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Houston is an experiment in what you get when you YOLO building regulations. One should expect them to re-learn all of the lessons of the past that caused thos

Houston is an experiment in what you get when you YOLO building regulations. One should expect them to re-learn all of the lessons of the past that caused those regulations to be written. It's basically a case study in technical debt from an urban planning angle. The lack of regulation made it cheap to build and allowed the city to rapidly expand, but also allowed it to sprawl almost beyond reason and caused it to become the poster child for poor city planning and a costly reminder of how hard it is to go back and try to fix problems after the fact.

reducesuffering 4y ago
Well, they're doing something right when a median home costs $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the Bay Area growing up here.
- russellbeattie 4y ago
  I don't think you're making the argument you think you are.
- andybak 4y ago
  Doesn't "technical debt" imply something on the balance sheet that hasn't yet become due?
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  > Well, they're doing something right when a median home costs $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the Bay Area growing up here. You can get a house for $75k (median) if you want in Gary Indiana. I'm not sure how lower housing prices can be directly correlated with "doing things more right".
  - volkk 4y ago
    isn't Gary Indiana a failed city? I would imagine Houston as relatively thriving given work, safety and industry levels?
    - Entinel 4y ago
      You're missing the point. They are saying Houston having lower housing prices is not an indicator that Houston is "doing something right."
      - volkk 4y ago
        i'm not missing anything, i'm just pointing out that using Gary doesn't make any sense. if you're going to use other cities to counter the OP's point, then choose something like Dallas or Tampa, or Miami. Gary is literally decrepit.
        Entinel 4y ago
        That is the point you are missing. It is not just about price of homes but quality of life while the OP is just comparing $ vs $ when there is more to it than that.
        volkk 4y ago
        i am saying that the example of Gary doesn't prove that Houston ISN'T a thriving city only based on housing costs. you need to use a city that is a bit more comparable to Houston to drive the point that low housing costs don't equate with a successfully run city. it's a bit like someone arguing that Land Rovers are bad cars because they are built poorly, and then someone else coming in and saying well at least they don't cost the amount that a lamborghini costs, they must be doing something right. and then a third person coming into that argument and saying "well, actually you can't use price because a bicycle costs 200$ and that doesn't mean a bicycle is better than a Land Rover based on price alone" ...the point they're driving could be correct, but the comparison is apples to oranges. you can't compare bicycles to cars to drive the point, just like i wouldn't use Gary to make the argument that low prices does not mean a thriving city. a better argument would be to use something that is comparable to a Land Rover (Houston) like say, a car that is within 10-20k range that does the job but is still largely a piece of crap to argue your point that price alone doesn't dictate success.
  - api 4y ago
    The difference is that Houston has more diverse and better job opportunities yet still has reasonably affordable housing. There are tons of places with very cheap housing and no jobs. Nobody moves there except maybe a few teleworkers looking to optimize hard for surplus or people with other reasons to go there like family ties.
  - nilkn 4y ago
    Houston is the home of the US oil & gas industry and has one of the largest and most advanced medical centers in the world. There's a lot of money in Houston, and the city has incredibly ritzy neighborhoods like River Oaks and Piney Point Village, among many others; keeping overall housing relatively affordable with so many affluent people competing for it actually is an accomplishment.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      I'm sure Houston works for you, but it just isn't the happening place on many people's radars. We could split hairs about its benefits; e.g. * Economy comes and goes with natural resource boom bust cycle. * America's most obese city * A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation There are other cities that match some of those qualities that I don't much care for, but I can see why a lot of people wouldn't mind and go for the cheap housing there as a decent trade off. But in my original comment, my only point was that you can't judge how great a city is based on how cheap its real estate is (and the correlation often goes the opposite way).
      - nilkn 4y ago
        The most expensive house listing for Gary right now seems to be for $575k; for Houston, it's $20 million, a difference of 35x. The average sale price in Piney Point Village is apparently just under $3.7 million (https://www.har.com/pineypointvillage/realestate https://www.har.com/pineypointvillage/realestate) and the average rent is $8500/month. So on and so forth. I think you're imagining all Houston real estate as cheap/affordable, when in reality the city has lots of extremely expensive real estate. It just also has affordable housing due to widespread construction of townhomes, apartments, and condos. Something like Gary just isn't comparable.
