Katy Freeway

[mattyt36]

And, for the record, I hate the Katy Freeway but that’s more about exiting the parking lots of the many retail centers around Mem City on to the feeder, a true death-defying experience. Almost as bad as the insult to us Inner Loopers on merging what seems 5 lanes to get to Ikea as a punishment for exiting the Loop.

[BEES?!]

44 minutes ago, mattyt36 said:

And, for the record, I hate the Katy Freeway but that’s more about exiting the parking lots of the many retail centers around Mem City on to the feeder, a true death-defying experience. Almost as bad as the insult to us Inner Loopers on merging what seems 5 lanes to get to Ikea as a punishment for exiting the Loop.

Parts of I10 seriously freak me out. It’s no I45 to be sure, but I’ve seen some crazy stuff and have had plenty of near-misses by people racing. I feel like when I drive on 59 it isn’t the same kind of white knuckle driving, but maybe that’s just me. It could also just be that I’m a little car-phobic :P

[samagon]

On 1/21/2022 at 2:58 PM, iah77 said:

Keep in mind that the west corridor literally added 100,000s of residents so this is ridiculous to say time went up by a little. 

this, ladies and gentlemen, is the definition of induced demand and proof that you can't widen your way out of traffic. thanks.

Edited January 26, 2022 by samagon

[mattyt36]

3 hours ago, samagon said:

this, ladies and gentlemen, is the definition of induced demand and proof that you can't widen your way out of traffic. thanks.

No, it's the definition of low land prices and very few geographical limitations.

The Houston MSA has added essentially 100K+ new residents NET every year since 2000.  I don't have a number for how this translates into households (and a large portion are children), but where, exactly, do you expect these people would have gone if the Katy Freeway weren't expanded?  If you're a middle-class family with everyday budget constraints and a strong preference to locate near good schools, you have to understand that forcing them to live in a house with, say, a $200K budget between the Loop and the Beltway, where the housing stock is generally nothing to write home about because most of it was built during the last great population boom, is an absolute nonstarter--it's simply not going to happen.  You are talking about options that are fantasies.

And if the Katy Freeway weren't expanded it's not going to stop residential development.  What it would do is to make the existing peripheral satellites (The Woodlands, Sugar Land, etc) larger and create new ones altogether and decrease the attractiveness of the Inner Loop commercial market.  In other words, MORE SPRAWL.

Or maybe you just want the region to get smaller.  Perfectly valid, but I don't know of many people who would opt to live in a metro area with declining economic activity.  There are plenty of Rust Belt examples out there.

[Houston19514]

To amplify mattyt's point, per the Census Bureau, the Houston metro area has added an average of 147,229.7 new residents NET every year from 2000 to 2020.  Yes, that's almost 3 Million more people.  We took Houston 2000 and added the entire 2020 Austin metro area population, plus an additional 1/2 million people.  IN 20 YEARS. 

Edited January 26, 2022 by Houston19514

[BEES?!]

I had no idea we’d added that many people, holy crap! 
 

I’d like to add too that I know at least in Sugar Land’s case, they have fairly strict zoning and a lot of the city limits is built out. (I grew up there so am decently familiar with how it developed.) That plus everyone wants to be zoned to (only certain lol) FBISD schools, so the house prices in SL have gone up pretty high. They can’t really move quickly and tear down, say, a crappy commercial area and just build residential unlike in most of Houston or the unincorporated areas, so while it isn’t critical, I bet it pushes a lot of development further outward. You can see Richmond/Rosenberg rapidly growing, though they seem a bit more keen on letting stuff like multifamily get built. 
 

a lot of west exurbia is outside of whatever city limits, so I bet that’s a lot of why you have insane numbers of housing stock getting thrown up left and right and people moving there- most seems to be single family just from looking at HAR/zillow, but they don’t seem to be as allergic to MF housing or very small lot sizes, unlike Sugar Land. 

I also wonder- is some of the westward expansion because of the business districts that formed on the western side of the city? You have westchase, energy corridor (which did come later to be fair), and the galleria if you aren’t commuting downtown. Living in one of the far-flung exurb towns doesn’t seem so unreasonable if your work is a straight shot along I-10 or the WPT. 

Plenty of megalopolises sprawl, anyway. I could use Tokyo as an example- the 23 wards and the surrounding satellite cities’ area in sq mi is pretty huge- though about half the size of Houston- if I remember right. Obviously they developed in a totally different pattern and have, like, the entire state of Texas’s worth of people living in their MSA, but they sprawl hard, tear stuff down all the time, and are able to keep their housing stock relatively affordable for being the largest city in the world. They have great transit, but they also have good expressways too even though they’re not car-focused in the slightest.
 

