This has been a long time in coming. The first HOV to HOT conversion has opened on 45S, allowing single-occupant vehicles to pay more to join the buses, vans, and HOV cars in the underutilized lane. The other HOV lanes will make the same conversion over the next year. This is a fantastic amenity for the city. Yes, few people will want to lay out the money on daily basis, but at least you will have the option to use it when you really need it: to catch a flight, to pick up your child before late fees kick in, to attend an important meeting or event when you're running late - whatever.
The other benefit: top executives at downtown firms who can afford the high tolls will feel better about keeping their companies downtown, instead of pulling an Exxon and consolidating everything to a far suburban campus. That keeps Houston's core, and tax base, healthier.
But there is a major flaw:
Inbound lanes will be available to solo drivers Monday through Friday, between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m., except for the 7-8 a.m. hour when the lanes will remain open only to drivers with passengers due to anticipated heavy congestion, Metro said.
Outbound HOT lanes will be available weekdays from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m., except between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.
...
Solo drivers who try to avoid paying the HOT lane toll face a $75 penalty. Single drivers who use HOT lanes when designated for HOV use only will be issued a citation and required to appear in court. The current fine is $170.
This is a major problem. First, it removes the option right when people might most need it at the peak of rush hour. Second, it just pisses off the previously mentioned executives, pretty much on a daily basis. Third, if you're running a few minutes late around 7am/4pm (or a few minutes early around 8am/6pm), you just went from a $4.50 toll to a $170 ticket and a court date! That's just vicious. I understand capacity is tight at those hours, but why not just price it appropriately to keep demand down, even if that's $20 each way? $20 will certainly sting if I miss my timing, but it's a heck of a lot better than $170 citation and a court date. And just wait until the first accidents happen as people slam on their brakes - or even back up! - to avoid entering the lanes when they're closed (not unlike what happened at the red-light camera intersections).
Metro, you've got a great thing going here. Just tweak the hours/pricing a little bit and you've got a home run.
The Urbanophile recently had an interesting post on the pros and cons of city-county consolidation, or, as he prefers to put it, "big box" vs. "small box" municipal government. This is particularly relevant to Houston because of the talk from time to time about Harris County vs. the City of Houston. Here's his opening:
I haven’t read all the academic literature on city-county consolidations, so won’t make any strong claims about the benefits its promoters have touted. But I will make two observations. One, I’m not aware of any city that has gone through a city-county consolidation that has become a civic failure, or which has a severely under-performing region. Most of the ones I’m familiar with seem to be doing ok or better. Two, if you look at the Midwest region, the metros that are doing well almost all feature a core city that either underwent a consolidation or has managed to maintain its ability to annex new territory (certainly this has been a benefit for Houston over its history). Minneapolis-St. Paul is an exception, but it has regional revenue sharing. (Landlocked and unconsolidated Chicago has a thriving core, but the regional numbers are lagging). So my gut tells me that big box solutions at a minimum don’t hurt and probably have some benefit to a region.
But they do come with downsides, and one of them is that it can make neighborhood redevelopment more difficult. The root of the problem is that with a single city covering a large area, there is only one mayor, one city council, etc. These have a large area to concern themselves with and cannot physically devote significant time and attention to each neighborhood. They inevitably spend most of their time dealing with the biggest and most visible challenges, which often means downtown development issues.
Houston's solution to this issue has been the creation of independent management districts to focus on improving specific districts like Uptown, Upper Kirby, TMC, Midtown, Downtown, and many more. We also have smaller city council districts and the super-neighborhoods to help with this issue.
His case study is Indianapolis, specifically two neighborhoods, Midtown (part of Indy) and Bexley (its own city, like West U or Bellaire). Some key observations:
[Bexley] This keeps land prices high, which preserves a largely affluent and exclusive resident base. This has pros and cons. Of course it means the city can be kept nicer. But it also denies the experience of that to those who can’t buy in. And the overall regional tax base misses out on one of its most affluent areas. This is the problem of all upscale suburbs. Midtown, Indianapolis, whatever its faults, has many well-off homeowners who pay significant money towards the broader community, including the city schools. And it is a much more mixed income area.
