20 ms·

Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston (2020)

119 points by jseliger 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago
Houston also let a lot of people build on areas that were almost sure to flood later, without any accompanying regulation around insurance or meaningful notification on subsequent sale. So some of that more liberal policy didn't work out well.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > or meaningful notification on subsequent sale I'm never buying a house that isn't on a hill. I want to literally be able to see where any water would run away. I don't know why anyone would buy a low-lying house now, except if they were financially constrained.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    There are a lot of areas and regions that are very flat. It's hard to build on a hill if there aren't any hills around. It's similar to telling people not to live in overpriced areas like SV. If that's were the jobs are and there are also people that want to live in that environment/area, then they keep moving there and driving prices even higher.
  - evancox100 6y ago
    There are no hills in Houston
    - tyingq 6y ago
      And if it seems like a hill, you're just next to a huge ditch. Like this: https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/2012/october/Easement https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/2012/october/Easement
- criddell 6y ago
  Don't lenders require flood insurance for high risk areas?
  - giantg2 6y ago
    The federal government requires flood insurance, even if you own your house outright. They also expanded those flood zones substantially over the past decade or so.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      I’ve never heard of the federal government requiring flood insurance for your own property, house or otherwise. Is there a source where I can read about this? All I can find is this: https://www.floodsmart.gov/flood-insurance/requirements https://www.floodsmart.gov/flood-insurance/requirements >Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with government-backed mortgages are required to have flood insurance. Which makes sense. I've never seen a government requirement for insurance for a loss only the asset's owner will incur.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        I forgot the details. It's not a blanket requirement but has to do with FEMA money. Basically, they don't want people relying on FEMA instead of buying insurance. "If you receive disaster relief funds following a disaster declared by the president, that money often comes with a caveat that you buy flood insurance to cover the cost of repairs or a replacement building if it is in a high-risk area for flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency requires that you maintain flood insurance on the property for as long as you own it. You’re also required to notify the next owner of the requirement if you sell the property. If you fail to cover your home with flood insurance after you receive federal disaster aid, you’re ineligible to receive future relief."
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Interesting! That makes sense too.
- rdiddly 6y ago
  Traffic is also miserable and public transit is reportedly pretty inadequate, so yeah there are other costs/considerations. You can't ever really talk land-use without talking transportation. (Although this pandemic has brought us closer than ever before to being able to plausibly consider the two separately.)
  - mlindner 6y ago
    The public transit is poor because it wasn't liberalized along with the property zoning. If the government is the only one allowed to do public transit then a company won't come along as trying to compete with the government (which would be suicide). People all over the west (US, Canada, and Europe) try really hard to ignore the amazing success that is Japan's public transit system (that's mostly privatized).
    - iakh 6y ago
      Japan by far had the most confusing and hardest to use metro of any major city I've been to. Stations with the same name that could only connect by exciting and reentering. Platforms with the same number at the exact same station. It's amazing what happens when multiple companies all own different parts of the network, but success would definitely need a better defined metric here.
    - jabl 6y ago
      > People all over the west (US, Canada, and Europe) try really hard to ignore the amazing success that is Japan's public transit system (that's mostly privatized). Most metropolitan public transit systems receive only about 50% of their income through ticket prices, the rest come from subsidies in various forms. That doesn't mean those public transit systems are dumb and useless, they add a lot of economic value to their cities, it's just they can't recover that value add through ticket prices alone. Now, back to Japan's privatized railways, they also get about 50% of their income through ticket sales, however, crucially, the railways own the land around the stations, where they run hotels, grocery stores and whatnot in addition to renting. This allows them to capture some of the value add of the railways through higher land values, and enables them to work without subsidies. This is nice and all, but probably quite hard to replicate in other countries; What you gonna do, have the government expropriate the most valuable land in the cities and give it to the railway companies? Yeah, that will go down really well...
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  And yet, if we look at actual migration rates, it's pretty clear that Americans are overwhelmingly voting with their feet for Houston's overall set of policies.
  - kemitchell 6y ago
    IIRC, the census data showed Houston in the top-five fastest growing cities, but it may have been number five, notably well behind Austin. San Antone and DFW weren't far behind. Houston's the only one with Houston's policies.
  - xnx 6y ago
    Houston's policies definitely aren't a dealbreaker. People are voting for Houston's overall set of conditions, which includes climate, job availability, culture, policies, and other factors.
