenced by the simple rustic dishes – the ones about the culture, not the flashy ones. The perfect piece of fish fresh caught, served with good potatoes, great olive oil, fresh garlic, and a little bit of parsley.”

Bistro Menil is another spot that takes a slice from Europe and re-interprets the classic dishes for Houstonians. Its patrons come from Rice University, the Medical Center, the Museum District and beyond, the attraction of the world-renowned Menil Collection standing just across the street. Inspired by the concept of cask wine, which head chef Greg Martin discovered on a trip to Rome, Bistro Menil relies heavily on relationships with cosmopolitan – yet locally centered – Houstonians.

“I don’t want to compete with that dish that you had in Rome,” Martin says, aware of ingredient limits this side of the Atlantic. “I want to reinterpret it with more of a New American approach, with some fresh eyes on our market, using our ingredients. Our ingredients and produce come from everywhere…I work really closely with a local importer. We’ve been working together for 30 years. He brings in our duck legs from Canada, our jamón Serrano from Spain. He brings all of our cheese in from France, Italy and Spain.”

It’s not just the food that shows Houstonians willing to work together across silos and lift up the local talent. “We have a very supportive gallery scene,” says Bill Arning, of the Contemporary Arts Museum. “Even the galleries that show a lot of major international and national artists, like the Texas Gallery and McClain Gallery, will not only show local artists, they’ll place them in the top collections in town. That’s unusual.”

The social egalitarianism combined with a pervasive “show me what you got” curiosity creates something very unique. Hipster cocktail bars seem no more privileged than authentic Vietnamese restaurants than classic barbecue and the iconic Rodeo. The lack of zoning makes thoroughfares like Westheimer Road, which stretches for miles from the city center to the distant suburbs, an avenue of cultural mismatches: The New York Times’-celebrated Underbelly is sandwiched between three tattoo parlors, a Catholic guild clothing store and the latest in coffee-roasted curation. There are so many opportunities to mix with those different from you that only the snobby find themselves bored and excluded. Creative friction – unchaperoned and unprescribed – is Houston’s secret sauce.

“This is a city that does not believe in censorship,” says Arning.

Agile, Active, and Future-Orientated

Houston is not Silicon Valley, but its entrepreneurial DNA is unmistakable, dispersed across many fields. The city emanates a conviction that people should have the freedom to determine their destiny, sometimes to the point of overlooking those that don’t have such clear vision, nor the resources and social networks to make it happen. The city is growth- and future-oriented, embracing change and risk. True to its namesake in Sam Houston – himself a failure before reinventing himself – Houston grants permission to fall hard.

“Houston is the only town where a person with no prior experience in a particular vocation can get joint venture capital for something they’ve never done before,” says local arts patron Judy Nyquist in one of Marlon’s Folklore Films. “Simply by virtue of their commitment to their idea, and how it can make the city better.”

This is true across sectors – for-profit, social service, and philanthropic.

Ella Russell of E-dub-a-licious Treats was an African American single mom working for AT&T when a breakup with her partner caused significant financial hardship. Her two boys, then age 3 and 9, came home from school asking to bring in treats for a holiday party. Russell felt helpless, all disposable income had run dry. But she did find sugar, flour and eggs in her pantry.

“I scraped up change to buy a bag of chocolate chips,” Russell recalls, “so I could make chocolate chip cookies. The kids took them in, and then I brought the leftovers in to work. My coworkers loved them, saying every future potluck would have to have my cookies.”

Three years later, her friends urged Russell to turn the sweetness into a business.

“I had no business experience other than what I knew working in corporate America,” Russell says. “I really winged it; I had no basis but the support of my friends.” In a couple years, she went from serving family and friends to delivering in seven different states.

In the burgeoning scholarship entrepreneurship of the last decade, the work of Saras D. Sarasvathy of the Darden Business School at the University of Virginia stands out. She’s coined a term called “effectual reasoning” to describe the mindsets of master entrepreneurs, one that pairs well with Houston’s soil:

Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don’t start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies. By contrast, [highly successful] corporate executives use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it.

Sarasvathy likes to compare expert entrepreneurs to Iron Chefs: “[They are] at their best when presented with an assortment of motley ingredients and challenged to whip up whatever dish expediency and imagination suggest,” she writes. “Corporate leaders, by contrast, decide they are going to make Swedish meatballs. They then proceed to shop, measure, mix, and cook Swedish meatballs in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible.”

If we could take her comparative study and extrapolate from it particular civic traits, you might see Chicago as the sort of personality for corporate leaders, Houston for the entrepreneurial. The city is rife with improvisers, fueled by a deep prioritization of human relationships, an affection for eccentrics and a perennial optimism that loves to build before over-planning. The fact that there are lots of open spaces to create, and fill, encourages new entrants into any kind of market, be it technological, artistic, or consumption-oriented.

This goes well beyond profit-seeking ventures. The Chronicle of Philanthropy identifies Houston as one of the country’s most generous cities, ranking at #11 for giving as a percentage of adjusted gross income – three stops behind Dallas.

“As [Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston] have each become centers of gushing economic production, and matured as communities, an energetic competition has grown up in their creation of impressive new parks, museums, hospitals, universities, and arts centers,” wrote Ari Schulman in the Fall 2015 issue of Philanthropy Magazine. “Burgeoning circles of local patriots wielding newly minted fortunes have dramatically changed the quality of life in both cities over the past decade or so.”

This enhanced quality of life has involved a deeper renaissance in the arts, a proliferation in family-friendly green spaces, advancements in medical facilities and, increasingly, innovative educational ventures. Houston’s acclaimed Museum of Fine Arts is currently undergoing a $450 million redesign, two-thirds of that already raised with the help of giant gifts from pipeline entrepreneur Richard Kinder and money-manager Fayez Sarofim. Kinder and his wife Nancy have also given $30 million to a public-private partnership aimed at reviving a snaking bayou from a stagnant waterway to an attractive waterfront graced by 20 miles of hike-and-bike trails, canoe launches, playgrounds, art installations, and outdoor performance venues.

“This kind of public-private partnership happens all the time,” says Criner. “In lots of other cities, philanthropic organizations tend to be run by the same group of guys that have been running stuff for a long time, and they treat them like their own turf. You don’t see that here at all. This is way more like, “if you can help, come on! What can you do? We’ll put you to work.”

“We have a tradition of philanthropy that my colleagues in other cities [envy],” agrees Arning, of the Contemporary Arts Museum. “Privileged young people here feel they need to find their philanthropies early on. That is something uniquely Houston.”

Humility and Cultural Accessibility

Long considered the unattractive hothouse of the south, Houston has suffered from a long-running inferiority complex when comparing itself to other cities. Even since rising to the top of dozens of “Best of” lists in the last five years, the residue from generations of modesty remains.

Before Marlon Hall was running Folklore Films, he and Danielle began something called the Eat Gallery, an incubator for budding chefs around the city that sought to turn food trucks into restaurants. In ramping up for this effort, they went around and asked Houstonians questions about where they found meaning, where they felt they fit, where they felt they made a difference. They discovered that people had low city esteem.

“They’d go to a great ballet, and they’d be like, wow, this reminds me of Chicago, Hall recalls. “They’d go to a musical performance and be like, oh, this feels like New York. People were telling the worst stories to the city about the city.

