

How Houston Gets Along Without Zoning Laws - pzxc
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/2007/10/how_houston_gets_along_without_zoning.html

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saryant
I love Houston. I lived there for several years growing up, having moved their
from the SF Bay Area. Yes, it has sprawl like none other. From the westernmost
point on I-10 to the easternmost is about 50 miles and growing every year.
Yes, you need a car. But it's a fascinating place on a scale few cities can
rival.

Houston is home to the world's largest medical center. 20,000 doctors _and it
was started as a tax dodge!_ It's the most ethnically diverse city in America,
moreso than LA or NYC. It's affordable, the schools are good (in the burbs
anyways) and the food is unbeatable, from endless pho shops on Westheimer,
Iranian and Turkish in West Houston and creative restaurants like Pass and
Provision or Underbelly in Montrose. One of the largest private art
collections in the world is smack in the middle of the city.

The people are friendly and welcoming and as tolerant as you'll ever find
(Houston has the nation's first openly lesbian mayor). Unless you're on the
road in which case everyone is a raging maniac trying to kill you. Houston's
drivers are the most balls-to-the-wall crazy I've ever seen and I'm typing
this from Penang in Malaysia...

~~~
ronnier
I grew up near Houston and would totally take Houston drivers over Seattle
drivers (Though I'm not living in the US as of this year).

Houston drivers drive. There's a sense of urgency to them. Not so in Seattle
where it's normal for the left lane traffic to go 15 mph below the speed
limit.

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saryant
I would say "urgency" is an understatement!

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angersock
Well, that's the thing, right?

If you're on the 59/610 west interchange, it's dangerous--so you should drive
faster to be exposed to danger less. It's obvious.

Especially in the rain..

And the ice.

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saryant
I spent a summer commuting from Katy to University of Houston's main campus.
Westpark toll to 59 passing through the 610 interchange.

Westpark's off ramp lands you in an exit only lane to 610, so you immediately
have to merge over three lanes within less than half a mile.

IIRC it's the most dangerous stretch of highway in America.

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stephenhuey
That stretch has a rival in Houston: if you're heading towards downtown on
Allen Parkway and get onto I-45 northbound, the entrance ramp is a tight
upward spiral and you'll need to accelerate from 30 to 70 lickety-split
because it dumps you right into a full-fledged interstate lane, not a merge
lane!

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GuiA
For a few years, I dated a girl whose parents lived in Houston, so I got to
spend some time there. Now as a European coming from a well developed city
with millennia of history, I am rarely impressed by any US city, but man was
Houston bad.

First of all, the city itself is huge and sprawling. Her parents lived in a
nice suburb where all houses looked the same. You had to drive 10 minutes
within the suburb on twisted roads with a 5mph speed limit to get out of it,
at which point you'd be on the highway and had to drive at least another 5-10
minutes to get anywhere. Forget walking anywhere - without a car, you wouldn't
go anywhere. The highways were quite shocking as well - I've never seen so
many lanes on a single road, nor so many stretches of road going over and
under each other. Perhaps my memory serves me poorly, but I remember exits
with three or four layers of highways going all over one another.

I spent some time downtown, which was a bit better - they had a nice museum,
some trees, and even a tramway to get around. Sadly, the downtown area was
minuscule, and had no personality. Things emptied out early in the evenings -
it was mostly businesses or day entertainment.

Overall, I hold a very poor memory of Houston and one could never pay me
enough to live there. I hope for the US's sake that this is not the model of
urban development they herald as the future, like the article implies.

~~~
Slartibreakfast
Houston's a tough and gritty place, but it's not without its charms. For
instance, a lot of people don't know that Houston is the home of the largest
medical center in the world - including M.D. Anderson, which is routinely
ranked as the top cancer treatment center in America.