- avs733 6y ago
  And also the building itself and the increased concrete ground cover massively contributes to flooding
Ericson2314 6y ago
For a long time, Georgism and other land-centric ideologies were dismissed as out-of-date holdovers from a far more agricultural area. But in recent years, it's been great to see a widespread rediscovery of the fact that, yes, land really is still paramount, even though society and the economy have greatly changed. Related was the discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26994175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26994175 the other dya of land appreciation underwriting fast food and small businesses. Very nice to see.
- snidane 6y ago
  Economy hasn't changed much for what matters. Real estate/land is still the dominant market. Economics changed however. Land is no longer a factor of production like it used to in classical economics. Real estate market, despite its size and 99% people involved with 50% of their salary in it, is just an afterthough for a modern economist.
  - foota 6y ago
    I don't think I'd say it's an afterthought for economists, I would argue that it's not talked about because it's pretty simple, but politics is out of touch with economics.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      Orthodox neoclassic economics does tend to overly focus on supply constraints, and if you like suburbs for misguided reasons well....we're no where close to actually running out of land!
  - cma 6y ago
    Maybe it isn't completely dominant yet, but attention has had a strong run: https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/ https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/
- minikites 6y ago
  Land is like attention: finite and there are no substitutes. Both are critical components of the economy.
skilesare 6y ago
Trying to find examples of optimized land use in Houston seems to be a bit....um....what is the word for "absurd beyond the point that reason and logic would allow"?
- nights192 6y ago
  Could you expound on this, please? I'm not too familiar with Houston's milieu, and I think hearing a reason why you believe this'd be really interesting.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Houston is 700 square miles of low-density sprawl, with what feels like 400 of them occupied by roads and parking lots. That pattern of development optimizes for... Well, a couple of metrics, but most of them don't have much to do with efficiency or optimization.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      Yes getting rid of zoning and things (which as the artificial nicely points out means going beyond what Houston has done) is still not enough. Cars are still uniquely terrible. I'm beginning to view them re development like a gene drive is to geneics: a single piece of technology that upends the careful balance from before and takes over everything. Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it, still also has increasing returns though. Do a LVT and Carbon tax too to accelerate that.
      - etrabroline 6y ago
        >Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it Then why does every billionaire and national newspaper support those things? For that to be true, your definition of "rich" would have to include the approximately 90% of Americans who bought a car and a home in a place that requires driving. Having a back yard and guest bedroom and driving 15 minutes to the grocery store is preferable to the vast majority of people to living in a small apartment and relying on public transportation. If it wasn't these western US cities would have developed differently.
fighterpilot 6y ago
Land taxes are one of the few taxes that don't disincentive productive activity. Are there any others like it (aside from externality taxes)?
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  They really are excellent taxes. If you are a Keynsian though, other distributive are also good as they "unlock" more demand which is the bootstrapping tension for the everything else.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- minikites 6y ago
  Taxes on financial transactions, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax
  - fighterpilot 6y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. This only doesn't disincentive productive activity if you think that secondary financial markets (including speculation and market making on those markets) aren't contributing anything productive. I'm of two minds about this but I lean towards the notion that speculation is a net value add. Think about the trillions raised in the secondary market, which is all contingent on valuations set by supply and demand, where these valuations are determined by speculators. The more accurate the speculators are, the more productive the capital is that's injected into the secondary market. So I think we definitely don't want to disincentive the institutional speculation that happens, which is what a tax would do. On the other hand we want to disincentive retail hype bubbles like GME, which lead to the opposite to the above - capital going the wrong way. However it's not clear to me that the tax would achieve that. Retail hype seems rather price inelastic. The bitcoin craze in late 2017 was good evidence of this, since fees for trading crypto are very high.
- everybodyknows 6y ago
canada_dry 6y ago
Had family that lived in Houston region for a couple decades... I would not hold it up as a template to follow! I recall them pointing out to me day-care centres beside buildings storing industrial chemicals. Many more absurd examples.
- afrodc_ 6y ago
  While it's fair to criticize components of the exact zoning and regulations they have, you can take a lesson from this as an effective system and make adjustments as necessary. It's not perfect but better than the single-family zoning in a lot of cities causing massive sprawl and increased expenditure in roads for commuters.
  - canada_dry 6y ago
    Fair enough. What I took issue with was that the article glosses over what I would suggest are significantly more problematic issues with Houston zoning. Their only mention: "the Bayou City is not without any land use regulations"... is one that prevents sex shops next to schools.