Bexley also has its own municipal authority, while Midtown does not, with the implications discussed above.
But another thing occurs to me. Because Midtown is part of a much larger city, it suffers from the problem of a diffusion of responsibility. That is, it can assume the rest of the city will carry the load in some respects. This manifests itself in a strong anti-development NIMBY contingent that is opposed to urbanization. Any proposed development of any kind is greeted by wailing and teeth-gnashing by opponents, who’ve been known to do things like pull their kids out of school to serve as props at mid-day zoning hearings where commissioners are told neighborhood kids will literally die if new apartments are approved.
I don’t know what the sentiment is in Bexley, but they’ve certainly implemented more actual urbanization than Midtown. I suspect one reason is that Bexley knows it has only its own tax base to rely on. If its residents want to keep quality schools, they can either approve more commercial and intense development, or watch their residential property taxes go up significantly over time. That focuses the mind wonderfully.
So I also hypothesize that in addition to making redevelopment more difficult for reasons of the structure of government, big box government also inculcates an anti-development mindset to a greater degree than small box government.
Houston seems to have mostly avoided the NIMBY mindset, Ashby high-rise and a few other projects aside, of course. I think the lack of zoning and its associated bureaucracy and process has helped a lot here. There's no easy way for NIMBYs to fight a development in Houston. I actually think NIMBY-ism is a bigger issue here in the smaller cities like West U, Bellaire, and the Villages.
His conclusion sums it up nicely:
I think the lesson here is that there are always, always trade offs to be made in governance. The trick is to understand the trade-offs you are making and take steps to try to mitigate the inherent problems with the model your city and region operate in.
Based on this and the previous post, we might say at high level that for big box government, the pros are stronger civic consensus and cohesion, generally stronger regional and downtown growth, a fairer tax base, and a general lack of totally failed central cities and suburbs. The cons are a weaker city neighborhoods, redevelopment challenges outside of downtown, weaker urban identity, and lower quality development.
For small box government is is basically the inverse of this. The pros are a strong central city and urban identity, higher quality development, more redevelopment opportunities. The downsides are civic fragmentation and lack of consensus, the potential for a failed central city, some failed suburbs, and possibly weaker downtown growth.
I think we have a good balance here. We have a large, strong, dominant central city, but also many smaller cities to compete as well as the unincorporated county areas around it, not to mention the benefits of the management districts. Dallas may be starting to tip in the wrong direction, with the City of Dallas representing an ever-smaller part of the DFW metro (in population, tax base, jobs, and power). My impression is that Austin and San Antonio are more trying to follow the Houston model and avoid being landlocked by suburban cities.
I don't sense any appetite for merging Harris County and the CoH, but there is still the issue County Judge Emmett raised about what to do with the now very large northwestern suburbs in the unincorporated county. Form a separate city? Have Houston annex them? Keep them as they are? BTW, keep in mind that Harris County now has almost as many people outside of the City of Houston as inside of it.
A Forbes story on the sophisticated, real-time traffic light synchronization system in Los Angeles. I know Houston does some good traffic light syncing, but I don't think it's adjustable on the fly like it is in LA. Something we should definitely look into. And more good news: LA will sell all the software for a relatively inexpensive $75k. Money well spent if it makes the traffic flow better in this town. First up: Uptown! (Hillcroft and Harwin to Weslayan)
"Repeated studies since the 1990s have found that travel times fall by 15% near connected signals and motorists make 20% to 30% fewer stops, massive improvements for a cost of about $150,000 per intersection."
"The Milken Institute's annual survey of Best-Performing Cities reveals that, for the second year in a row, other states can't mess with Texas.
San Antonio led the list of 200 large metro areas, and Houston was first among the 10 biggest. In fact, Texas metros occupied four of the Top 5 positions (vs. three last year), and nine of the Top 25 (vs. 11 in 2010)."
