Amazon HQ2

[Reefmonkey]

4 minutes ago, ToryGattis said:

 

Good one. I see the appeal of their model. From an Opportunity Urbanism perspective, I'd guess they're very appealing for college-educated whites (except for the winters!), but I doubt there's as much opportunity there for immigrants, minorities, or people with less education.  I think we're more vibrant in industries that employ more of those people - home building, restaurants, industrial/mfg, port trade.  I could be wrong, but that's my impression.

That's fair, you and H-town Man are right about the differences, and I'm not against growth, I just think when it's already 65 you don't need to revv it up to 90 mph, and the boosters benefit quite a bit more from and are less effected by the downsides of growth than the average Houstonian. I think that Harvey and the poor city planning and uncontrolled growth that exacerbated its effects should be a wakeup call to put the brakes on growth for a minute, reassess, and Amazon HQ2 would not have been good for that.

[Vy65]

This might be slightly off topic, but why doesn't the city invest the 200+ million of reported incentives in other tech start ups? It's obviously a bigger gamble than HQ2, but if the city and its business leaders are serious about the "innovation corridor," now seems as good as any to literally put your money where your mouth is.

[H-Town Man]

25 minutes ago, Reefmonkey said:

By the way, I finished reading "Pleasant Bend" about the history of the area along Buffalo Bayou between 610 and Highway 6, great source of information, if a little tedious a read at times. It and other stuff I've read led me to believe that  before the 50s the stretch of land I-10 now passes through was mostly prairie and later rice fields.

 

Looking at historicaerials.com, it seems like it was all forest out to Voss Road, then kind of a mixed pattern out to Kirkwood. This was in the mid-60's.

[HOUTEX]

Good article in Bisnow from today: https://www.bisnow.com/houston/news/economy/where-houstons-hq2-pitch-fell-short-83950

 

Quote

Greater Houston Partnership CEO Bob Harvey called Amazon's Houston snub a "wake-up call" for the city. "I think that's an accurate statement," Midway Executive Vice President David Hightower said. Midway has been working with the Greater Houston Partnership to bring the e-commerce giant to its East River site near Downtown. "Houston needs to up its game." 

 

Quote

Between an abundance of literal and figurative parking lots, lack of rail and flooding concerns, Houston's infrastructure was likely a major sticking point for Amazon.  "Amazon doesn't want to build [in] a place with 50,000 parking spots in it," said Adam Ozimek, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics. "That, possibly more than anything else, is going to rule out Houston." Egan pointed out that transportation is so bad in Houston, Turner won the last mayoral election with a campaign centered around fixing potholes. "We have terrible roads and almost no public transportation," Egan said. 

 

City of Houston Controller Chris Brown told the Houston Business Journal Houston's lack of a robust rail network, particularly one that connects to an airport, may have been one of the city's shortfalls. Egan agreed, saying Houston's lack of rail connections to the airport likely played a particularly large role. 

 

Reinforces the opinion that rail is what makes a difference in commercial real estate investment. Bus systems, though they serve a more diffuse service area, are easily removed and don't provide an assurance that might compel a firm to invest in putting down roots. 

 

Quote

"The schools [in Houston] are really small," Egan told Houston Matters. "What we really need is something like a UT Houston, a big cornerstone state school to drive our profile." Houston was close to boosting its educational footprint before the University of Texas system walked away from plans that had been in the works for years. UT spent $215M acquiring over 350 acres just south of Loop 610 near NRG Stadium, but when the University of Houston called foul over the competition, UT scrapped the project, which was later revealed to be a technology-focused data science campus.

 

Quote

As the number one destination for STEM talent according to the GHP, Houston's labor force is chock full of advanced degrees, but its relatively small number of computing and software-focused workers likely hurt the city's chances. Amazon is notorious for its high turnover rate, so Houston’s lack of rival tech employers would subdue employment opportunities. Beyond that, Houston's culture may have turned off Amazon. The world's leading oil and gas hub has produced a different work dynamic than what Amazon is used to in the high-growth Seattle tech scene where co-working and hoodies abound.  "Houston has faced challenges because of our industry mix, we're not very engaged in startup ecosystems," Egan said. 

