The problem as I see it with Houston is that there are few inhibitors to the sprawl, and few options to navigate it. Land to the west of town(where a significant part of the growth is happening) is plentiful and relatively cheap. I sometimes joke that Houston and San Antonio will merge at some point.(they are technically ~180 miles apart)
There are now 3 rings around the city: 610, 8 and 99. The best way to get in and out of the city is by car, there just isnt a comprehensive public transport system to be found. There is talks of rail every few years, but they usually end up being shot down because
a) nobody wants to give up their land to build it(imminent domain fighting)
b) the city is so damn big it would be cost prohibitive to build a rail system.
The only way I manage to deal with it is to work 6am to 3pm so that my commute is in front of rush hour. I'm admittedly part of the problem, as I live 30 miles southwest of the city. If I were to commute at the 8-5pm time, I would be on the road for 110 minutes each commute. As long as I get on the road by 5:30am, I cut that to 45 minutes in the morning and 55 in the afternoon.
> the city is so damn big it would be cost prohibitive to build a rail system.
But yet there is endless money for roads and parking lots as if they are free or cheap. I'm so sick of people acting like there is no money for public transit.
In my hometown of San Diego they are spending close to a billion dollars adding a single lane to a freeway.
Also, public transit is not the same thing as rail. Public bus systems work amazingly well in other parts of the world. But in America they are stigmatized (as being for poor people) to the point that they aren't even mentioned as public transit options.
Cost prohibitive doesn't mean there's no money, it means money used wouldn't be worth it. The Dallas area has the longest light rail system in the US, yet it barely covers the sprawl. Same with buses. There are too many people, living dozens of miles away from each other, going in all directions at all times which makes public transit often cost prohibitive. Of course they try anyways to service their citizens. But without a mind shift change _and_ a recentralization of people _and_ a significant increase in expenditure, it's a real waste to grow the barely used system. Especially since most of the people we're talking about with the sprawl don't live in the city anyways.
As for road expenditures, in both Houston and Dallas, a large amount of new money towards them use private money on toll roads. This includes joint ventures for toll lanes on public highways which is of course regressive, but keeps at bay this kind of comment complaining about public funds.
> Cost prohibitive doesn't mean there's no money, it means money used wouldn't be worth it.
Yes, light rail sucks (you will get no argument from me on that). Its basically the least functional of all public transit, and often times I believe is put in to make people hate transit since it is less functional
> As for road expenditures, in both Houston and Dallas, a large amount of new money towards them use private money on toll roads
That's great that they have toll roads. I still think most people completely underestimate how unsustainable this type of development is. In 50 years these sunbelt cities will be falling apart with strip malls collapsing and pot holes in the roads.
I remember when light rail was proposed. The thing that got me at the time was it was a single line and it went a very short distance (the goal was to have people not park in downtown if I remember because downtown Houston is a pain to park). After the first line was built the number of people who had traffic accidents with the light rail trains were staggering. The light rail even switches lanes from one side of the street to the other with cars having to stop for the train to cross. Downtown is where they aimed it but there wasn't much room to properly develop and design a line there. If they had developed/designed it to bring people into town from the suburbs it would have been better I think.
Are there examples? The New York and Tokyo subways have earned a reputation for reliably showing up very frequently, but I can't name any busses like that.
In 2020, 691 K jobs are inside I-610, while 911 K jobs are in the ring between I-610 and TX-8. The other 1850 K jobs are in various sectors around the perimeter.
So not only do most Houston metro residents not commute to the city center, they do not commute to inside of 8, a ring of about 25 miles in diameter.
Thats definitely true in many cases, and Im sure its driven largely by the traffic patterns. I can add that once you get inside of beltway 8, its usually a pretty easy drive. It is the part between 99 and beltway 8 (usually about 5-10 miles iirc) that takes 50% of the commuting time.
> The problem as I see it with Houston is that there are few inhibitors to the sprawl
While Lake Ontario prohibits development to the south of Toronto, Canada, there is not much limiting development in any other direction, and the suburbs have done so.