  - ska 6y ago
    > but better than the single-family zoning in a lot of cities causing massive sprawl and increased expenditure in roads for commuters. I can't make sense of this, Houston has massive sprawl and all that entails. They cut costs a bit on roads by underspending on maintenance, but that hardly tips the balance.
- swiley 6y ago
  The west Texes disaster comes from the same state and is considered one of the worst industrial disasters in US history because people built housing right up against heavy industry.
bpodgursky 6y ago
The important thing to note about Houston is that it has grown 20-60% per decade over the past half century and now has over 7,000,000 people and is still growing rapidly. It really doesn't matter how many anecdotes or criticisms from urban designers get posted here, because the important part is that an enormous number of people want to and do live in Houston, which is tautologically better urban design than any city which to which people have been unable or unwilling to move.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  This is borderline "no true scottsman". Lots of people live where they need to not where they want to. Just because a city holds more people at a lower price doesn't make it intrinsically better planned.
  - parineum 6y ago
    What better metric is there? If you ask people, they're bound to lie to you. What people do is much more indicative of their priorities than what they say.
    - DubiousPusher 6y ago
      Better is pretty subjective. But there are quite a few I'd say are also reasonable to consider. How healthy is the average person living there? How happy is the average person living there? Is the development sustainable or will it create problems in the future? Many gold rush boom towns pulled a lot of strings to get enough housing, tents, taverns or tenements to house their populations. Would we call most of those towns well planned? Even successful?
    - alistairSH 6y ago
      It's probably a reasonable metric. But, it doesn't necessarily tell us why. Picking a place to live is a balancing act. Houston might have a strong enough job market to offset several other negatives (long commutes, lack of green space). Money is a strong motivator, but doesn't always make for a better QoL or healthier existence. Put another way, given the option between two suburban hell-scapes, people will pick the one that pays better. But, it's a still a suburban hell-scape. Personally, I find Austin a much more palatable place to live than Houston (though I continue to remain in DC).
erentz 6y ago
A common misconception about Houston is it doesn’t have zoning. Which is true. But it effectively achieves the same thing with a number of city ordinances and with covenants that subdivisions place on their land use which are enforced by the city.
- afrodc_ 6y ago
  It goes into that in the article and states it was one of the ways to make the liberalization of zoning digestible by allowing concerned communities being able to opt out under certain democratic conditions.
gustavo-fring 6y ago
Re: Georgism. I ran across the wiki article on this a few weeks ago (I only recall George as being an also ran candidate for NYC, like Roosevelt). There is utopian quote after utopian quote about both George the man and what Georgism could accomplish. Basically, you tax land value (unincorporated) and therefore business/people are encouraged to pay for the most valuably located lots while still encouraging development elsewhere and to discourage land speculation. The modern version is land value tax. I recently saw sama proposing what sounded a lot like it (though he didn't directly cite it as an influence) and it is certainly something that would be popular among the tech elite because another component of this is those taxes could theoretically fund UBI. Houston does seem like one of the best places in the world to test this out (exploding population, tons of existing value, zoning laws) but in the progressive era when this was but one of a lots of idea trying to gain traction, it was ruled unconstitutional by the state. It's something I'd love to see more discussion about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism Geoism seems to be the modern cultural correct identifier.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  I wonder if a place like Houston would experience pretty dramatic shifts in culture as a result, particularly around the usages of cars and transit. IIRC, there are parking lots everywhere in Houston. A LVT would presumably make putting in denser uses more valuable or drive up the cost of parking. A lot in Downtown would surely bring in more rent as offices/housing/retail than just a surface lot. But then this applies pressures to those who commute in single occupancy vehicles, reduces the amount of available parking, and generally makes the downtown less desireable for those in the suburbs. To me, this is what we should be doing -- making driving into city centers for work quite unpalatable relative to transit -- but I wonder if Texas is culturally ready to even consider a change like that.
  - photojosh 6y ago
    I'm in the eighth largest city in Australia (similar car-oriented like the USA, public transport is poor unless that's your #1 priority in housing). It's absolutely ridiculous that there can be large surface lots of parking right in the centre of town.
laactech 6y ago
I've lived in Houston the majority of my life, and my anecdotal experience is reinforced by this article. Over the past 5 years Houston has seen a lot of development specifically with clusters of vertical townhomes. This seems to be happening all over inside the 610 loop with concentration in specific areas such as east downtown.
nerdkid93 6y ago
Related video from City Beautiful on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k
burlesona 6y ago
