Researchers find ‘significant rates’ of sinking ground in Houston suburbs
uh.edu
uh.edu
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
USGS has a network of sensors that you use to see subsidence here: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e5c75a...
Of note is Katy's subsidence, which I believe is from hydrocarbon withdrawals.
I believe what this study does that's new is analyze Sentinel-1A data and correlate it to hotspots in the Houston area, which is actually super cool.
the good thing is we're stealing all those nice cali tech jobs so it won't be true forever ;)
cool
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The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).
The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.
[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/15/3831# [1] https://hgsubsidence.org/GPS/2021/P050_HRF20_neu_cm.col
You can get a house for $75k (median) if you want in Gary Indiana. I'm not sure how lower housing prices can be directly correlated with "doing things more right".
it's a bit like someone arguing that Land Rovers are bad cars because they are built poorly, and then someone else coming in and saying well at least they don't cost the amount that a lamborghini costs, they must be doing something right. and then a third person coming into that argument and saying "well, actually you can't use price because a bicycle costs 200$ and that doesn't mean a bicycle is better than a Land Rover based on price alone" ...the point they're driving could be correct, but the comparison is apples to oranges. you can't compare bicycles to cars to drive the point, just like i wouldn't use Gary to make the argument that low prices does not mean a thriving city. a better argument would be to use something that is comparable to a Land Rover (Houston) like say, a car that is within 10-20k range that does the job but is still largely a piece of crap to argue your point that price alone doesn't dictate success.
There are tons of places with very cheap housing and no jobs. Nobody moves there except maybe a few teleworkers looking to optimize hard for surplus or people with other reasons to go there like family ties.
* Economy comes and goes with natural resource boom bust cycle.
* America's most obese city
* A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation
There are other cities that match some of those qualities that I don't much care for, but I can see why a lot of people wouldn't mind and go for the cheap housing there as a decent trade off.
But in my original comment, my only point was that you can't judge how great a city is based on how cheap its real estate is (and the correlation often goes the opposite way).
I think you're imagining all Houston real estate as cheap/affordable, when in reality the city has lots of extremely expensive real estate. It just also has affordable housing due to widespread construction of townhomes, apartments, and condos. Something like Gary just isn't comparable.
I wonder what sinking into the Gulf of Mexico is going to do for property values.
I'm not sure how the criteria are different, the above is looking at big cities. The other list seems to have a bunch of small cities (e.g. Jackson MS). The difference could also be in study year. Neither list is very surprising to me.
> * A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation There are only a few cities in the U.S. that have good public transportation and while it's really nice it's also super expensive to live there.
Look there is no reason to live in Houston if you're rich. It's much nicer to live in a prettier city with great public transit and driving distance from some amazing natural features.
But if you're not rich and you want to be able to raise a family, own a house, and experience nice entertainment on 50k a year, Houston is a wonderful city.
Are you kidding? Its easily worth twice that. Wait until I show you the upgrades, new paint and wall to wall carpet. The bathroom's been renovated with new fixtures, and that is genuine imported Mexican tile. You'd be a fool to pass on this. Just think of the possibilities.
https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/metro-...
That is, sure, houses are cheap for now. But that doesn't mean you will have a place worth living in, given time.
13 million people living in the Los Angeles basin seem to disagree.
So the ability to sustain/tolerate sprawl seems far higher than we expect.
The 9 county area of the Bay Area is 7000 square miles... and that includes a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a city on.
If you take the land area of the cities in the Bay Area ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_th... ) and sum them all up, you've got something on the order of 1,600 square miles.
The land constraints within the Bay Area contribute significantly to the price of a house.
Pave every single square foot of the nine counties that make up the Bay Area including Marin, Sonoma, and Napa... and you're still 3,000 square miles short of the greater Huston area.
That said, Tokyo, which is a wonderful city to live in, and on more earthquake prone land, has 14 million people on 5,194 square miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo.
To me, human homes is one of the most worthy uses of land.
Of course, it would be nice if you could keep everything you're doing right and bring housing prices down (largely by building more of it). But on the whole real-estate being valuable is generally a positive sign.
On the flip side, the cheapest houses you could find for awhile (maybe still?) were in detroit, that's not a sign that Detroit was doing well - but that demand had plummeted to literally 0 because it was doing so poorly.