 

I concur with this assessment. There might be a lot of STEM workers in town, but they aren't the labor force that would be usable by a tech company. Ironically lack of competition for Amazon in the Houston workforce is probably more of a turn off than a benefit. That's, in part, why I think they'll end up in Dallas, which has a lot higher coefficient of STEM workers in the tech space. 

[Reefmonkey]

8 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

Looking at historicaerials.com, it seems like it was all forest out to Voss Road, then kind of a mixed pattern out to Kirkwood. This was in the mid-60's.

Yeah, that makes sense, we know of Piney Point as the name of a couple of streets and one of the Memorial Villages, but the name for that area has a history going back to Austin's Old 300 passing through there in pre-independence times, for being a landmark of sorts for settlers passing through, the last big forested area before the trees tapered out on the prairie.

[ToryGattis]

7 minutes ago, HOUTEX said:

Good article in Bisnow from today: https://www.bisnow.com/houston/news/economy/where-houstons-hq2-pitch-fell-short-83950

 

Quote

"City of Houston Controller Chris Brown told the Houston Business Journal Houston's lack of a robust rail network, particularly one that connects to an airport, may have been one of the city's shortfalls. Egan agreed, saying Houston's lack of rail connections to the airport likely played a particularly large role. "

7 minutes ago, HOUTEX said:

Reinforces the opinion that rail is what makes a difference in commercial real estate investment. Bus systems, though they serve a more diffuse service area, are easily removed and don't provide an assurance that might compel a firm to invest in putting down roots. 

 

 

 

I'm calling BS on this.  Half of the finalists they picked don't have rail to the airport!  We once had fast express bus service from downtown to IAH and it attracted less than 2 riders per bus - how could we support (slower!) rail on that route!?  DART's airport service has pathetic ridership.  This is classic: everybody who has a pet issue in Houston is coming out to claim it's the reason Amazon didn't put us on the short list. Don't believe it.

[HOUTEX]

Well it was said early on that Amazon likely wouldn't want to build or own 50,000 parking spaces in garages. That's not their financial model in Seattle and would be a drain on their resources. Moreover public transit (with emphasis on rail) was a central tenant of the RPP, as was connectivity and transit time to airports. There was no explicit sentence that said you have to have rail to airports, but the area where Amazon's Seattle campus is located has rail access to SeaTac Int'l Airport, so it's not an illogical assumption that would help "check a box."

 

But that's not what I was saying - my point was that fixed rail lines (street car, light rail, etc.) provide CRE investors / developers more security that mass transit will be accessible at their site than a rubber tire trolley or bus route. I've never heard anyone of authority say otherwise. Now the pros/cons of such a system are contingent on how it's implemented, what the route is, etc. 

[ToryGattis]

5 hours ago, Reefmonkey said:

Minneapolis-St Paul for one.

Median home price: $242,000 (vs Houston $230,000)

Median income $66,282 (vs Houston $42,877)

Unemployment 3.0% (vs Houston 4.1%)

Environmentally and in terms of sustainability better off than Houston.

 

 

 

Some coincidental timing from the WSJ!  Sounds like they would like to be growing more like Houston is than how they are currently...

Forget the Midwest. Minnesota Casts Itself as the North

It won’t help the Vikings but to solve its population problem, the state is branding itself as ‘the North’;  ‘Sick of being this afterthought in this afterthought called the Midwest’

...Convincing people to move to Minnesota is “the most important work we can do in terms of growing our economy and staying competitive for the future,” said Michael Langley, chief executive of the regional economic development group Greater MSP and an executive board member of the Super Bowl host committee.

[Timoric]

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[gmac]

The millennials I know would love to have cars. They just can't afford them due to crushing student loan debt.