I'm seeing a lot of posters making snide remarks about how Houston isn't a good city and so we can't learn anything from it. I don't think that's a very open-minded or intellectually curious mindset. I lived in Houston for five years. I moved there very reluctantly for the only job I could find in the depths of the recession, but I grew to appreciate it as a complex and interesting place that is very much worthy of study. Here are some good things about Houston that I think outsiders should know. First, Houston is a wonderfully diverse and cosmopolitan city, and not necessarily in the ways you would expect. When I lived there, the parking meters downtown were "Push 1 for English, 2 for Vietnamese, 3 for Spanish." The City website is offered in Arabic, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Vietnamese (apparently in their English alphabetical order). When living there I met people from all over the world, and among them the general consensus was "this place is interesting." The large majority of people in Houston are proud of that diversity, and celebrate that their city is a global melting pot. Second, many people assume that all of Texas is desert, but most of the state is not, and Houston is nearly a jungle - many people who visited when I lived there were shocked by how lush and green it is, more like Miami than LA. We had banana trees growing in the courtyard of our apartment, and yes, they were delicious. The nearly-tropical weather and rainfall means that the parks and gardens are often overflowing with flowers and beautiful plants. And while I would argue that there aren't as many of these as there should be for a city of its size, the parks in Houston improved noticeably during the years I lived there, and continue to improve. Third, Houston is a fantastically low-ego and entrepreneurial place. In Houston, no one asks where you work, they ask "what do you do?" And people tend to have interesting answers. A lot of the people I met would identify as artisans of some kind, and perhaps acknowledge that they worked multiple jobs. "I'm a scrap metal artist, but I also work part-time at a bank." "I'm a pastry chef and a music teacher." "I design shoes and help my parents at their restaurant on weekends." With the very laid back business environment, and in particular because most of the city allows people to operate low-key businesses from their home, it's extremely common to find people running scrappy little businesses inside their neighborhood. As a result of the cultural diversity and ease of doing business, Houston is also home to an exceptional food scene, made even better by the fact that most of it is quite affordable. I've yet to find another place that had the same casual abundance of excellent food from any part of the world you can imagine. New York is pretty comparable in terms of selection, but usually much more expensive. Fourth, Houston is has a much richer arts and culture scene than outsiders realize. Houston has the second largest theater district in the nation (after Broadway). The Houston MFA and Museum of Natural Science are among the best in the nation. But more interesting, the city has dozens of smaller, very high quality museums sprinkled through its neighborhoods. Places like the Menil collection, a world-famous art gallery, just quietly chill in the midst of a residential neighborhood of mostly bungalows, small apartments, and neighborhood shops. And the Menil is free for everyone, a gift from the wealth of the de Menil family. Finally, there are many Houstons, so while I can share my observations (and could share many more stories), it's still not a place that's easy to generalize. The city has annexed a truly absurd amount of it's suburban hinterland, and even then the land area extends greatly beyond the city limits to mostly fill the surrounding county (Harris County), which is about the size of Rhode Island. Infamously, much like LA, you can drive for hours and still be in the sprawl of Houston, and because it is so vast, daily life varies quite a bit among the city's sub-areas. To me this was the biggest negative about life there, I got very sick of all the driving. For transparency, I lived entirely in "Urban Houston," which is roughly the western half of the city's innermost freeway loop, so my observations are mostly about life in that area (which by comparison is about the size of San Francisco). I also witnessed many old single-family homes get torn down and replaced by 3-4 townhomes. At the time it bothered me, because the old homes were often prettier than the new townhomes (not always, but often). However, this constant influx of supply where people wanted to move made it very realistic for a middle class family to buy a home and move into Urban Houston - at the time townhomes cost anywhere from $200k to $500k, and I bought a fairly nice condo for exactly $100k. This post has gotten too long, so I'll just end by saying: yes, on the surface, much of Houston is ugly, and it's not easy to see the appeal from the outside. But most people who live there are optimistic and happy, in large part because they are surrounded by opportunity and upward mobility, and those things are worth a lot. And for many people, those things are worth more than scenic beaches or picturesque mountains in the distance, worth enough to even put up with the frustratingly hot and humid summers. So if you've previously dismissed Houston, perhaps reconsider. It's a complicated place, and far from perfect, but there are definitely lessons to be learned there.
TedShiller 6y ago
If you’ve spent time in Houston you know how this turned out. Not well.
rcpt 6y ago
I'm a huge supporter of LVT but one thing I can't get around: they're hugely unpopular with voting demographics, ie landowners. Suppose we implement a LVT. Housing costs go down and we lift a ton of people out of poverty. Great! Now everyone can afford to own land. But as soon as they do of course they go and vote in tax limits (eg the hugely popular Prop 13) and other policies that incentivze land speculation. My understanding is that this happened in New Zealand where in the 90s they eliminated a great LVT and replaced it with income and sales tax.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
Mercatus Institute is the Koch Bros' think tank run by Tyler Cohen. Make of that what you will.

