5 ms·
Berlin, 3.645M citizen, everything underground. Houston, 2.302M citizen, ... "gigantic"
by KingOfCoders 2y ago
Berlin, 3.645M citizen, everything underground.
Houston, 2.302M citizen, ... "gigantic"
- bdcravens 2y agoIt's not a matter of population, but land. Berlin is about 345 square miles; Houston is 640.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoBerlin including suburbs ("Speckgürtel") is ~1400 square miles.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoSo approximately 1/7th the size of the Houston metro area.
- bdcravens 2y agoIf you includes the suburbs, the Houston area is roughly 10,000 square miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston#Geography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston#Geography
- tstrimple 2y agoAnd thus their additional challenges are caused by their absolute neglect of urban planning. If only someone could have predicted that spreading single family housing over hundreds of square miles was going to create a maintenance nightmare.
- dwighttk 2y agoWhen people are talking about Houston they are talking about Greater Houston: 7.5M people over 10,000 square miles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston
- KingOfCoders 2y agoGreater Berlin also is much bigger than Berlin.
- FireBeyond 2y agoThis is silly. MSAs have near zero to do with a city. They are not talking about Greater Houston. For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area) It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle". It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same. Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle". Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle". Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best. To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily. It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level. Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world. Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel. In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country. The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.
- dwighttk 2y agoEven Wikipedia doesn’t include College Station
- tohnjitor 2y agoAs I understand it, the topsoil in parts of Texas is only a foot deep or less and then it's solid bedrock. This is why most homes do not have basements.
- EasyMark 2y agoThat’s not true in all of Texas for sure. I can vouch for it in Central Texas “hill country” 6-10”around my home and you will hit solid limestone. Makes a nice home foundation (provided it’s not too porous)but I would not want to pay for a pool or basement here.
- Teknomancer 2y agoBerlin, Germany is inland, with an elevation average around 34 meters above sea level. The ground soil composition in Berlin is primarily sandy, draining easily and lending itself exceptionally well to underground infrastructure development. Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.
- Symbiote 2y agoHow about Amsterdam, or London (outer London if you want a lower density).
- tstrimple 2y agoThere always seems to be an excuse as to why America is exceptional and things accomplished routinely in other countries couldn't possibly work here. It's true to a degree. They absolutely cannot work here. But that's more about our political dysfunction than anything meaningful about our geographical situations.
- mrguyorama 2y agoImagine if we made these arguments in the past: "No we can't have a transcontinental railroad because the US is gigantic and mostly empty" (which is the entire reason we wanted a damn railroad across the US!) "No we can't build an interstate transport system because the US is mostly empty" "No we can't dam nearly every mid sized river in the country because the US is too spread out" It's just fundamentally wrong on all levels. We can build a Burger King in the middle east in a week, we can build a system of levees around a swampland that is actively under the waterline that, when they failed due to design deficiencies, we decided to build even stronger ones. We fucking COULD do massive amounts of high speed rail criscrossing the country and connecting all of us for reasonable prices without even taking your shoes off. It would be even easier if we just stop it at the Californian border
- 2y ago
- chasd00 2y agoBerlin also has the advantage, being generous on “advantage”, of being completely rebuilt about 70 years ago.
- ggm 2y agoWhen did the explosion of Houston's size and city take place? pre- or post 1945?
- gregw2 2y agoSome of both but mostly post-45. The quip is that two things made Houston possible: oil and air conditioning.
- hindsightbias 2y agoA wave in the 60’s for oil & space, then more burbs and exurbs when the bible belters migrated to TX in the 80’s.
- KingOfCoders 2y agohttps://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/