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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 al

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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
      - cool_dude85 5y ago
        Sorry, which national newspaper supports anti-car urbanism?
        specialist 5y ago
        My local paper regularly rails against an imaginary phalanx of anti-car jihadists. Any dollar not spent in support of automobiles is sufficient evidence of a nefarious anti-car agenda. Meanwhile, pre-apocalypse, mass transit is chronically under funded and over capacity. Apparently commuters choosing to not drive is an unforgivable affront to Freedom Markets™. Cite: The Power Broker, Robert Caro
        etrabroline 5y ago
        >mass transit is chronically under funded and over capacity. Ironically in most places it's hardly used at all and the few places where people actually use it are where its underfunded and overcrowded.
        jcranmer 5y ago
        There are definitely some activists for whom the label "anti-car" might be fairly applied, as these activists appear to reflexively oppose any project involving cars. However, virtually every time I've seen the charge of "anti-car" labelled at an organization or individual, it's generally by the sort of people you describe, people who define "anti-car" as spending a dime on anything that doesn't support cars, irrespective of whether or not the targets also support car projects. The national newspapers I've seen have broadly been pro-infrastructure of all kinds, whether car or mass transit.
        Ericson2314 5y ago
        Right but mass transit are cars in inherent conflict. There's no way to "do both" and not be incredibly wasteful. A lot of newspapers are for a little for-show light rail with park and drive for 9-5 commuters only, but this is a waste that just begets more car-oriented suburbs. True urban development is going to force a lot of people comfortable in their subdivisions and predictable slowly-to-the-moon single family home prices to comfort a different world, and nobody likes change. So it's rich people + status quo inertia. That's a lot to confront.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Where I live (not the US) has clean, efficient public transit and high density urban planning. What do most of the middle class want? To move out of their cramped apartments into a single family home. And to own a car. People act like suburbanism was forced on people when the reality is it’s preferred by many.
      - ZoomerCretin 5y ago
        >People act like suburbanism was forced on people when the reality is it’s preferred by many. That some people prefer suburbanism does not imply suburbanism is not being forced on a large proportion of the population that prefers affordable housing in cities dense enough to support efficient public transit. When people moved to the suburbs, large corporations followed and built sprawling offices, often in areas with poor public transportation and without sidewalks. When the choice is between an apartment with a hellish commute and a house close to work, of course many opt for the suburbs, but that does not imply that this is their preference. A suburban home and a car are nice to have if it's an option, but too frequently it's a requirement to own a car, and painful to not live near your suburban office.
      - vkou 5y ago
        > And to own a car. Who wants to own a car? Between tolls, parking, insurance, maintenance, and the sticker price, it's a large hole in the ground that I throw money into. I do want to be able to use a car... To go out of town a few times a year.
        refurb 5y ago
        Plenty apparently. Like I said, the public transportation is great here but owning a car is very popular. No more waiting for transit. No more trips that take 30 min that you can drive in 15 min. Easier to cart your kids around. And it’s not cheap at all (import tax of 100%), yet people are more than willing to pay it.
        vkou 5y ago
        Ah, so the problem with this is that it stops being something to aspire to when everyone gets one. Because then, that 15 minute trip turns into 30 minutes of gridlock, followed by 15 minutes of looking for parking. That's the problem with cars. They are great in theory, but absolutely ruin a city in practice. Which is fine if you are the only person on your block who owns one...
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    This is mentioned in the article. The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s. But, that wouldn't have undone decades of too-large lots for SFH and lot size so large THs were completely untenable. All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc.
    - jcranmer 5y ago
      > All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc. The problem is that Houston is extremely lacking in offering any transit-based options for people, which means the "solution" is going to be extremely biased towards whatever is most comfortable to people who travel exclusively via single-occupant vehicles.
    - ska 5y ago
      > The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s. Only inside the loop, which is a small fraction of the city's area. They also point out the pervasive use of restrictive convenants, which make most of the suburbs much like their counterparts in other cities. One thing they didn't mention is that some parts of the inner loop are not getting any kind of development; mostly the south west loop. As always it's complicated but there are socioeconomic and race issues bundled up in it. At least that was true a dozen years ago.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  One example I vividly recall when visiting Rice University (in Houston): Literally across the street from my hotel room, on the 16th story, was a single-family detached house.
  - parineum 5y ago
    What's the problem?
    - Pfhreak 5y ago
      If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's because you need the density. No one puts an apartment building down that size in a ghost town. Odds are good that density is still desired across the street. Or maybe one step down into something more mid-rise. A single family home uses an entire lot to house a single family, maybe just 1-2 people. It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
      - lokar 5y ago
        This illustrates the issue (IMO) at the heart of all of these discussions: Is personal ownership of land like other property ownership (like a chair), or is it somehow different? To what degree does society at large retain some ownership rights to all land, and a say in how it should be used?
        Pfhreak 5y ago
        It's different, but similar. We do actually care about other property ownership -- we tax various parts of its production to encourage the outcomes we want. That might be taxing based on country of origin, of materials used, of cost to dispose of, etc. But land is intrinsically tied to housing and food production. We should be strongly discouraging allowing usable land to lie dormant because someone wants to speculate on it. Land should be taxed in a way that encourages maximizing housing/business/service utilization. A city block dedicated to surface parking provides almost no utility compared to placing a forty story mixed use residential building on the same lot. Even worse are property speculators who purchase abandoned sites and do nothing with them for years in hopes that property values will rise considerably in an urban core.
CheezeIt 5y ago
The optimization is that it’s affordable to live there.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Is it affordable because of the zoning, or because it's a mind numbingly boring flatland with no geographic barriers to endless sprawl?
  - burlesona 5y ago
    It’s also a wildly diverse multi-cultural melting pot full of interesting entrepreneurs from all over the word, and a place that offers significant upward mobility to millions of people.

