Worth adding some context to this study. We've known about subsidence in our area for many many years. The Houston-Galveston subsidence district was created almost 50 years ago by the Texas legislature to regulate groundwater withdrawal and manage subsidence. https://hgsubsidence.org/ It's worth noting that this regulation has drastically slowed subsidence, but not completely halted due to the groundwater problem, and an exploding population.
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
Thanks for the arcgis link. It is interesting to compare to the Sentinel 1A data from the study[0]. For example there is one existing (ground based) measurement East of Mont Belvieu (P050), but most of the displacement in the satellite data appears just to the West, centered on Mont Belvieu. This is by eye only, so I may be mistaken in comparing the locations.
The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).
The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.
nah, its just thay saying "oil" is too narrow because a huge amount of the extraction is also natural gas. Hydrocarbon is both very clear and accurately specific.
meh only sorta. like, yeah oil is obviously a big deal because it's a valuable resource. but like if something is a huge part of the state's economy and a ton of jobs is working to keep that industry healthy/growing really "being run by it" or is it just good policy?
the good thing is we're stealing all those nice cali tech jobs so it won't be true forever ;)
Vouching for this, because while the wording was confrontational, the points being expressed are valid. Apart from the water kinda. West Texas where they depend on groundwater for irrigation is screwed, but the rest is really well planned and run reservoir systems that catch several states worth of watershed.
Agree with the politics or not. TX isn't going to grab talent from states with strongly pro-choice workforces at nearly the rate it used to.
And the climatic extremes are bad and seemingly getting worse, anthropogenic or not. This summer was brutal, the last was as well, and both winters were fairly horrific as well. Partially because, as pointed out, the power grid isn't up to the current load.
I love TX, but it is because of the friendly people, the power infrastructure and climate situations are atrocious, and TX abortion laws are absolutely going to affect the influx of knowledge workers.
I routinely ignore recruiters from places I don’t want to live even if the job is interesting. Red states, and places with similar politics are on that list.
I spent a week in Utah and heard open antisemitism and anti Mexican rhetoric. I don’t have faith that my wife could get medical care she needs there. Why would I ever want to live there or any of the politically similar places.
I went to grad school in SLC, it wasn't that bad; I found it better than Austin anyways. I couldn't imagine working in Provo, however.
Without Roe vs. Wade, though, I totally agree that the dynamics of these choices have changed. I don't expect it to last very long, however, due to economic competition, but that's just a guess.
> people will be upset about this, very few will change their life plans over it
I am moving from Texas in the next few months, and I own a house here. Texas and Florida Republicans are in an insane game of red-meat one-upsmanship that's leading both states into a terrible place. They are not done yet, and Im not staying to find out how insane they can get.
I wish recent arrivers the best of luck! And hopefully one of y'all will buy my house with your bay area salaries.
Vouching for this too, because it is a reasonable and possibly correct observation. I think people are less likely to leave than they are to weigh it as a factor when deciding to go to Austin vs stay where they are.
Why can't we have conversations about this stuff without voting each other into oblivion?
Just add it to a laundry list of terrible policy decisions in Texas. Might not make someone leave but really reminds a lot of people why you wouldn't want to go move or vacation there.
I had an equal pay job offer in Austin that I turned down (despite a massive increase in the standard of living I'd be able to afford) not because of "abortion" per se (this was several years ago), but I just didn't want to live in a state full of Texans. I like Texans as "characters" but not as my community.
It's true, that tech workers lean politically left, but it's not true that access to abortion is the single-issue that drives everyone's decision making. Nationally it continues to trail behind the economy when people are polled about which issue is most important to them.
California might be great at social policy, but the average person can't afford to buy a $1.5M home while paying exorbitant taxes, and all the pro-choice laws in the world won't change that. Sure there will be some people with strong political convictions who stay, but most people grow up and want a small house, a yard, and a safe neighborhood for their kids to grow up in. California continues to fail in that area by every conceivable metric.
Its not "political". Its a matter of life and death. For the safety, health and security of my partner, there is no way I would ever move to Texas.
The abortion laws, their enforcement, and the impact on other drugs and services is not a theoretical harm it is very real and would've had substantial, possibly lethal harm to my partner when we were trying to conceive.
> California continues to fail in that area by every conceivable metric.
The right repeats this over and over again, hoping for it to become true. Meanwhile, those liberals who bought at $500k now have houses worth $1.5M, and their pay checks aren't taking the 13% hit conservatives keep repeating (because they don't understand how graduated tax rates work). People will continue to move to as well as leave California in remarkably reasonable numbers, I doubt Texas will achieve population parity with California again (they were the same size in 1940) in my lifetime.