“So we said, what if we told better stories to Houstonians about Houstonians, featuring people that folks know and celebrate? But what if we began their stories with their brokenness, so that people would know that there’s something inherently broken about every beautiful person? So that’s what we did, that’s why we started Folklore Films. To raise the city esteem.”

Folklore discovered that Houston is a city of new beginnings. When you move here, the past intrigues less than how you intend to exploit the future. Whether you’re an immigrant from overseas or a fellow American that’s left some entrenched failure behind, Houston pulses with a forward-looking frankness grounded in a humility shaped by whatever came before. This drive paired with an individual and corporate self-awareness defines the city’s character – culturally, spiritually and even economically.

“There’s this at-homeness that people from Houston have,” Hall says. “When I think about people who have left Houston to do other things, like Beyonce, there’s this comfort to be who one is. She walks around with hot sauce in her purse – I mean, who else can say that from where else?”

“There’s something about Houston that’s like…I’m not afraid to be who I am, even if it’s full of seeming contradictions.”

“The collective body in Houston is significantly more adventurous than most cities,” Arning of the Contemporary Arts Museum says. “Both in use and collection. In most collection cities, you hear who supported or recommended the collection before going. Houstonians, because of their wildcat nature, [will try anything] they like.”

Houston’s increasing diversity keeps the city vibrant and ever ready to accept change and innovation. There is no room for insularity because there is no homogeneity. Your ideas are constantly being chiseled and countered by the Other. No one has the luxury of feeling superior because everyone’s in a gem tumbler with folks not like them. It makes the city competitive, but not in a way that produces monopolies.

“I think that Houston has come to this place where it’s a ‘My Space,’” says Marlon. People want to take ownership of their lives and creations here. “There’s a desire to own who you are in Houston, which is different from owning a business, a house a car.”

Houston residents tend to be proud of their individual accomplishments, and feel an affection toward the place that allowed those accomplishments to happen. But there’s a recognition that success is the result of many different pieces coming together, usually organically and iteratively. The environment invites people to fulfill their individual destiny, and almost discourages any person or governing body to take credit for Houston’s successes as a whole.

“I hesitate to say things like ‘I’m proud of Houston,’” Sanford Criner says. “What gives you the right to take pride in a place? Did you build it? Did you do it?”

Challenges to Sustaining Opportunity

Houston continues to beat the odds to this day. And while its adventurous impulse is what continues to draw people to Houston and make it the emblem opportunity city for 21st century dynamics and demographics, it must still be said that what you put into the world must survive. Houston is a much better place to live than it was 30 years ago. But will it continue on this trajectory, or even sustain the fruits of its triumphs?

Houstonians recognize there needs to be a concerted effort to reform and improve Houston’s educational opportunities, its transportation and traffic infrastructure, and a more general care to respect tradition and an intensive effort toward more inclusive mobility. The city’s grown so big, so fast, it could inevitably buckle under its own weight.

“We are not on track to make headway on a lot of the issues that are facing us,” says James Llamas, of Traffic Engineers, Inc. “We’re growing way faster than we’re adding transportation capacity or options, at the same time there does seem to be recognition that we need to do something and what we’ve been doing isn’t going to continue to work.”

Despite precedent, massive infrastructure may not be the answer, especially given the shifting preferences of a younger population and the costs of maintenance. New mayor Sylvester Turner is considering expanding to two HOV lanes and providing express bus service. Others advocate for densification of the more traditional gridded neighborhoods that are far from holding their population capacity – but without adding infrastructure, and without pushing anyone out.

And then there’s the perennial education challenges.

“We are now in a different economy where education is critical,” says Stephen Klineberg, founding director of the Kinder Institute. “It never used to be critical, especially not in Texas. You made money by land – by exploiting all the natural resources you needed on the land. The great cattle, timber, oil. The source of wealth in the 21st century Houston, is knowledge. …If you don’t have education beyond high school, with the technical skills that allow you to get the jobs of the 21st century, and compete, you’re not going to make it. Texas hasn’t come fully to grips with it.”

Conclusion

In the last 20 years, Houston has cultivated a series of signaling mechanisms that continue to draw people into its orbit. It’s a welcoming city, supported by affordability and diversity. Majority opinion says “anything is possible if you’re willing to work hard,” a conviction increasingly on the decline in the rest of the country. And, crucially, it’s cultivated the conditions necessary for entrepreneurs to have a field day. “The assortment of motley ingredients” noted by innovation scholar Sarasvathy describes Houston in a nutshell, and the regulatory instinct has been to stay light, allowing imported imaginations to run experiments without interference.

The city’s not beautiful upon first blush, nor does it offer the charm of pedestrian fancy that denser cities boast. But in an era of civic unrest, with many up and down the social spectrum feeling disconnected and robbed of agency, Houstonians can still shape their destiny. The city’s the clay; residents the potters. The wide range of home sizes and work-life arrangements makes Houston like the cowboy boot its Rodeo celebrates – adaptable to the needs of each life stage as residents progress through singleness, marriage, family and retirement. Residents are not trapped by the regulatory, financial or even social limits that other cities increasingly impose. The mindset is one of abundance, not scarcity.

“This is the genius of this place,” wrote Cort McMurray in the Houston Chronicle in January of 2016, in a profile of an Iraqi refugee who had come to Houston with a B.S. in Chemistry, currently cleaning pools. “Houston will always be shambolic and stretched and not quite finished. We will never be the most beautiful city, or the most pedestrian-friendly city, or the most efficiently planned city: The heat and soul-sapping humidity, our adolescent fascination with cars and speed and shiny things, our perpetual craving for something new, all conspire against our best civic aspirations. Houston is a place to start over, and we do starting over better than any other city on the planet.”

In an age of heightened political frustration, a sclerotic economy and shifting structural tectonics, it could be that the “starting over” ethos that Houston embodies is precisely what the country itself needs, and what other cities should seek to foster in their own policies and cultural climates. Innovation, reinvention and reinterpretation, after all, lie at the heart of the American genius.

Anne Snyder is a Fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, a Houston-based think tank that explores how cities can drive opportunity and social mobility for the bulk of their citizens. She is also the Director of The Character Initiative at The Philanthropy Roundtable, a pilot program that seeks to help foundations and wealth creators around the country advance character formation through their giving. She previously worked at The New York Times in Washington, as well as World Affairs Journal and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Georgetown University and a B.A. in philosophy and international relations from Wheaton College (IL), and has published in The Atlantic Monthly, National Journal, The Washington Post, City Journal and elsewhere.

Top photo: Photo by Chris Doelle, Licensed under CC License.

The Texas Urban Model

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:38:22 -0500

This essay is part of a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism titled "The Texas Way of Urbanism". Download the entire report here.

The future of American cities can be summed up in five letters: Texas. The metropolitan areas of the Lone Star state are developing rapidly. These cities are offering residents a broad array of choices — from high density communities to those where the population is spread out — and a wealth of opportunities.

Historically, Texas was heavily dependent on commodities such as oil, cotton, and cattle, with its cities largely disdained by observers. John Gunther, writing in 1946, described Houston as having “…a residential section mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches.” The only reasons to live in Houston, he claimed, were economic ones; it was a city “…where few people think about anything but money.” He also predicted that the area would have a million people by now. Actually, the metropolitan area today is well on the way to seven million.