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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
    - cool_dude85 5y ago
      Sorry, which national newspaper supports anti-car urbanism?
      - specialist 5y ago
        My local paper regularly rails against an imaginary phalanx of anti-car jihadists. Any dollar not spent in support of automobiles is sufficient evidence of a nefarious anti-car agenda. Meanwhile, pre-apocalypse, mass transit is chronically under funded and over capacity. Apparently commuters choosing to not drive is an unforgivable affront to Freedom Markets™. Cite: The Power Broker, Robert Caro
        etrabroline 5y ago
        >mass transit is chronically under funded and over capacity. Ironically in most places it's hardly used at all and the few places where people actually use it are where its underfunded and overcrowded.
        jcranmer 5y ago
        There are definitely some activists for whom the label "anti-car" might be fairly applied, as these activists appear to reflexively oppose any project involving cars. However, virtually every time I've seen the charge of "anti-car" labelled at an organization or individual, it's generally by the sort of people you describe, people who define "anti-car" as spending a dime on anything that doesn't support cars, irrespective of whether or not the targets also support car projects. The national newspapers I've seen have broadly been pro-infrastructure of all kinds, whether car or mass transit.
        Ericson2314 5y ago
        Right but mass transit are cars in inherent conflict. There's no way to "do both" and not be incredibly wasteful. A lot of newspapers are for a little for-show light rail with park and drive for 9-5 commuters only, but this is a waste that just begets more car-oriented suburbs. True urban development is going to force a lot of people comfortable in their subdivisions and predictable slowly-to-the-moon single family home prices to comfort a different world, and nobody likes change. So it's rich people + status quo inertia. That's a lot to confront.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Where I live (not the US) has clean, efficient public transit and high density urban planning. What do most of the middle class want? To move out of their cramped apartments into a single family home. And to own a car. People act like suburbanism was forced on people when the reality is it’s preferred by many.
    - ZoomerCretin 5y ago
      >People act like suburbanism was forced on people when the reality is it’s preferred by many. That some people prefer suburbanism does not imply suburbanism is not being forced on a large proportion of the population that prefers affordable housing in cities dense enough to support efficient public transit. When people moved to the suburbs, large corporations followed and built sprawling offices, often in areas with poor public transportation and without sidewalks. When the choice is between an apartment with a hellish commute and a house close to work, of course many opt for the suburbs, but that does not imply that this is their preference. A suburban home and a car are nice to have if it's an option, but too frequently it's a requirement to own a car, and painful to not live near your suburban office.
    - vkou 5y ago
      > And to own a car. Who wants to own a car? Between tolls, parking, insurance, maintenance, and the sticker price, it's a large hole in the ground that I throw money into. I do want to be able to use a car... To go out of town a few times a year.
      - refurb 5y ago
        Plenty apparently. Like I said, the public transportation is great here but owning a car is very popular. No more waiting for transit. No more trips that take 30 min that you can drive in 15 min. Easier to cart your kids around. And it’s not cheap at all (import tax of 100%), yet people are more than willing to pay it.
        vkou 5y ago
