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"?
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.
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.
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.
b) Small transit-connected apartments fetch much better prices than many sprawl houses, suggesting that the preferences people express with their wallets and they preferences they speak into the microphone at zoning board meetings are pretty different.
b) You have cause and effect backwards here. Apartments are built in those areas because real-estate is already expensive. The real-estate is not expensive because they built an apartment building in the middle of nowhere. Things have to be high-density from the beginning for it to work, and everyone building housing since the automobile has chosen to go low-density whenever possible.
Building a high-density city today would require preventing people from building low-density just outside city limits and driving into town, zooming past all the suckers who bought a cramped apartment waiting at the bus stop.
Actually you just said the solution. Let them buy all the exurb crap the want, but make driving hell in all the main destinations. Do that, and your transit investments will actually work.
Only spinless politicians that want to appease both sides make transit fail and let the car win.
Welcome to democracy. The only way this could work is if you could decide to have a city where all the people who want cars aren't allowed to live there (or at least aren't allowed to vote there). In other words, a hard boarder with immigration controls, and ideally an independent budget so the Federal or State government can't tax you are require you to build highways to get your tax money back in the form of grants.
In the case of Denver or some place like it, do a few blocks around the light rail stations. The car owners won't really notice (yet), but the small businessmen will complain. Ignore the small businesses, they are wrong about their own situation: Foot traffic will more than make up for any lost parking.
In fact there is a name, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_urbanism, for this sort of bootstrapping, to build a loyal constituency over people defending their new car free privileges rather than merely imagining an alternative future.
But stuff like congestion pricing, the 14th street bus lane, and bridge conversions, in NYC gives me a little hope. Manhattan can also set a better example for the rest of the US --- active measures rather than simply basking in good decisions made 100 years ago.
The first time a place is developed it’s almost always going to be low density. And once a place is developed the first time, the only way it can be substantially changed is with near-unanimous consent. There are enough people with an innate distrust of change that this consent is not forthcoming. So the initial conditions are permanent. Cities can’t evolve anymore.
No amount of 'trusting change' will transform the millions of spread out homes already constructed over 80 years into densely packed apartment buildings without tearing the houses down and putting the apartment buildings up. Pre-car cities were built high-density from the beginning. They were never low-density.
Even New York started out looking like a small town. There are lots of places that look like this in California today, and are under comparable economic pressure to grow. They're just choosing not to respond.
Apparently commuters choosing to not drive is an unforgivable affront to Freedom Markets™.
Cite: The Power Broker, Robert Caro
The national newspapers I've seen have broadly been pro-infrastructure of all kinds, whether car or mass transit.
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.
There is plenty written about making the LIRR more than a rich suburbanite's 9-5 commute booster, and likewise making the long island buses complement rather than ignore a train service that runs east-west throughout the day.
Nobody need pony up 300 a month because there's no other choice.
> it's about time they [cars?] divide the rich and the aspirational
I'm somewhat shocked by this. Why would you want rich people to be able to avoid all the problems they create for everyone else with their greed?
In NYC the congestion tax at least was going to be linked to more MTA funding pre-pandemic.
> I'm somewhat shocked by this. Why would you want rich people to be able to avoid all the problems they create for everyone else with their greed?
So right now cars and homeownership are still broadly popular. People view them as the hallmark of prosperity and essential middle-class-and-up status symbols. There's still a deep sense in many parts that urbanism is just part of the the Democrats fetishizing poverty, non-white people, etc., and that apartments and public transit are palliatives for people that didn't make the American dream or whatever.
And indeed "middle class" in general is the aspirational LARPing the landed rich. Big cars because fancy carriages. Suburb houses with lawns to mimmick country estates (and feudal manors before that). And yes ownership to mimic the land ownership itself.
So for urbanism to win, we need to break the coalition between the rich and the wannabes, break wealth in homeownership as a safety net when the state provides none, and break car ownership as the normal way to travel etc.
If congestion taxes heighten the underlying truth car usage always excludes others from the street, that's great. Hell, if wall street keeps on buying up subdivisions to rent out, I can approve of that in an acceleration way: better we pay rent than mortgages if realigns class consciousness. Likewise with some super-car-sharing world where no one can afford a car if they don't rent out rides.
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.
1. Most national news, by number of publications leans left. Conservative publications get more eyeballs per outlet, though. Most local news, of course, takes the installation of a single bike lane as evidence that the ghosts of Pol Pot and Stalin have just succeeded in an unholy socialist coup of the local city council.
2. Right leaning billionaires tend to keep their mouths shut more than left-leaning ones.
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.
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.
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.
And it’s not cheap at all (import tax of 100%), yet people are more than willing to pay it.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Literally across the street from my hotel room, on the 16th story, was a single-family detached house.
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.
Who is "you"? The way your sentence is structured is from the perspective of a city planner zoning a city or a powerful central authority actually building these structures.
In Houston, "you" is an individual and if you are placing a 16+ storing housing building down, you're doing it because you think you can make money renting or selling the units. The idea of relaxed land use regulations (zoning) is to allow demand to plan the city.
> It's an inefficient use of our limited resources, and artificially inflates housing prices by limiting supply.
Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people. If it was, we'd all live in dormitories and eat in the cafeteria because private bathrooms and kitchens are wasteful. I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?
I should have been more specific in 'need the density'. Yes, in today's climate that means 'because someone thought it would be profitable. That's because they saw there was demand for housing there.
> Efficiency isn't the most important thing to all people.
You've constructed a strawman position I don't hold. There's clearly a difference between "we should live in dorms" and "maybe we should discourage single family homes holding the land that could be use to house hundreds of families in apartments or condos."
> I don't understand what you mean by "artificial" inflation of prices, what's artificial about it?
Speculators are buying houses and renting them out in hopes that the land prices will skyrocket as demand for city life increases. By holding the stock of single family homes near urban cores in reserve, they are preventing the land from being used to build large housing developments. Because there is a lack of large housing developments, housing costs are higher than they would be if speculators instead sold all their lots to developers for developing low/mid/highrise housing.
I did that entirely on purpose but it wasn't to say that you hold that position. The point was to show that efficiency isn't black and white and, if your justification was efficiency (which it was), there was an even more efficient position than yours. What you're asking for is something more efficient than a multi-acre unoccupied vacation villa and less efficient than military barracks. I wanted to demonstrate that, on the spectrum of efficiency, you're choice of preferring a multi-level housing to a small single family home is just as arbitrary as any other choice.
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?
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.
Chairs are created by human (or machine) labor.
Since the provenance of the owned thing is entirely different in each case, it seems likely the legal/social/moral understanding of ownership in each case would be quite different.
If there is shortage of land there is nothong you can do.
It turns out that what he community does say when given a voice is NO!
But Houston has relatively little urban fabric; to me it looks mostly like a really large suburban agglomeration, a place where you cannot get anywhere without driving a few miles in a car.