Well, well, well. The Wizard suffered a cratered hard drive a number of days back and subsequently found that his available backups were not exactly up to the task of restoring their contents. Sigh... life goes on.
As it is, my quality of life has returned to its normal excellence, all without a dime of taxpayer monies or time wasted with worthless political rhetoric. Some of this was achieved by shopping this weekend at three of my favorite places, Frys, Borders, and Home Depot. I also purchased two new pairs of running shoes from a place I have done business with for nearly 20 years.
And speaking of worthless rhetoric, On Thursday, February 7, 2008, Houston's newspaper of record published the findings of a panel of so-called experts from the Urban Land Institute and their ideas for Houston's future. Tory writes about it here. I am on a fresh install of Windows as I write this, so I cannot access the PowerPoint of the group's "findings". Still, I shall deal with their points as made by the Chronicle and Tory.
1) Houston needs more housing in downtown.
Answer: The marketplace will answer that question, not a panel of people who possibly might have been hired by some downtown Houston landowners and interest groups, conceivably at taxpayer expense. As it is, the 3,500 or so people who live in downtown Houston live in housing whose cost gradients are going for at least $235 per square foot, if not higher. The office space in downtown Houston currently has gradients of $275 or more per square foot. Meanwhile, would be homeowners can buy in some areas within 10 miles of downtown Houston which have price gradients of $70-$90 per square foot. Doing so and driving a car into downtown saves them many thousands of dollars every year in housing costs. As such, the Wizard believes that the market for housing in downtown Houston is probably saturated and will remain a small niche market. The same market forces which left downtown dormant after nightfall as late as the late 1990's have returned to some degree and will probably stay that way. Funny, but some people who have written about this don't seem to understand this idea.
Meanwhile, there is no compelling reason why Fry's, Home Depot, or other companies should locate downtown. Doing so would put them at a cost disadvantage vis-a-vis with their marketplace competitors. Land is valuable thanks to the agglomerated economies of scale afforded via the construction of skyscrapers, which allow dozens or hundreds of firms needing office space to bundle together (like law firms who would like to be just down the street from the City and County government and court houses) and outbid manufacturers or retailers for access to downtown property via renting floors of such towers. Moreover, for many there is no compelling reason to locate near downtown for access to the port or to rail heads, as there is no advantage to be found for most to do so.
2) Houston's competitors are (insert city here).
Houston's size, as is the size of most cities in a market economy (and yes, 1/3rd of the U.S. economy is in the political economy), will be determined by the size of its markets. The factor payments flowing into Houston thanks to $90 per barrel petroleum and $7 per 1,000 cubic foot natural gas are incredible. If you can't make some money right now, then there is something wrong with you. Naturally Houston should be expanding.
Still, it would be nice if we could attract some other non-fossil fuel firms, or if our current incumbents would show enough foresight to start buying up land so that they can control cellulose ethanol production from offices located in Houston. In general however, I am not a big believer in the idea that Houston is competing against cities like Sydney.
3) Houston should consider planning for its ad-hoc sewer system.
Ah! Now these guys are onto something. Staying on top of your infrastructure is a very wise thing to do. Too bad the political classes here in town seem more interested in building sports temples rather than deal with sewage.
4) Houston must start shelling out billions to run rail to the airports.
Oh, my goodness! If this one didn't give away who paid for this report, then I don't know what would.
The Metro Solutions 2003 ballot language called for the taxpaying public to shell out for rail to both Hobby and Intercontinental. Naturally, the rail lines lead to - you guessed it - downtown Houston. Tory's thread questions how far this would be. The Wizard works downtown and drove to Intercontinental in December 2006 when taking a business trip to London and onto Algeria. The distance of the drive along I-45? 25 miles. It took me 55 minutes in 5pm Friday evening rush hour traffic with 1 freeway accident to make it to Intercontinental. The Metro Solutions ballot language states that a hypothetical route would be 21.5 miles.
The cost of a light rail route to Intercontinental? That would be a minimum of $3 billion. We would be giving up a Katy Freeway refurbishment and expansion - all 18 lanes (with room for two more), 350,000 daily vehicle capacity, and tens of thousands of freight trucks - for such a project. Meanwhile, Metro stated in its 2006 North Corridor FEIS that the first 5.4 miles of LRT transit from downtown to Northline Mall would attract 15,000 riders per day.
Folks - shelling out for rail to the airports is a recipe for disaster. If the downtown interest groups - which in every expanding city are sick of people running away from them because sprawl makes their land less valuable - politically demand and insist on dedicated public transportation to the airports from downtown Houston, then build a pair of dedicated bus lanes to the airports and run buses along them. It will save the taxpayer a ton of money.
In a future post, the Wizard will give gentle readers some pearls of wisdom regarding the phenomenon of cities which have run rail to their airports.
5) H-GAC needs to distribute transportation dollars based on quality of life criteria.
I have a question to ask: Define quality of life for me? If shelling out billions of dollars to run rail to the airports results in more traffic congestion because that money was not spent on creative ideas like tunneling under freeways, then that results in a diminishing of my quality of life. One of the reasons why people have been sprawling outwards from urban cores for generations is to get away from the historically narrow streets and inadequate transportation infrastructure which existed in Central Business Districts. Sprawl helps alleviate congestion, not cause it. Anyone who doubts this should do what I did and spend a good 10 weeks in London (or better yet, Bangkok). There you will see the results of narrow roads from antiquity, complemented with dense development. Average speed of travel around London? Try 8-13 miles per hour.
Moreover, trying to insert language that transportation dollars should be doled out on non-quantifiable issues like "quality of life" detracts from dealing with concrete problems, such as measuring that a freeway is backed up for 8 hours per day and that vehicle traffic is slowed to 20-30 mph during those time frames. Maybe it is time that we should start considering adding some more lanes somewhere, right?
So the Wizard's verdict? I'd accept the recommendations on sewage and non-zoning and file the rest of this report into the rubbish bin. We'd all be better off for it.
More Fireballs, Lightning Bolts, and Hell Storms to come.
Wizard