        Ah, so the problem with this is that it stops being something to aspire to when everyone gets one. Because then, that 15 minute trip turns into 30 minutes of gridlock, followed by 15 minutes of looking for parking. That's the problem with cars. They are great in theory, but absolutely ruin a city in practice. Which is fine if you are the only person on your block who owns one...
- alistairSH 5y ago
  This is mentioned in the article. The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s. But, that wouldn't have undone decades of too-large lots for SFH and lot size so large THs were completely untenable. All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc.
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    > All that said, it sounds like Houston could be a good "experiment" for something more efficient/optimal than the normal US city/suburb zoning scheme. Reduce the lot sizes a bit more, remove parking minimums, etc. The problem is that Houston is extremely lacking in offering any transit-based options for people, which means the "solution" is going to be extremely biased towards whatever is most comfortable to people who travel exclusively via single-occupant vehicles.
  - ska 5y ago
    > The city did reduce the minimum lot size considerably in the late 90s. Only inside the loop, which is a small fraction of the city's area. They also point out the pervasive use of restrictive convenants, which make most of the suburbs much like their counterparts in other cities. One thing they didn't mention is that some parts of the inner loop are not getting any kind of development; mostly the south west loop. As always it's complicated but there are socioeconomic and race issues bundled up in it. At least that was true a dozen years ago.
jcranmer 5y ago
One example I vividly recall when visiting Rice University (in Houston): Literally across the street from my hotel room, on the 16th story, was a single-family detached house.
- parineum 5y ago
  What's the problem?
  - Pfhreak 5y ago
    If you are placing 16+ story housing buildings down, it's because you need the density. No one puts an apartment building down that size in a ghost town. Odds are good that density is still desired across the street. Or maybe one step down into something more mid-rise. A single family home uses an entire lot to house a single family, maybe just 1-2 people. It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
    - lokar 5y ago
      This illustrates the issue (IMO) at the heart of all of these discussions: Is personal ownership of land like other property ownership (like a chair), or is it somehow different? To what degree does society at large retain some ownership rights to all land, and a say in how it should be used?
      - Pfhreak 5y ago
        It's different, but similar. We do actually care about other property ownership -- we tax various parts of its production to encourage the outcomes we want. That might be taxing based on country of origin, of materials used, of cost to dispose of, etc. But land is intrinsically tied to housing and food production. We should be strongly discouraging allowing usable land to lie dormant because someone wants to speculate on it. Land should be taxed in a way that encourages maximizing housing/business/service utilization. A city block dedicated to surface parking provides almost no utility compared to placing a forty story mixed use residential building on the same lot. Even worse are property speculators who purchase abandoned sites and do nothing with them for years in hopes that property values will rise considerably in an urban core.

CheezeIt 5y ago

The optimization is that it’s affordable to live there.

seattle_spring 5y ago
Is it affordable because of the zoning, or because it's a mind numbingly boring flatland with no geographic barriers to endless sprawl?
- burlesona 5y ago
  It’s also a wildly diverse multi-cultural melting pot full of interesting entrepreneurs from all over the word, and a place that offers significant upward mobility to millions of people.