However, to protect the water supply and farmland, the Ontario legislature created a 'green zone' around the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that limited municipalities and regions/counties from approving development in certain areas:
According to the Citizen's Budget Commission >The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit civic organization whose mission is to achieve constructive change in the finances and services of New York City and New York State government. Our mission is rooted in serving the citizenry at large, rather than narrow special interests; preserving public resources, whether financial or human; and focusing on the well-being of future New Yorkers, the most underrepresented group in city and state government.
See Figure 1 of their Report at https://cbcny.org/research/rent-and-ride for a comparison of housing plus transportation costs for a median income household for 20 cities. Miami is the lowest; San Jose is the highest. Figure 3 shows housing and transportation as a percentage of median income. Washington, DC is the lowest; Phoenix is the highest.
The study appears to be based on the city, not the metro area. Cities vary considerably in how much of the metro is covered by the city, what percent of city workers live outside, what percent reverse commute, etc.
Turns out building in a flood plain leads to flooding too. Maybe no zoning laws has drawbacks.
I stayed with a friend in Houston for a week. As a New Yorker, I took the bus a few places. I also found a farmers market within walking distance to his home and organized a few people to shop there. They were pleasantly surprised at this wonderful, affordable source of delicious, healthy produce.
But these social activities were swimming hard upstream. Telling people I took the bus to meet them prompted reactions like I came from another planet. Not many people looked like they ate a lot of vegetables. They liked it far more when I told them I went to a firing range and shot a gun for the first time.
This sounds exacty like the kind of bigoted drivel you'd get from someone who thinks they know what Houston is like, but has never actually been there. First, Houston has pretty strict zoning laws, second, the metro system is pretty widely used where it is built out, and thirdly, Houston with some exceptions, is one of the blue-est (and some areas are the red-est, to be fair) cities in the state, with a pretty wide spectrum of political opionons represented in between. Where exactly in Houston were you? Edit: 'zoning laws' is the wrong term. Houston, does not, in fact have zoning laws as we we think of them traditionally, but are instead governed by 'https://houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/'
Maybe in downtown. Get much outside of the tall buildings (which isn't very far tbqh) and you'll find fast food places, breweries, residences, schools, offices, and shopping centers all within blocks of each other. I honestly think this is generally a good thing.
> the metro system is pretty widely used where it is built out
I live in Houston and I don't get the impression that Houstonians understand where bus stops are (they're "there" but where do they "go" and at what times?). Moreover the only person I know who took the bus had to leave the office prior to a specific time: prior to when the bus route stopped. Otherwise she'd be stranded 15 miles away from her home. Everyone else avoids the bus because they don't want their schedule to be dictated by the public transport system and can't afford the occasional taxi/rideshare.
So in my experience: the metro system is mostly used by poor people and it's mostly not built out very much. There's light rail in downtown but the bulk of public transportation going into downtown from outside the 610 loop is via bus. That's a sliver of people compared to people driving by car.
> is one of the blue-est (and some areas are the red-est, to be fair) cities in the state, with a pretty wide spectrum of political opionons represented in between.
Being "one of the blue-est cities in the state" doesn't mean much when the rest of the state is very bible-belt red outside of Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio.
And being "one of the blue-est cities in the state" ignores the fact that we're gerrymandered to hell. We're so gerrymandered that we're made fun of on social media. Of course, the mockery usually excludes the fact that the gerrymandering occurred 20 years ago. But it's still a mockery nonetheless.
When I didn't have access to a car I did use the Metro bus in Houston. The place I was going to was about 5 mins by car (10 mins in traffic). The closest bus stop was about a mile's walk from my house. The actual bus ride was quick enough but there was usually a mile of walking to the front-door of the place I was going to. So, this turned into about a 30~45 minute commute. And I will agree that most of the bus riders are the poorer people of Houston (not all riders). I also can not count the number of times a bus just wasn't on time and I would walk to the next stop. I had even seen taxis come by and haggle with riders when the bus wasn't on time.
My understanding is that Houston does not have zoning laws. In fact from their newspaper:
> The city of Houston does not have zoning but development is governed by codes that address how property can be subdivided. The City codes do not address land use."
