Agitators miss the mark

David Crossley, Jan 22, 08.

Tagged with urban planning

The outside agitators brought in to fight against the citizen movement toward planning in the City of Houston just had a field day with parallel opinion pieces in both the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Business Journal(subscribers only).

Wendell Cox, whose polemic was headlined "Houston land policy fosters homeownership," placed large quantities of baloney on our civic table. Noting that the national homeownership rate is nearly 70%, he touts Houston for policies that support this goal. However, he fails to note that, in 2006, City of Houston homeownership was at 46.5%, near the bottom of the list of the 40 biggest cities in the US. It was badly beaten by the dreaded Portland, at 57%.

In fact, none of the 40 biggest cities achieves 70% homeownership, although Mesa, AZ, comes close at 69%. Ironically, while Cox argues that San Jose is one of the truly horrible planning disasters, the city is way up there, at 62% home ownership.

Of the 40 biggest cities in the United States, Houston is ranked 34th in home ownership. Of the 10 biggest cities, Houston is 8th. Harris County home ownership is well below the Texas average, and the City of Houston is well below that.

The City of Houston is the place Cox was hired to shoot at. (See earlier posts about the Lanier/Weekley/Linbeck political action committee to fight citizen planning in the City). But in the HBJ piece appears to be talking about the Houston region, not the City. The current assault by what one expert calls "mercenaries" is, at least nominally, supposed to be a reaction to the Ashby high rise struggle, which has prompted the City to create an ordinance that changes the rules in the middle of the development.

Perhaps Cox and his friend Randal O'Toole are largely talking about the region because they don't have information or understanding about the City, and because the dynamics in the City are so different from the rest of the region. As others have noted, most of the successful areas outside the City have planning, regulation, and even zoning. The City of Houston does not have a comprehensive plan, but it does have a huge number of development regulations. Even so, homeownership in the Houston metropolitan statistical area is 63.4 percent, far higher than the City. Yet it is the City that's under attack here, the place that has plenty of regulations but no plan for the future.

The City of Houston has always had strong central planning and regulation. Once that was done in the famous "suite 8F" of the Lamar Hotel, but today it's done by a strong Mayor, who makes all the rules. This is not about Bill White, but about whoever is the Mayor of Houston.

Citizens are tired of it. They have been very clear (83%) that they want a general plan for Houston's future, and they want it to be based on their vision, values, and goals.

To make the charge that planning negatively affects home ownership is to miss the complexity of the issue. For instance, a quick look at home ownership in the US, shows that Whites* tend to have ownership rates of about 79%, while Blacks and Hispanics tend to average about 49%. So if you look at our Montgomery County, you find the population there is 76% White, and the home ownership rate is 77%, while the City of Houston is 27.6% White, with ownership at 46.5%.

If you home ownership rates in all American cities to their ethnic make-up, what do you discover? If you start with the homeowner winner of the 40 biggest cities, Mesa, AZ, darned if you don't find that White people are 65% of the population.

The City of Houston is one of the most diverse places in the US, and Dr. Stephen Klineberg says it is essentially a microcosm today of a future US. Chicago (heavily planned with lots of transit) is another city with a rich mix of people, and sure enough its homeownership rate is essentially identical to Houston's.

Is this telling us that the less White a city is, the lower the home ownership rate is? Or is "race/ethnicity" here a proxy for economic status, and that's the real story? It all needs much deeper examination and discussion than the gunslingers are giving, but obviously it's not all about the degree of planning and regulation.

For that matter, homeowner rates in the US dropped slightly in 2007, while renter rates rose. Does this reflect job mobility, or falling spending power further down the ladder, or is it all that pernicious planning that's moving this indicator? Probably not the latter.

* In all the above numbers, "White" means non-Hispanic White.

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