It would no doubt shock Gunther to learn that Texas now boasts some of the most dynamic urban areas in the high income world. Approximately 80 percent of all population growth since 2000 in the Lone Star state has been in the four largest metropolitan areas. People may wear cowboy boots, drive pickups and attend the big rodeo in Houston, but they are first and foremost part of a great urban experiment.

The notion of Texas as an urban model still rankles many of those who think of themselves as urbanists. Most urbanists, when thinking of cities of the future, keep an eye on the past, identifying with the already great cities that follow the traditional transit dependent and dense urban form: New York, London, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo. And yet, within these five urban areas, there are large, evolving, dynamic sections that are automobile oriented and have lower density.

Measuring Employment Success

Since 2000, Dallas and Houston have increased jobs by 31 percent, growing at three times the rate of increase in New York and five times as rapidly as Los Angeles. Texas’ smaller but up-and-coming metropolitan regions are also thriving, with San Antonio and Austin, for example, boasting some of the most rapid job growth in the country.

This growth is not all at the low end of the job market, as some suggest. Over the past fifteen years Texas cities have generally experienced faster STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math-related) job growth than their more celebrated rivals. Austin and San Antonio have grown their STEM related jobs even more quickly than the San Francisco Bay Area has grown theirs, while both Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth have increased STEM employment far more rapidly than New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

The Texas cities also have enjoyed faster growth in middle class jobs, those paying between 80 percent and 200 percent of the median wage at the national level. Since 2001, these jobs have grown 39 percent in Austin, 26 percent in Houston, and 21 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth, a much more rapid clip than experienced in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles, while Chicago has actually seen these kinds of job decrease.

Recent Pew Research Center data illustrates that between 2000 and 2014, out of the 53 metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1,000,000, San Antonio had the second largest gain in percentage of combined middle-income and upper-income households; the percentage of households in the lower-income segment dropped. Houston ranked 6th and Austin ranked 13th, while Dallas-Fort Worth placed 25th, still in the top half.

Much of the credit for this growth in jobs goes to the state’s reputation for business friendliness. Texas is consistently ranked by business executives as the first or second leading state. Needless to say, New York, California and Illinois do not fare nearly as well. The Texas tax burden ranks 41st in the country. Compare this to New York, which has the highest total state tax burden, Texas rates are also far lower than those in New York, neighbors Connecticut and New Jersey, or in California.

The Demographic Equation

No surprise, then, that people are flocking to the Texas cities. Over the last ten years, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Houston have emerged as the fastest growing big cities of more than five million people in the high-income world, growing more than three times faster in population than New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Boston. Among the 53 US major metropolitan areas, four of the top seven fastest growing from 2010 to 2015 were in Texas.

Foreign immigration, a key indicator of economic opportunity, is now growing much faster in Texas’ cities than in those of its more established rivals. Between 2000 and 2014 alone, Texas absorbed more than 1.6 million foreign born citizens. In numbers, that’s slightly less than California took in, but in proportion to Texas’ population it is 60 percent more.

During that same time period the Latino population of Austin grew by 90 percent; Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston each grew by about 75 percent. In contrast, the Latino population in Los Angeles grew only 17 percent.

Houston now has a far higher percentage of foreign born residents than Chicago does. Dallas-Ft. Worth draws even with Chicago in that measurement, with an immigrant population that has grown three times as fast as that of the Windy City since 2000.

Economic opportunity explains much of the difference. Texas’ vibrant industrial and construction culture has provided many opportunities for Latino business owners. In a recent measurement of best cities for Latino entrepreneurs, Texas accounted for more than one third of the top 50 cities out of 150. In another measurement, San Antonio and Houston boasted far larger shares of Latino-owned businesses than Los Angeles, which also has a strong Latino presence.

Texas is not a totally successful environment for minorities. Poverty levels for blacks and Hispanics remain high, and education levels lag in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio. But the key factor is that Texas cities present superior prospects for upward mobility.

Domestic Migration Trends

Since 2000, Dallas-Ft. Worth has gained 570,000 net domestic migrants, and Houston has netted 500,000. In contrast, the New York area has had a net loss of over 2.6 million people, while Los Angeles hemorrhaged a net 1.6 million, and Chicago nearly 900,000. Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio were all among the top eleven in total net domestic migration gains. The smaller Texas cities have also experienced large gains in migrants.

Many newcomers come from places — notably, California — where many Texans once migrated. Between 2001 and 2013, more than 145,000 people (net) have moved from greater Los Angeles to the Texas cities, while about 80,000 have come from Chicago and 90,000 from New York.

As Dallas Morning News columnist Mitchell Schnurman says, “If oil prices don’t go up, Texas can always count on California — and New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey.”

Creating the Next Generation of Urbanites

Texas urban growth has occurred more or less in conjunction with market demand, without the strict controls and grandiose ‘visions’ that dominate planning in New York and California. Overall housing prices in Texas cities remain, on average, one-half or less than those in coastal California cities such as San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Los Angeles. They are a third below those in New York, and have not experienced the huge spikes in housing inflation seen elsewhere in the Northeast Corridor, such as in Boston.

The lower house prices in Texas facilitate greater aspirations to home ownership, particularly among young people. The financial leap from renting to owning is far less daunting in Texas than it is the Northeast, or in some western US cities.

These lower prices have been a boon to ethnic minorities, who make up an ever-growing percentage of the population in cities nationwide. Latinos and African-Americans are far more likely to be home owners in Texas cities than in New York, Los Angeles, Boston or San Francisco.

A review of US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis data indicates that housing costs are responsible for virtually all of the cost-of-living differences between the nation’s approximately 380 metropolitan areas. Consequently, it is far cheaper to live in Texas cities — even Austin — than in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago and, most of all, the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas.

Some observers lament that, due to market forces, the vast majority of Texas metropolitan growth — nearly 100 percent — has taken place in the suburbs and exurbs. Yet the Texas cities mirror nationwide experiences: there is essentially no difference between the share of metropolitan development in the Texas suburbs and the share in most other areas. The average share for all major metropolitan areas is 99.8 percent, including in Portland, Oregon, the much ballyhooed model for densification.

Ironically, dense housing development has grown more rapidly in Texas cities than it has in California, where the state has tried to mandate dense development. Building permit rates indicate that Texas cities have led the nation in both low density single family housing and in high density multifamily development. Between 2010 and 2015, Texas’ largest cities held three of the top five positions among the 53 major metropolitan areas in the issuance of multifamily building permits. Austin led the nation in these permits, while Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth had higher multifamily building permit rates than San Jose, Denver, Portland, Washington, or Los Angeles. At the same time, these three Texas cities also were in the top 10 in single-family building permits. Who occupies these new residences? Between 2010 and 2014 Texas cities, led by Austin and San Antonio, experienced higher rates of growth among college educated 25 to 34 year olds than did traditional ‘brain centers’ like New York, Boston, Chicago and even San Francisco. During the tech boom of the late 1990s, more people moved from Texas to the Bay Area than vice versa; in the current one, the pattern is reversed. A recent San Jose Mercury poll found that one-third of all Bay Area residents hope to leave the area, primarily citing high housing costs and overall cost of living.

As young people mature, Texas’ major urban areas provide them with an array of choices. Texas city-dwellers, unlike many New Yorkers or San Franciscans, do not need to choose between living a middle class family lifestyle or staying in a city they love. Texas housing policies that allow organic growth driven by the market are attractive to young people seeking to establish careers or families, and to those who are already newly-established.

