Kinder Institute looks at Houston region’s growth

Highest in nation

David Crossley, Jul 22, 11.

Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University Co-Director Michael Emerson has produced a video in which he talks about what is driving the Houston region’s growth of the last 10 years. “Houston’s growth represents more people than the population growth in the New York and Chicago metropolitan areas combined during the past decade,” he notes.

[Editor’s note: While it may be correct that the Houston metro region gained more population that any other in the US, one of the reasons given for that - no zoning in the City of Houston - implies the City had something to do with all that growth. But the City of Houston hardly grew at all - 145,000 people over ten years, and probably 80,000 of those were from Katrina, as Dr. Emerson notes. In the whole region, 71% of the growth during the last decade was in unincorporated areas, not in the region’s 144 towns and cities. That was not an independent phenomenon, that was intentional public policy.]