Houston a Model De-Sprawler; Which Neighborhoods Will Be Payless-less

Photo of the Texas Packing Company building: Patrick Feller via Swamplot Flickr Pool

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  • I’ve got my money together and I’m planting yellow signs everywhere that say” cash for coastal properties”. Enter my web dumb asses, please!

  • ‘But by other measures, Houston is actually leading the shift away from sprawl,’ say the geniuses at The Urban Edge. Uh, maybe they should take a look at the HBJ piece on where homebuilding in greater Houston is taking place.

  • Jonathan’s The Rub is really popular but it’s local fan base has been heavily affected by flooding. Midway seems to be overtaking MetroNational as the most hated local developer in Memorial. People see that memorial green is built way over grade and have serious reservations that the underground water pit they built is big enough. Midway has long been accused of pumping out water from city centre into the neighborhoods which seems very likely to have contributed to flooding and the big sinkhole nearby on memorial drive. It will be interesting to see if the Memorial Green location of the Rub is embraced or rejected by the locals who are fed up with Brad Freels.

  • The Urban Edge piece is a clunky read. I wish that I could say that I expect better from Rice U., but…I don’t. All of their research and public outreach that touches on urban issues is poorly executed and tinged with a sort of sheltered classism that jerks rhetorically from an academic register to one of normative activism. It’s painful to read.
    .
    To summarize the meat and bones of it, though, which I do agree with in principle: Houston (and Dallas) are growing at such a rapid pace that they are getting less dense while also having very high rates (in absolute terms) of urban housing development. This is construed as inevitable, and to that end land use regulations are frowned upon because supply/demand will simply flow around them, more often than not into the suburbs.