Houston, We Have a Solution (2023)
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But using the beltway which is 6x the area, the vast majority of development is still nowhere near a refinery, or on a 100 year flood plain.
Meanwhile, Austin and other parts of the triangle are building like crazy in low-lying areas and near floodplains with massive tract home developments.
Flooding is an issue but it isn’t existential for Austin/SA or DFW, and with the huge reforms in Austin recently a type of opt out style like the article is now there too that can compensate for sprawl.
Worried about Corpus and RGV in the future though.
Curiously unmentioned in the article were TIRZ, but those are mostly used to manage commercial areas, not residential.
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.