These trends will have a long-term demographic impact, and suggest a continuing Texan ascendency. According to the American Community Survey’s ranking of elementary-age school children per family, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio rank in the top six among the 53 major metropolitan areas. By comparison, Chicago ranks twenty-second, Los Angeles twenty-seventh, New York thirty-sixth, and San Francisco 45th.

The Lone Star State is already home to two of the nation’s five largest metropolitan areas, the first time in history that any state has so dominated the nation’s large urban centers. At its current rate of growth, Dallas-Ft.Worth, could surpass Chicago in the 2040s, as would Houston a decade later. By 2050 the Lone Star state could dominate America’s big urban centers even more than it does now.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

“Welcome To Texas” flickr photo by David Herrera is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The Emergence of Texas Urbanism; The Triangle Takes Off

Henry Cisneros — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:38:22 -0500

This essay is part of a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism titled "The Texas Way of Urbanism". Download the entire report here.

Throughout the history of the United States, much of the nation’s economic vitality can be traced to specific regions and their mastery of the productive sectors which propelled the country forward. Today we see this most evident in the remarkable emergence of the “Texas Triangle” encompassing Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Austin-San Antonio.

The role of metropolitan regions reflects a steady theme of shifting economic power throughout American urban history. The early stages of commercial growth and then the first wave of industrial innovation established the economic strength of the New York-Connecticut-Massachusetts region; the global roles of New York City and Boston owe much to this early start, in part due to the talent networks and capital that clustered in these cities.

Heavy industry, the next phase of industrial growth --- autos, steel, and appliances --- blossomed in the early Twentieth Century, transforming metros from Cleveland to Chicago into global economic powers. These areas provided the country much of the wherewithal to win the Second World War. Over the last 75 years, technology breakthroughs and Asia-Pacific trade relationships have steadily accelerated the importance of the extended West Coast region from Seattle to San Diego.

More recent has been the rise of other regions, many which were once backwaters. This includes Miami, with its strong ties to the Caribbean and South America; the Southern belt of cities reaching in an arc from Charlotte and Raleigh to Atlanta and Nashville. Then there’s the rising Intermountain West, centered largely in the metros of Denver, Salt Lake City and Phoenix.

But no place has seen more dramatic and steady economic and demographic growth than the Texas Triangle, formed by the Dallas-Fort Worth metro at its northern point in North Texas; the Houston metro at its southeastern edge on the Gulf Coast; and Austin-San Antonio at its western tip in Central Texas.

The growth of these areas has transformed Texas from a largely agricultural and commodities-producing state into a highly urbanized and economically sophisticated place. Together the metropolitan areas of the Texas Triangle have a population of more than 18 million residents. The Texas Triangle metros together account for more than 66% of the population of Texas and 77% of the GDP of the nation’s second largest state.

This emergence is now globally acknowledged. In terms of economic strength, each of the Texas Triangle metros ranked among the top six strongest urban areas in the nation in a post-recession analysis by the Praxis group and their economic output together would position the Texas Triangle as the fifth strongest regional economy in the U.S. in a framework created by metropolitan scholar Richard Florida. The fact that these measurements use a variety of factors suggests the powerful and pervasive nature of the Texas urban ascendency.

One way to look at the importance of the Texas Triangle is to examine the vital and often quite unique economic contributions which each metropolitan area contributes to the nation’s well-being.

• Houston is the acknowledged energy capital of the world with its complex of energy headquarters, financing institutions, research centers, and petroleum processing and transportation facilities. Its medical center houses more clinical institutions and life sciences research facilities than any other medical complex in the world.

• Dallas-Fort Worth is an established financial center, telecommunications pioneer, and its two airports are the hubs of flights connecting the Southwestern U.S. to the nation and to the world. It has become a favored location for corporate expansions and relocations for both domestic and foreign companies.

• Austin and San Antonio are connected by 75 miles of continuous urbanization, including the vital region around San Marcos and a string of the fastest growing small cities in the nation. Austin is home to world-class companies, particularly in technology, the University of Texas, and also is home to the government of the nation’s second largest state. San Antonio is home to the nation’s second largest concentration of cybersecurity companies, to three major Armed Forces commands, to an international automotive manufacturing hub centered on Toyota, and to the most visited destinations in the state, the Alamo and the Riverwalk.

Although not as established as a global center as the metropolitan networks on the East and West coasts, the Texas Triangle now occupies an increasingly important place among the world’s commercial centers. There are now 53 Fortune 500 firms headquartered in the Triangle metros, including American Airlines, AT&T, and Exxon Mobil in Dallas-Fort Worth; USAA and Valero, and Whole Foods in San Antonio and Austin; and Conoco-Phillips and Halliburton in Houston. Global headquarters, such as Occidental Petroleum, and national operational headquarters, such as those of Toyota USA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, underscore that the global role of the Texas Triangle is ascendant.

The Texas Triangle is also home to a concentration of high-quality higher education. Nationally-ranked research institutions such as the University of Texas at Austin and Rice University in Houston are joined by such major public institutions as the University of Houston; the University of Texas campuses at San Antonio, Dallas, and Arlington; and the Texas A&M campus in San Antonio. Excellent private institutions include Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and Trinity University and Incarnate Word University in San Antonio. Within the geographic expense of the Texas Triangle are such powerhouses as Texas A&M University in College Station and Baylor University in Waco.

The Texas Triangle is connected to the commercial centers of the globe through its impressive transportation assets. The Port of Houston is the second largest port by volume of tonnage in the U.S. The state boosts major airline hubs for American Airlines at DFW Airport, for United Airlines at George Bush Houston International, and for Southwest Airlines at Love Field in Dallas, as well as extensive international airline connections from Austin and San Antonio. Major cargo volumes flow on the state’s highway grid, most notably on the NAFTA Highway, IH-35, which delineates the western spine of the Texas Triangle and expedites the greatest volume of international freight from any inland port to markets across the nation.

This economic ascendency owes much to pro – business Texas policies, largely embraced by both major political parties, that stress job creation and wage growth as the best strategies for continued and broadened prosperity. Investments in roads, water, power, broadband, ports and essential public facilities, such as higher education campuses, remain priorities in state and municipal budgets.

But what really makes the Triangle grow is its people, animated by the spirit of new opportunity luring work-ready in-migrants from other states and ambitious immigrants from around the world. Texas attracts investors, entrepreneurs, researchers, inventors, and workers who recognize a state committed to reducing barriers to economic success and to creating the financial, educational, and physical conditions for growth and upward mobility.

That combination of the policy regime, the physical facilities, and the human energies has created an economic juggernaut now claiming its place among the great commercial networks of the world. The nation can look to the Texas Triangle for future breakthroughs in innovative products and creative services. But beyond that the world can look to the Texas Triangle for examples of cities that combine a passion for growth with a determination to improve the lives of people.

Henry Cisneros is Chairman of City View companies, which have invested in and built more than 90 urban residential projects since 2000 in 13 states. Mr. Cisneros is also Chairman of the Executive Committee of Siebert Cisneros Shank, one of the nation’s most successful minority-owned public finance and capital markets firms, having participated in more than $2.5 trillion in municipal and public authority issuances and corporate transactions. Mr. Cisneros was Mayor of San Antonio for four terms and was Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in President Clinton’s Cabinet from 1993-97. He is a corporate board member of Univision Communications and La Quinta Holdings and is Vice Chairman of Habitat for Humanity International and a board member of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington D.C.