> Austin can't be Austin while it's based inside [some insults] modern Texas under Greg Abbott
No doubt this is true for many. But Texas as it is is also appealing to many who are moving there for precisely the things you don't like. Choice is a good thing, time will tell which direction gets more migration
i mean i'm not super behind cali big tech moving here, that was basically a joke. i think they're pretty toxic and distort the cities they call home which is what happened to SF and is now happening to austin. i think overly-progressive city governments have some fault in both but there's no way past the fact that tech will gentrify literally everyone out of a city, not just the poorest, if it ends up all in one city. i don't really want the entire houston-austin corridor gradually pricing out even the middle class which is where it's going rn.
believe it or not, MBAs and execs aren't picking where they put a campus based on abortion. they continued expanding in SF for many years when it's not a "urbane, pleasant, safe place to live" and the only box it checks is "liberal".
i think the only thing that has changed majorly in the past decade is Texas abortion policy. fact is most tech workers have more than enough money to go fly to another state so probably won't turn down a super high paying job at a big name tech company over it. maybe you will but sounds like you're ideologically very fixed on this. like, i won't go work in states that abuse their citizens gun rights so i get where you're coming from and would personally like some liberalization of state abortion policy. but most people don't have those kind of dealbreaker issues.
we can get past water issues, we'll just start piping it in like y'all did years ago. despite some of the goofy ahh rhetoric from abbot Texas is a leader in renewables and that will probably make it economical to do desalination at scale before other states. we're already pretty used to relying on climate control, and there's finally some movement on getting micronukes up for the grid.
tbh i liked Texas before all the cali types showed up. so i'm not gonna be pressed if they leave. i'd much rather we build up our own innovation scene focused on hard tech, medtech etc. rather than importing the cali "culture".
yeah, cool story bro, you mean like the sweet gig at Oracle (who can't recruit in the Bay Area) that will pay you enough to buy an electric generator and a flight for your daughter to get birth control?
Houston is an experiment in what you get when you YOLO building regulations. One should expect them to re-learn all of the lessons of the past that caused those regulations to be written. It's basically a case study in technical debt from an urban planning angle. The lack of regulation made it cheap to build and allowed the city to rapidly expand, but also allowed it to sprawl almost beyond reason and caused it to become the poster child for poor city planning and a costly reminder of how hard it is to go back and try to fix problems after the fact.
Pretty good article that explains the facets. I feel like the article undersells Houston zoning a bit though. You still see far more bizarre stuff in Houston than you would see in other places. The article makes the point that you don’t see churches next to brothels, which is a pretty extreme example, but you definitely do see some stuff you would not see in other cities: residential lands abutting churches on one side and industrial locations on the other with some retail location right behind. It’s a bit of a crapshoot in a lot of places and even if it’s not when you move in it could be later.
Decades ago my aunt and uncle moved into what was at the time a pretty rural neighborhood in northwest Houston with only residents around but years later a church bought the property adjacent to their land and Sundays and Wednesdays moving forward there were noise and parking related issues.
Over time Houston's land use code has gotten more restrictive to prevent close proximity of nuisance uses[1]. As for churches, they are very often allowed in residential areas regardless[2][3]. Houston's zoning regulations are still some of the most permissive in the country, but that's only relative to other American cities. Ever since the Euclid v. Ambler (1926), zoning in the US grew rapidly more restrictive, far more so than much of the rest of the world. The primary reason Houston doesn't look like Tokyo (with its more liberal zoning[4][5]) is that it still has a lot of the worst parts of zoning as the parent comment points out.
Just about every new housing development in the greater Houston area starts like this: Acquire some cheap farmland not too far from a highway, come in and sub-divide the lots, build some kind of neighborhood amenity (pool, rec center, etc.), and creat a Municipal Utility District with on-site well and sewer.
None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.
With such little regulation, I would have guessed housing supply would be really great and prices quite affordable. But the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for house prices.
> But the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for house prices.
That seems unsurprising, and not sure it's a good metric. Houston is certainly much cheaper than, for example, Austin, and my guess is that it is considerably cheaper than similar sized metros.
I can't find it right now, but I remember reading an article from a few years back that basically called Houston the best city to live if you are poor. That is, don't just look at median prices, but Houston actually has a ton of affordable housing that is simply non-existent (or highly restricted in stupid lottery games) in other cities.
