iluvatar5150
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- Aug 3, 2012
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While I generally agree with the points of the article, using Houston as a model is just.... yikes. Yes, the housing may be affordable, but that's partly because Houston has subsumed many surrounding communities and, as a result, has a lot of empty land on which to build. According to the article, it's not "all sprawl," but IME a lot of it is sprawl. The times I've been to Houston, it's mostly been on the southeastern side around JSC and towards Galveston, and the area is just a sea of highways, strip malls, and parking lots. Sure, you save on housing costs (which are depressed, in part, by high-ish property taxes), but how much extra are you spending on transportation because the road system is a mess and public transit is non-existent and entirely unfeasible?Pretty fair assessment I think. For example, one massive negative re inflation is of course housing -- both buying and renting: which are artificially inflated prices due to zoning restricting construction and density (such as being able to construct a rental unit on your house property, etc., or being able to build a multi-unit on a 'single family' zoned area, etc.), so a reasonable response would be to consider whether the federal government could do something to encourage better zoning (or make a law that controls local zoning excesses). Houston is a great example of what a big city can be like in housing costs if there is little restriction in zoning -- it has much lower housing costs due having very little zoning restrictions.
Here's a review article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...g-affordability-nimby-parking-houston/661289/
An excerpt:
It doesn’t have to be this way. In cities like Minneapolis and Hartford, local YIMBY groups have abolished zoning policies such as minimum parking requirements. In states like California and Oregon, policy makers now heavily restrict the ability of local governments to ban apartments. At the federal level, bills with unsubtle names such as the “Yes In My Backyard Act” and the “Build More Housing Near Transit Act” are winding their way through Congress. If passed, they would tie coveted federal dollars to zoning liberalization, providing a needed check on local NIMBY impulses.
...
Consider America’s lone unzoned major city. Houston twice put zoning to a citywide vote, where it lost because of opposition from working-class voters of all races. As a result, land-use regulation in Houston is largely focused on regulating actual nuisances, like noisy neighbors or slaughterhouses; the city’s few zoninglike regulations, such as minimum lot sizes and parking mandates, are on the way out. Blocks that want stricter rules can voluntarily opt into them through private deed restrictions. But they can’t just show up at public hearings and shout their preferences into law.
The results speak for themselves. Houston builds housing at 14 times the rate of peers like San Jose. And it isn’t just sprawl: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite being half its size. Since reforms to minimum-lot-size rules were put in place in 1998, more than 25,000 townhouses have been built, overwhelmingly in existing urban areas.
To be clear, Houston has made its share of planning mistakes. But, free of zoning, the city can constantly remake itself. That Houston is now one of the most affordable and diverse cities in the country is no accident.
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