I know, I know, having been cured of cancer probably influences my opinion
just a bit, but I think Houston's a pretty damned cool town :-)

I think every place has it's own charms, you just have to look for it - in
some places you have to look harder than others, sure. I hated NYC the first
year I lived there, and later came to really like it. But, I'm the kind of
person who'd enjoy living in the Mojave just as much as I'd enjoy living in
Manhattan - it's all good, and every day I'm breathing is a great day to
appreciate wherever the hell I happen to be.

~~~
jostmey
My wife calls Houston the _Mecca of Medicine_.

~~~
angersock
...which is fitting, given the number of nice visiting folks from oil-enriched
nations we get. :)

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AndrewKemendo
Having grown up in Houston the zoning issue is definitely something everyone
young and old knows about. It's almost part of the ethos. In practice though,
it was rare to see development that was crazy or so "out of place" that it
would have caused problems. That said, places like the Heights and the wards
have some interesting character as a result.

I would never move back largely due to the lack of public infrastructure, heat
and humidity but the sprawl of the city isn't really a result of poor urban
planning but rather seemed to be a function of the cost of real estate and the
need to access the oil corridor while also not living in the refinery
wasteland to the South east.

~~~
_delirium
> it was rare to see development that was crazy or so "out of place"

Part of that is because, imo, the "no zoning" mythos doesn't really result in
practical freedom to develop land however you want. There are two big zoning-
like restrictions in practice, which if anything end up with more restrictive
land use than many cities which do officially have zoning.

The first is that just about all neighborhoods built after WW2 are master-
planned communities laid out by one developer (in many parts of Houston,
subsidiaries of the various oil companies who were selling off land). These
developers built neighborhoods intended to have a particular character, most
commonly a suburban-style character, and attached deed restrictions to the
properties requiring buyers to maintain that character in perpetuity. This has
very similar effects to zoning, in that there are huge swaths of Houston which
are by deed restriction not allowed to be redeveloped into anything but
single-family homes with a minimum lot size (owners also cannot subdivide
their home into rental units). In some ways it's even worse because "rezoning"
is even more difficult than usual. Most of these communities do have a way to
modify the deeds in principle, but it's all routed through homeowners'
association politics, which make regular municipal politics look well-
functioning.

The second is a big set of development restrictions from the city which, while
not precisely zoning, strongly influence what can practically be built. Rules
on minimum setbacks, height, and minimum parking really constrain a lot of
possible redevelopment.

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AndrewKemendo
Well exactly, the whole Deed restriction and HOA thing that is rampant is what
makes most of Houston's newest developments frustrating to live in.

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cgrubb
I like Houston but I have only visited. If I were to live there, I would live
inside the 610 loop, which has reasonable density. It is still a driving city,
though.

The closest thing to a walking city are the underground tunnels downtown.
However, as another commented, the downtown empties out at night; at least
that was the case 20 years ago. Houston is very hot in the summer, so a
walking city is probably not a reasonable thing to ask for.

One of the absurdities was the Transco tower, called today the Williams tower.
It used to be the tallest building in Houston, and it is outside the 610 loop
and 4 miles from the downtown. Everything around it is quite small and it is
difficult to understand what economics motivated building it.

Update: I'm trying to think why I like the city. I guess it is the vegetation.
Houston is perhaps a bit like how Mayan cities must have been.

~~~
unchocked
Houston's surprisingly nice, like a Texas version of Los Angeles. A great
place to buy a used car: incomes are high, real estate is cheap, nobody wants
to buy a pristine car with 80k miles that's never seen snow or dirt.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
LA is much drier and Houston is pretty wet; mold would be a problem in the
latter but not the former.

~~~
Slartibreakfast
This. If there's one thing I can't stand about Houston, it's the mold. You
could probably make a living selling bleach door to door in this town.

~~~
jamiesonbecker
Isn't that what AC is for? ;) It's funny you should say this, though - I had
someone come to my door a few months ago and say "you have some mildew on your
foundation and roof, I can take care of it for $75.."