From New Geography: "Houston, the nation’s energy capital, has enjoyed the fastest growth in per-capita income in the past decade. No reason to expect this to slow down much this year."
"Houston's total personal income (TPI) grew at an annual rate of 5.69 percent between 2000 and 2010. That was the fastest pace set by any of America's 75 major metros, according to an On Numbers analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis."
Some cool maps from Aaron Renn showing the shifting diversity of the country. Relative to the rest of the country, Houston has been losing proportional Black and Hispanic population concentration, and gaining Asian population concentration and children. Sort of surprising (this was in the decade of the Katrina evacuation of New Orleans). Obviously we're gaining tons of population overall, it's just that Black and Hispanic population concentrations have grown nationally faster than they have in the Houston metro.
"Transit projects should be built where it’s cheapest to serve the most riders. This principle can and should stand on its own."
Finally, check out the coolest USA map ever created. A guy spent a solid two years full-time making it. Highly recommended, especially if you have children and you want them to learn some geography. I ordered two, including one as a gift (you can buy it here). Just got it up on my wall yesterday, and it looks amazing. Just beautiful.
In 1927, he told me, the City of Houston built its first underground drinking-water reservoir - a concrete holding tank roughly the size of one and half football fields on Sabine Street, near Buffalo Bayou. But after decades of service, the reservoir sprang a leak that couldn't be found, much less stopped. So the reservoir was drained, and for years it sat unused: just an odd hill topped with hatches behind a Public Works building.
...
But when the partnership's consultants climbed through the hatch, they were stunned. When their eyes adjusted to the steamy darkness, they saw row upon row of slender concrete columns, 25 feet tall and reflected in about 6 inches of water at the reservoir's floor. From the hatches, light fell in dramatic shafts. The enormous old reservoir, never intended as anything more than efficient infrastructure, turned out to be stunningly, startlingly beautiful: an industrial cross between a cavern and a cathedral.
The question now, of course, is what to do with the Cistern. Hagstette says that everyone now agrees it won't be used for parking or storage. But what should it be? How should the public have access to it? And how will it be paid for? (The Cistern was discovered after the Buffalo Bayou Project had budgeted all its Shepherd-to-Sabine money for other projects.)
...
"Basically, it's a cathedral of light and sound," he said. "Can you imagine the right concert in here? Or art or sound installations? Different lights could change the look completely. Sometimes you might have water on the floor, but sometimes not."
My own idea? Sure, have art and music, but wrap a major, signature, tourist attraction bar/nightclub/dance club (and restaurant?) around it to generate steady attendance and revenue, not unlike what Studio 54 used to be for NYC. The kind of place we would all take our out-of-town friends when they visit (just like we take 'em to our favorite restaurants). To get maybe a bit of a visualization, check out two scenes in this trailer for The Last Days of Disco, at the 0:50 and 1:29 points:
The next big question would be how to pay for it and who would run it. Coincidentally, the answer was on the front page of that very same day's newspaper: Landry's and Tilman Fertitta. Like me, you probably have mixed feelings about his developments, but despite Hair Balls' objections, he's got the deep pockets and the experience to make this an... um... experience - like what they've done with their restaurants, Kemah, and Vegas casino. It may not be perfect or high art, but at least it would get turned into something interesting with a lot lower chance of dying from a lack of funds or attendance.
Top rankings mania, United HQ, jobs, zoning, Texans, and more
The smaller misc items have been piling up faster than usual lately...
The 2012 8th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey has been released, with Houston once again held up as a paragon with a very affordable 2.9 ratio between the median home price ($160k) and median income ($55k). That certainly beats ratios around 6 for the major coastal cities and even much worse for international cities like Hong Kong, Sydney, and Vancouver.
"Throughout the economic crisis, Houston has been the buttoned-down older brother to Austin's hippie slacker.