It’s unlikely Houston or really any american metropolis that developed after the automobile will ever hit the kind of density that you see in some of those cities (but tbh I’m okay with that. The densest, most walkable parts of town don’t feel claustrophobic like some cities in other parts of the world do- that is a real driver to make people leave, and our culture is very different re: personal space), but I think we can use the robust road system we do have and make transit work on it really really well. I mean, think about it. We don’t have to acquire a bunch of ROW if we want to take one of our nice roads and put a two-way bike lane or shared use path or BRT or LRT down it. Or nix traffic signals and throw in some roundabouts. Whatever, lol.  We’d just have to do a road diet, and we have plenty of roadway to make that work for us. We get better transit, cars get taken off the road because said transit isn’t stuck in traffic, and it didn’t cost insane amounts of money to build because a lot of the groundwork was already there. The freeways and highways and too-wide roads are ugly, absolutely. But there’s a lot of opportunity in them, too. 

[august948]

10 hours ago, BEES?! said:

I had no idea we’d added that many people, holy crap! 
 

I’d like to add too that I know at least in Sugar Land’s case, they have fairly strict zoning and a lot of the city limits is built out. (I grew up there so am decently familiar with how it developed.) That plus everyone wants to be zoned to (only certain lol) FBISD schools, so the house prices in SL have gone up pretty high. They can’t really move quickly and tear down, say, a crappy commercial area and just build residential unlike in most of Houston or the unincorporated areas, so while it isn’t critical, I bet it pushes a lot of development further outward. You can see Richmond/Rosenberg rapidly growing, though they seem a bit more keen on letting stuff like multifamily get built. 
 

a lot of west exurbia is outside of whatever city limits, so I bet that’s a lot of why you have insane numbers of housing stock getting thrown up left and right and people moving there- most seems to be single family just from looking at HAR/zillow, but they don’t seem to be as allergic to MF housing or very small lot sizes, unlike Sugar Land. 

I also wonder- is some of the westward expansion because of the business districts that formed on the western side of the city? You have westchase, energy corridor (which did come later to be fair), and the galleria if you aren’t commuting downtown. Living in one of the far-flung exurb towns doesn’t seem so unreasonable if your work is a straight shot along I-10 or the WPT. 

Plenty of megalopolises sprawl, anyway. I could use Tokyo as an example- the 23 wards and the surrounding satellite cities’ area in sq mi is pretty huge- though about half the size of Houston- if I remember right. Obviously they developed in a totally different pattern and have, like, the entire state of Texas’s worth of people living in their MSA, but they sprawl hard, tear stuff down all the time, and are able to keep their housing stock relatively affordable for being the largest city in the world. They have great transit, but they also have good expressways too even though they’re not car-focused in the slightest.
 

It’s unlikely Houston or really any american metropolis that developed after the automobile will ever hit the kind of density that you see in some of those cities (but tbh I’m okay with that. The densest, most walkable parts of town don’t feel claustrophobic like some cities in other parts of the world do- that is a real driver to make people leave, and our culture is very different re: personal space), but I think we can use the robust road system we do have and make transit work on it really really well. I mean, think about it. We don’t have to acquire a bunch of ROW if we want to take one of our nice roads and put a two-way bike lane or shared use path or BRT or LRT down it. Or nix traffic signals and throw in some roundabouts. Whatever, lol.  We’d just have to do a road diet, and we have plenty of roadway to make that work for us. We get better transit, cars get taken off the road because said transit isn’t stuck in traffic, and it didn’t cost insane amounts of money to build because a lot of the groundwork was already there. The freeways and highways and too-wide roads are ugly, absolutely. But there’s a lot of opportunity in them, too. 

The westward expansion started a long time ago.  Note that River Oaks was built west of downtown and the Heights was built northwest.  Most likely development moved west because in the east we have had refineries for a very long time.  People who can will move away from industrial areas and will take their higher spending with them.  I recall an article written a decade or so ago had the population center of Houston somewhere around City Centre.

[Amlaham]

6 hours ago, august948 said:

The westward expansion started a long time ago.  Note that River Oaks was built west of downtown and the Heights was built northwest.  Most likely development moved west because in the east we have had refineries for a very long time.  People who can will move away from industrial areas and will take their higher spending with them.  I recall an article written a decade or so ago had the population center of Houston somewhere around City Centre.

Curious, but what caused the east side to start getting more attention than before (besides being closer to downtown), did the refinery situation change since the early 1900s? Like did a lot of them move further east, shut down, or something else happen to where people don't mind living east as much? Genuinely curious.