For instance: nice homes in very low demand areas may sell for large amounts of money and only have a single offer.
One is that we're really talking about demand from people who can afford it. All the demand in the world from people living on minimum wage won't drive house prices up so they aren't really "counted" in my analysis. There's not really a way to fix this issue with the data, but I'd argue that demand from reasonably rich people is still a good sign. Indeed, rich people are the most mobile and able to move away from a shitty place to live.
The other is that the quality of the home matters (a lot). Which is completely true, but the cheap shitty homes in the bay area are still demanding these prices, so I'm not sure it really applies to the concrete situation being discussed even though it is an issue with my general argument. You could maybe try and find "comparable" homes in different places to try and account for that, but I have no doubt doing so would open you up to issues with bias (intentional or otherwise).
These houses and the areas they occupy (i.e Beverly Hills, Park Ave ) are an extreme edge case, and don't exist in the same housing market as normal houses.
Above a certain very high price percentile, there are always very few buyers and sellers, and they are all paying a high premium for things like high physical security.
I think you have used circular reasoning here. The price is ultimately governed by supply and demand. They are expensive because more people demand them than the supply available for sale. There are many reasons why demand can exceed supply, like development restrictions, difficult building environments.
That's no different in a pretty rural area or in a place like the bay area. The extremely pretty and expensive rural areas (think luxury ski towns) control housing development even more strictly than expensive cities. The bottom line is desirability, which manifests as demand.
And, if you're paying $1M+ for a house in the rural plains, it's probably far bigger than the typical house, because the land is very cheap.
You may have a piece of property that only one person in the world wants to live on, but if you get a single buyer willing to give you a million bucks, you have a million dollar property.
Meanwhile, 100 people might want to live in a particular property in a ghetto, but none of them have a million dollars to bid on it. The price will only raise to the maximum amount that the buying pool can afford. More demand doesn't result in higher prices, it results in homelessness and/or people moving to alternate markets.
My point is that $1.5m prices are not a signal that a ton of people want to live in a particular place. It's a signal that people who can obtain $1.5 million dollar loans want to purchase there, and that the demand satisfies the motivated supply. That's it.
I don't know where you are referring to but there is reams of historical data that demonstrates that more demand without an increase in supply leads to all 3 of those.
> My point is that $1.5m prices are not a signal that a ton of people want to live in a particular place.
Yes, and $1.5M in isolation is a meaningless number and not a signal of anything at all without describing what exactly it buys you.
What does signal desirability is the trend line in property prices in a given area and the relative price of equivalent properties in different areas.
I suspect some of this is market moves (e.g. people moving into apartments during COVID, and business relocations: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/business/20...).
People will live in the best place they can afford. This means prices will always be driven by the income level of people in the area.
If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You’ll actually just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving there. That’ll drive the prices right back to where they were.
Demand would have to drop, while you expand supply. Remove tech jobs from SF and demand will drop, lowering prices. If enough external people don’t wish to move there and you’re building, then prices drop.
Effectively, demand always massively outstrips supply for living accommodations
As a thought exercise: imagine it was $100/month to live in a 3Bed, 2Br house in Houston. You’d have 100m people want to move there.
Keep moving that number up, at some point you’ll get supply and demand meeting. If you add 1000 new houses, it’ll barely impact demand because you’ll have 1000 people willing to move for a $50/month reduction in cost. Then prices will be right back where they started.
Unless you can build 10k units or 100k units prices won’t meaningfully change from supply side factors alone.
Alaska effectively goes further by paying people to live there with their Permanent Fund - https://pfd.alaska.gov/ - where they give residents an annual dividend based on oil proceeds. But Kansas and other places have done the same offering to pay remote people $10k to move there.
This is an overly simplified view of demand. People with live in the best place among the places they want to live. That’s why we see strong selection along political and cultural dimensions, even when they correlate weakly (or even negatively) with purchasing power.
If you bulldozed 100k units in SF there would be no where you live. Likely it would drop property values lol
[1]: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-donates-to-californi...
Even if we take your theory as true, this still seems net good to me? More people able to live in SF if they want to is a good thing.