Photo: NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Urbanism, Texas-Style

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 01:38:09 -0400

Cities, noted René Descartes, should provide “an inventory of the possible,” a transformative experience—and a better life—for those who migrate to them. This was certainly true of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, about which the French philosopher was speaking. And it’s increasingly true of Texas’s fast-growing metropolises—Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio. In the last decade, these booming cities have created jobs and attracted new residents—especially young families and immigrants—at rates unmatched by coastal metropolitan areas. Approximately 80 percent of all population growth in the Lone Star State has been in the four large metropolitan areas since 2000. Texas now boasts two of the nation’s five largest metros, the first time any state has enjoyed that distinction. At its current rate of growth, Houston could replace Chicago as the nation’s third-largest city by 2030, and the Dallas–Fort Worth region could surpass Chicagoland as the nation’s third-largest metropolitan area by the 2040s.

Historically, those who think and write about urban living have regarded Texas cities with disdain. The midcentury journalist John Gunther dismissed Houston, now the state’s largest city, as a place “where few people think about anything but money.” Gunther predicted that the area’s population would eventually grow to a measly 1 million people. He was off by a bit: close to 7 million people now call the Houston metropolitan area home. Houston and the other flourishing Texas metros are neither downtown-focused like New York nor highly regulated and densely packed like Los Angeles. They aren’t disproportionately brain-intensive or tech-oriented; and they aren’t dominated by green politics and, generally speaking, strict planning. Though booming, they have kept living costs down. In all this, they differ from San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Boston—places that may continue to thrive in the future but that show little interest in creating the economic opportunity and affordability that attracts aspirational middle- and working-class families. In short, Texas’s cities are reshaping urbanism in America, albeit in ways few scholars or planners seem to appreciate.

Though some east/west coastal cities—notably, San Francisco—have enjoyed vigorous growth of late, none has been nearly as proficient in creating jobs in the new millennium as Texas’s four leading metros. Overall, Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston have emerged as the nation’s fastest-expanding big-city economies. Between 2000 and 2015, Dallas–Fort Worth boosted its net job numbers by 22.7 percent, and Houston expanded them by an even better 31.2 percent. Smaller Austin (38.2 percent job-base increase) and once-sleepy San Antonio (31.4 percent) have done just as well. New York, by way of comparison, increased its number of jobs in those years by just 10 percent, Los Angeles by 6.5 percent, and San Francisco by 5.2 percent, while Chicago actually lost net employment. And the Texas jobs are not just low-wage employment. Middle-class positions—those paying between 80 percent and 200 percent of the national median wage—have expanded 39 percent in Austin, 26 percent in Houston, and 21 percent in Dallas since 2001. These percentages far outpace the rate of middle-class job creation in San Francisco (6 percent), New York and Los Angeles (little progress), and Chicago (down 3 percent) over the same period.

The energy industry can take some credit for Texas’s impressive numbers, but only some. In fact, despite assertions that dense coastal cities are the natural incubators of innovative tech firms, an analysis of the last decade and a half shows that Texas’s sprawling metropoles are growing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs more rapidly than the Bay Area—and far faster than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Since 2001, STEM employment in Austin is up 35 percent, while Houston has increased these desirable positions by 22 percent and Dallas by 17 percent. STEM jobs have increased 6 percent in San Jose and 2 percent in New York over this same period. L.A. has seen no STEM growth; Chicago has lost 3 percent of such positions.

Recent Pew Research Center data give further evidence of the Texas urban boom. Among 52 American metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents, San Antonio had the largest gain in its share of middle- and upper-income households—that is, the percentage of households in the lower-income category in the city actually dropped—from 2000 to 2014. Houston ranked sixth, Austin 13th, and Dallas–Fort Worth 25th in the Pew survey. The performance is even more impressive, given Texas’s absorption of 1.6 million foreign-born residents since 2000, a 60 percent larger intake than California’s, proportionate to the two states’ populations.

All this dynamism reflects Texas urbanism’s remarkable culture of opportunity. These are business-friendly cities. According to Site Selection magazine, executives consistently rank Texas as the best or second-best locale to do business in the United States. Taxes are among the lowest in the country. (New York has the heaviest tax burden; California isn’t far behind and seems determined to catch up.) Regulations are light. Coastal urban areas often impose draconian climate-change rules or favor high density, thus discouraging industries like manufacturing, logistics, and home construction—all thriving under Texas urbanism’s market-friendly reign.

“The consensus in San Antonio,” observes former mayor and longtime Democrat Henry Cisneros, “is all about jobs. Everything is driven by that.” One can say the same about the other big Texas metros. The jobs focus can be seen in the many corporate relocations and expansions in Texas, which are often large-scale, employing many middle managers—unlike highly publicized relocations of “executive headquarters” in cities such as Chicago, which frequently employ, at most, several hundred people. The recent movement of Occidental Petroleum from Los Angeles to Houston as well as transfers of jobs from Chevron—still headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, at least for now—alone represented some 2,000 jobs.

A key part of this opportunity culture rests on housing affordability. Property inflation plagues east/west coastal cities, largely because of restrictive planning policies that slow development, making the cost of living exorbitant. Texas cities are instead pro-development—“self-organizing,” in the words of Rice University’s Lars Lerup—and, as they happily expand their peripheries, they encourage a healthy supply of housing at all income levels. The inexpensive housing, a major draw for those relocating firms, has helped shift a long-standing migration pattern of jobs and people. In the last tech boom, more people moved from Texas to the Bay Area; in this one, it’s the other way around. Last year, at least three dozen companies either expanded away from or moved out of Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo Counties—ten of them to Texas, according to a recent report by Spectrum Location Solutions, an Irvine business-consulting firm that tracks corporate “divestment” from California. When Toyota recently moved its headquarters from Los Angeles County to the Dallas area, for example, executives said that the L.A. area’s rising housing prices—roughly three times what they are in Dallas–Fort Worth, adjusted for income—had much to do with it.

Dallas–Fort Worth might be the big metro that benefits most from this movement. The typical corporate expansions in the Dallas area—not just Toyota but also State Farm, Liberty Mutual, and Amazon—have included headquarters and back-office centers in the area’s northern suburbs, creating thousands of jobs. As Southern Methodist University scholars Klaus Desmet and Cullum Clark found in a soon-to-be-published study, jobs are shifting from Chicago and surrounding areas to Dallas–Fort Worth in such numbers that the Texas city is increasingly poised to replace the Windy City as the business center of the mid-U.S.

People are coming in droves. “Gone to Texas” or “GTT”: the phrase became famous during the nineteenth century as Americans fleeing debts (especially after the Panic of 1837) headed to the Lone Star State to escape impoverishment or even prison. Texas also attracted the ambitious, the desperate, and, in some cases, the downright dishonest. The phrase may become popular again. Over the last decade and a half, Texas’s four major cities ranked among the nation’s ten fastest-growing large metropolitan areas. Since 2000, Dallas–Fort Worth has boosted its population by 33.6 percent; Houston did even better, expanding 38 percent. Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, by comparison, grew less than 10 percent over that period. Last year, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth each gained more people than New York or L.A.