The issue is that living is actually a combination of housing + transportation. Looked through that lens, the large sprawl of Houston is less affordable.
Poorer folks are probably not looking at average car ownership costs. They're probably going to buy cheap/crappy cars, which means it's probably reasonable to live in Houston. Of course, then there's the reality that a cheap car is much more likely to need significant repair, which could either cripple a poor person in constant need of the car, or bankrupt the person, and fuel is generally more expensive as efficiency is lower.
Houston‘s sprawl pushes up transportation costs so poor people might have a cheaper car but they are paying more in gas and maintenance. And of course average people care about affordability not just the poor.
But does the low housing cost make up for the transportation cost?
I think the parent commenter did everyone a massive disservice by breaking housing and transportation into two separate categories since they're fungible with each other the same way time and money are.
Working 3 jobs requires limiting transportation time to have enough remianing time to work multiple jobs. This makes Houston disruptively unaffordable for the working poor in a way that’s less obvious if you look at them combined.
> Poorer folks are probably not looking at average car ownership costs
That’s part of a vicious cycle down. Rent or mortgage checks are visible so people minimize that and then accept a long commute. People who buy cars based on the monthly payment often pay high interest. A farther commute means hundred of hours a year sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. A drive that’s half an hour on the weekend can inflate to an hour during rush hour. Way too many people consider housing+transportation as separate budget categories.
This is mostly accurate from what I've seen, but if you were willing to go as far out from the Austin city center as Houston's natural sprawl goes, you would probably get comparable home prices.
This is a very good point that often gets overlooked. Empty lots in desirable inner loop Houston neighborhoods cost $1M. That's not really any different from Austin.
Every large city has a desirable neighborhood with million dollar lots. But if you look at # of houses within 15 minutes of downtown that cost less than 200k. Houston is one of few that's still affordable.
This is a fun off the cuff guess but if you look at a Zillow it's not true. Houses the same distance from the center of town are significantly more expensive in Austin. Everyone I know who moved from Houston to Austin moved twice as far from downtown and paid twice as much to do it.
I haven't looked at the numbers but a popular and growing city being below median price?! Surely that is exceptional, probably unique for the USA or anywhere for that matter.
I've read that Houston isn't regulation free per se. Zoning was mostly replaced with neighbor associations of one sort or another which are just as restrictive with regard to dense development.
I wonder what the scale involved is, and if compared to say Boston, the neighbor associations overlay roughly onto the suburb towns that all have highly customized regulations.
It depends on the area. Most go back to when the area was developed, some of them were voted into an association (eg historic heights), others are simply drawn at class lines (river oaks is entirely an association). The lines are really arbitrary. My house has a very minimal neighborhood restriction (no commercial front businesses) while my neighbors a few blocks away are required to maintain sidewalks, upkeep of yard, etc. Condos and townhomes obviously have HOAs as well. I believe a complete tear down is the only way to part ways with a deed restriction (which is why historic homes being remodeled are sometimes razed in the middle of the night)
Draw a radius outside of Boston/Cambridge for an hour drive (not in rush hour traffic--where many of the jobs are anyway) and there are many housing prices that are pretty reasonable. Not depressed ex-steel city in the Midwest reasonable but $300K for a single family home reasonable. And this gets into pretty rural areas without a lot of regulations. Of course, many especially closer in towns are much more regulated.
Compared to a town with 100k people in Wisconsin Houston doesn't look very affordable. But compared to the top 10 largest cities in the US it looks pretty good.
Well, nearly every metro went off the rails in terms of availability/affordability since the pandemic.
For many years Houston was much more affordable than the national average. 2010 seems to have been the inflection point. See the first House Price Index graph here:
Being below the national median is great for a large, growing metro.
Check every other large, economically booming metro area and see what their housing prices are in comparison. I know the last time I checked, Dallas was substantially more expensive, and that city seems like the most obvious comparison to make.
Even without traditional zoning, housing supply is somewhat land constrained, since building further up gets more and more expensive as you go higher. It still helps to be able to build higher, but it's not a panacea that will solve all housing cost problems.
I would expect the YOLO housing and environment approach to never be about equality and affordability. I would expect it to be a signal that NIMBYism is through the roof and that they have the regulatory power to inflate prices.
I’m always shocked that people think supply is the issue…
People will live in the best place they can afford. This means prices will always be driven by the income level of people in the area.
If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You’ll actually just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving there. That’ll drive the prices right back to where they were.