119 points by jseliger 6y ago

Houston also let a lot of people build on areas that were almost sure to flood later, without any accompanying regulation around insurance or meaningful notification on subsequent sale. So some of that more liberal policy didn't work out well.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> or meaningful notification on subsequent sale I'm never buying a house that isn't on a hill. I want to literally be able to see where any water would run away. I don't know why anyone would buy a low-lying house now, except if they were financially constrained.
- giantg2 6y ago
  There are a lot of areas and regions that are very flat. It's hard to build on a hill if there aren't any hills around. It's similar to telling people not to live in overpriced areas like SV. If that's were the jobs are and there are also people that want to live in that environment/area, then they keep moving there and driving prices even higher.
- evancox100 6y ago
  There are no hills in Houston
  - tyingq 6y ago
    And if it seems like a hill, you're just next to a huge ditch. Like this: https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/2012/october/Easement https://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/2012/october/Easement
criddell 6y ago
Don't lenders require flood insurance for high risk areas?
- giantg2 6y ago
  The federal government requires flood insurance, even if you own your house outright. They also expanded those flood zones substantially over the past decade or so.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I’ve never heard of the federal government requiring flood insurance for your own property, house or otherwise. Is there a source where I can read about this? All I can find is this: https://www.floodsmart.gov/flood-insurance/requirements https://www.floodsmart.gov/flood-insurance/requirements >Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with government-backed mortgages are required to have flood insurance. Which makes sense. I've never seen a government requirement for insurance for a loss only the asset's owner will incur.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I forgot the details. It's not a blanket requirement but has to do with FEMA money. Basically, they don't want people relying on FEMA instead of buying insurance. "If you receive disaster relief funds following a disaster declared by the president, that money often comes with a caveat that you buy flood insurance to cover the cost of repairs or a replacement building if it is in a high-risk area for flooding. The Federal Emergency Management Agency requires that you maintain flood insurance on the property for as long as you own it. You’re also required to notify the next owner of the requirement if you sell the property. If you fail to cover your home with flood insurance after you receive federal disaster aid, you’re ineligible to receive future relief."
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Interesting! That makes sense too.
rdiddly 6y ago
Traffic is also miserable and public transit is reportedly pretty inadequate, so yeah there are other costs/considerations. You can't ever really talk land-use without talking transportation. (Although this pandemic has brought us closer than ever before to being able to plausibly consider the two separately.)
- mlindner 6y ago
  The public transit is poor because it wasn't liberalized along with the property zoning. If the government is the only one allowed to do public transit then a company won't come along as trying to compete with the government (which would be suicide). People all over the west (US, Canada, and Europe) try really hard to ignore the amazing success that is Japan's public transit system (that's mostly privatized).
  - iakh 6y ago
    Japan by far had the most confusing and hardest to use metro of any major city I've been to. Stations with the same name that could only connect by exciting and reentering. Platforms with the same number at the exact same station. It's amazing what happens when multiple companies all own different parts of the network, but success would definitely need a better defined metric here.
  - jabl 6y ago
    > People all over the west (US, Canada, and Europe) try really hard to ignore the amazing success that is Japan's public transit system (that's mostly privatized). Most metropolitan public transit systems receive only about 50% of their income through ticket prices, the rest come from subsidies in various forms. That doesn't mean those public transit systems are dumb and useless, they add a lot of economic value to their cities, it's just they can't recover that value add through ticket prices alone. Now, back to Japan's privatized railways, they also get about 50% of their income through ticket sales, however, crucially, the railways own the land around the stations, where they run hotels, grocery stores and whatnot in addition to renting. This allows them to capture some of the value add of the railways through higher land values, and enables them to work without subsidies. This is nice and all, but probably quite hard to replicate in other countries; What you gonna do, have the government expropriate the most valuable land in the cities and give it to the railway companies? Yeah, that will go down really well...
dcolkitt 6y ago
And yet, if we look at actual migration rates, it's pretty clear that Americans are overwhelmingly voting with their feet for Houston's overall set of policies.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  IIRC, the census data showed Houston in the top-five fastest growing cities, but it may have been number five, notably well behind Austin. San Antone and DFW weren't far behind. Houston's the only one with Houston's policies.
- xnx 6y ago
  Houston's policies definitely aren't a dealbreaker. People are voting for Houston's overall set of conditions, which includes climate, job availability, culture, policies, and other factors.
avs733 6y ago
And also the building itself and the increased concrete ground cover massively contributes to flooding