While college-boy Austin coasts by on education and arts, Houston shrugs off the cool kids, goes to work every day with its buddies in the energy industry and does what it can to keep unemployment below 8%. Unlike Austin, though, Houston doesn't have to drop its home prices to draw new blood."
I came across this quote about the United-Continental merger and choice of HQ in a Fortune article. Based on this and what I've heard about the radical decline in Continental service since the merger, I think I can safely say that they royally screwed up this merger picking Chicago for the HQ over Houston. It not only raised costs, but helped the much lower regarded United culture win out.
"To be fair, there are some initial benefits to combining operations. Merging headquarters and slashing management costs does help the surviving airline, although it can be limited. For example, United has had to hike the pay of Continental employees by 20% to 30% to entice them to move up to Chicago from Houston, a person close to the company told Fortune. The bizarre reason to remain headquartered in such an expensive city, even with tax breaks, shows that airline mergers aren't always rational."
Finally, I'm a couple weeks too late in sharing this, but it's still pretty cool. In retrospect, the lyrics at the 3:16 point were poorly chosen. Oh well. Next season is looking good. Go Texans!
"Whenever I talk about anti-density land use restrictions, someone inevitably brings up Houston, where people have heard there are no zoning rules. If overregulation causes low density, people ask, then how come Houston is so sprawling? There are a number of reasons this line of questioning is a mistake, but the most fundamental one is that people misunderstand what "no zoning" means in the Houston context. If land use in Houston were genuinely unregulated, then this Nancy Sarnoff article about possible revisions to Houston land use rules would make no sense. In fact, the city features extensive regulation of minimum lot size and maximum parking requirements just like every other major American city. The specific proposal here, meanwhile, is a mixed bag.
On the one hand, you'd be allowed to build townhomes and other "urban-style housing" outside of Loop 610. That's good. But on the flipside they're also talking about "requiring additional parking in higher density developments." Parking requirements are pernicious in almost all contexts, but especially so when you have a major effort under way to encourage more residential density. The point isn't that Houston developers should build parking. It's a very auto-oriented city, and if I were building homes I expected to sell to people I'd want to include parking. But there's no reason to require more parking than the market demands."
Well, unless you're reacting to the free-rider/tragedy-of-the-commons problem of street parking.
He's basically arguing that, while we don't have zoning, we do have regulation, which is certainly true. But that doesn't mean our lack of zoning is a myth. I think he was looking for a provocative headline. But what I most enjoyed were some of the comments, where quite a debate developed. Some favorite excerpts:
Houston still does not have Zoning in the concept that other cities have zoning. While there many development regulations, there is no land use regulations. There are not regulations that restrict what can be built on a piece of land and what that land can be used for.
There is a caveat though, liquor stores and strip clubs can't be built by schools and platted neighborhoods can have their own internal land use controls.
The internal land use controls are in the form of Deed Restrictions. Active neighborhoods keep these restrictions in place and maintain their land use. Neighborhoods that neglect their Deed Restrictions see massive change. It's a very effective way to develop a city and it's more real and natural. Central planning destroys cities by forcing them to develop unnaturally.
The inner loop of the Houston is growing in density at a faster pace without some urban planning zoning it to be denser.
-----------------------------------
The most interesting thing about Houston is, outside deed restricted neighborhoods, there are few if any restrictions on the height of Residential or Commercial property.
As a result while we have a decently developed downtown, we have about half a dozen mini downtowns scattered across the city, not to mention the Texas Medical Center which is a small city in its own right.
This also allows condo developers and high rise apartment owners to offer buildings with great views.
It also allows neighborhoods with two story houses near downtown and other premium locations to be affordable and safe.
It is a huge headache for transit managers to deal with multiple job centers, but it is great for traffic because you have tons of rush hour traffic that is multi-directional meaning you do not see freeways as clogged as other cities.
Of course, these points are probably not exactly news to the readers of this blog, but I still thought they were good, concise articulations of how Houston works and the advantages this gives us. One not mentioned: how it helps us be such an amazing restaurant town - something repeated to me today by a friend visiting from out-of-town for the marathon.