 

Just like Houston...

Nashville has bus service.

Indianapolis has bus service.

Raleigh has bus service.

 

I won't go on.

[dixiedean]

I went on Metro route 102 which expresses out to IAH and Greenspoint and it looked like it had good ridership.

[ToryGattis]

1 minute ago, dixiedean said:

I went on route 103 which expresses out to IAH and Greenspoint and it looked like it had good ridership.

Because of all the local passengers in the Greenspoint area (lots of low-income apartments), which slows down the route incredibly for airport travelers (few to none).  I'm talking about when they ran the express bus from the transit center downtown directly to and from IAH.

[dixiedean]

Which amplifies your point having a bus to the airport only makes sense as an afterthought.

[Ross]

8 hours ago, Reefmonkey said:

Minneapolis-St Paul for one.

Median home price: $242,000 (vs Houston $230,000)

Median income $66,282 (vs Houston $42,877)

Unemployment 3.0% (vs Houston 4.1%)

Environmentally and in terms of sustainability better off than Houston.

 

 

But the winter temps near absolute zero make it unlivable for normal humans. I know a few folks who came from there or lived there, and they were all glad to leave.

[102IAHexpress]

2 hours ago, ToryGattis said:

Because of all the local passengers in the Greenspoint area (lots of low-income apartments), which slows down the route incredibly for airport travelers (few to none).  I'm talking about when they ran the express bus from the transit center downtown directly to and from IAH.

 

Correct about the two services. The nonstop airport route did not last very long. It failed. However, the 102 local bus service has decent ridership.  You're right about almost no airport travelers, however there a lot of airport workers who take the 102 to the airport. 

[H-Town Man]

4 hours ago, Timoric said:

Heard an interesting fact in the DC Area drive-time morning news today. In essence, not an exact quote, "All of the 20 finalists had very strong transportation options...millennials like to bike, walk, and take public transit to work.

 

Houston we have a problem

 

Whether it is true or not, the perception is that a sprawling car town is a no-go to our best companies

 

Enjoyment of biking to work correlates strongly with education. We have about 32% of our population with college degrees and some of these places have near 50%. There is something about being highly educated that makes people want to do something more dangerous than tackle football.

[Timoric]

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[Mr.Clean19]

Stirring write-up Timoric with little direction. We have boxed ourselves in with Katy Freeway, We have boxed ourselves in with the Light Rail, and we are already heading down the same path with the bullet train. People in leadership get there by pandering to those with the loudest voice. That voice is typically not one of reason, so you can expect their decisions to be short sighted and knee jerk. This is the path Houston is headed down and unless there is a stern leadership change, the sprawl will continue. 

[IronTiger]

1 hour ago, Mr.Clean19 said:

Stirring write-up Timoric with little direction. We have boxed ourselves in with Katy Freeway, We have boxed ourselves in with the Light Rail, and we are already heading down the same path with the bullet train. People in leadership get there by pandering to those with the loudest voice. That voice is typically not one of reason, so you can expect their decisions to be short sighted and knee jerk. This is the path Houston is headed down and unless there is a stern leadership change, the sprawl will continue. 

The "loudest voice" in this case are actually the ones who think we should Houston should have an East Coast-style commuter train system when more sensible heads know that the cost/benefit is very little. Anytime Katy Freeway is mentioned I always roll my eyes because there's so much misinformation about it. First, it was TxDOT that bought the line (from 610 to Katy, at least, I don't know if they were involved in the Inner Loop portion at all), not METRO. The only reason METRO was even involved in the Katy Freeway was because of the federal funding used to build the original HOV lane (which the rebuild would've replaced), and decided to pour money into over-engineering Katy Tollway to potentially be used as a rail corridor, even though HCTRA and TxDOT would be unlikely to let it go. Yet no one brings up this incredible waste of money as to why there's not more rail, blaming Culberson is more politically convenient.

