How Houston Gets Along Without Zoning Laws
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Houston is home to the world's largest medical center. 20,000 doctors and it was started as a tax dodge! It's the most ethnically diverse city in America, moreso than LA or NYC. It's affordable, the schools are good (in the burbs anyways) and the food is unbeatable, from endless pho shops on Westheimer, Iranian and Turkish in West Houston and creative restaurants like Pass and Provision or Underbelly in Montrose. One of the largest private art collections in the world is smack in the middle of the city.
The people are friendly and welcoming and as tolerant as you'll ever find (Houston has the nation's first openly lesbian mayor). Unless you're on the road in which case everyone is a raging maniac trying to kill you. Houston's drivers are the most balls-to-the-wall crazy I've ever seen and I'm typing this from Penang in Malaysia...
Houston drivers drive. There's a sense of urgency to them. Not so in Seattle where it's normal for the left lane traffic to go 15 mph below the speed limit.
If you're on the 59/610 west interchange, it's dangerous--so you should drive faster to be exposed to danger less. It's obvious.
Especially in the rain..
And the ice.
Westpark's off ramp lands you in an exit only lane to 610, so you immediately have to merge over three lanes within less than half a mile.
IIRC it's the most dangerous stretch of highway in America.
First of all, the city itself is huge and sprawling. Her parents lived in a nice suburb where all houses looked the same. You had to drive 10 minutes within the suburb on twisted roads with a 5mph speed limit to get out of it, at which point you'd be on the highway and had to drive at least another 5-10 minutes to get anywhere. Forget walking anywhere - without a car, you wouldn't go anywhere. The highways were quite shocking as well - I've never seen so many lanes on a single road, nor so many stretches of road going over and under each other. Perhaps my memory serves me poorly, but I remember exits with three or four layers of highways going all over one another.
I spent some time downtown, which was a bit better - they had a nice museum, some trees, and even a tramway to get around. Sadly, the downtown area was minuscule, and had no personality. Things emptied out early in the evenings - it was mostly businesses or day entertainment.
Overall, I hold a very poor memory of Houston and one could never pay me enough to live there. I hope for the US's sake that this is not the model of urban development they herald as the future, like the article implies.
It's a soulless place, and I was glad to be rid of it as fast as I was able.
Most of the driving that people complain about are people that don't even have Houston addresses, it's a rare day I drive more than 5 miles, and none of the houses in my neighborhood are the same.
I'll always prefer a city with good mass transit and sidewalks over one with mega-highways.
Points for Dallas: DART is awesome. Houston is expanding and would do well to expand it to be able too reach its airports the way DART in Dallas does.
Points for Houston: The Bikeshare program is freaking huge and they're completely reworking the bus routes to realistic for the first time in ages. Dallas recently opened a Bikeshare.
But as with all things, your life is mostly local. Live in the right neighborhood in either, and you won't have to drive except for a few times a week. Live in the wrong neighborhoods in either, and get used to planning your evenings around traffic reports.
Part of the trouble with trying to arrange your life in that way in Houston (I've never lived in Dallas, so can't compare) is that most of the jobs aren't in places amenable to it. It's just about doable if you work downtown or in the medical center, but that's a minority of Houston-area jobs. At least when I lived there, it was also not where most of the engineering jobs were. The big concentration of oil & gas jobs, for example, are in the Westlake corridor. Another big cluster of engineering jobs are scattered in about a 5-mile radius of the Johnson Space Center, which is itself 25 miles from downtown. And huge numbers of jobs are in just random places off any given freeway: the 45, 10, etc. feeders are lined with office buildings going out every direction.
I know, I know, having been cured of cancer probably influences my opinion just a bit, but I think Houston's a pretty damned cool town :-)
I think every place has it's own charms, you just have to look for it - in some places you have to look harder than others, sure. I hated NYC the first year I lived there, and later came to really like it. But, I'm the kind of person who'd enjoy living in the Mojave just as much as I'd enjoy living in Manhattan - it's all good, and every day I'm breathing is a great day to appreciate wherever the hell I happen to be.
That said I'm not sure all of Houston is so tough and gritty, especially around the Med Center. If you drive North 2 minutes from the there the 300 acre Hermann park and the Museum District are both gorgeous.
Europeans are just so charming, aren't they?
I grew up there and live a couple of hours away. When I visit family, they're in the suburbs and I don't much enjoy the experience. However, I spend a good bit of my time "inside the Loop" where there is a vibrant and positive experience in progress (and has been for many decades). The area has world-class arts, food, entertainment, and (surprise!) geography. It's an incredibly international city with people from all over the world found throughout the city.
Yes, it's big and getting from one side of town to another sucks. But if you're inclined to explore what makes it interesting, there's plenty there to keep your attention.
Honestly I'm slowly becoming one of those "Inside the Loop" people who treats anything outside of it as being in another city entirely.