        selectodude 4y ago
        Gary is a suburb of Chicago and comparing it to Greater Houston seems a bit absurd. Chicagoland has many units that are listed for $15+ million.
  - crawl_soever 4y ago
    I live in Gary and there are many factors that can factor into the economics here, mainly a single employer planning the entire city and that employer collapse. A house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > A house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it Are you kidding? Its easily worth twice that. Wait until I show you the upgrades, new paint and wall to wall carpet. The bathroom's been renovated with new fixtures, and that is genuine imported Mexican tile. You'd be a fool to pass on this. Just think of the possibilities.
  - sershe 4y ago
    Except Houston is a fast-growing city, and Gary is a dying city. Houston managed to keep housing affordable while growing faster than most/all major cities.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  It's barely under median for the US, that is the real comparison. There are many places across the US with significantly less expensive homes.
  - hilbertseries 4y ago
    Homes in large cities are almost always more expensive than rural areas. I don’t think median is the right comparison, comparing to other large cities and metro areas makes much more sense.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      This is not a completely mismatched urban-vs-rural comparison, it is looking just at metro statistical areas across the U.S. https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-home-prices-q2-2022-ranked-median-single-family-2022-08-11.pdf https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-...
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Hamburger is cheaper than ribeye, but I’m not sure that makes it better.
- taeric 4y ago
  The assertion seems to be that it is not going to end well. If it really is unsustainable sprawl with poorly put together civic functions, why do we expect it to go on forever? That is, sure, houses are cheap for now. But that doesn't mean you will have a place worth living in, given time.
  - Tempest1981 4y ago
    > unsustainable sprawl 13 million people living in the Los Angeles basin seem to disagree.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I’m not one of them, but Los Angeles doesn’t really scream “sustainable” to me. Is it really a counterexample to what the GP is saying?
    - taeric 4y ago
      The basin has house prices much lower than the bay area. Still higher than Houston, but I'm not sure where that fits in this discussion. Did I mix up threads?
      - Tempest1981 4y ago
        If Houston is unsustainable, then LA must be far beyond unsustainable... yet it continues to sprawl with no end in sight. So the ability to sustain/tolerate sprawl seems far higher than we expect.
        taeric 4y ago
        Is it established that the basin has less regulation then normal, as well? Or on par with Houston?
- shagie 4y ago
  The greater Huston area is approximately 10,000 square miles. The city of Huston itself is 670 square miles. The 9 county area of the Bay Area is 7000 square miles... and that includes a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a city on. If you take the land area of the cities in the Bay Area ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_th... ) and sum them all up, you've got something on the order of 1,600 square miles. The land constraints within the Bay Area contribute significantly to the price of a house.
  - dan_quixote 4y ago
    And general desirability - diverse and well-paying economy, weather, water, mountains.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Absolutely... though that's harder to point a number to. The "this is how much land is there" is a metric that can't be argued. If you then try to look at the population densities of those areas, it becomes even more clear about why a single family detached house would be that much more expensive.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      Houston is more racially diverse than the Bay Area.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    It’s also functionality illegal to build anything but single family homes in most of the Bay Area and it’s now out of places to do that. Houston does have more space, but also doesn’t prevent you from building a duplex on your own land.
    - exhilaration 4y ago
      Pretty much all of the HOAs that are de facto zoning boards of the Houston area would most definitely prevent you from doing anything like that. HOA by-laws are where you'll find the real zoning regulations over there.
- gpm 4y ago
  $1.5m houses is a signal that a ton of people want to live there, and are willing to pay a premium for doing it. That's not a signal that you're doing something wrong. Of course, it would be nice if you could keep everything you're doing right and bring housing prices down (largely by building more of it). But on the whole real-estate being valuable is generally a positive sign. On the flip side, the cheapest houses you could find for awhile (maybe still?) were in detroit, that's not a sign that Detroit was doing well - but that demand had plummeted to literally 0 because it was doing so poorly.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    High prices aren’t necessarily an indicator of the quantity of demand but more so that >= 2 people with that amount of money want that home. For instance: nice homes in very low demand areas may sell for large amounts of money and only have a single offer.
    - gpm 4y ago