Ericson2314 6y ago

For a long time, Georgism and other land-centric ideologies were dismissed as out-of-date holdovers from a far more agricultural area. But in recent years, it's been great to see a widespread rediscovery of the fact that, yes, land really is still paramount, even though society and the economy have greatly changed. Related was the discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26994175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26994175 the other dya of land appreciation underwriting fast food and small businesses. Very nice to see.

snidane 6y ago
Economy hasn't changed much for what matters. Real estate/land is still the dominant market. Economics changed however. Land is no longer a factor of production like it used to in classical economics. Real estate market, despite its size and 99% people involved with 50% of their salary in it, is just an afterthough for a modern economist.
- foota 6y ago
  I don't think I'd say it's an afterthought for economists, I would argue that it's not talked about because it's pretty simple, but politics is out of touch with economics.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Orthodox neoclassic economics does tend to overly focus on supply constraints, and if you like suburbs for misguided reasons well....we're no where close to actually running out of land!
- cma 6y ago
  Maybe it isn't completely dominant yet, but attention has had a strong run: https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/ https://www.wired.com/1997/12/es-attention/
minikites 6y ago
Land is like attention: finite and there are no substitutes. Both are critical components of the economy.

skilesare 6y ago

Trying to find examples of optimized land use in Houston seems to be a bit....um....what is the word for "absurd beyond the point that reason and logic would allow"?

nights192 6y ago
Could you expound on this, please? I'm not too familiar with Houston's milieu, and I think hearing a reason why you believe this'd be really interesting.
- vkou 6y ago
  Houston is 700 square miles of low-density sprawl, with what feels like 400 of them occupied by roads and parking lots. That pattern of development optimizes for... Well, a couple of metrics, but most of them don't have much to do with efficiency or optimization.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Yes getting rid of zoning and things (which as the artificial nicely points out means going beyond what Houston has done) is still not enough. Cars are still uniquely terrible. I'm beginning to view them re development like a gene drive is to geneics: a single piece of technology that upends the careful balance from before and takes over everything. Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it, still also has increasing returns though. Do a LVT and Carbon tax too to accelerate that.
    - etrabroline 6y ago
      >Public transit + anti-car urbanism, while much more fragile due to today's rich hating it Then why does every billionaire and national newspaper support those things? For that to be true, your definition of "rich" would have to include the approximately 90% of Americans who bought a car and a home in a place that requires driving. Having a back yard and guest bedroom and driving 15 minutes to the grocery store is preferable to the vast majority of people to living in a small apartment and relying on public transportation. If it wasn't these western US cities would have developed differently.

fighterpilot 6y ago

Land taxes are one of the few taxes that don't disincentive productive activity. Are there any others like it (aside from externality taxes)?

Ericson2314 6y ago
They really are excellent taxes. If you are a Keynsian though, other distributive are also good as they "unlock" more demand which is the bootstrapping tension for the everything else.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
minikites 6y ago
Taxes on financial transactions, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax
- fighterpilot 6y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. This only doesn't disincentive productive activity if you think that secondary financial markets (including speculation and market making on those markets) aren't contributing anything productive. I'm of two minds about this but I lean towards the notion that speculation is a net value add. Think about the trillions raised in the secondary market, which is all contingent on valuations set by supply and demand, where these valuations are determined by speculators. The more accurate the speculators are, the more productive the capital is that's injected into the secondary market. So I think we definitely don't want to disincentive the institutional speculation that happens, which is what a tax would do. On the other hand we want to disincentive retail hype bubbles like GME, which lead to the opposite to the above - capital going the wrong way. However it's not clear to me that the tax would achieve that. Retail hype seems rather price inelastic. The bitcoin craze in late 2017 was good evidence of this, since fees for trading crypto are very high.
everybodyknows 6y ago

canada_dry 6y ago

Had family that lived in Houston region for a couple decades... I would not hold it up as a template to follow! I recall them pointing out to me day-care centres beside buildings storing industrial chemicals. Many more absurd examples.

afrodc_ 6y ago
While it's fair to criticize components of the exact zoning and regulations they have, you can take a lesson from this as an effective system and make adjustments as necessary. It's not perfect but better than the single-family zoning in a lot of cities causing massive sprawl and increased expenditure in roads for commuters.
- canada_dry 6y ago
  Fair enough. What I took issue with was that the article glosses over what I would suggest are significantly more problematic issues with Houston zoning. Their only mention: "the Bayou City is not without any land use regulations"... is one that prevents sex shops next to schools.
- ska 6y ago
  > but better than the single-family zoning in a lot of cities causing massive sprawl and increased expenditure in roads for commuters. I can't make sense of this, Houston has massive sprawl and all that entails. They cut costs a bit on roads by underspending on maintenance, but that hardly tips the balance.
swiley 6y ago
The west Texes disaster comes from the same state and is considered one of the worst industrial disasters in US history because people built housing right up against heavy industry.

bpodgursky 6y ago

The important thing to note about Houston is that it has grown 20-60% per decade over the past half century and now has over 7,000,000 people and is still growing rapidly. It really doesn't matter how many anecdotes or criticisms from urban designers get posted here, because the important part is that an enormous number of people want to and do live in Houston, which is tautologically better urban design than any city which to which people have been unable or unwilling to move.

