Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Agree completely. Houston doesn’t have zoning. Houston also doesn’t have a housing affordability crisis. Houston also doesn’t have high developer fees or low income housing mandates. Houston also has a lot of parking. Weird. A city doing almost the exact opposite of what many “housing advocates” prescribe and they don’t have a housing problem.

View on HN

Houston is also not squeezed at all geographically except for to the south-east by the Gulf. San Francisco on the other hand is constrained on 3 sides by water. Expanding across the Bay is possible but expensive because you have to provide bridges for all the people to get back into jobs in the city otherwise it's not SF housing it's just Oakland housing.

Houston is squeezed in geographically by flood plains and marshes - which developers merrily ignored and developed on. When a hurricane hit, surprise of all surprises, a bunch of houses in these areas were flooded. Thankfully a lack of regulations managed to not solve any traffic or density issues while all also making the city more vulnerable to disasters.

They /should/ have been squeezed, but flood plains and marshes aren't hard barriers to building like water (though you can do reclamation but that's also pretty expensive). They're places you shouldn't (or should be very careful about about) build in but they're not places you can't build in period.

Houston doesn't have official zoning. It does have land use regulations, including off-street parking mandates, which act like de facto zoning.

https://marketurbanism.com/2016/09/19/how-houston-regulates-...

> Here’s the doozy: Houston mandates off-street parking for just about every form of development. This is probably the number one regulation holding back the city’s rapid densification and a major reason that car-dependence remains the norm. By requiring developers to build either parking deserts and garages, this policy encourages developers to bypass exciting infill and downtown opportunities in favor of developing in the suburbs where land is cheap.

You can't compare Texas with literally acres of open space surrounding their cities to real states with actual population densities. Texas literally brags about how big they are and how much land they have. Come talk to me when Texas has less than 20% of it's population as cows unlike the 40% it's at now.

Houston has parking minimums and other car-favored building regulations.

Houston is also the most egregious case of rampant urban sprawl on the planet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com