      I think there are two (very fair) criticisms in your post. One is that we're really talking about demand from people who can afford it. All the demand in the world from people living on minimum wage won't drive house prices up so they aren't really "counted" in my analysis. There's not really a way to fix this issue with the data, but I'd argue that demand from reasonably rich people is still a good sign. Indeed, rich people are the most mobile and able to move away from a shitty place to live. The other is that the quality of the home matters (a lot). Which is completely true, but the cheap shitty homes in the bay area are still demanding these prices, so I'm not sure it really applies to the concrete situation being discussed even though it is an issue with my general argument. You could maybe try and find "comparable" homes in different places to try and account for that, but I have no doubt doing so would open you up to issues with bias (intentional or otherwise).
    - danans 4y ago
      > For instance: nice homes in very low demand areas may sell for large amounts of money and only have a single offer. These houses and the areas they occupy (i.e Beverly Hills, Park Ave ) are an extreme edge case, and don't exist in the same housing market as normal houses. Above a certain very high price percentile, there are always very few buyers and sellers, and they are all paying a high premium for things like high physical security.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  you can get a house for under 100k in mississippi and they’re definitely not doing something right
rootusrootus 4y ago
With such little regulation, I would have guessed housing supply would be really great and prices quite affordable. But the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for house prices.
- chomp 4y ago
  They were affordable-ish... I don't have insight into the market, other than we're building like crazy and it's still not enough: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/housing/2022/10/07/434698/report-houston-led-nation-in-apartment-construction-during-first-half-of-2022/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/housing/2022/10/... I suspect some of this is market moves (e.g. people moving into apartments during COVID, and business relocations: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/business/2021/10/22/411596/texas-apartment-rentals-are-booming-driving-up-the-costs-to-tenants-by-double-digits/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/business/20...).
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I would expect the YOLO housing and environment approach to never be about equality and affordability. I would expect it to be a signal that NIMBYism is through the roof and that they have the regulatory power to inflate prices.
- lettergram 4y ago
  I’m always shocked that people think supply is the issue… People will live in the best place they can afford. This means prices will always be driven by the income level of people in the area. If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You’ll actually just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving there. That’ll drive the prices right back to where they were. Demand would have to drop, while you expand supply. Remove tech jobs from SF and demand will drop, lowering prices. If enough external people don’t wish to move there and you’re building, then prices drop. Effectively, demand always massively outstrips supply for living accommodations As a thought exercise: imagine it was $100/month to live in a 3Bed, 2Br house in Houston. You’d have 100m people want to move there. Keep moving that number up, at some point you’ll get supply and demand meeting. If you add 1000 new houses, it’ll barely impact demand because you’ll have 1000 people willing to move for a $50/month reduction in cost. Then prices will be right back where they started. Unless you can build 10k units or 100k units prices won’t meaningfully change from supply side factors alone.
fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
I thought Houston’s sprawl was mandated by minimum parking regulations.
pitaj 4y ago
Houston still has de facto zoning [0] and minimum parking requirements. The sprawl is not ideal, but prices are still far lower than other places. 1: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-ho...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  Pretty good article that explains the facets. I feel like the article undersells Houston zoning a bit though. You still see far more bizarre stuff in Houston than you would see in other places. The article makes the point that you don’t see churches next to brothels, which is a pretty extreme example, but you definitely do see some stuff you would not see in other cities: residential lands abutting churches on one side and industrial locations on the other with some retail location right behind. It’s a bit of a crapshoot in a lot of places and even if it’s not when you move in it could be later. Decades ago my aunt and uncle moved into what was at the time a pretty rural neighborhood in northwest Houston with only residents around but years later a church bought the property adjacent to their land and Sundays and Wednesdays moving forward there were noise and parking related issues.
  - gfaster 4y ago