DubiousPusher 6y ago
This is borderline "no true scottsman". Lots of people live where they need to not where they want to. Just because a city holds more people at a lower price doesn't make it intrinsically better planned.
- parineum 6y ago
  What better metric is there? If you ask people, they're bound to lie to you. What people do is much more indicative of their priorities than what they say.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    Better is pretty subjective. But there are quite a few I'd say are also reasonable to consider. How healthy is the average person living there? How happy is the average person living there? Is the development sustainable or will it create problems in the future? Many gold rush boom towns pulled a lot of strings to get enough housing, tents, taverns or tenements to house their populations. Would we call most of those towns well planned? Even successful?
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    It's probably a reasonable metric. But, it doesn't necessarily tell us why. Picking a place to live is a balancing act. Houston might have a strong enough job market to offset several other negatives (long commutes, lack of green space). Money is a strong motivator, but doesn't always make for a better QoL or healthier existence. Put another way, given the option between two suburban hell-scapes, people will pick the one that pays better. But, it's a still a suburban hell-scape. Personally, I find Austin a much more palatable place to live than Houston (though I continue to remain in DC).

erentz 6y ago

A common misconception about Houston is it doesn’t have zoning. Which is true. But it effectively achieves the same thing with a number of city ordinances and with covenants that subdivisions place on their land use which are enforced by the city.

afrodc_ 6y ago
It goes into that in the article and states it was one of the ways to make the liberalization of zoning digestible by allowing concerned communities being able to opt out under certain democratic conditions.

gustavo-fring 6y ago

Re: Georgism. I ran across the wiki article on this a few weeks ago (I only recall George as being an also ran candidate for NYC, like Roosevelt). There is utopian quote after utopian quote about both George the man and what Georgism could accomplish. Basically, you tax land value (unincorporated) and therefore business/people are encouraged to pay for the most valuably located lots while still encouraging development elsewhere and to discourage land speculation. The modern version is land value tax. I recently saw sama proposing what sounded a lot like it (though he didn't directly cite it as an influence) and it is certainly something that would be popular among the tech elite because another component of this is those taxes could theoretically fund UBI. Houston does seem like one of the best places in the world to test this out (exploding population, tons of existing value, zoning laws) but in the progressive era when this was but one of a lots of idea trying to gain traction, it was ruled unconstitutional by the state. It's something I'd love to see more discussion about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism Geoism seems to be the modern cultural correct identifier.

Pfhreak 6y ago
I wonder if a place like Houston would experience pretty dramatic shifts in culture as a result, particularly around the usages of cars and transit. IIRC, there are parking lots everywhere in Houston. A LVT would presumably make putting in denser uses more valuable or drive up the cost of parking. A lot in Downtown would surely bring in more rent as offices/housing/retail than just a surface lot. But then this applies pressures to those who commute in single occupancy vehicles, reduces the amount of available parking, and generally makes the downtown less desireable for those in the suburbs. To me, this is what we should be doing -- making driving into city centers for work quite unpalatable relative to transit -- but I wonder if Texas is culturally ready to even consider a change like that.
- photojosh 6y ago
  I'm in the eighth largest city in Australia (similar car-oriented like the USA, public transport is poor unless that's your #1 priority in housing). It's absolutely ridiculous that there can be large surface lots of parking right in the centre of town.

laactech 6y ago

I've lived in Houston the majority of my life, and my anecdotal experience is reinforced by this article. Over the past 5 years Houston has seen a lot of development specifically with clusters of vertical townhomes. This seems to be happening all over inside the 610 loop with concentration in specific areas such as east downtown.

