Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston (2020)
I&#x27;m seeing a lot of posters making snide remarks about how Houston isn&#x27;t a good city and so we can&#x27;t learn anything from it. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a very open-minded or intellectually curious mindset.<p>I lived in Houston for five years. I moved there very reluctantly for the only job I could find in the depths of the recession, but I grew to appreciate it as a complex and interesting place that is very much worthy of study. Here are some good things about Houston that I think outsiders should know.<p>First, Houston is a wonderfully diverse and cosmopolitan city, and not necessarily in the ways you would expect. When I lived there, the parking meters downtown were &quot;Push 1 for English, 2 for Vietnamese, 3 for Spanish.&quot; The City website is offered in Arabic, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Vietnamese (apparently in their English alphabetical order). When living there I met people from all over the world, and among them the general consensus was &quot;this place is interesting.&quot; The large majority of people in Houston are <i>proud</i> of that diversity, and celebrate that their city is a global melting pot.<p>Second, many people assume that all of Texas is desert, but most of the state is not, and Houston is nearly a jungle - many people who visited when I lived there were shocked by how lush and green it is, more like Miami than LA. We had banana trees growing in the courtyard of our apartment, and yes, they were delicious. The nearly-tropical weather and rainfall means that the parks and gardens are often overflowing with flowers and beautiful plants. And while I would argue that there aren&#x27;t as many of these as there should be for a city of its size, the parks in Houston improved noticeably during the years I lived there, and continue to improve.<p>Third, Houston is a fantastically low-ego and entrepreneurial place. In Houston, no one asks where you work, they ask &quot;what do you do?&quot; And people tend to have interesting answers. A lot of the people I met would identify as artisans of some kind, and perhaps acknowledge that they worked multiple jobs. &quot;I&#x27;m a scrap metal artist, but I also work part-time at a bank.&quot; &quot;I&#x27;m a pastry chef and a music teacher.&quot; &quot;I design shoes and help my parents at their restaurant on weekends.&quot; With the very laid back business environment, and in particular because most of the city allows people to operate low-key businesses from their <i>home</i>, it&#x27;s extremely common to find people running scrappy little businesses inside their neighborhood.<p>As a result of the cultural diversity and ease of doing business, Houston is also home to an exceptional food scene, made even better by the fact that most of it is quite affordable. I&#x27;ve yet to find another place that had the same casual abundance of excellent food from any part of the world you can imagine. New York is pretty comparable in terms of selection, but usually much more expensive.<p>Fourth, Houston is has a much richer arts and culture scene than outsiders realize. Houston has the second largest theater district in the nation (after Broadway). The Houston MFA and Museum of Natural Science are among the best in the nation. But more interesting, the city has dozens of smaller, very high quality museums sprinkled through its neighborhoods. Places like the Menil collection, a world-famous art gallery, just quietly chill in the midst of a residential neighborhood of mostly bungalows, small apartments, and neighborhood shops. And the Menil is free for everyone, a gift from the wealth of the de Menil family.<p>Finally, there are many Houstons, so while I can share my observations (and could share many more stories), it&#x27;s still not a place that&#x27;s easy to generalize. The city has annexed a truly absurd amount of it&#x27;s suburban hinterland, and even then the land area extends greatly beyond the city limits to mostly fill the surrounding county (Harris County), which is about the size of Rhode Island. Infamously, much like LA, you can drive for hours and still be in the sprawl of Houston, and because it is so vast, daily life varies quite a bit among the city&#x27;s sub-areas. To me this was the biggest negative about life there, I got very sick of all the driving.<p>For transparency, I lived entirely in &quot;Urban Houston,&quot; which is roughly the western half of the city&#x27;s innermost freeway loop, so my observations are mostly about life in that area (which by comparison is about the size of San Francisco). I also witnessed many old single-family homes get torn down and replaced by 3-4 townhomes. At the time it bothered me, because the old homes were often prettier than the new townhomes (not always, but often). However, this constant influx of supply where people wanted to move made it very realistic for a middle class family to buy a home and move into Urban Houston - at the time townhomes cost anywhere from $200k to $500k, and I bought a fairly nice condo for exactly $100k.<p>This post has gotten too long, so I&#x27;ll just end by saying: yes, on the surface, much of Houston is ugly, and it&#x27;s not easy to see the appeal from the outside. But most people who live there are optimistic and happy, in large part because they are surrounded by opportunity and upward mobility, and those things are worth a <i>lot.</i> And for many people, those things are worth more than scenic beaches or picturesque mountains in the distance, worth enough to even put up with the frustratingly hot and humid summers. So if you&#x27;ve previously dismissed Houston, perhaps reconsider. It&#x27;s a complicated place, and far from perfect, but there are definitely lessons to be learned there.