Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
Yet Houston, Dallas, Atlanta seem to not be bothered by any of these arguments....
Greg Hinz posted another one today in Crains analyzing this data further. Good stuff...
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Ah yes, cities that have all boomed in the last 50 years and have suffered absolutely no catastrophic consequences from their terrible design decisions. Of course that's only if you ignore repeated "100 year" flooding in Houston because they built on all the swamps without providing any infrastructure to address it.
Here's the thing, Northern cities were all very dense and very large with huge industrial bases before WWII. The destruction caused by deindustrialization, blasting freeways through the urban fabric and urban renewal all totally destabilized these places. Meanwhile the South was finally beginning to pull their heads just a hair out of their asses due to forced desegregation by the Federal government. These places rapidly realized that there was serious money to be made undercutting the expensive Northern labor pool and poaching companies. Thus we have the situation we have today.
Unfortunately for these cities, they are heading for a day of reckoning and, whenever that day comes, they have none of the legacy infrastructure or built environment that places like Chicago have. More than even the factors I listed above, Chicago ran into a problem with depreciation syncing where entire areas were built virtually overnight and therefore the building stock wore out virtually overnight. Sound familiar?
Well little of any of the cities you mention is older than 50 years old. Virtually no parts of these cities is older than 75 years old. Guess when the depreciation syncing problem becomes a serious issue? Usually 50-75 years after an area was built.
Now let's look at a city like Houston with it's sprawling area and very paltry infrastructure (which by the way is also subject to depreciation syncing, notice how Chicago has basically had to build an entirely new freeway system over the past 20 years?). How's that gonna work when all of the sudden huuuugggeeee swaths of Houston that were slapped up in the 1970's, 80's or 90's suddenly become rundown all at once? Who's going to move in?
Who is going to decide it's worth taking a chance on some inner Houston area that consists of cookie cutter shitboxes that are probably falling apart? At least Chicago's historic core was built with such great quality that it could withstand a century or more of use and still be functional. I kid you not, I just gutted a building that still had all original 1880's plumbing including fixtures, farmhouse sink in the kitchen, only a clawfoot tub and toilet in the bathroom with no sink. That's 130 year old improvements still placed in use. What is central Houston going to look like in 130 years? My guess is something similar to Detroit, but partially submerged.