The domestic migration numbers are truly striking. Over the past 15 years, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth have gained an estimated 1 million domestic migrants, even as New York lost more than 2.4 million net migrants, L.A. bled 1.5 million, and Chicago 800,000. As a percentage of the population, the Texas cities averaged a 1 percent net migration gain annually; Chicago, L.A., New York, and San Francisco have seen strong net losses annually. San Antonio and Austin have also been gaining migrants at a rapid rate. In fact, Austin has attracted more newcomers as a percentage of its population than any major metropolitan area in the country since 2000. Texas Monthly calls it “the city of the eternal boom.”

Many of the new Texas urbanites are arriving from places—above all, California—to which Texans had once migrated. Between 2001 and 2013, more than 145,000 people, net, have moved from the greater Los Angeles area to Texas cities, while more than 90,000 have come from New York and nearly 80,000 from Chicago. The newcomers are better educated than the average Texan, and they elevate the quality of the workforce, observes Dallas Morning News columnist Mitchell Schnurman. “If oil prices don’t go up, Texas can always count on California—and New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey.”

The domestic migrants’ numbers include many blue-collar workers seeking a better future, so the migrants’ average education level falls slightly below that of people moving, say, to Boston or San Francisco. But the Texas metropoles are increasingly attractive to the young, educated workers who often flock to those coastal cities. According to a recent Cleveland Foundation study, three of the four major Texas cities ranked among the top-ten regions nationally in the growth in educated residents aged 25 to 34. The migrants’ imprint is evident in the expanding urban amenities of Texas cities, including a vibrant restaurant scene and innovation in the arts.

Affordability is a major draw for these younger newcomers. The ten regions losing the most millennials last year, according to Trulia, include Chicago, New York, Washington, and the area along California’s coast—all much pricier than the Lone Star State. More than 30 percent of millennials still live at home in Los Angeles and New York City, according to Zillow data, more than one-third higher than the rate in Dallas and Houston.

Texas is also drawing massive migration from overseas. Like the young migrants crowding the clubs and hip eateries of the Texas boomtowns, the foreign-born are, in their own ways, transforming the economy and culture of the state. Asian immigrants, barely present before 2000, have been the fastest-growing group. Over the last decade, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth had a larger increase in their Asian populations (including Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese, and Koreans) than all but three American cities—New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Houston now has the fifth-largest Asian population among the nation’s major metropolitan areas.

Much of this growth isn’t taking place in traditional “Chinatowns” or even in core cities but instead in the less expensive suburban and even exurban areas. More than 95 percent of the expansion of Dallas–Fort Worth’s Asian population and 85 percent of Houston’s, for instance, has occurred in the suburbs. A Rice University study found Fort Bend County, southwest of Houston, the most ethnically diverse county in the nation: 36 percent white, 24 percent Latino, and more than one-fifth black, Asian, or other ethnicity. The county is home to one of the largest Hindu temples in America.

In fast-growing Cinco Ranch, a suburb built on an expanse of Texas prairie 31 miles west of Houston, one in five residents is foreign-born, well above the Texas average. “We have lived in other places since we came to America ten years ago,” says Indian immigrant Pria Kothari, who moved to Cinco with her husband and two children in 2013. “We lived in apartments elsewhere in big cities, but here we found a place where we could put our roots down. It has a community feel. You walk around and see all the families. There’s room for bikes—that’s great for the kids.”

Over the last two decades, Texas’s big cities have also received a huge infusion of immigrants from Latin America. Between 2000 and 2014, the Latino population of Dallas–Fort Worth grew 39 percent, while Houston’s expanded 42 percent, Austin’s 60 percent, and San Antonio’s 39 percent. Texas’s population is already nearly 40 percent Latino, a percentage likely to increase in the years ahead.

Much of this rapid demographic shift stems from, again, Texas’s opportunity urbanism. Though many of the newcomers—along with “Tejanos,” native Texas Latinos—are poor and often not well educated, they’re much better off economically than their counterparts in New York, Los Angeles, or Miami. Texas’s vibrant industrial and construction sectors, in particular, have provided abundant jobs for Latinos. In 2015, unemployment among Texas’s Hispanic population reached just 4.9 percent, the lowest for Latinos in the country—California’s rate tops 7 percent—and below the national average of 5.3 percent.

Texas Latinos show an entrepreneurial streak. In a recent survey of the 150 best cities for Latino business owners, Texas accounted for 17 of the top 50 locations; Boston, New York, L.A., and San Francisco were all in the bottom third of the ranking. In a census measurement, San Antonio and Houston boasted far larger shares of Latino-owned firms than did heavily Hispanic L.A.

In Texas, Hispanics are becoming homeowners, a traditional means of entering the middle class. In New York, barely a quarter of Latino households own their own homes, while in Los Angeles, 38 percent do. In Houston, by contrast, 52 percent of Hispanic households own homes, and in San Antonio, it’s 57 percent—matching the Latino homeownership rate for Texas as a whole. That’s well above the 46 percent national rate for Hispanics—and above the rate for allCalifornia households. (The same encouraging pattern exists for Texas’s African-Americans.)

California and Texas, the nation’s most populous states, are often compared. Both have large Latino populations, for instance, but make no mistake: Texas’s, especially in large urban areas, is doing much better, and not just economically. Texas public schools could certainly be improved, but according to the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress—a high-quality assessment—Texas fourth- and eighth-graders scored equal to or better than California kids, including Hispanics, in math and reading. In Texas, the educational gap between Hispanics and white non-Hispanics was equal to or lower than it was in California in all cases.

Though California, with 12 percent of the American population, has more than 35 percent of the nation’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare caseload—with Latinos constituting nearly half the adult rolls in the state—Texas, with under 9 percent of the country’s population, has less than 1 percent of the national welfare caseload. Further, according to the 2014 American Community Survey, Texas Hispanics had a significantly lower rate of out-of-wedlock births and a higher marriage rate than California Hispanics.

In California, Latino politics increasingly revolves around ethnic identity and lobbying for government subsidies and benefits. In Texas, the goal is upward mobility through work. “There is more of an accommodationist spirit here,” says Rodrigo Saenz, an expert on Latino demographics and politics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where the student body is 50 percent Hispanic. It’s obvious which model best encourages economic opportunity.

Texas urbanism is also producing the next generation of urbanites. Increasingly, the dense urban cores of America’s favored cities—New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and so on—are becoming child-free, or child-scarce, zones. (See “The Childless City,” Summer 2013.) The trend is powerfully visible in San Francisco, a city with reportedly 80,000 more dogs than kids.

In Texas cities, the situation is strikingly different. According to American Community Survey data, the four big Texas cities all rank above the national average and in the top 15 of the 50 major American metropolitan areas in children per household. Houston ranks third, Dallas–Fort Worth fourth, San Antonio fifth, and Austin sixth. New York is 31st and San Francisco 45th. Like cities throughout history—think of the Chicago described in Saul Bellow’sAdventures of Augie March—Texas cities appeal to people at every stage of their lives, not just when they’re young and unencumbered.

By allowing the market to work, these expanding urban areas offer vibrant inner cities, where young singles and couples can congregate, as well as affordable nearby neighborhoods for families and the middle-aged and elderly. A Texas urbanite doesn’t have to contemplate the choice of staying in the city that he or she loves or having a family. How many San Franciscans or New Yorkers can say the same?

In part because of their rapid growth, Texas’s cities face numerous challenges. One is worn-out infrastructure, as seen in recent Houston flooding. Poverty levels for Hispanics and blacks are still high in the Texas boomtowns. Urban schools in Texas require major redress. Municipal debt, particularly in the core cities, is mounting.