 

Additionally, thinking an elevated rail (especially downtown) would've been feasible post-ADA is laughable.

[mollusk]

6 hours ago, IronTiger said:

Additionally, thinking an elevated rail (especially downtown) would've been feasible post-ADA is laughable.

 

In the Big City we have elevators. 

 

[Reefmonkey]

On 1/22/2018 at 10:04 PM, Ross said:

But the winter temps near absolute zero make it unlivable for normal humans. I know a few folks who came from there or lived there, and they were all glad to leave.

But we are talking about city planning, economy, etc., the things humans can control to affect quality of life there. Favorable weather is completely irrelevant to this discussion

[Mr.Clean19]

On 1/23/2018 at 11:51 AM, Mr.Clean19 said:

Stirring write-up Timoric with little direction. We have boxed ourselves in with Katy Freeway, We have boxed ourselves in with the Light Rail, and we are already heading down the same path with the bullet train. People in leadership get there by pandering to those with the loudest voice. That voice is typically not one of reason, so you can expect their decisions to be short sighted and knee jerk. This is the path Houston is headed down and unless there is a stern leadership change, the sprawl will continue. 

 

https://www.bisnow.com/houston/news/economy/where-houstons-hq2-pitch-fell-short-83950

 

Exactly what i was saying about the people in leadership. If we have been steering the ship wrong and completely missed this "Wake up Call" opportunity, what changes that will wake us up?

[IronTiger]

17 hours ago, mollusk said:

 

In the Big City we have elevators. 

 

I'm at work right now so I can't make a super-long, detailed post but elevators aren't enough in some cases. To put elevated rail downtown would mean that there would be substantially less stations or more building demolitions, probably both.

[BeerNut]

2 hours ago, IronTiger said:

I'm at work right now so I can't make a super-long, detailed post but elevators aren't enough in some cases. To put elevated rail downtown would mean that there would be substantially less stations or more building demolitions, probably both.

 

What about less freeway?

[mkultra25]

On 1/23/2018 at 7:26 PM, mollusk said:

 

In the Big City we have elevators. 

 

 

 

When I was in college, I used to know a guy that was almost literally fresh off the farm. He took great delight in projecting an image of being a big, dumb hick when he was really one of the sharpest knives in the drawer, but he rarely reached the near-Andy Kaufman-like heights that he did during his first week on campus. Upon moving into one of the high-rise dorms, he had most of his classmates completely convinced that he'd never been in an elevator before when he went into a full-blown freakout the first time he followed a group of his peers into one and it started moving.

 

I'm pretty sure there were similar instances of poker-faced chain-yanking that transpired related to other things commonly encountered in the Big City, but the elevator is the one that really jogged my memory.

[IronTiger]

9 hours ago, Mr.Clean19 said:

 

https://www.bisnow.com/houston/news/economy/where-houstons-hq2-pitch-fell-short-83950

 

Exactly what i was saying about the people in leadership. If we have been steering the ship wrong and completely missed this "Wake up Call" opportunity, what changes that will wake us up?

It's not a "wake up call opportunity". A big company passed Houston up, and it's not like it was Houston's last big chance to become a "real city". It already has tons of big companies, tons of people, and a baseball team that won the World Series. Also say what you want about rail, but in no way will rail "reduce sprawl". Heck, rail INVENTED sprawl, when there was suddenly a way for people that could afford it to move OUT of the crowded big cities.

 

Anyway. The post I wanted to write dealt with elevated rail. You could point to Chicago for the biggest example of elevated rail, but it definitely isn't feasible for a modern city in this day and age, and would've had to been done back several decades ago. The "El" in Chicago only had less than 10% ADA compliant stations in 1990, and even as of 2016, about 30% still were not compliant. I wasn't kidding when I was talking about building demolitions earlier for compliance. That's straight out of Chicago Transit Authority's website.