"Our top ranked area, Houston, is one of only four regions that enjoyed net job growth in manufacturing in the past 10 years. This year its heavy manufacturing sector expanded by almost 5%. Houston’s industrial growth is no fluke; over the past year its overall job growth has been about the best among all the nation’s major metros.
Houston’s industrial success owes much to the city’s massive port and booming energy sector, says Bill Gilmer, senior economist at the Federal Reserve office of Dallas. “Houston is about energy — it’s about fabricated metals and machinery,” he says. “It’s oil service supply and petrochemicals. It’s all paced by a high price of oil and new technology that makes it more accessible.”
This shift towards domestic energy augurs well for a huge and economically beneficial shift in America’s longer term economic prospects, he points out. Cheap natural gas, for example, makes petrochemical production in America more competitive than anyone could have imagined a decade ago. Linkages with Mexico in terms of energy as well as autos has made Texas — which is also home to No. 4 ranked San Antonio and No. 15 ranked Dallas — the nation’s primary export super-power, with current shipment 15% to 20% above pre-crisis levels."
In her 2nd-term inauguration speech last week, the Mayor mentioned tackling the homeless problem. This may be a good model to consider. Delancy Street Foundation, now with six locations across the country, is "... considered the country's leading residential self-help organization for substance abusers, ex-convicts, homeless and others who have hit bottom... Rather than hire experts to help the people with problems, we decided to run Delancey Street with no staff and no funding. Like a large family, our residents must learn to develop their strengths and help each other." If any of you out there have an inside connection to the Mayor, you may want to send this one over to her, or to whomever works with the homeless in her administration.
Finally, Reason dissects LA's light rail system in this amusing video interviewing passengers on a ride from LAX to Burbank, while pointing out the huge per-rider taxpayer subsidies involved, how it has led to substantial under-investment in bus service, and the hardships that has caused for transit riders. And unfortunately Metro seems to be on a similar path here, with ongoing cuts to bus service instead of the huge increase promised in the 2001 referendum. Sadly, the poor, elderly, and transit-dependent suffer while we pat ourselves on the back as progressives for building light rail. Hat tip to Barry.
It's time for the Fall 4Q11 quarterly highlights post, which also sums up all of 2011. These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I'd like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they're mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as "reference posts" that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they've also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search). They're not quite as useful as they were when I was still doing multiple posts each week, but still have some value (at least for me).
Don't forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts - see the Google Groups subscription signup box in the right sidebar. An RSS feed link is also available in the right sidebar. As always, thanks for your readership, and may you have a wonderful 2012.
And don't forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it's worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot "stored up" before I started blogging) and most definitely in the 5th birthday retrospective.
The Wall Street Journal recently profiled Austin's power to create middle class jobs, something the rest of the nation is struggling with. But not Houston. If you check out their graph, you'll note that Houston and Austin are neck-and-neck in middle-skill job growth since 2001 at ~25%, and well ahead of the rest of the pack, including Dallas (surprisingly). Let's look at the key excerpts first, then discuss if Houston is following Austin's model:
AUSTIN, Texas—As the nation grapples with stubbornly high unemployment, Texas's political and high-tech capital shows one way to create good jobs for people who didn't go to college: Attract highly skilled entrepreneurs, and watch the companies they start hire lower-skilled workers.
The Texas state Capitol in Austin, a city that in the past decade has added 50,000 'middle-skill' positions that pay roughly $38,000 a year.
Praxis Strategy Group, an economic-development consultancy, estimates Austin added 50,000 "middle-skill" positions in the past decade. These are jobs that require a two-year associate's degree or the equivalent work experience, and pay a median wage of $17.30 an hour, or $38,000 a year. That pace of growth is roughly four times faster than the nation's as a whole, three times that of New York and Portland, Ore., and twice that of Phoenix.