I'm from the west side of town but I feel like the east side has so much potential to look nicer than the west. Especially since it's a lot closer to the bay/ waterfront. 

[samagon]

1 hour ago, Amlaham said:

Curious, but what caused the east side to start getting more attention than before (besides being closer to downtown), did the refinery situation change since the early 1900s? Like did a lot of them move further east, shut down, or something else happen to where people don't mind living east as much? Genuinely curious.

I'm from the west side of town but I feel like the east side has so much potential to look nicer than the west. Especially since it's a lot closer to the bay/ waterfront. 

I presume you're talking about close in to town.

if you want to live within a mile or two of downtown and don't want to pay $900,000 for a townhome, the east end calls. open realtor.com and do a search of the west side of town close in with a filter of max price $500,000 you are looking at a very short list of homes, and a bunch of condos.

in the east end, your money goes so much farther. 

a lot of the industry that was in the area isn't any longer. you can go drive through the 'eado' portion of town and see tons of townhomes, generally speaking, every little townhome farm used to be a warehouse for some form of industrial use. then along the bayou there are commercial properties that wanted to move on, the huge east river property that used to be heavy industrial, Farmer Brothers coffee on Navigation is gone, just to name a few. sure the stuff that's beyond wayside probably isn't going anywhere any time soon, but for refineries, or things that you wouldn't want to live near, you gotta go to the other side of 610, and for the bulk of the east end, that is far enough away that if something is spewing out of that, it's far enough away that it won't make you grow a third arm.

https://aqicn.org/map/houston/ 

hover the map over the Idylwood station and it's no worse (no better either) than the stations on the west side of town.

anyway, yeah, it's all about proximity to town, and prices compared with other areas this close to town. you just can't do much better.

[mattyt36]

3 hours ago, Amlaham said:

Curious, but what caused the east side to start getting more attention than before (besides being closer to downtown), did the refinery situation change since the early 1900s? Like did a lot of them move further east, shut down, or something else happen to where people don't mind living east as much? Genuinely curious.

I'm from the west side of town but I feel like the east side has so much potential to look nicer than the west. Especially since it's a lot closer to the bay/ waterfront. 

It's my understanding that the development axis used to be more eastward (and south), with Buffalo Bayou, for example, having regular excursion cruises from downtown back in the day.  So maybe the real question is what caused that to change . . . I don't know if it is more related to the new developments to the west or all the Ship Channel/petrochemical development to the east.

@samagon thank you for the (indirect) acknowledgment of the critical importance of housing and land prices in location decisions

Edited January 28, 2022 by mattyt36

[samagon]

On 1/26/2022 at 2:26 PM, Houston19514 said:

To amplify mattyt's point, per the Census Bureau, the Houston metro area has added an average of 147,229.7 new residents NET every year from 2000 to 2020.  Yes, that's almost 3 Million more people.  We took Houston 2000 and added the entire 2020 Austin metro area population, plus an additional 1/2 million people.  IN 20 YEARS. 

there's a lot of YT channels, and internet blogs that have info on what's wrong with sprawl, sustainability from a economic standpoint is but one reason.

this is a good watch from CNBC that illustrates pretty well why , rather than some random blog, or random YT channel.

I recommend the watch, it's not all about "suburbs bad", in fact, they suggest that urbanizing the suburbs as a solution to the problem, but certainly, building bigger freeways enables sprawl in a huge way. 

[ADCS]

Ah man, I was ready for the Gladio/Years of Lead derail, but it never came.

[freundb]

Adam Ruins Everything also did an episode on Suburbs. S2E10  for people who stream. They list all their sources too so you can view them if you don't believe. They do list some positives as well.

[samagon]

there's other streamers that have equally compelling arguments (Not Just Bikes), but inevitably it's easy to say 'well, that's just a guy looking for views' vs a CNBC.

[Arboosto]

What's not to love about the Katy Freeway? In fact, it has my favorite application of TxDOT pedestrian friendly infrastructure. /s

[august948]

5 hours ago, Arboosto said:

What's not to love about the Katy Freeway? In fact, it has my favorite application of TxDOT pedestrian friendly infrastructure. /s

Proof that I10 inside the loop needs to be built out to match the expansion outside the loop?

[BigFootsSocks]

Any idea what work they're doing in the median under the Post Oak bridge by the Northwest Transit Center? Looks like rebar forms for something.

[freundb]

Not sure but noticed a form is up for what looks like a bridge support.

[hindesky]

Major closures this weekend on IH 10 Eastbound, be aware it will be a major CF in the area.

[freundb]

[hindesky]