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skilesare
Native Houstonian here. This is a great place to make a living. We even have
some pockets of genuine beauty here and it is really frustrating that they are
so spread out. Houston is going to have some real opportunities as we
transition to a driverless travel situation. The amount of land we have that
is covered in soon to be useless parking surfaces is mind boggling. Hopefully
we don't screw it up.

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neverartful
The only good thing I have to say about Houston is that it has good food.
That's it. On the downside, it's huge, noisy, polluted, terrible traffic, very
high humidity, toll-roads everywhere, McMansions, susceptible to flooding,
hurricanes, etc. The best view I ever had of Houston was in my rear-view
mirror.

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ryanmarsh
Yah, we get along fine without zoning laws. We have this wonderful urban
sprawl and no hope for useful public transit. Oh and the surprises! Buy a nice
house in a new neighborhood and just wait to see what pops up nearby! It could
be anything, like a drill pipe manufacturing plant! But if you don't like your
neighborhood, just wait for the next dip in oil prices, you'll have all new
neighbors when the price goes back up and people buy up the foreclosed homes
in your neighborhood and turn them into rental homes. Constant new people to
meet! Sometimes they even cut their grass! Want to protect your investment in
your home? Don't worry developers will be quick to build low cost apartments
around your house the moment enough retail exists. Who needs equity!

Look, I lived in San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere. It is definitely
easier to exist here in Houston because it's damn cheap, but it sure as hell
ain't pretty.

~~~
rsvihla
In fairness you don't have a Houston address ;)

If you want some stability live in a deed restricted neighborhood.

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jamiesonbecker
Houston is a strange place but I mostly love it. I've lived in a suburb north
of Houston (literally 30 miles north) for the last ten years or so and really
love it up there, but it's really very different (and VERY far away, even at
80 mph) from the city itself. (fwiw, I'm a NY'er and moved here from CA, so
I've got some experience in other big cities; Houston's the fourth largest
city in the USA.)

The strangest thing to me, and a result of the zoning laws (which seem to be a
slightly insane form of pure genius to me), is the multiple downtowns that are
scattered around aside from the 'real' downtown. Pockets of skyscrapers and
tall office buildings are every 30 miles or so. It's interesting and so I'm
still finding (huge, significant) parts of the city that I've never seen
before. It's so spread out that it make other big cities (like SF) feel
distinctly small; going there once makes you feel like "oh, this is tiny
compared to, say, NYC", which is, of course, mostly true, but then you find
out that you're only looking at one of the 'downtown' sorts of areas.

Houston has a surprisingly large arts community. Low costs of living tend to
help there. It also has lots of alternative lifestyles, but also (rather
small) pockets of religious and conservativism. It also has an incredibly
vibrant culture, with more theater seating than any other city in the country,
except for NYC. (Yes, even more than Chicago or LA).
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Theater_District](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Theater_District)

It's also a great food town. Since it's more ethnically diverse than any other
city in the United States, you can find almost any food you want. There's also
a very nice part of town that's quite reminscent of Austin's downtown.

And I've spoken with other startups -- Houston tends to be attractive to
startup engineers coming from the Bay area and in some ways feels alternately
like SF or SV, depending on where you are. It tends to be more difficult to
attract serious tech startup executives, however.

The only significant downsides, at least to me, for the HN crowd: the city is
so spread out that it's hard to build a strong community. (I run The Woodlands
Entrepreneur's meetup w/ over 300 members, but only about 30 or so are in tech
startups of some sort; I also run the Houston AWS and Houston Cloud meetups
and most of the AWS users are associated with big oil or big medtech, not tech
startups.) Still, there's SO much here.

The other downside is the utter lack of VC, and what little is here is not
competitive. This alone may be a reason to pick another city. (Austin has a
few really great VC's.) .. on the other hand, if you're bootstrapping, you
really can't go wrong with Houston. Your runway goes a really long way here.

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querulous
the best bar in north america is in houston, on rice campus

~~~
angersock
willys is terrible tbh

