I dislike the lack of zoning in Houston. It means you want to buy a home, but it's right next to a strip club, so it ruins the deal. You want to live in a nice and expensive neighborhood, but then a developer comes in and builds a 6 story apartment building right next to your two story house. And the lack of zoning means the traffic on the street of that apartment complex becomes horrific because there's now twice as many people living on that block.
You see a lot of mixed-income neighborhoods in Houston - places where people are building $700,000 homes where 80% of the same street are 1000 square foot shacks with people living in them making $20k a year. Luckily for them, their lots are worth half a million dollars. I don't know if this is the result of the lack of zoning, but I don't see this happening in other cities in Texas, so I have to think it's somehow related.
>You see a lot of mixed-income neighborhoods in Houston - places where people are building $700,000 homes where 80% of the same street are 1000 square foot shacks with people living in them making $20k a year. Luckily for them, their lots are worth half a million dollars. I don't know if this is the result of the lack of zoning, but I don't see this happening in other cities in Texas, so I have to think it's somehow related.
This is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of thing. If neighborhoods are income-segregated, there is no end to opinion pieces about this awful late-capitalist crypto-apartheid. If neighborhoods are mixed-income, then the hand-wringing is about rich people living behind walls next to a shanty town.
There's clearly a correct answer here: repeal segregation laws. Why on earth is my government forcing lower income families out of neighborhoods they want to live in?
Yeah, it's awesome having neighbors that leave garbage everywhere, don't mow their lawns, smoke copious amounts of weed on their porch, are constantly calling the cops, revving their shitty Civics with the exhaust cut off at 4AM on a Sunday, and park 4 rusted out cars on the curb outside their home.
You might say "So don't buy a home there" or "So buy a home in an HOA". The point is that there isn't housing available in those areas nearly as much as there is most everywhere else, meaning people start to gentrify crappier blocks because they house the want at the location they want just doesn't exist.
> Luckily for them, their lots are worth half a million dollars.
Not so luckily. Texas has no state income tax and gets most of it's money from property taxes. Those land-wealthy people making $20k a year likely have a $12k tax bill (there are things like homestead exemptions which can help .. but still)
You see a lot of mixed-income neighborhoods in Houston - places where people are building $700,000 homes where 80% of the same street are 1000 square foot shacks with people living in them making $20k a year. Luckily for them, their lots are worth half a million dollars. I don't know if this is the result of the lack of zoning, but I don't see this happening in other cities in Texas, so I have to think it's somehow related.