Austin's success in creating middle-class jobs runs against the grain of national trends. As America's shift from manufacturing to the service sector has accelerated, economists have noted a hollowing out of such jobs.
...
One consequence of the economy's shift away from production toward brain work is that companies are constantly seeking new ways to break down high-value intellectual tasks into smaller, cheaper bits. Much the same way that assembly lines created millions of new jobs by reducing mass production to a sum of tasks, employers in Austin and elsewhere are constantly breaking down higher-skill jobs to "create new middle-skill, middle-income specialties," according to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute.
...
Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that highly educated cities see faster wage growth for less-educated citizens as well as the high fliers. One reason is that that many lower-level employees use the most productive technologies and act as complements to more-expensive and highly-educated workers, making it much easier for companies to raise their wages faster than overall inflation.
Another force, Mr. Moretti notes, is called "human capital spillovers," a fancy way of saying that many "middle skill" workers begin to acquire skills that are much more valuable than their overall education level might suggest.
The WSJ has a companion blog post on "brain-hub cities", with the following distinction between two types of them:
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, notes that there are two types of high-educated metro. The first are old stalwarts like Washington, San Jose — the heart of the Silicon Valley — and Boston. Those cities are already highly educated — each has a greater than 35% share of college degree or higher workers, versus 28.2% nationally — yet have still seen big gains in their share of college educated population. That’s not so much because young and educated workers are moving there, although many are. What’s driving those gains is the fact that many lesser-educated workers are leaving — either by dying or moving to less expensive cities.
The second type of educated city are places like Raleigh and Austin that have had fast growing populations but, thanks in part to their relative affordability, have seen a more diverse mix of educated and less-educated workers moving there. Because they’re adding all sorts of people, those places are middle of the pack when it comes to their share gain of college educated workers. But, when measured in raw numbers of college-educated people moving there, they were the nation’s number one and two most popular destinations.
Now, you don't often hear of Houston as a "brain hub", but I'd argue we fall pretty clearly into the second camp there. The reason we don't get the same media hype as a place like Austin is that our brain hub is hidden inside of a much larger overall metro economy driven by things like the port and manufacturing (both of which also drive a lot of middle class jobs). Our brain hub is also not concentrated in the media's darling industry, technology, but broken up across energy, medical, and NASA. Both factors muddle up Houston's story (not to mention the energy boom), thus the Journal's preference for Austin's simpler story even though our stats are almost tied (tied on a percentage growth basis, which means in reality Houston has created many more absolute numbers of middle class jobs, probably close to triple Austin's).
The question is, do we have a similar dynamic to Austin as described in my bold highlights in the main story? Do our brain jobs in energy and medical drive the same type of middle-class job growth in the ways they describe? I suspect yes, but don't have a lot of experience in either industry, so I'll throw it to my readers. Thoughts welcome in the comments.
290 rail, IAH A380, city GDP, H-town Hackerspace, K12's future, and more
OK, the smaller miscellaneous items just keep stacking up:
Check out TX/RX Labs, Houston's Hackerspace. I just think it's awesome that Houston has something like this. Very cool and expanding fast.
Peter Wang writes about a nightmare traffic experience at CityCentre for a holiday party, noting that New Urbanist/"Livable Center" developments in Houston will still need to accommodate large volumes of cars at peak periods since we just don't move that many people by foot, bike, or transit (like classic "old urbanist" cities would).
IAH is getting Airbus A380 service, and is just the sixth U.S. city to do so! (on Lufthansa from their Frankfurt hub) I remember meeting an airport official a few years back that was skeptical about IAH getting A380 service (or, more importantly, needing to pay big $ to upgrade the airport to accommodate it), but I think the global energy boom is changing the equation.
"But even taking the report's ridership projections at face value, the real stumbling block to this project is the cost. Without the link to downtown, the start-up capital costs are estimated to be $290 million, with an annual operating cost of more than $6 million. This equals a capital cost of $96,000 per rider and an annual operating cost of more than $2,000 per rider, a level that is clearly not viable.