Demand would have to drop, while you expand supply. Remove tech jobs from SF and demand will drop, lowering prices. If enough external people don’t wish to move there and you’re building, then prices drop.
Effectively, demand always massively outstrips supply for living accommodations
As a thought exercise: imagine it was $100/month to live in a 3Bed, 2Br house in Houston. You’d have 100m people want to move there.
Keep moving that number up, at some point you’ll get supply and demand meeting. If you add 1000 new houses, it’ll barely impact demand because you’ll have 1000 people willing to move for a $50/month reduction in cost. Then prices will be right back where they started.
Unless you can build 10k units or 100k units prices won’t meaningfully change from supply side factors alone.
> People will live in the best place they can afford.
This is an overly simplified view of demand. People with live in the best place among the places they want to live. That’s why we see strong selection along political and cultural dimensions, even when they correlate weakly (or even negatively) with purchasing power.
If you would like to be proven conclusively wrong, I'd suggest looking at Japan. Its zoning stayed much more liberal than the United States and despite the massive size and growth of Tokyo, it stays affordable. Even in SF, some of the largest housing advocates are the tech companies that don't like having to pay employees enough to live in SF[1].
There are hundreds of thousands of households in SF. Of course adding a thousand new houses is not going to drastically reduce house prices. That doesn't disprove that it's a supply-side problem. It demonstrates the size of the supply-side problem.
That's simply running the thought experiment the other direction: There are places where you could lower the cost of living to zero and people still wouldn't move there.
Alaska effectively goes further by paying people to live there with their Permanent Fund - https://pfd.alaska.gov/ - where they give residents an annual dividend based on oil proceeds. But Kansas and other places have done the same offering to pay remote people $10k to move there.
> If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You’ll actually just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving there. That’ll drive the prices right back to where they were.
Even if we take your theory as true, this still seems net good to me? More people able to live in SF if they want to is a good thing.
Every urban planning enthusiast online says without artificial zoning, there would be no sprawl and everything would be a walkable paradise with a healthy mix of shops and housing close by. But then Texas comes up and the narrative flips somehow.
The implementation is different, but Texas has zoning. Importantly they have minimum parking zoning which forces sprawl as much as if not more than most zoning laws.
I think sprawl would happen anyway, cars are ultimately cheap and convenient (as % of budget large, but still affordable) and by the time traffic is a problem you have sprawl that transit cannot easily be retrofitted to.
Cars are not super cheap, and in fact are very expensive when you start to account for public costs and externalities. Especially in regards parking, building car infrastructure is expensive and space inefficient, and nowhere near the amount built today would be built without laws mandating it. Moreover, highways really aren't cheap either, and Houston is suffering under the financial weight of them.
Obviously since sprawl exists now it's hard to get rid of it; a city would be hard-pressed to go to the suburbs and tell them that they won't receive services anymore. However, as Detroit has shown, sprawl is definitely a liability if the city ever has any sort of period of decline. That certainly hasn't stopped Houston (and many other American cities) from acting as if that could never happen, and I suspect that the next 50 years will reveal the weaknesses of the model. I hope to be proven wrong, but that would require climate change to magically disappear and resources of all kinds to stay abundant, which seems unlikely.
Cars are super cheap compared to jet airplanes or helicopters. Yes they are a large part of our economy (I once read 60%, but I have no idea how to look that up), and of the average person's budget, but they are still cheap.
Walking barefoot is a lot cheaper than cars (and not as stupid as it sounds - your feet are made to walk barefoot), but it is so much slower nobody considers it reasonable anymore.
I think you're thinking of automotive manufacturing, which was a super important part of the economy at one point.
Cars (and by extension the policies that enable car dependence), have an extremely high externalities. They require vast amounts of public spending, lower land productivity, make areas more flood prone, damage the health of those living near car infrastructure, contribute to climate change, are traffic, drive suburban sprawl, and kill more Americans than guns do (crashes alone are just 0.3/100k fewer). The reason 'nobody considers it reasonable anymore' to walk are those policies that build for cars. In places with less car-oriented policies, people walk places. It has nothing to do with maximizing the speed of the vehicle you're using.
This seems to ignore the reality that developers live in. Build it as cheap and fast as possible and try not to think any more about infrastructure than you are forced to by the local government.
> Well, they're doing something right when a median home costs $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the Bay Area growing up here.
You can get a house for $75k (median) if you want in Gary Indiana. I'm not sure how lower housing prices can be directly correlated with "doing things more right".