    Over time Houston's land use code has gotten more restrictive to prevent close proximity of nuisance uses[1]. As for churches, they are very often allowed in residential areas regardless[2][3]. Houston's zoning regulations are still some of the most permissive in the country, but that's only relative to other American cities. Ever since the Euclid v. Ambler (1926), zoning in the US grew rapidly more restrictive, far more so than much of the rest of the world. The primary reason Houston doesn't look like Tokyo (with its more liberal zoning[4][5]) is that it still has a lot of the worst parts of zoning as the parent comment points out. [1]: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ (see Ord. No. 2020-1092) [2]: https://online.encodeplus.com/regs/fairfaxcounty-va/doc-viewer.aspx#secid-241 https://online.encodeplus.com/regs/fairfaxcounty-va/doc-view... [3]: https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT25LADE_CH25-2ZO_SUBCHAPTER_CUSDERE_ART2PRUSDERE_DIV1RETA_S25-2-491PECOPRUS https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinan... [4]: https://www.mlit.go.jp/toshi/city_plan/toshi_city_plan_tk_000043.html https://www.mlit.go.jp/toshi/city_plan/toshi_city_plan_tk_00... (japanese, pptx downloads, my japanese isn't good enough to navigate and find better documents, but if anyone knows of them that would be helpful) [5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071223082802/http://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.jp/plan/pe-007.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20071223082802/http://www.toshis...
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Sprawl and monster trucks everywhere are still a product of intentional government interference in Houston, it's just they call it ordinances and traffic engineering rather than zoning.
jimmaswell 4y ago
Every urban planning enthusiast online says without artificial zoning, there would be no sprawl and everything would be a walkable paradise with a healthy mix of shops and housing close by. But then Texas comes up and the narrative flips somehow.
- bluGill 4y ago
  The implementation is different, but Texas has zoning. Importantly they have minimum parking zoning which forces sprawl as much as if not more than most zoning laws. I think sprawl would happen anyway, cars are ultimately cheap and convenient (as % of budget large, but still affordable) and by the time traffic is a problem you have sprawl that transit cannot easily be retrofitted to.
  - gfaster 4y ago
    Cars are not super cheap, and in fact are very expensive when you start to account for public costs and externalities. Especially in regards parking, building car infrastructure is expensive and space inefficient, and nowhere near the amount built today would be built without laws mandating it. Moreover, highways really aren't cheap either, and Houston is suffering under the financial weight of them. Obviously since sprawl exists now it's hard to get rid of it; a city would be hard-pressed to go to the suburbs and tell them that they won't receive services anymore. However, as Detroit has shown, sprawl is definitely a liability if the city ever has any sort of period of decline. That certainly hasn't stopped Houston (and many other American cities) from acting as if that could never happen, and I suspect that the next 50 years will reveal the weaknesses of the model. I hope to be proven wrong, but that would require climate change to magically disappear and resources of all kinds to stay abundant, which seems unlikely.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Cars are super cheap compared to jet airplanes or helicopters. Yes they are a large part of our economy (I once read 60%, but I have no idea how to look that up), and of the average person's budget, but they are still cheap. Walking barefoot is a lot cheaper than cars (and not as stupid as it sounds - your feet are made to walk barefoot), but it is so much slower nobody considers it reasonable anymore.
ranrotx 4y ago
Just about every new housing development in the greater Houston area starts like this: Acquire some cheap farmland not too far from a highway, come in and sub-divide the lots, build some kind of neighborhood amenity (pool, rec center, etc.), and creat a Municipal Utility District with on-site well and sewer. None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
m463 4y ago
From what I remember, houston was surrouded by unincorporated areas that it would eventually assimilate. I believe the unincorporated areas would not have the building requirements of houston and the houses there would be grandfathered in. Also, speaking of groundwater. never drain your pool in houston. bad things will happen.
- g_sch 4y ago
  You've piqued my curiosity - what happens when you drain your pool in Houston?
  - conductr 4y ago
    It turns into a concrete boat and pops out of the ground. Happens everywhere with high water table. Can even happen randomly in other areas because most people don’t really know how much water is in the earth before they drain the pool. Maybe it rained a week ago and you thought things were dried out, stuff like that.
RockingGoodNite 4y ago
You can find a McDonald's next to a high rise, the contrast is pretty wild.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
You're making the same mistake as all the people that hand wring about "America doesn't regulate/ban <thing that is regulated/banned at the state level but not federally>. Houston the city doesn't regulate a lot of things. But its various neighborhood associations (which are somewhat comparable to town governments on the East coast and council governments in the UK) regulate at lot of that stuff instead. That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Does Houston have homeless camps and shantytowns housing thousands of people in random open spaces? My heavily zoned hometown Oakland does.
- _fullpint 4y ago
  It indeed does
  - fingerofchicken 4y ago

