Houston, We Have a Solution (2023)

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/houston-we-have-a-solution/

by telotortium • 2 years ago

46 15 2 years ago

banish-m42• 2 years ago

My mom is from San Anton, and her family is from nowhere N TX.

Houston failed by allowing residential areas to be built in flood plains ("sacrifice zones") and near polluting petrochemical plants that blow up about once a year. And, it's regularly ravaged by hurricanes and just yesterday a derecho blew out skyscraper windows, collapsed a brick wall, and knocked out power for what maybe weeks. Not much of the HTX metro area can be called "a good place to live" with a straight face. Zoning rules should prevent people from living in dangerous areas, which HTX has clearly failed at.

dreamcompiler• 2 years ago

The flooding issue is huge in Houston. The city was built on a swamp and the fact that buildings sit there now does not make it less of a swamp.

There are places around the city that are high enough not to flood horribly, but even if you live in such a place you still have to deal with Houston summers (April through October) when being outdoors for any length of time is miserable.

anonymousDan• 2 years ago

Yeah when I lived there as a kid the joke was that Houston has three seasons - Summer, July and August!

abathur2• 2 years ago

you still have to deal with Houston summers (April through October) when being outdoors for any length of time is miserable.

This is a minor exaggeration. Pollen aside, April is generally fairly pleasant. May is more dicey, but it isn't necessarily miserable. (I've managed to work from a coffee shop patio at least a couple days this month without having to call it quits in the early afternoon.) We can even have pleasant if humid days as late as early June IME.

But yes, summer can be rough. I generally say summer is 6 months when I'm speaking loosely to set context for someone who hasn't experienced it.

fuzzfactor2• 2 years ago

Founded in the 1830s at the confluence of the Buffalo and White Oak bayous

There are other bayous collecting runoff from other watersheds, and like others, these two streams running through central Houston have apparently become miles wider and dozens of feet deeper on a routine basis for many thousands of years.

In Wikipedia, the 1873 aerial drawing of Houston shows there is only one thing in the picture; a flood plain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old_map-Houston-1873.jpg

The developing Allen brothers probably didn't know it at the time, but the purpose of Houston was to sell "false estate" as if it was real estate.

aegypti3• 2 years ago

This is literally an article about how infill/density became easier in Houston, removing the need to expand residential zoning outwards to flood plains and refinery backyards to continue growing.

ted_dunning• 2 years ago

Actually, it was an article about how they could increase housing density near existing refineries in the urban area and in already inhabited flood plains.

There are 6 refineries that I found inside the highway 8 beltway in about 30 seconds. All of them have housing developments within 1000m. Two have houses within a few hundred meters.

mordymoop• 2 years ago

The mistake of cyberpunk sci-fi like Blade Runner is that the setting is always future Los Angeles or Tokyo, when Houston has been a much better candidate for the international, multilingual, steel-and-glass-and-concrete megacity of the future.

xnx• 2 years ago

Sounds like Houston had minimal rules on land use prior to 1998, and then they relaxed land use even further and things got better. Seems like a lesson a lot of cities could learn from.

fuzzfactor2• 2 years ago

Houston is rarely held up as an example of good land use planning.

The plan in 1837 was to sell the land.

To people who wanted to come to the intended capital & industrial center of the new republic, after it won independence from Mexico.

That's a wide variety of buyers, many of whom were expected to do things with their land that had never been done before.

No surprise that without further planning, it turned out better for citizens than alternatives. Maybe it goes to show that the planning often seen elsewhere is crafted more to the disadvantage of citizens than none at all.

adamfeldman• 2 years ago

I live in a townhome in the area talked about in the article (inside the 610 loop). As a local, this article felt spot-on and matched local understanding of how Houston manages residential land-use hyper-locally through deed restrictions and the like.

Curiously unmentioned in the article were TIRZ, but those are mostly used to manage commercial areas, not residential.

Houston, We Have a Solution (2023)

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