Houston is the home of the US oil & gas industry and has one of the largest and most advanced medical centers in the world. There's a lot of money in Houston, and the city has incredibly ritzy neighborhoods like River Oaks and Piney Point Village, among many others; keeping overall housing relatively affordable with so many affluent people competing for it actually is an accomplishment.
I'm sure Houston works for you, but it just isn't the happening place on many people's radars. We could split hairs about its benefits; e.g.
* Economy comes and goes with natural resource boom bust cycle.
* America's most obese city
* A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation
There are other cities that match some of those qualities that I don't much care for, but I can see why a lot of people wouldn't mind and go for the cheap housing there as a decent trade off.
But in my original comment, my only point was that you can't judge how great a city is based on how cheap its real estate is (and the correlation often goes the opposite way).
The most expensive house listing for Gary right now seems to be for $575k; for Houston, it's $20 million, a difference of 35x. The average sale price in Piney Point Village is apparently just under $3.7 million (https://www.har.com/pineypointvillage/realestate) and the average rent is $8500/month. So on and so forth.
I think you're imagining all Houston real estate as cheap/affordable, when in reality the city has lots of extremely expensive real estate. It just also has affordable housing due to widespread construction of townhomes, apartments, and condos. Something like Gary just isn't comparable.
> * America's most obese city
It's now #27th. This is mostly driven by being suburban, southern, relatively poorer city.
> * A huge sprawl with bad traffic and poor public transportation
There are only a few cities in the U.S. that have good public transportation and while it's really nice it's also super expensive to live there.
Look there is no reason to live in Houston if you're rich. It's much nicer to live in a prettier city with great public transit and driving distance from some amazing natural features.
But if you're not rich and you want to be able to raise a family, own a house, and experience nice entertainment on 50k a year, Houston is a wonderful city.
It's definitely not a third of the price. There are definitely parts of the Bay Area that are more expensive, but certainly not every part. It's pretty close to Menlo Park in affordability or lack thereof. Property taxes are also 2x or more what they are in the Bay Area so you may be overestimating your purchasing power.
I'm not sure how the criteria are different, the above is looking at big cities. The other list seems to have a bunch of small cities (e.g. Jackson MS). The difference could also be in study year. Neither list is very surprising to me.
Again, it is including a lot of smaller cities. So ya, we all know Jackson Mississippi is fatter than Houston Texas, but...do we really put Jackson in the same class of city as Houston?
In a list of fattest cities i imagine they'd be compared. In the list of fattest top 10 major metroplexes i imagine it wouldn't. (I also assume it's the fattest major metropolitan area?
The difference is that Houston has more diverse and better job opportunities yet still has reasonably affordable housing.
There are tons of places with very cheap housing and no jobs. Nobody moves there except maybe a few teleworkers looking to optimize hard for surplus or people with other reasons to go there like family ties.
i'm not missing anything, i'm just pointing out that using Gary doesn't make any sense. if you're going to use other cities to counter the OP's point, then choose something like Dallas or Tampa, or Miami. Gary is literally decrepit.
That is the point you are missing. It is not just about price of homes but quality of life while the OP is just comparing $ vs $ when there is more to it than that.
i am saying that the example of Gary doesn't prove that Houston ISN'T a thriving city only based on housing costs. you need to use a city that is a bit more comparable to Houston to drive the point that low housing costs don't equate with a successfully run city.
it's a bit like someone arguing that Land Rovers are bad cars because they are built poorly, and then someone else coming in and saying well at least they don't cost the amount that a lamborghini costs, they must be doing something right. and then a third person coming into that argument and saying "well, actually you can't use price because a bicycle costs 200$ and that doesn't mean a bicycle is better than a Land Rover based on price alone" ...the point they're driving could be correct, but the comparison is apples to oranges. you can't compare bicycles to cars to drive the point, just like i wouldn't use Gary to make the argument that low prices does not mean a thriving city. a better argument would be to use something that is comparable to a Land Rover (Houston) like say, a car that is within 10-20k range that does the job but is still largely a piece of crap to argue your point that price alone doesn't dictate success.
I live in Gary and there are many factors that can factor into the economics here, mainly a single employer planning the entire city and that employer collapse. A house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it
> A house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it
Are you kidding? Its easily worth twice that. Wait until I show you the upgrades, new paint and wall to wall carpet. The bathroom's been renovated with new fixtures, and that is genuine imported Mexican tile. You'd be a fool to pass on this. Just think of the possibilities.