reducesuffering 4y ago

Well, they're doing something right when a median home costs $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the Bay Area growing up here.

russellbeattie 4y ago
I don't think you're making the argument you think you are.
andybak 4y ago
Doesn't "technical debt" imply something on the balance sheet that hasn't yet become due?
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
> Well, they're doing something right when a median home costs $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the Bay Area growing up here. You can get a house for $75k (median) if you want in Gary Indiana. I'm not sure how lower housing prices can be directly correlated with "doing things more right".
- volkk 4y ago
  isn't Gary Indiana a failed city? I would imagine Houston as relatively thriving given work, safety and industry levels?
  - Entinel 4y ago
    You're missing the point. They are saying Houston having lower housing prices is not an indicator that Houston is "doing something right."
    - volkk 4y ago
      i'm not missing anything, i'm just pointing out that using Gary doesn't make any sense. if you're going to use other cities to counter the OP's point, then choose something like Dallas or Tampa, or Miami. Gary is literally decrepit.
      - Entinel 4y ago
        That is the point you are missing. It is not just about price of homes but quality of life while the OP is just comparing $ vs $ when there is more to it than that.
        volkk 4y ago
        i am saying that the example of Gary doesn't prove that Houston ISN'T a thriving city only based on housing costs. you need to use a city that is a bit more comparable to Houston to drive the point that low housing costs don't equate with a successfully run city. it's a bit like someone arguing that Land Rovers are bad cars because they are built poorly, and then someone else coming in and saying well at least they don't cost the amount that a lamborghini costs, they must be doing something right. and then a third person coming into that argument and saying "well, actually you can't use price because a bicycle costs 200$ and that doesn't mean a bicycle is better than a Land Rover based on price alone" ...the point they're driving could be correct, but the comparison is apples to oranges. you can't compare bicycles to cars to drive the point, just like i wouldn't use Gary to make the argument that low prices does not mean a thriving city. a better argument would be to use something that is comparable to a Land Rover (Houston) like say, a car that is within 10-20k range that does the job but is still largely a piece of crap to argue your point that price alone doesn't dictate success.
- api 4y ago
  The difference is that Houston has more diverse and better job opportunities yet still has reasonably affordable housing. There are tons of places with very cheap housing and no jobs. Nobody moves there except maybe a few teleworkers looking to optimize hard for surplus or people with other reasons to go there like family ties.
- nilkn 4y ago
  Houston is the home of the US oil & gas industry and has one of the largest and most advanced medical centers in the world. There's a lot of money in Houston, and the city has incredibly ritzy neighborhoods like River Oaks and Piney Point Village, among many others; keeping overall housing relatively affordable with so many affluent people competing for it actually is an accomplishment.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    I'm sure Houston works for you, but it just isn't the happening place on many people's radars. We could split hairs about its benefits; e.g. * Economy comes and goes with natural resource boom bust cycle. * America's most obese city * A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation There are other cities that match some of those qualities that I don't much care for, but I can see why a lot of people wouldn't mind and go for the cheap housing there as a decent trade off. But in my original comment, my only point was that you can't judge how great a city is based on how cheap its real estate is (and the correlation often goes the opposite way).
    - nilkn 4y ago
      The most expensive house listing for Gary right now seems to be for $575k; for Houston, it's $20 million, a difference of 35x. The average sale price in Piney Point Village is apparently just under $3.7 million (https://www.har.com/pineypointvillage/realestate https://www.har.com/pineypointvillage/realestate) and the average rent is $8500/month. So on and so forth. I think you're imagining all Houston real estate as cheap/affordable, when in reality the city has lots of extremely expensive real estate. It just also has affordable housing due to widespread construction of townhomes, apartments, and condos. Something like Gary just isn't comparable.
      - selectodude 4y ago
        Gary is a suburb of Chicago and comparing it to Greater Houston seems a bit absurd. Chicagoland has many units that are listed for $15+ million.
- crawl_soever 4y ago
  I live in Gary and there are many factors that can factor into the economics here, mainly a single employer planning the entire city and that employer collapse. A house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > A house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it Are you kidding? Its easily worth twice that. Wait until I show you the upgrades, new paint and wall to wall carpet. The bathroom's been renovated with new fixtures, and that is genuine imported Mexican tile. You'd be a fool to pass on this. Just think of the possibilities.
- sershe 4y ago
  Except Houston is a fast-growing city, and Gary is a dying city. Houston managed to keep housing affordable while growing faster than most/all major cities.
rootusrootus 4y ago
It's barely under median for the US, that is the real comparison. There are many places across the US with significantly less expensive homes.