That seems unsurprising, and not sure it's a good metric. Houston is certainly much cheaper than, for example, Austin, and my guess is that it is considerably cheaper than similar sized metros.
I can't find it right now, but I remember reading an article from a few years back that basically called Houston the best city to live if you are poor. That is, don't just look at median prices, but Houston actually has a ton of affordable housing that is simply non-existent (or highly restricted in stupid lottery games) in other cities.
The average cost of owning a car in the US is $10,728, according to AAA. It’s not easy at all to be car free in most of America. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
I think the parent commenter did everyone a massive disservice by breaking housing and transportation into two separate categories since they're fungible with each other the same way time and money are.
Working 3 jobs requires limiting transportation time to have enough remianing time to work multiple jobs. This makes Houston disruptively unaffordable for the working poor in a way that’s less obvious if you look at them combined.
That’s part of a vicious cycle down. Rent or mortgage checks are visible so people minimize that and then accept a long commute. People who buy cars based on the monthly payment often pay high interest. A farther commute means hundred of hours a year sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. A drive that’s half an hour on the weekend can inflate to an hour during rush hour. Way too many people consider housing+transportation as separate budget categories.
https://www.understandinghouston.org/topic/housing/home-affo...
Check every other large, economically booming metro area and see what their housing prices are in comparison. I know the last time I checked, Dallas was substantially more expensive, and that city seems like the most obvious comparison to make.
Even without traditional zoning, housing supply is somewhat land constrained, since building further up gets more and more expensive as you go higher. It still helps to be able to build higher, but it's not a panacea that will solve all housing cost problems.
This lists Houston as 19th on affordability and a price of $247,000
Los Angeles, California – 3,849,297 - 710k
Chicago, Illinois – 2,696,555 - 252k
Houston, Texas – 2,288,250 - 192k
Phoenix, Arizona – 1,624,569 - 308k
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 1,576,251 - 240k
San Antonio, Texas – 1,451,853 - 175k
San Diego, California – 1,381,611 - 620k
Dallas, Texas – 1,288,457 - 225k
San Jose, California – 983,489 - 1,160k
Compared to a town with 100k people in Wisconsin Houston doesn't look very affordable. But compared to the top 10 largest cities in the US it looks pretty good.
[0] - https://www.kiplinger.com/article/real-estate/t010-c000-s002...
1: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-ho...
Decades ago my aunt and uncle moved into what was at the time a pretty rural neighborhood in northwest Houston with only residents around but years later a church bought the property adjacent to their land and Sundays and Wednesdays moving forward there were noise and parking related issues.
[1]: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/ (see Ord. No. 2020-1092)
[2]: https://online.encodeplus.com/regs/fairfaxcounty-va/doc-view...
[3]: https://library.municode.com/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinan...
[4]: https://www.mlit.go.jp/toshi/city_plan/toshi_city_plan_tk_00... (japanese, pptx downloads, my japanese isn't good enough to navigate and find better documents, but if anyone knows of them that would be helpful)
[5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071223082802/http://www.toshis...
I think sprawl would happen anyway, cars are ultimately cheap and convenient (as % of budget large, but still affordable) and by the time traffic is a problem you have sprawl that transit cannot easily be retrofitted to.
Obviously since sprawl exists now it's hard to get rid of it; a city would be hard-pressed to go to the suburbs and tell them that they won't receive services anymore. However, as Detroit has shown, sprawl is definitely a liability if the city ever has any sort of period of decline. That certainly hasn't stopped Houston (and many other American cities) from acting as if that could never happen, and I suspect that the next 50 years will reveal the weaknesses of the model. I hope to be proven wrong, but that would require climate change to magically disappear and resources of all kinds to stay abundant, which seems unlikely.
Walking barefoot is a lot cheaper than cars (and not as stupid as it sounds - your feet are made to walk barefoot), but it is so much slower nobody considers it reasonable anymore.
Cars (and by extension the policies that enable car dependence), have an extremely high externalities. They require vast amounts of public spending, lower land productivity, make areas more flood prone, damage the health of those living near car infrastructure, contribute to climate change, are traffic, drive suburban sprawl, and kill more Americans than guns do (crashes alone are just 0.3/100k fewer). The reason 'nobody considers it reasonable anymore' to walk are those policies that build for cars. In places with less car-oriented policies, people walk places. It has nothing to do with maximizing the speed of the vehicle you're using.