 

It was either in this thread or another one where I mentioned I "rolled my eyes" every time someone brings up more trains in Houston, because I have yet to read a halfway compelling argument that brings up past Houston projects (Whitmire's monorail, Katy Freeway, etc.) without gross oversimplification, misinformation, or blatant falsehoods.

[MaxConcrete]

37 minutes ago, IronTiger said:

It was either in this thread or another one where I mentioned I "rolled my eyes" every time someone brings up more trains in Houston, because I have yet to read a halfway compelling argument that brings up past Houston projects (Whitmire's monorail, Katy Freeway, etc.) without gross oversimplification, misinformation, or blatant falsehoods.

 

Unfortunately some interests are going to use the Amazon situation to promote more rail, when in fact Houston having less rail than other cities was almost surely a negligible factor.

1. Analyses like bisnow.com fail to mention that our proposed sites were poor. Generation Park is a nonstarter due to location, East River is extremely rough (and a dump in my opinion), and there is no obvious good site in the recently-hatched "innovation corridor".

2. As the bisnow article mentioned, our technical workforce is substantially incompatible with Amazon's needs. Houston is rich in chemical/process engineers, medical researchers, energy-related engineers, energy-related sciences like geophysics, and NASA-related space/aerospace. Our workforce has speciality/niche technical skills,  while Amazon needs the kind of workforce that the mainstream technology industry uses (mostly programmers), and any number of cities have a workforce more geared to mainstream technology.

3. Houston's incentives appear to be weak compared to the competition.

 

While there really was nothing for Houston to lose because we were never in the game due to the incompatible workforce, this could turn into a loss for Houston if it results in billions of dollars being squandered on new light rail with very low ridership like the green and purple lines.

[BeerNut]

8 hours ago, MaxConcrete said:

While there really was nothing for Houston to lose because we were never in the game due to the incompatible workforce, this could turn into a loss for Houston if it results in billions of dollars being squandered on new light rail with very low ridership like the green and purple lines.

 

So the University line(or equivalent) is the only one we should consider building.  University line ridership would have been a more compelling argument for future rail than green and purple.

[KinkaidAlum]

The green and purple lines are incomplete without the University Line. We have a central North-South Line but a mostly incomplete East-West one. But, max concrete knows that. That was part of the anti-transit lobby's plan all along. Kill the extension to the West where the major employment centers are and then use the lower than anticipated ridership numbers to the partially completed sections to keep it dead. 

 

It's hard to take anything he says seriously because it is in his name. He has a vested interest in killing alternative modes of travel. 

 

That said, ridership numbers for both the green and purple lines are increasing. The last two months we have figures for (Oct and Nov 2017) show that ridership is up over 400,000+ year-over year and that other than the months of August-September due to Harvey and multiple service interruptions, ridership is way up in 2017. 

 

 

 

[ToryGattis]

25 minutes ago, KinkaidAlum said:

The green and purple lines are incomplete without the University Line. We have a central North-South Line but a mostly incomplete East-West one. But, max concrete knows that. That was part of the anti-transit lobby's plan all along. Kill the extension to the West where the major employment centers are and then use the lower than anticipated ridership numbers to the partially completed sections to keep it dead. 

 

It's hard to take anything he says seriously because it is in his name. He has a vested interest in killing alternative modes of travel. 

 

That said, ridership numbers for both the green and purple lines are increasing. The last two months we have figures for (Oct and Nov 2017) show that ridership is up over 400,000+ year-over year and that other than the months of August-September due to Harvey and multiple service interruptions, ridership is way up in 2017. 

 

 

 

 

Sorry, but ad hominem attacks on the arguer is a sign you know you can't win on the facts or logic.  Keep it respectful and argue on the merits, not personal attacks.

 

As far as myself, I've always argued *METRO* (not opponents) made a massive error of judgment when the used limited resources to build the green and purple lines when they should have prioritized the much more useful University line.  But when Culberson blocked them, I'm guessing they figured they'd build what they could (ridership be damned) and just keep pointing to the network hole hoping to get another round of funding and authorization to build it.