Houston is also the 4th largest city in the US and extremely diverse (not just in race), I imagine depending where you are in the city is whether or not you're more likely to see mostly healthy people or mostly unhealthy people
Yep, I was wrong, and the OP and you are correct - there are no zoning laws as such, only a series of what would be considered building codes in other cities.
>the metro system is pretty widely used where it is built out
Nationwide, the general sentiment is that only poor people use public transportation. Just because it's widely used does not affect that sentiment.
>Houston with some exceptions, is one of the blue-est (and some areas are the red-est, to be fair) cities in the state, with a pretty wide spectrum of political opionons represented in between.
I'm guessing this is in response to the gun comment...believe it or not, dems like guns too.
> Nationwide, the general sentiment is that only poor people use public transportation. Just because it's widely used does not affect that sentiment.
Yes it does. If it’s actually widely used class stigma dissipates rapidly. See the subway in New York or commuter rail in the New York metro area. I believe commuter rail is also a thing in other parts of the Boston-Washington corridor and I know BART has substantial non-poor ridership even though the Bay Area’s public transport is a complete snafu. North America may have the worst public transport of the continents with substantial development but it’s not uniformly awful, just awful compared to Europe or Asia.
>If it’s actually widely used class stigma dissipates rapidly
I think the same is true for Chicago - both buses and rail are used extensively. There's still plenty of people in cars, but the stigma is a lot lower.
One thing unaccounted for in the comparison is the type of housing that each respective city affords. Housing costs may be similar (Houston is still less compared to NYC in the article), but Houstonians are certainly getting much more space, both inside and out of their home, than NYC residents. This matters when it comes to things like larger families. Spending time on the road is definitely a huge pain in Houston, but in the end where you live doesn't just come down to a numerical comparison.
> getting much more space, both inside and out of their home
I recently visited Dallas (which I assume is similar to Houston) and I asked my airport Uber driver what there is to do in Dallas and he couldn't name a single thing. I ended up spending my small time there at a Texas Roadhouse (on recommendation) which is some horrible corporate restaurant chain getting served luke-warm mushy green beans that were mostly inedible.
Say what you will about space, I don't know how anyone could live in a place as culturally dead as Dallas.
You visit a city apparently without doing any planning or research, you rely on an Uber driver for recommendations, then declare the city culturally dead when you end up at (what is essentially) Applebee's?
I currently live in the suburbs of Austin and I hope that one day I have a self driving car so that I can live further out of the city and have more space because I want a big workshop. I'll gladly trade easy access to restaurants and museums for access to tools and quiet.
For your future last-minute trips, it only takes a few minutes to pull up TripAdvisor for the city you just arrived in and look up the top things to do. I tend not to plan most of my trips until the last minute, but at least this way I'm seeing the highlights.
I'm pretty sure you can find chain restaurants anywhere, including right on Times Square. Just because someone recommended it to you doesn't mean you suddenly lost all agency. If you know that you dislike chain restaurants, why would you make one the primary place you visited in the city?
No Texas Roadhouse on Times Square, but there are 8 in the surrounding counties, e.g. at New Rochelle, Deer Park, and East Meadows, NY. It was founded in Indiana and is now headquartered in Louisville. There are a few hundred locations, and Texas Roadhouse bears the same relationship to Texas as Outback Steakhouse bears to Australia.
I felt the same way on a road trip that took me through Dallas and Houston several years ago. Even though I knew they were sprawly and car oriented, I was a bit surprised about the vibe as the cities are old enough to in theory have nice old traditional down-towns. There were some neat spots, but what's seared in my memory are multi-level parking garages and ground-level retail few and far between.
Reading up on it after, apparently the cities built under/overground tunnels between many of the buildings to keep people out of the heat, especially at the height of summer. This sucked life out of the streets.
> Say what you will about space, I don't know how anyone could live in a place as culturally dead as Dallas.
Culturally dead is the wrong word, I think. You don't have millions of people in one place and no culture. The streets lacked vibrancy from what I could gather from two days in each city, making it hard to find it (which is a major problem).
