Two local items from Houston

1 - Houston's mayor announced two related projects. One designed to reforest Memorial Park - which was hit hard by Hurricane Ike and the ongoing drought - and address traffic issues in the Galleria area by creating "Bus Rapid Transit Lanes" in the median on Post Oak.

Funding these projects will be augmented by expanding the Uptown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone 16 by adding almost 1,800 acres to it.

- From yourhoustonnews.
- From the Chron.

Here's a map of the uptown TIRZ.




2 - HISD has announced the creation of two magnet schools "specializing in two key Houston industries: health care and energy. Both are set to open in the fall. The middle school will involve a collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine, and the high school will be a partnership with the Independent Petroleum Institute of America."

Cities are primarily economic entities, and these two efforts seem designed to enhance the area's economic focus on the energy and health sectors.

How the Economic Crisis will Impact Cities

Richard Florida, who years back developed the concept of the "creative class" and argued that the successful cities will be those who can attract and retain this group, now argues that the current economic crisis will have disparate effects on cities.

Those committed to industries that are on the decline, and lack the knowledge base to attract or develop new technologies, will lose. Big losers include cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. Areas with a concentration of people with skills in a growth industry -- finance, communications, entertainment, or energy (that means Houston) -- will become even more dominant. Central to this dynamic is the idea that these places create environments that make an area attractive to people who could live anywhere they choose. If you wonder why Houston spends so much effort sprucing itself up, there's why.

There's a political consequence as well. An interactive map, which includes data showing how many patents are issued in each city in the country, suggests that future growth will happen in areas where Democrats have an advantage. There aren't that many ideas generated in the South and Upper Midwest.

Opportunity Urbanism

The buzz for urban planners over the past decade has been over "the creative class." Cities that could lure the young and hip would succeed in the new economy because they would create the next generation of cutting edge technologies and the businesses that would spawn off it. Other would want to follow behind them and growth, hip growth, would ensue. Since the members of this class could live anywhere they wanted, cities had to compete to create environments that would lure them: green spaces, clubs, restaurants, all that stuff.

Joel Kotkin is out to disprove this theory and presented his ideas to the Greater Houston Partnership today.

He calls his theory "opportunity urbanism" and argues that the creative class focuses too much on elites. The true growth cities are those that focus on building the old fashioned middle class by providing a solid infrastructure, good schools, a manufacturing base that attracts blue collar workers, and let's the fancy stuff take care of itself.

He uses Houston as a prime example of such a city and points out that the "superstar" cities like San Francisco and New York are pricing out the middle class and are actually losing population as a result.