- hilbertseries 4y ago
  Homes in large cities are almost always more expensive than rural areas. I don’t think median is the right comparison, comparing to other large cities and metro areas makes much more sense.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    This is not a completely mismatched urban-vs-rural comparison, it is looking just at metro statistical areas across the U.S. https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-home-prices-q2-2022-ranked-median-single-family-2022-08-11.pdf https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-...
ceejayoz 4y ago
Hamburger is cheaper than ribeye, but I’m not sure that makes it better.
taeric 4y ago
The assertion seems to be that it is not going to end well. If it really is unsustainable sprawl with poorly put together civic functions, why do we expect it to go on forever? That is, sure, houses are cheap for now. But that doesn't mean you will have a place worth living in, given time.
- Tempest1981 4y ago
  > unsustainable sprawl 13 million people living in the Los Angeles basin seem to disagree.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I’m not one of them, but Los Angeles doesn’t really scream “sustainable” to me. Is it really a counterexample to what the GP is saying?
  - taeric 4y ago
    The basin has house prices much lower than the bay area. Still higher than Houston, but I'm not sure where that fits in this discussion. Did I mix up threads?
    - Tempest1981 4y ago
      If Houston is unsustainable, then LA must be far beyond unsustainable... yet it continues to sprawl with no end in sight. So the ability to sustain/tolerate sprawl seems far higher than we expect.
      - taeric 4y ago
        Is it established that the basin has less regulation then normal, as well? Or on par with Houston?
shagie 4y ago
The greater Huston area is approximately 10,000 square miles. The city of Huston itself is 670 square miles. The 9 county area of the Bay Area is 7000 square miles... and that includes a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a city on. If you take the land area of the cities in the Bay Area ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_th... ) and sum them all up, you've got something on the order of 1,600 square miles. The land constraints within the Bay Area contribute significantly to the price of a house.
- dan_quixote 4y ago
  And general desirability - diverse and well-paying economy, weather, water, mountains.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Absolutely... though that's harder to point a number to. The "this is how much land is there" is a metric that can't be argued. If you then try to look at the population densities of those areas, it becomes even more clear about why a single family detached house would be that much more expensive.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Houston is more racially diverse than the Bay Area.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  It’s also functionality illegal to build anything but single family homes in most of the Bay Area and it’s now out of places to do that. Houston does have more space, but also doesn’t prevent you from building a duplex on your own land.
  - exhilaration 4y ago
    Pretty much all of the HOAs that are de facto zoning boards of the Houston area would most definitely prevent you from doing anything like that. HOA by-laws are where you'll find the real zoning regulations over there.
gpm 4y ago
$1.5m houses is a signal that a ton of people want to live there, and are willing to pay a premium for doing it. That's not a signal that you're doing something wrong. Of course, it would be nice if you could keep everything you're doing right and bring housing prices down (largely by building more of it). But on the whole real-estate being valuable is generally a positive sign. On the flip side, the cheapest houses you could find for awhile (maybe still?) were in detroit, that's not a sign that Detroit was doing well - but that demand had plummeted to literally 0 because it was doing so poorly.
- kube-system 4y ago
  High prices aren’t necessarily an indicator of the quantity of demand but more so that >= 2 people with that amount of money want that home. For instance: nice homes in very low demand areas may sell for large amounts of money and only have a single offer.
  - gpm 4y ago
    I think there are two (very fair) criticisms in your post. One is that we're really talking about demand from people who can afford it. All the demand in the world from people living on minimum wage won't drive house prices up so they aren't really "counted" in my analysis. There's not really a way to fix this issue with the data, but I'd argue that demand from reasonably rich people is still a good sign. Indeed, rich people are the most mobile and able to move away from a shitty place to live. The other is that the quality of the home matters (a lot). Which is completely true, but the cheap shitty homes in the bay area are still demanding these prices, so I'm not sure it really applies to the concrete situation being discussed even though it is an issue with my general argument. You could maybe try and find "comparable" homes in different places to try and account for that, but I have no doubt doing so would open you up to issues with bias (intentional or otherwise).
  - danans 4y ago
    > For instance: nice homes in very low demand areas may sell for large amounts of money and only have a single offer. These houses and the areas they occupy (i.e Beverly Hills, Park Ave ) are an extreme edge case, and don't exist in the same housing market as normal houses. Above a certain very high price percentile, there are always very few buyers and sellers, and they are all paying a high premium for things like high physical security.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
you can get a house for under 100k in mississippi and they’re definitely not doing something right