The argument I've heard is for thoughtful mixed-use zoning: not a free-for-all. Downtowns in several Texas cities bear this argument out.
None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.
Also, speaking of groundwater.
never drain your pool in houston.
bad things will happen.
That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.
My heavily zoned hometown Oakland does.
People aren't wired to notice subsidence, which has meant that large changes due to groundwater pumping and oil/gas extraction have gone "under the radar", and that's changing ;-).
Large subsidence can cause problems including seawater infiltration into the water table, permanent loss of groundwater storage capacity, and disturbance to infrastructure like roads and pipelines.
Subsidence is also one of the few ways we have to get insight into large-scale groundwater withdrawals (land goes down -> water being taken out and not replaced).
Here's a summary with a nice motivational picture showing meters of subsidence over multiple years in the California central valley: https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/land-subsidence
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
I lived in Spring for 13 years. In the last 2-3 years in the house, the foundation issues seemed to be accelerating. I assumed it was just old house issues (house was built in the last 1970s) but perhaps subsidence plays a role.
I'm not qualified to speak to which of the two they found in Spring/The Woodlands, but it's not restricted to oil and gas drilling.
According to https://www.texas-drilling.com/harris-county/spring there are 2 gas drilling leases in Spring. https://www.texas-drilling.com/montgomery-county/the-woodlan... shows 2 oil/gas leases.
There's enough for everyone, but some large actors are taking most of the water and wasting it or exporting the productive value of that water due to a lack of real market forces on the price of water.
You're absolutely correct there will be water rights issues, I would argue they will become wars in certain places and in others it will result in certain massive cities becoming dead over several decades.
I moved 1000mi from Florida to here and very little changed at least as far as the climate is concerned.
https://www.bayouswamptours.com/bayou-vs-swamp-whats-the-dif...
I grew up on the Gulf Coast, mostly further east on the Florida Panhandle, but also very briefly in rural SW Louisiana surrounded by actual swamps. I suspect people today will tend to use the term swamp for its more derogatory insinuations when describing New Orleans, and bayou for other areas when they're trying to be more charitable or simply because bayou is more apt.
FWIW, to me a swamp is very stagnant and mostly overgrown with trees, whereas a bayou tends to me more open and dominated more by grasses than trees, though you can still certainly see trees (e.g. in clusters on high spots/islands). That said, the term bayou is more often heard in Louisiana, Mississippi and Eastern Texas than in Florida or Alabama, so I've not had many occasions to ponder the distinction.
I've lived in S. Florida and in Houston. Humidity is similar, but Florida is far more comfortable because it is surrounded by ocean, there's always an off shore breeze, and whenever it does get too hot, it always thunderstorms for about an hour pretty much every afternoon when it gets hot. With the ocean breezes and the daily short sunbursts, the air is really clean.
I recall once getting back to my apartment in Houston after work, and I took a shower like I did everyday after work. Had to, always got soaking wet from sweat on the commute home, even with AC. I forgot my wallet in the car, and I knew never ever to leave my wallet in the car in Houston. Walked out to get it, maybe it was all of 30 yards through the parking lot and back 30 yards. I had to take another shower. Never forgot my wallet again. And when it rains in Houston it rains for days on end. And you just know with all those refineries and traffic that Houston air is horrid. Must smell like money to the residents. The only thing I miss about Houston is the Tex-Mex, which is just as good in Austin but without the humidity.
- Agent Smith, The Matrix
Ah I thought this was from Shrek 2.
Neo is the one, and Smith is the zero. Zero times anyone else becomes zero.
man is just better at avoiding this last die off part.
It's why I started hunting deer in my country - no natural predators, so they'll breed until they outbreed the carrying capacity of the forests they browse, and then they'll suffer long and agonising deaths, and in their desperation will devastate the forest, eating anything that's remotely edible, seedlings gone, bark stripped from adult trees.
Perhaps animals who are territorial and fight, within-species, for territory can be considered to have a mechanism of self-regulating their consumption of resources.
Humans are perhaps the only animal that will even consciously contemplate the consequences of their actions on the environment. We are, I would say, the furthest from the virus.