If one assumes that somehow the inevitable neighborhood opposition to an extension through the Heights could be overcome, and a link to downtown completed, the report projects the total capital costs would be $544 million with annual operating costs of $21 million. This would still be about $50,000 in capital costs and more than $2,000 in annual operating costs per rider."
"Metro service today has 5-minute intervals between buses and goes nonstop to downtown. The proposed commuter rail line would have 20-minute intervals and stop at 10 stations, then require a transfer to a bus to get downtown."
A WSJ profile of the world's most fabulous airport in Singapore, including rooftop pool, butterfly garden, and tons of other amenities. IAH, take notes if you want to be the hub of choice for international travelers...
Houston is the country's #5 metro in terms of GDP at $379B, behind NYC, LA, Chicago, and DC, but ahead of SF, Dallas, Boston, Philly and Atlanta. That makes *just our city* the 31st-largest economy in the world and larger than Austria, Argentina, or South Africa.
Forbes “Best State for Business” pegs Texas at No. 6, but No. 1 in the economic climate category.
If you want to understand the high-tech future of K-12 education, read this book. Short, quick, easy read, but one that will amaze you with the potential revolution. It even has a book jacket endorsement from HISD superintendent Terry Grier (but don't let that stop you if you're not a fan of his). I plan on doing a future post with a more detailed book review, but wanted to get it out there now in case anybody's looking for a little holiday reading material for when you're traveling or stuck at the in-laws'... ;-)
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger had some very nice things to say about Texas in a recent column about Rick Perry. For my excerpts, I'm going to skip the Perry stuff and just focus on the Texas accolades. It'll make you proud.
Rick Perry says Texas is the most successful state in America. He's right. Texan economic output exceeds Mexico's and Australia's and rivals India's. ...
(that last stat blows me away considering that we have 25 million people vs. 1,200 million (1.2 billion) people in India!)
Texas, unlike California, isn't America's most beautiful state. Through October this year, parts of Texas had 90 days of 100+ temperatures. Yet companies and people keep moving into the high heat of Texas. ...
In 1990, one of the world's biggest companies, Exxon Mobil, left New York City for Dallas. Exxon's former CEO, Lee Raymond, says the move in part was indeed about costs and New York State's notoriously overbearing tax authority. But it was also about working amid a culture of competence. "It's just the attitude in Texas of getting things done and doing them well," he says.
Mr. Raymond remarks that the economic policies that in time trapped the Northeast and Rust Belt in spirals of decline never touched Texas. But this is about something beyond low taxes and no unions: "In Texas the people tend to be farmers or individual businessmen, and they have this attitude: We have to make do with what we have and work together to get things done and survive. It's can-do. That attitude permeates everything there."
...
Ed Trevis, a smaller fish, is also happy. A California-educated Brazilian immigrant and tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley for 25 years, Mr. Trevis moved Corvalent Corp. to Austin for similar reasons. He had to hire a firm just to do California's compliance. "In California," he says, "you are always doing something wrong."
"What I found in Texas is that from the standpoint of running a business, cost of living, education, the labor pool, quality of life, it just blew other states out of the water." I heard this constantly—people enjoy being in business in Texas.
...
Texas' pro-business bias goes back about 175 years—and never died. "It's just that they believe in the whole Horatio Alger myth down here," said Mr. Booth. "It's hard to understand if you haven't lived here."
And so Perry's Paradox: Rick Perry is a success because he nominally presides over an American tiger state, a genuine free-market economy that doesn't much need—or want—his tender loving care. ...
This much is obvious: Texas, not California, better be the American future...
Well, at least economically. Let's hope California's weather - and not Texas' - is America's future, most especially in this horribly hot-and-dry drought year...
Out history New Orleans, Boston, Savannah or Charleston? (or even San Antonio)
See what I mean? People choose vacation locations for specific reasons, and the winners are pretty damn dominant. We're stuck as a local/regional "big city" tourism destination like Chicago is for the midwest and Atlanta is for the southeast, with our share of great museums, restaurants, shopping, and a few attractions - but not enough to pull people from across the country - much less the world - to vacation here.