I live in the central area of a major city (Toronto) and I love the fact that I don't own a car and can rent one when I need it. I have shopping/groceries/bars/work/parks/museums all within a 10-15 minute walk from home so I get where you're coming from. When I visited Edmonton, Alberta about a decade ago, my first impressions were very similar until my cousins took me out to all the things they do and I had a good time (still wouldn't want to live there).
You are basing your entire review of a city off of a single Uber driver? Bad times lie ahead...
Dallas has the best bbq, it’s a little podunk restaurant near the Cisco office. Dallas has an entire jazz nightlife scene in their hipster district. Dallas has tons of American history with one of our favorite presidents being assassinated in that very city where his Vice President was from... Something tells me you were not trying very hard to fit in with the Dallas culture (as weird as it is)
I think you might just have highlighted why a taxi driver and an Uber driver are not the same thing. For all you know, the Uber driver might have arrived in Dallas just a week before you.
It would really be interesting to see the amount spent on fuel -- as a proxy for driving -- in the summer vs the fall/spring.
While everyone on here advocating for fewer cars and more alternatives (walking, biking, public transportation) is correct for all the usual reasons (environment), there are several issues that make it harder in Houston:
1. The heat in the summer
2. There isn't mixed use housing. Walking by restaurants and cafes and people in NYC is a pleasant experience. Walking over sidewalks in the heat without a person in site is not as pleasant.
I think if they start more mix use housing (several brave souls try every year), and as they become successful, we will see more walking in the good seasons.
I know, it feels like we don't have that kind of time, but hopefully we can plant more trees in the meantime to slow it all down.
Native Houstonian turned New Yorker (25 years!) here. I often say to my Houston family and friends that while it may be hotter in Houston, we New Yorkers deal with the summer heat way more than they do. They go from their air conditioned houses to their air conditioned cars to their air conditioned destinations. We New Yorkers are out in it all day...we walk a hell of a lot more, and stand around in the ovens otherwise known as subway stations. And there are just way more spaces that simply lack A/C in NYC.
Yes we do have smaller living spaces, but I will say that my household electricity usage is about 50% less than most of my Houston cohorts, especially in the summertime.
I've not spent much time studying this but is it not the case that there's basically some sort of 'ideal suburban-ness' beyond which things start to get horribly congested?
If you want the sort of front and back garden, big detached house lifestyle, then it feels like you want to get in early whilst a city is still small. Once it's beyond a certain size, even if you can afford it, traffic is just awful at any time of day so you're not getting anywhere.
Public transport isn't the answer either - taxi services can work, but if you bought in to a place for the sprawl, you just can't get buses and trains to every corner of it. (It's theoretically possible, but people who move to these places don't want it by definition - the whole point of having that big old house is to fill it with big toys, the workshop in the garage, the big chest freezer, etc etc).
There's a natural push-pull here, though. Big cities have the best, most high-paying jobs. People move to Houston for the earning opportunity and then put up with the traffic because they have to (not realizing how much it's costing them). Small cities with less sprawl and less traffic don't have those same job opportunities. The network effect is very real for companies.
> However, median transportation costs were $1,152, a figure 38 percent higher than for New Yorkers. In total, the study found, living in Houston was only $79 cheaper each month than New York.
What isn’t clear to me from this if if the median transportation costs are higher in Houston because they have to be, or because people have more free income and are simply choosing to spend it on more expensive vehicles. I’d guess you’d find plenty of SUVs and trucks in and around Houston, which are expensive luxury vehicles that are not needed to commute. So you’re paying a higher lease price and higher gas prices for your gas guzzling status symbol, but that’s your own choice - you could drive a used beater sedan and have lower costs.
Not an expert on Houston, but did spend the past weekend there.
There's definitely a big car factor there. I had reserved a mid sized rental car to get to and from the airport and around the car centric area I was staying. When I got to the rental car center they apologized and said they were out of mid sized cars and said I could take a truck, a large suv, a jeep wrangler or what she referred to as a 2 door. It turns out a 2 door was a dodge challenger (large, overpowered and fuel inefficient car). The representative said they got rid of all the smaller cars because no one would be willing to rent them.
The concentration of pickup trucks being driven as day to day commuting vehicles seemed quite high as well.