The biggest threat, however, is that Texans will decide—particularly as more residents arrive from the liberal coastal cities—to abandon the culture of opportunity behind their cities’ remarkable success. Market-oriented zoning policies and pro-business regulatory and tax environments are part of what has made Texas’s urban areas private-sector dynamos and magnets for the aspirational. If Texas stays true to what has made it great, Lone Star cities will continue to shine as the new exemplars of American urbanism.

This piece is part of The City Journal's special Texas issue. Check it out here.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Dallas photo by Bigstock.

Lone Star Quartet

Aaron M. Renn — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 01:38:47 -0400

Texas’s spectacular growth is largely a story of its cities—especially of Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. These Big Four metropolitan areas, arranged in a layout known as the “Texas Triangle,” contain two-thirds of the state’s population and an even higher share of its jobs. Nationally, the four metros, which combined make up less than 6 percent of the American population, posted job growth equivalent to 30 percent of the United States’ total since the financial crash in 2007. Within Texas, they’ve accounted for almost 80 percent of the state’s population growth since 2000 and over 75 percent of its job growth. Meantime, a third of Texas counties, mostly rural, have actually been losing population.

Texas is sometimes described as the new California, an apt parallel in terms of the states’ respective urban geographies. Neither state is dominated by a single large city; each has four urban areas of more than 1 million people, with two of these among the largest regions in the United States. In both states, these major regions are demographically and economically distinct.

But unlike California, whose cities have refocused on elite priorities at the expense of middle-class occupations, Texas offers a complete spectrum of economic activities in its metros. Another key difference is that Texas cities have mostly embraced pro-development policies that have kept them affordable by allowing housing supply to expand with population, while California’s housing prices blasted into the stratosphere due to severe development restrictions. Texas cities also benefit from favorable state policies, such as the absence of a state income tax and a reasonable regulatory and litigation environment. These factors make Texas cities today what California’s used to be: places to go in search of the American dream.

In Texas, the major metros also have the advantage of being in a fairly compact region. San Antonio and Austin are separated by an 80-mile drive, almost entirely filled in with development along the I-35 corridor, with significant future opportunities in towns near enough to serve both markets, such as San Marcos. The other regions are all within a three- to three-and-a-half-hour drive of one another—not much different from the Acela train connections linking New York, Boston, and Washington.

This proximity makes the Texas Triangle one of the premier emerging American mega-regions. All four cities rank in the top ten for percentage population growth since 2000 among major metro areas (those with more than 1 million people). Three of the four rank in the top ten for percentage job growth during that time. (Dallas just misses, with a rank of 11th.) Houston, San Antonio, and Austin are in the top ten metro areas for growth in residents with college degrees and in the top five for growth in millennials (ages 25–34) with degrees since 2000. But while these successful cities have much in common, they’ve each done it their own way.

Dallas–Fort Worth doesn’t usually come to mind when one thinks about America’s largest cities. But with a population topping 7 million, Dallas is now the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country. If current growth rates continue, Dallas would pass Chicago and move into third place in regional population before 2050.

Chicago and Dallas have much in common. Both lie within the central time zone, with large airports that serve as ideal hubs for air travel around the United States. Both cities boast large, diversified corporate centers not reliant on a single industry, with deep talent pools and thick labor markets. Both are key national logistics hubs. Both are home to diverse populations, with Dallas now exceeding Chicago in its share of foreign-born residents. Chicago retains some advantages: the Loop remains America’s second-largest business district and is currently booming. And the Windy City’s downtown beat out Dallas in a competition to lure Boeing’s headquarters back in 2001.

But while Chicago remains dominant in urbanity and global-city functions, Dallas increasingly prevails in everything else. If Chicago is downtown-dominated, Dallas is perhaps the most multipolar urban region in America, with two distinct cities in Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as premier suburban business centers in Plano and Richardson. Firms can choose from a range of environments. While America’s elite urban centers increasingly attract niche, if high-value, employers, Dallas remains a place where companies can afford to hire thousands of people—or relocate them, as Toyota decided to do in 2014, when it announced that it would move 5,000 employees and contractors from Southern California to the Dallas area, settling them into a new campus in Plano. The Japanese automaker joins other large-scale employers in the area, including American Airlines (25,000 employees), Lockheed Martin (13,700), and Texas Instruments (13,000).

Dallas strives to be not only a welcoming place for commerce but also a high-quality place to live. The city is spending big to fulfill that goal. Fort Worth’s cultural district was already home to the renowned Kimbell Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum. Dallas, which has seen a boom in its urban core, particularly its Uptown district, recently invested in a $1 billion downtown performing-arts district that includes a concert hall, opera house, and other buildings designed by prominent architects.

Generous philanthropic communities are Texas’s secret weapon. Donations—including 134 separate donations of $1 million or more—provided almost all the performing-arts center’s financing and also helped pay for the new Klyde Warren Park, built on a deck over a freeway, and a signature bridge design by Santiago Calatrava. Like northern capitalists of the great industrial age, wealthy Texans are willing to spend big to put their hometowns on the map. High-quality urban amenities cost money, and a robust Texas private sector made these kinds of investments possible. But it was the philanthropic culture of the Texas money men that led them to put their cash to work to expand the area’s cultural offerings.

Not all the money has been well spent. Dallas built the longest light-rail system in the United States, at 90 miles, but the DART rail system carries only about 100,000 passengers per day, a drop in the bucket for the region. DART cost billions to build and requires about $75 million per year in subsidies to operate, and unlike the cost of the performing-arts center, these costs are financed by tax dollars.

With a population of 6.5 million, Houston is the fifth-largest metro area in the United States, giving Texas two of the five largest regions in the country. Unlike diversified Dallas, Houston is known for being the global center of the energy industry.

Houston is such an energy magnet that even companies with headquarters elsewhere have a huge presence there. Headquartered in Dallas, ExxonMobil is building a new Houston campus that will employ 10,000. Chevron is based in the Bay Area but has more employees (8,000) in Houston and has been shifting more jobs there. International energy firms with a Houston presence include Total, BP, Shell, Repsol, and Petrobras. Houston dominates oil services, with firms like Schlumberger and Halliburton.

Powered by the energy sector, Houston has added more than 700,000 jobs since 2000, despite two recessions. Recent declines in oil prices will no doubt be a drag on Houston’s economy in the near term, just as federal retrenchment has affected Washington, D.C. But like Washington’s, Houston’s long-term fundamentals remain strong. Economically, the city is not a one-horse town. It boasts one of America’s largest ports. It has the nation’s largest petrochemical manufacturing complex (which benefits from low oil prices). Houston is home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest, serving thousands of international patients each year. Philanthropy has played a substantial role in supporting the medical center.

Houston famously has no zoning inside city limits, though the city’s building code imposes some zoning-like restrictions, and many private developments utilize deed restrictions that mimic zoning. Houston’s physical development pattern is not unlike that of most other sprawling American cities. But the lack of use-based zoning illustrates the city’s pro-development and pro-business mind-set. For example, the city of Houston issued permits for more apartment construction in the year ending May 2015 than anywhere else except New York City.

Coastal dwellers portray Texas as culturally retrograde, but Houston, where one of America’s best opera companies performs, was the first of America’s biggest cities to elect an openly homosexual mayor, pro-market Democrat Annise Parker. The area is 23.1 percent foreign-born, ranking seventh in the country among major metros in its share of such residents; and 91 consulates, trade offices, or other foreign missions operate there. The Houston area’s Asian population, half a million strong, has more than doubled since 2000. The city also famously opened its doors to thousands of mostly black New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Many chose to stay in Houston, attracted by its economic opportunities.