And here's my new insight that came out of the discussion:
From a marketing analysis, there is an unfilled niche, and here's my articulation of it: parents plan family trips, and they often want to educate their kids as well as have fun. There are plenty of opportunities to do this with history - Colonial Williamsburg, Boston, New Orleans, San Antonio and the Alamo, etc. - not to mention Europe. DC is where you learn about our great country's history and political system. The national parks for learning about nature and the environment. San Diego for every type of animal in the mega-zoo (and SeaWorld for aquatic animals).
But there's bit of a hole in the tourism market when it comes to teaching kids about and inspiring them into STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). On a national level there's the Air and Space Museum in DC and a couple of NASA sites (inc. Houston JSC), but it's pretty limited. On a local level it's pretty small science and children's museums. We could aspire to be one of those "must-do" vacations for all families that want to broadly educate their kids. "A DC/Smithsonian of STEM" might be a way to think of it. Maybe that's one mega-museum, or a collection of medium-sized ones. The Astrodome is a huge opportunity, as is the giant empty field to the south of it and the easy rail connection to our Museum District. And we already have a starting pull with Space Center Houston. Build on that, and we can create a differentiated niche from other tourist destinations.
By creating a very future-oriented, big challenge-focused, STEM-based tech/engi/science museum complex (including energy) as a compliment to NASA, we become one of those destinations families will want to visit for the benefit of their kids. I'm not saying they won't also have some fun when they get here (Kemah, Galveston, shopping, eating, etc.), but the core reason they will add it to their vacation plans will be to inspire their kids into STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) - just like I'm sure plenty of DC trips have inspired kids into public service careers.
The short description would be like the National Air and Space museum (the 2nd most popular museum in the world after Paris' Louvre), but covering a broader range of STEM subject areas and giving not just history, but articulate the big challenges facing those fields going forward. The goal is to not just look backward, but inspire kids to study hard so they can contribute to working on the big problems of the future in their careers. The original vision of Epcot might be another example. Include lots of interactivity and summer camps, with school field trip groups on multi-day visits. It should address the Grand Challenges of Engineering, with maybe a wing for each.
I think most of the museum would be the history of engineering and technology, maybe grouped into themes like "transportation", "computing", "health/medicine" (link to the world's largest medical center, anyone?), "energy", etc. but then shifting at the end of their timelines to broad, long-term challenges. The goal is for the kid to get swept up in the great people and innovations of the past and then get them excited about being contributors to future progress.
I wonder if a better name might be "The Museum of Progress", showing how human civilization has advanced with science, engineering, and technology and the great challenges we face going forward.
Definitely take some time to browse the thread - there are some good ideas and graphics from others in there. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on the strategy, the specific museum concept, and potential names in the comments. And if you're one of Houston's political or financial power-players interested in supporting something like this, please drop me an email (tgattis (at) pdq.net).
An open dialogue on serious strategies for making Houston a better city, as well as a coalition-builder to make them happen. All comments, email, and support welcome.
Social Systems Architect, consultant and entrepreneur with a genuine love of my hometown and its people. I cover a wide range of topics in this blog - including transportation, transit, economic development, quality-of-life, city identity, and development and land-use regulations - and have published numerous Houston Chronicle op-eds on these topics. I also co-authored the Opportunity Urbanism study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. I am a native Houstonian, 6th-generation Texan, attended Rice University for my BSEE and MBA, and a former McKinsey consultant and adjunct faculty member with Leadership Houston. I have had a long career in information technology, and am currently the founder and president of OpenTeams, a web-based collaborative software company that emphasizes openness and transparency inside large organizations. CONTACT EMAIL in no-spam format: tgattis (at) pdq.net - send me an email if you would like to receive these posts via email, or see the Google Groups signup box below.