rootusrootus 4y ago

With such little regulation, I would have guessed housing supply would be really great and prices quite affordable. But the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for house prices.

chomp 4y ago
They were affordable-ish... I don't have insight into the market, other than we're building like crazy and it's still not enough: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/housing/2022/10/07/434698/report-houston-led-nation-in-apartment-construction-during-first-half-of-2022/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/housing/2022/10/... I suspect some of this is market moves (e.g. people moving into apartments during COVID, and business relocations: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/business/2021/10/22/411596/texas-apartment-rentals-are-booming-driving-up-the-costs-to-tenants-by-double-digits/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/business/20...).
Waterluvian 4y ago
I would expect the YOLO housing and environment approach to never be about equality and affordability. I would expect it to be a signal that NIMBYism is through the roof and that they have the regulatory power to inflate prices.
lettergram 4y ago
I’m always shocked that people think supply is the issue… People will live in the best place they can afford. This means prices will always be driven by the income level of people in the area. If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You’ll actually just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving there. That’ll drive the prices right back to where they were. Demand would have to drop, while you expand supply. Remove tech jobs from SF and demand will drop, lowering prices. If enough external people don’t wish to move there and you’re building, then prices drop. Effectively, demand always massively outstrips supply for living accommodations As a thought exercise: imagine it was $100/month to live in a 3Bed, 2Br house in Houston. You’d have 100m people want to move there. Keep moving that number up, at some point you’ll get supply and demand meeting. If you add 1000 new houses, it’ll barely impact demand because you’ll have 1000 people willing to move for a $50/month reduction in cost. Then prices will be right back where they started. Unless you can build 10k units or 100k units prices won’t meaningfully change from supply side factors alone.

fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago

I thought Houston’s sprawl was mandated by minimum parking regulations.

pitaj 4y ago

Houston still has de facto zoning [0] and minimum parking requirements. The sprawl is not ideal, but prices are still far lower than other places. 1: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-ho...

SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
Pretty good article that explains the facets. I feel like the article undersells Houston zoning a bit though. You still see far more bizarre stuff in Houston than you would see in other places. The article makes the point that you don’t see churches next to brothels, which is a pretty extreme example, but you definitely do see some stuff you would not see in other cities: residential lands abutting churches on one side and industrial locations on the other with some retail location right behind. It’s a bit of a crapshoot in a lot of places and even if it’s not when you move in it could be later. Decades ago my aunt and uncle moved into what was at the time a pretty rural neighborhood in northwest Houston with only residents around but years later a church bought the property adjacent to their land and Sundays and Wednesdays moving forward there were noise and parking related issues.
- gfaster 4y ago
  Over time Houston's land use code has gotten more restrictive to prevent close proximity of nuisance uses[1]. As for churches, they are very often allowed in residential areas regardless[2][3]. Houston's zoning regulations are still some of the most permissive in the country, but that's only relative to other American cities. Ever since the Euclid v. Ambler (1926), zoning in the US grew rapidly more restrictive, far more so than much of the rest of the world. The primary reason Houston doesn't look like Tokyo (with its more liberal zoning[4][5]) is that it still has a lot of the worst parts of zoning as the parent comment points out. [1]: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ (see Ord. No. 2020-1092) [2]: https://online.encodeplus.com/regs/fairfaxcounty-va/doc-viewer.aspx#secid-241 https://online.encodeplus.com/regs/fairfaxcounty-va/doc-view... [3]: https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT25LADE_CH25-2ZO_SUBCHAPTER_CUSDERE_ART2PRUSDERE_DIV1RETA_S25-2-491PECOPRUS https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinan... [4]: https://www.mlit.go.jp/toshi/city_plan/toshi_city_plan_tk_000043.html https://www.mlit.go.jp/toshi/city_plan/toshi_city_plan_tk_00... (japanese, pptx downloads, my japanese isn't good enough to navigate and find better documents, but if anyone knows of them that would be helpful) [5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071223082802/http://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.jp/plan/pe-007.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20071223082802/http://www.toshis...

