Houston over NYC?

A quick wrap-up of a recently interesting dialogue…

The New York Sun ran an article touting Houston’s advantages over New York. That lit-up the urban design and planning blogosphere. Tory Gattis gave the world a big “I told you so.”

The gist of the article is: Houston is way more affordable for the middle-class, and thus, functioning better as a city than New York.

Now, plenty of urbanists, including myself, would balk at that conclusion. While I’m not sure I’d want to live in Manhattan, certainly most people would prefer it over Houston – as evidenced by the huge population and the incredible price of housing there.

And, I think the basic idea of the article, that Houston’s housing pattern is better than New York’s, is fundamentally untrue.

The Austin Contrarian ran a response July 23, which I thought was brilliant. Worth the read. Basically he says, it’s not the FORM of Houston’s housing that works, it’s the PROCESS. That is the absolute truth.

Where Houston works as a city it works by not getting in the way of the market. Houston isn’t amazingly well-built, but it is efficiently run. The government isn’t a bureaucratic nightmare, and that keeps things affordable. The lesson to take away from this? Good governance can lead to a better-built, more beautiful city; but meddling and unwieldy governance serves only to dramatically impede the market and thus distort the cost of living upwards.