nerdkid93 6y ago

Related video from City Beautiful on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k

burlesona 6y ago

I'm seeing a lot of posters making snide remarks about how Houston isn't a good city and so we can't learn anything from it. I don't think that's a very open-minded or intellectually curious mindset. I lived in Houston for five years. I moved there very reluctantly for the only job I could find in the depths of the recession, but I grew to appreciate it as a complex and interesting place that is very much worthy of study. Here are some good things about Houston that I think outsiders should know. First, Houston is a wonderfully diverse and cosmopolitan city, and not necessarily in the ways you would expect. When I lived there, the parking meters downtown were "Push 1 for English, 2 for Vietnamese, 3 for Spanish." The City website is offered in Arabic, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Vietnamese (apparently in their English alphabetical order). When living there I met people from all over the world, and among them the general consensus was "this place is interesting." The large majority of people in Houston are proud of that diversity, and celebrate that their city is a global melting pot. Second, many people assume that all of Texas is desert, but most of the state is not, and Houston is nearly a jungle - many people who visited when I lived there were shocked by how lush and green it is, more like Miami than LA. We had banana trees growing in the courtyard of our apartment, and yes, they were delicious. The nearly-tropical weather and rainfall means that the parks and gardens are often overflowing with flowers and beautiful plants. And while I would argue that there aren't as many of these as there should be for a city of its size, the parks in Houston improved noticeably during the years I lived there, and continue to improve. Third, Houston is a fantastically low-ego and entrepreneurial place. In Houston, no one asks where you work, they ask "what do you do?" And people tend to have interesting answers. A lot of the people I met would identify as artisans of some kind, and perhaps acknowledge that they worked multiple jobs. "I'm a scrap metal artist, but I also work part-time at a bank." "I'm a pastry chef and a music teacher." "I design shoes and help my parents at their restaurant on weekends." With the very laid back business environment, and in particular because most of the city allows people to operate low-key businesses from their home, it's extremely common to find people running scrappy little businesses inside their neighborhood. As a result of the cultural diversity and ease of doing business, Houston is also home to an exceptional food scene, made even better by the fact that most of it is quite affordable. I've yet to find another place that had the same casual abundance of excellent food from any part of the world you can imagine. New York is pretty comparable in terms of selection, but usually much more expensive. Fourth, Houston is has a much richer arts and culture scene than outsiders realize. Houston has the second largest theater district in the nation (after Broadway). The Houston MFA and Museum of Natural Science are among the best in the nation. But more interesting, the city has dozens of smaller, very high quality museums sprinkled through its neighborhoods. Places like the Menil collection, a world-famous art gallery, just quietly chill in the midst of a residential neighborhood of mostly bungalows, small apartments, and neighborhood shops. And the Menil is free for everyone, a gift from the wealth of the de Menil family. Finally, there are many Houstons, so while I can share my observations (and could share many more stories), it's still not a place that's easy to generalize. The city has annexed a truly absurd amount of it's suburban hinterland, and even then the land area extends greatly beyond the city limits to mostly fill the surrounding county (Harris County), which is about the size of Rhode Island. Infamously, much like LA, you can drive for hours and still be in the sprawl of Houston, and because it is so vast, daily life varies quite a bit among the city's sub-areas. To me this was the biggest negative about life there, I got very sick of all the driving. For transparency, I lived entirely in "Urban Houston," which is roughly the western half of the city's innermost freeway loop, so my observations are mostly about life in that area (which by comparison is about the size of San Francisco). I also witnessed many old single-family homes get torn down and replaced by 3-4 townhomes. At the time it bothered me, because the old homes were often prettier than the new townhomes (not always, but often). However, this constant influx of supply where people wanted to move made it very realistic for a middle class family to buy a home and move into Urban Houston - at the time townhomes cost anywhere from $200k to $500k, and I bought a fairly nice condo for exactly $100k. This post has gotten too long, so I'll just end by saying: yes, on the surface, much of Houston is ugly, and it's not easy to see the appeal from the outside. But most people who live there are optimistic and happy, in large part because they are surrounded by opportunity and upward mobility, and those things are worth a lot. And for many people, those things are worth more than scenic beaches or picturesque mountains in the distance, worth enough to even put up with the frustratingly hot and humid summers. So if you've previously dismissed Houston, perhaps reconsider. It's a complicated place, and far from perfect, but there are definitely lessons to be learned there.

TedShiller 6y ago

If you’ve spent time in Houston you know how this turned out. Not well.

rcpt 6y ago

I'm a huge supporter of LVT but one thing I can't get around: they're hugely unpopular with voting demographics, ie landowners. Suppose we implement a LVT. Housing costs go down and we lift a ton of people out of poverty. Great! Now everyone can afford to own land. But as soon as they do of course they go and vote in tax limits (eg the hugely popular Prop 13) and other policies that incentivze land speculation. My understanding is that this happened in New Zealand where in the 90s they eliminated a great LVT and replaced it with income and sales tax.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

Mercatus Institute is the Koch Bros' think tank run by Tyler Cohen. Make of that what you will.