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Sprawl and monster trucks everywhere are still a product of intentional government interference in Houston, it's just they call it ordinances and traffic engineering rather than zoning.

jimmaswell 4y ago

Every urban planning enthusiast online says without artificial zoning, there would be no sprawl and everything would be a walkable paradise with a healthy mix of shops and housing close by. But then Texas comes up and the narrative flips somehow.

bluGill 4y ago
The implementation is different, but Texas has zoning. Importantly they have minimum parking zoning which forces sprawl as much as if not more than most zoning laws. I think sprawl would happen anyway, cars are ultimately cheap and convenient (as % of budget large, but still affordable) and by the time traffic is a problem you have sprawl that transit cannot easily be retrofitted to.
- gfaster 4y ago
  Cars are not super cheap, and in fact are very expensive when you start to account for public costs and externalities. Especially in regards parking, building car infrastructure is expensive and space inefficient, and nowhere near the amount built today would be built without laws mandating it. Moreover, highways really aren't cheap either, and Houston is suffering under the financial weight of them. Obviously since sprawl exists now it's hard to get rid of it; a city would be hard-pressed to go to the suburbs and tell them that they won't receive services anymore. However, as Detroit has shown, sprawl is definitely a liability if the city ever has any sort of period of decline. That certainly hasn't stopped Houston (and many other American cities) from acting as if that could never happen, and I suspect that the next 50 years will reveal the weaknesses of the model. I hope to be proven wrong, but that would require climate change to magically disappear and resources of all kinds to stay abundant, which seems unlikely.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Cars are super cheap compared to jet airplanes or helicopters. Yes they are a large part of our economy (I once read 60%, but I have no idea how to look that up), and of the average person's budget, but they are still cheap. Walking barefoot is a lot cheaper than cars (and not as stupid as it sounds - your feet are made to walk barefoot), but it is so much slower nobody considers it reasonable anymore.

ranrotx 4y ago

Just about every new housing development in the greater Houston area starts like this: Acquire some cheap farmland not too far from a highway, come in and sub-divide the lots, build some kind of neighborhood amenity (pool, rec center, etc.), and creat a Municipal Utility District with on-site well and sewer. None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.

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m463 4y ago

From what I remember, houston was surrouded by unincorporated areas that it would eventually assimilate. I believe the unincorporated areas would not have the building requirements of houston and the houses there would be grandfathered in. Also, speaking of groundwater. never drain your pool in houston. bad things will happen.

g_sch 4y ago
You've piqued my curiosity - what happens when you drain your pool in Houston?
- conductr 4y ago
  It turns into a concrete boat and pops out of the ground. Happens everywhere with high water table. Can even happen randomly in other areas because most people don’t really know how much water is in the earth before they drain the pool. Maybe it rained a week ago and you thought things were dried out, stuff like that.

RockingGoodNite 4y ago

You can find a McDonald's next to a high rise, the contrast is pretty wild.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

You're making the same mistake as all the people that hand wring about "America doesn't regulate/ban <thing that is regulated/banned at the state level but not federally>. Houston the city doesn't regulate a lot of things. But its various neighborhood associations (which are somewhat comparable to town governments on the East coast and council governments in the UK) regulate at lot of that stuff instead. That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Does Houston have homeless camps and shantytowns housing thousands of people in random open spaces? My heavily zoned hometown Oakland does.

_fullpint 4y ago
It indeed does
- fingerofchicken 4y ago