Except Houston is a fast-growing city, and Gary is a dying city. Houston managed to keep housing affordable while growing faster than most/all major cities.
It’s also functionality illegal to build anything but single family homes in most of the Bay Area and it’s now out of places to do that. Houston does have more space, but also doesn’t prevent you from building a duplex on your own land.
Pretty much all of the HOAs that are de facto zoning boards of the Houston area would most definitely prevent you from doing anything like that. HOA by-laws are where you'll find the real zoning regulations over there.
You mean trying to violate the deed restriction with compliance mandated by Section 26-475 (and other applicable places) of the Houston Code of Ordinances? I don't think a lawsuit would hold up very well, unless you could could convince the judge that the city can't regulate land use.
Absolutely... though that's harder to point a number to. The "this is how much land is there" is a metric that can't be argued. If you then try to look at the population densities of those areas, it becomes even more clear about why a single family detached house would be that much more expensive.
A huge part (half? 1/3?) of the Bay Area is nature reserves of various kinds, but most of that land would be perfectly suitable for housing construction, if it was legalized.
Ok... double the space allocated to the cities and you're still at about 1/3 of the greater Huston area.
Pave every single square foot of the nine counties that make up the Bay Area including Marin, Sonoma, and Napa... and you're still 3,000 square miles short of the greater Huston area.
My disagreement was about "a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a city on". I don't doubt your numbers.
That said, Tokyo, which is a wonderful city to live in, and on more earthquake prone land, has 14 million people on 5,194 square miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo.
$1.5m houses is a signal that a ton of people want to live there, and are willing to pay a premium for doing it. That's not a signal that you're doing something wrong.
Of course, it would be nice if you could keep everything you're doing right and bring housing prices down (largely by building more of it). But on the whole real-estate being valuable is generally a positive sign.
On the flip side, the cheapest houses you could find for awhile (maybe still?) were in detroit, that's not a sign that Detroit was doing well - but that demand had plummeted to literally 0 because it was doing so poorly.
I think there are two (very fair) criticisms in your post.
One is that we're really talking about demand from people who can afford it. All the demand in the world from people living on minimum wage won't drive house prices up so they aren't really "counted" in my analysis. There's not really a way to fix this issue with the data, but I'd argue that demand from reasonably rich people is still a good sign. Indeed, rich people are the most mobile and able to move away from a shitty place to live.
The other is that the quality of the home matters (a lot). Which is completely true, but the cheap shitty homes in the bay area are still demanding these prices, so I'm not sure it really applies to the concrete situation being discussed even though it is an issue with my general argument. You could maybe try and find "comparable" homes in different places to try and account for that, but I have no doubt doing so would open you up to issues with bias (intentional or otherwise).
> For instance: nice homes in very low demand areas may sell for large amounts of money and only have a single offer.
These houses and the areas they occupy (i.e Beverly Hills, Park Ave ) are an extreme edge case, and don't exist in the same housing market as normal houses.
Above a certain very high price percentile, there are always very few buyers and sellers, and they are all paying a high premium for things like high physical security.
That wasn't what I was thinking of -- I was thinking more of the $1m+ homes sparsely scattered around rural America. They're expensive because they're nice places to be, not because they're high in demand like a home in the Bay Area
> They're expensive because they're nice places to be, not because they're high in demand like a home in the Bay Area
I think you have used circular reasoning here. The price is ultimately governed by supply and demand. They are expensive because more people demand them than the supply available for sale. There are many reasons why demand can exceed supply, like development restrictions, difficult building environments.
That's no different in a pretty rural area or in a place like the bay area. The extremely pretty and expensive rural areas (think luxury ski towns) control housing development even more strictly than expensive cities. The bottom line is desirability, which manifests as demand.
And, if you're paying $1M+ for a house in the rural plains, it's probably far bigger than the typical house, because the land is very cheap.
I am saying that the value of the demand is not necessarily driven by the number of people demanding it.
You may have a piece of property that only one person in the world wants to live on, but if you get a single buyer willing to give you a million bucks, you have a million dollar property.
Meanwhile, 100 people might want to live in a particular property in a ghetto, but none of them have a million dollars to bid on it. The price will only raise to the maximum amount that the buying pool can afford. More demand doesn't result in higher prices, it results in homelessness and/or people moving to alternate markets.
My point is that $1.5m prices are not a signal that a ton of people want to live in a particular place. It's a signal that people who can obtain $1.5 million dollar loans want to purchase there, and that the demand satisfies the motivated supply. That's it.