It’s probably a bit of both. Houston uses HOV toll lanes, so there are additional costs to commuting there. The distance that people commute in the Houston area can be insane, though, which is where I imagine the cost comparison comes in. 30-50 mile commutes aren’t uncommon in the Houston metro area.
I just moved to NYC from Durham, NC, and I braced for the change in COL.
But I don't think it's as bad as people say, and I think a big part is transportation.
The 1 month Metrocard costs about what I was spending on gas in a month of commuting with a 124 Spider (not the most fuel efficient car, but very far from a gas guzzler)
Once maintenance and insurance are included, the Metrocard is cheaper (as I take trips outside of work).
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I can also walk to most errands I previously had to drive 15-20 minutes for (40+ minutes total after parking and traffic).
Besides saving money, the time saved is pretty valuable
Perth Western Australia needs to look very hard at this.
Its rapidly becoming affordable to live and work in the States capital, and the rest of the state gets their costs driven up and resources strangled off to try and pay the escalating cost of sprawl.
News flash: general living activities, working and housing being far apart from each other is expensive. See Mr Money Mustache for supporting evidence.
Former Houston native here so I will weigh in. Houston being less affordable that NYC is debatable. I have lived in 3 other states and 5 other major cities and everywhere I have been has been a give and take situation.
For example, property taxes in Texas are legalized robbery. But in Ohio, property taxes are pretty low. But I get to pay state, and local city income taxes so my savings in that category is made up for in another. Same goes for food, rent, transportation, etc.
Sprawl has to do with annexation. Texas allows larger cities to annex smaller ones and that is how Houston is getting bigger via sprawl. Last thing Houston, Dallas, or Austin wants is to be locked in geographically. Houston would rather go to court to fight Dallas to annex a city than build skyscrapers used for housing.
Sounds like a success. The city grew huge until an equilibrium was reached that slowed growth. With restrictive zoning, you would just have a smaller, poorer city which fewer people would have wanted to move to.
Every growing city reaches peak suburb eventually and going back to normal (transit, bike, and walk oriented) land use patterns just harder and harder the more car-oriented your city gets
While transportation in Houston's sprawl is a factor (and yes, duh, requires a car for almost everybody commuting), the quality of life in Houston, even considering the heat, humidity, and potential for flooding if you buy too close to a flood-prone bayou, is literally orders of magnitude higher than NYC. Seriously, NYC (or any other congested city like it) is just below Hell on the list of places I NEVER want to be, much less live...) . I lived in Houston for 10 years, and although I like Austin better overall, there are things I really miss about Houston. I would not live in NYC for any level of income. Seriously - offer me $3M/yr and I'll say you're not even close...
Enjoy it while the cost of fuel doesn’t include the environmental costs. Future generations will end up paying for the comforts of these years. That is not to say NYC is ideal, but moving mass over great distances is not free.
Obviously, simply living isn’t free either, and who’s to say what this generation is entitled to consume versus the future ones.
As a Houston native I strongly disagree. You spend a huge % of life in a car there, and not in a fun way driving down twisty roads either. That is much more unpleasant than being cramped in NYC for many, where at least you can walk everywhere.
Why? Walking is good exercise and the public transit will take you almost anywhere, plus the gender ratios are nice. It’s only bad if you use a car.
Personally I absolutely hate cars, they’re expensive, unreliable, complex, and ridiculously dangerous. Cars are the largest killers of young healthy people in the US behind drugs.
There are now 3 rings around the city: 610, 8 and 99. The best way to get in and out of the city is by car, there just isnt a comprehensive public transport system to be found. There is talks of rail every few years, but they usually end up being shot down because
a) nobody wants to give up their land to build it(imminent domain fighting)
b) the city is so damn big it would be cost prohibitive to build a rail system.
The only way I manage to deal with it is to work 6am to 3pm so that my commute is in front of rush hour. I'm admittedly part of the problem, as I live 30 miles southwest of the city. If I were to commute at the 8-5pm time, I would be on the road for 110 minutes each commute. As long as I get on the road by 5:30am, I cut that to 45 minutes in the morning and 55 in the afternoon.