Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom In Chicago
I noticed that there were more than a few empty/abandoned buildings in Houston when I was there in November. . . the notable one being already posted here, but there are certainly more of them in the high-rise variety. . . but for some reason they all looked like old hotels from the 1960s. . . weird. . . maybe someone else here knows more about it. . .
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We discussed this in another thread recently... Houston's economy has had a bit of a "feast or famine" problem, in that when the city is booming, there is so much money flowing around that many corporations prefer to anchor brand-new towers rather than locate in old ones - sometimes because of ego (they want the tallest) or control (they want a tailor-made building). When the economy is on a down period, there's little money available for any development at all.
As Houston's economy has diversified away from the monolithic focus on oil, the development of the city's downtown has become more stable.
New Orleans has the exact same history, except that after the 1980s, the city decided to focus on the growth of tourism to recover from the oil glut, instead of diversifying and growing jobs in a wide range of sectors like Houston did. Consequently, the only new towers we've seen since the 1980s are hotels to handle the tourists, and perhaps 2 or 3 residential mid-rises built very recently.