> More demand doesn't result in higher prices, it results in homelessness and/or people moving to alternate markets
I don't know where you are referring to but there is reams of historical data that demonstrates that more demand without an increase in supply leads to all 3 of those.
> My point is that $1.5m prices are not a signal that a ton of people want to live in a particular place.
Yes, and $1.5M in isolation is a meaningless number and not a signal of anything at all without describing what exactly it buys you.
What does signal desirability is the trend line in property prices in a given area and the relative price of equivalent properties in different areas.
The assertion seems to be that it is not going to end well. If it really is unsustainable sprawl with poorly put together civic functions, why do we expect it to go on forever?
That is, sure, houses are cheap for now. But that doesn't mean you will have a place worth living in, given time.
The basin has house prices much lower than the bay area. Still higher than Houston, but I'm not sure where that fits in this discussion. Did I mix up threads?
Homes in large cities are almost always more expensive than rural areas. I don’t think median is the right comparison, comparing to other large cities and metro areas makes much more sense.
You're making the same mistake as all the people that hand wring about "America doesn't regulate/ban <thing that is regulated/banned at the state level but not federally>. Houston the city doesn't regulate a lot of things. But its various neighborhood associations (which are somewhat comparable to town governments on the East coast and council governments in the UK) regulate at lot of that stuff instead.
That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.
Sprawl and monster trucks everywhere are still a product of intentional government interference in Houston, it's just they call it ordinances and traffic engineering rather than zoning.
From what I remember, houston was surrouded by unincorporated areas that it would eventually assimilate. I believe the unincorporated areas would not have the building requirements of houston and the houses there would be grandfathered in.
It turns into a concrete boat and pops out of the ground. Happens everywhere with high water table. Can even happen randomly in other areas because most people don’t really know how much water is in the earth before they drain the pool. Maybe it rained a week ago and you thought things were dried out, stuff like that.
Can't comment on the specific contents of the linked research paper, but just a note that space-based measurements of subsidence have become a lot more routine with the development of Interferometric SAR (InSAR). You can get spatial maps of subsidence using the ~monthly/weekly overpasses of the radar, to ~several cm accuracy. It works better over some terrains than others.
People aren't wired to notice subsidence, which has meant that large changes due to groundwater pumping and oil/gas extraction have gone "under the radar", and that's changing ;-).
Large subsidence can cause problems including seawater infiltration into the water table, permanent loss of groundwater storage capacity, and disturbance to infrastructure like roads and pipelines.
Subsidence is also one of the few ways we have to get insight into large-scale groundwater withdrawals (land goes down -> water being taken out and not replaced).
That area is now subsiding at over a meter every year. Luckily the state will bail out the guy responsible for the subsidence by spending billions to fix the aqueducts.
There’s a Houston suburb that sank due to subsistence and had to be abandoned several decades ago. As I understand it, that was a big wake-up call, and things here have improved quite a bit since then. Though not everywhere, apparently.
> His team found substantial subsidence in Katy, Spring, The Woodlands, Fresno and Mont Belvieu with groundwater and oil and gas withdrawal identified as the primary cause.
I lived in Spring for 13 years. In the last 2-3 years in the house, the foundation issues seemed to be accelerating. I assumed it was just old house issues (house was built in the last 1970s) but perhaps subsidence plays a role.
Water rights are going to be a hot topic. There just isn't enough for everyone, and sharing a commons is not something that America (and other western societies) has been good at.
There's enough for everyone, but some large actors are taking most of the water and wasting it or exporting the productive value of that water due to a lack of real market forces on the price of water.
You're absolutely correct there will be water rights issues, I would argue they will become wars in certain places and in others it will result in certain massive cities becoming dead over several decades.
^^^ we have large parts of the country that effectively export water via ag. America has plenty of water, plenty of land, plenty of resources to maintain our current diet and way of life, it is exporting to the rest of the world that we can't do.
There’s plenty for everyone. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of cutbacks in the few regions where we’ve just started getting contentious. Saying otherwise makes you an intentional or unintentional mouthpiece for agriculture which dominates water usage and hardly pays anything for it.
Most of the old place names and literature describing New Orleans use the term bayou. Though I think the core downtown area was originally built on [slightly] higher ground above the surrounding bayou(s). I don't know what New Orleans looked like 100+ years ago, but at least today the area generally looks more bayou'ish, though I'm sure there were also plenty of swamps here and there. Certainly you don't have to go very far to reach a swamp, but neither do you need to go very far to reach a bayou.