Like Dallas, Houston built a dubious light-rail system. More astutely, it recently reengineered its bus service to focus on high-frequency routes, without adding costs. It’s also investing substantially in parks, such as the ten-mile-long Buffalo Bayou Park. So Houston, too, is focusing on getting better, not just bigger.

The oldest major city in Texas, San Antonio was for decades its largest city. Demographically, it is a Latino stronghold. It has the highest share of its population of Hispanic origin of any region over 1 million people in the U.S.—even more than Miami—and it’s the only one where over half the population is Hispanic. San Antonio’s Hispanics have long-standing roots in the community, however: only 12 percent of the metro area is foreign-born, simultaneously the smallest foreign-born and smallest Anglo population among major Texas cities.

With its long history, San Antonio enjoys a thriving tourism industry. More than 30 million visitors each year come to see the city’s historic sites, such as old Spanish missions, including the famed Alamo. San Antonio’s Riverwalk is widely known around the country, with many cities trying to replicate it.

The real engine driving the city’s economy, though, is a strong military presence, including such installations as Fort Sam Houston and Lackland Air Force Base. Though the military has downsized, San Antonio has benefited from consolidation. Much of its military presence is high-value, such as its Medical Education and Training Campus. Home to the Air Force’s Cyber Command and a National Security Agency cryptography center, among other related operations, San Antonio has also become an unlikely center for cyber-security, with the city’s University of Texas campus offering the nation’s top-rated program in that discipline. The military presence has also spawned related private-sector businesses, such as financial-services giant USAA, which serves military members, veterans, and their families.

Military life has lured many permanent residents to the area. Every year, 4,200 people get discharged from the service in San Antonio, and many decide to stay in the city. This high-quality, reasonably priced labor force has attracted firms like Accenture, which employs 1,200 at a service center in the region.

The military has also served as a vehicle for integrating Hispanics into the city’s middle class. City leaders boast of excellent relations between ethnic groups. For example, though not known as a black population center, San Antonio has one of the nation’s largest Martin Luther King Day parades. These ethnic connections go back a long way. A stronghold of Latinos and German immigrants, San Antonio was a pro-Union city during the Civil War.

While San Antonio excels in middle- and working-class job growth—Toyota recently built a truck plant there—its educational attainment rates rank third from the bottom among major metros. Only 26.3 percent of its adults hold college degrees. Unlike elite coastal cities, San Antonio continues to attract the less educated, though the region is growing its number of people with degrees at one of the fastest rates in the country.

If one Texas city can boast “street cred” among coastal elites, it’s Austin, the state capital and home to the flagship campus of the University of Texas, giving it many attributes of a college town. This includes its live music scene, nationally known thanks to PBS’s Austin City Limits, the longest-running music program in television history, which has developed into one of the country’s largest annual music festivals and a permanent music venue in downtown Austin. The city also hosts the global SXSW festival, originally a music event and now arguably the hippest technology conference in the country, drawing talent from around the globe.

Austin is a city of distinct neighborhoods and districts. A campaign to preserve local small businesses spawned the slogan “Keep Austin Weird,” now copied by cities like Portland and Louisville. Austin ranks as the sixth-most educated region in the country, with 41.5 percent of its adults having college degrees. It’s regularly listed as among America’s most physically fit cities.

Austin’s technology industry has roots in the city going back to the 1960s, when IBM and Texas Instruments opened up shop. Motorola arrived in the 1970s, while the 1980s saw the arrival of chip-industry consortium Sematech and the founding of Dell Computer. Today, Austin has one of the country’s fastest-growing tech sectors, with a flurry of start-ups as well as offices from a who’s who of Silicon Valley firms, including Apple (approaching 7,000 local employees), Oracle, Facebook, Google (which is bringing its Google Fiber product to the city), and Intel.

With its big-government and university heritage, Austin unsurprisingly has the blue politics amenable to coastal dwellers and its many public employees—and it shows some signs of emulating the negatives of California and Silicon

Valley. Its median home-price multiple—the price of the median home divided by the regional median income—has crept up to 4.0, the highest of the Texas urban quartet. The city of Austin’s share of children is declining. Already the least diverse major Texas metro, Austin is seeing its share of blacks decrease. And the city has failed to invest in infrastructure to keep up with its rapid growth. As Ryan Streeter at the University of Texas put it: “Austin thought that if the city didn’t build it, they wouldn’t come—but they came anyway.”

While all four Texas metro areas rank among the most booming cities in America, they face threats to future prosperity. When their growth cycles inevitably come to an end, they will have to prove themselves again, as Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York once did. Time will tell whether they can renew themselves across economic cycles, as New York has done—or fall, like Detroit. The Texas metros also must demonstrate that they can grow their per-capita incomes over time, not just add lots of jobs. Their record here is mixed, with only the Houston region significantly outperforming the national average. Austin and Dallas have lost ground versus the country as a whole since 2000. San Antonio did better but still trails the U.S. average.

The cities face short-term risks, too, especially poor municipal balance sheets. The Hoover Institution ranked Dallas and Houston among the worst cities for their unfunded pension liabilities as a percent of government revenues. Houston’s unfunded pension liability, including pension obligation bonds, stands at $5.9 billion, and the city faces a budget crunch. Dallas’s estimated pension shortfall is between $3 billion and $5 billion, depending on how one calculates it. Last fall, S&P and Moody’s downgraded the city’s credit rating. Other risks include failing to expand infrastructure in line with growth—as may have happened in Austin already—and potentially unsustainable development patterns in Dallas and Houston.

But perhaps the most serious near-term concern is that these cities might forget what made them successful. Dallas passed a plastic-bag fee (since repealed), and Austin banned plastic bags altogether. Denton, in north suburban Dallas, banned fracking within city limits, though the state overturned the ban. Texas already faces an external threat from environmental activists who would destroy its energy business and suburban-oriented development model if they could. As the fracking ban shows, a regulatory mind-set has begun to creep in, one that could eventually undermine the Texas economy.

Antidevelopment advocates have also targeted highway construction. Houston’s new mayor, Sylvester Turner, has said, “We need a paradigm shift [away from roads and single-occupancy vehicles] in order to achieve the kind of mobility outcomes we desire. . . . We need greater focus on intercity rail, regional rail, High Occupancy Vehicle facilities, Park and Rides, Transit Centers, and robust local transit.” But in regions adding more than 1 million new residents per decade, roadway expansion is critical. If Los Angeles can’t increase transit ridership with billions of dollars’ worth of new rail lines, there’s no prospect that Texas cities can do so. Investment in buses, cycling, and sidewalks is important but no substitute for core highway infrastructure. Yes, the urban cores of these cities should become more dense and walkable, but that shouldn’t mean becoming hostile to suburbs.

Texas isn’t California. Many people are willing to pay a lot to live in gorgeous, transit-friendly San Francisco or Southern California’s perfect climate. But no one will pay a premium to live in flat, sweltering Texas. To continue succeeding, Texas cities need to become the best possible version of what they already are—not a poor man’s substitute for something that they can never be.

This piece is part of The City Journal's special Texas issue. Check it out here. Top graphic courtesy of The City Journal.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.