"You're grabbing dinner in the Heights? I'll see you there."
"Lunch with you at City Center? I wish you told me last week. It takes like two days to get out there!"
Even though, depending on traffic patterns, those trips might be the same length.
It is indeed the model of the future. This fact makes me as an American very sad sometimes.
I would never move back largely due to the lack of public infrastructure, heat and humidity but the sprawl of the city isn't really a result of poor urban planning but rather seemed to be a function of the cost of real estate and the need to access the oil corridor while also not living in the refinery wasteland to the South east.
Part of that is because, imo, the "no zoning" mythos doesn't really result in practical freedom to develop land however you want. There are two big zoning-like restrictions in practice, which if anything end up with more restrictive land use than many cities which do officially have zoning.
The first is that just about all neighborhoods built after WW2 are master-planned communities laid out by one developer (in many parts of Houston, subsidiaries of the various oil companies who were selling off land). These developers built neighborhoods intended to have a particular character, most commonly a suburban-style character, and attached deed restrictions to the properties requiring buyers to maintain that character in perpetuity. This has very similar effects to zoning, in that there are huge swaths of Houston which are by deed restriction not allowed to be redeveloped into anything but single-family homes with a minimum lot size (owners also cannot subdivide their home into rental units). In some ways it's even worse because "rezoning" is even more difficult than usual. Most of these communities do have a way to modify the deeds in principle, but it's all routed through homeowners' association politics, which make regular municipal politics look well-functioning.
The second is a big set of development restrictions from the city which, while not precisely zoning, strongly influence what can practically be built. Rules on minimum setbacks, height, and minimum parking really constrain a lot of possible redevelopment.
Some parts of Houston really shine as a demonstration of the adaptability and character of a lack of zoning, and some really do end up worse off for it. And opinions differ, often by what people value in the first place. Plus some areas feel like they're zoned, because a combination of historical designations and private land covenants make them functionally close enough anyway.
I was in Houston briefly in 1999.
We were driving through a completely residential neighborhood, and someone was running a liquor store out of their porch.
They had a house. It was a normal house in a normal neighborhood. That house had a porch. There was an I-shit-you-not liquor store being run from that porch.
I would characterize that as "crazy" and also "out of place".
The closest thing to a walking city are the underground tunnels downtown. However, as another commented, the downtown empties out at night; at least that was the case 20 years ago. Houston is very hot in the summer, so a walking city is probably not a reasonable thing to ask for.
One of the absurdities was the Transco tower, called today the Williams tower. It used to be the tallest building in Houston, and it is outside the 610 loop and 4 miles from the downtown. Everything around it is quite small and it is difficult to understand what economics motivated building it.
Update: I'm trying to think why I like the city. I guess it is the vegetation. Houston is perhaps a bit like how Mayan cities must have been.
I can attest from personal experience that mold is an major headache if you live close to the ocean in Los Angeles.
Look, I lived in San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere. It is definitely easier to exist here in Houston because it's damn cheap, but it sure as hell ain't pretty.
If you want some stability live in a deed restricted neighborhood.
The strangest thing to me, and a result of the zoning laws (which seem to be a slightly insane form of pure genius to me), is the multiple downtowns that are scattered around aside from the 'real' downtown. Pockets of skyscrapers and tall office buildings are every 30 miles or so. It's interesting and so I'm still finding (huge, significant) parts of the city that I've never seen before. It's so spread out that it make other big cities (like SF) feel distinctly small; going there once makes you feel like "oh, this is tiny compared to, say, NYC", which is, of course, mostly true, but then you find out that you're only looking at one of the 'downtown' sorts of areas.
Houston has a surprisingly large arts community. Low costs of living tend to help there. It also has lots of alternative lifestyles, but also (rather small) pockets of religious and conservativism. It also has an incredibly vibrant culture, with more theater seating than any other city in the country, except for NYC. (Yes, even more than Chicago or LA). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Theater_District
It's also a great food town. Since it's more ethnically diverse than any other city in the United States, you can find almost any food you want. There's also a very nice part of town that's quite reminscent of Austin's downtown.
And I've spoken with other startups -- Houston tends to be attractive to startup engineers coming from the Bay area and in some ways feels alternately like SF or SV, depending on where you are. It tends to be more difficult to attract serious tech startup executives, however.
The only significant downsides, at least to me, for the HN crowd: the city is so spread out that it's hard to build a strong community. (I run The Woodlands Entrepreneur's meetup w/ over 300 members, but only about 30 or so are in tech startups of some sort; I also run the Houston AWS and Houston Cloud meetups and most of the AWS users are associated with big oil or big medtech, not tech startups.) Still, there's SO much here.
The other downside is the utter lack of VC, and what little is here is not competitive. This alone may be a reason to pick another city. (Austin has a few really great VC's.) .. on the other hand, if you're bootstrapping, you really can't go wrong with Houston. Your runway goes a really long way here.