I grew up on the Gulf Coast, mostly further east on the Florida Panhandle, but also very briefly in rural SW Louisiana surrounded by actual swamps. I suspect people today will tend to use the term swamp for its more derogatory insinuations when describing New Orleans, and bayou for other areas when they're trying to be more charitable or simply because bayou is more apt.
FWIW, to me a swamp is very stagnant and mostly overgrown with trees, whereas a bayou tends to me more open and dominated more by grasses than trees, though you can still certainly see trees (e.g. in clusters on high spots/islands). That said, the term bayou is more often heard in Louisiana, Mississippi and Eastern Texas than in Florida or Alabama, so I've not had many occasions to ponder the distinction.
> very little changed at least as far as the climate is concerned.
I've lived in S. Florida and in Houston. Humidity is similar, but Florida is far more comfortable because it is surrounded by ocean, there's always an off shore breeze, and whenever it does get too hot, it always thunderstorms for about an hour pretty much every afternoon when it gets hot. With the ocean breezes and the daily short sunbursts, the air is really clean.
I recall once getting back to my apartment in Houston after work, and I took a shower like I did everyday after work. Had to, always got soaking wet from sweat on the commute home, even with AC. I forgot my wallet in the car, and I knew never ever to leave my wallet in the car in Houston. Walked out to get it, maybe it was all of 30 yards through the parking lot and back 30 yards. I had to take another shower. Never forgot my wallet again. And when it rains in Houston it rains for days on end. And you just know with all those refineries and traffic that Houston air is horrid. Must smell like money to the residents. The only thing I miss about Houston is the Tex-Mex, which is just as good in Austin but without the humidity.
It gets hot and humid, but not that hot and humid. Your car ac wasn't working properly and it sounds like you might be... prone to sweat a lot more than an average person?
Well, a car sitting in the Texas sun all day holds a lot of heat, and glass has low thermal conductivity, but is transparent to sunlight, which comes through and turns into heat and doesn't escape, ala greenhouse effect. Add high humidity, and sweat doesn't evaporate, causing more sweat. Also, trust me on this, AC has gotten a lot better in the last 30 years. But I guarantee you a non-negligible amount of Houston commuters still ordinarily shower for relief from heat and sticky sweat after getting home from work.
Yea, I think this is confirmation that your AC was broken. Your AC should have been able to dramatically lower the humidity level inside the car, even if the greenhouse effect and radiant heat from solar loading kept the temperature super high.
"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
What I hate about these edgelord philosophies (see antinatalism also) is that they present a difficult problem but intentionally provide no solution. Like what do you suggest? The human race collectively ends itself? A global authoritarian state controls the birth rate? It's better to now dwell on the this train of thought and deal with individual problems.
Is it absolutely required to provide a solution when you highlight a problem? Is it possible some people are better at seeing problems than coming up with solutions to said problems, and vice-versa?
Sure, but I don’t believe the point of these arguments is search for an answer, it’s to make yourself look edgy and smart. Which is probably why it’s a popular ideology for movie villains.
Many animals will multiply and consume available resources without stopping. Cute bunnies left to their own devices on a lush meadow will multiply and keep eating grass until the is little grass left, upon which they will die en masse. Invasive fish crowd everything else out, insects that eat whole swaths of forest leaving no remaining habitat for themselves.
Perhaps animals who are territorial and fight, within-species, for territory can be considered to have a mechanism of self-regulating their consumption of resources.
Humans are perhaps the only animal that will even consciously contemplate the consequences of their actions on the environment. We are, I would say, the furthest from the virus.
the funny thing is no, this is how basically every organism works. take an invasive species and introduce it somewhere, if there are no natural predators and the environment is good for it the species will multiply and thrive and explode in population. it will suck up resources until it runs out and then there will be a die off.
man is just better at avoiding this last die off part.
They achieve that "natural equilibrium" by starving en masse.
It's why I started hunting deer in my country - no natural predators, so they'll breed until they outbreed the carrying capacity of the forests they browse, and then they'll suffer long and agonising deaths, and in their desperation will devastate the forest, eating anything that's remotely edible, seedlings gone, bark stripped from adult trees.
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
USGS has a network of sensors that you use to see subsidence here: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e5c75a...
Of note is Katy's subsidence, which I believe is from hydrocarbon withdrawals.
I believe what this study does that's new is analyze Sentinel-1A data and correlate it to hotspots in the Houston area, which is actually super cool.