Worth adding some context to this study. We've known about subsidence in our area for many many years. The Houston-Galveston subsidence district was created almost 50 years ago by the Texas legislature to regulate groundwater withdrawal and manage subsidence. https://hgsubsidence.org/ It's worth noting that this regulation has drastically slowed subsidence, but not completely halted due to the groundwater problem, and an exploding population.
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
Thanks for the arcgis link. It is interesting to compare to the Sentinel 1A data from the study[0]. For example there is one existing (ground based) measurement East of Mont Belvieu (P050), but most of the displacement in the satellite data appears just to the West, centered on Mont Belvieu. This is by eye only, so I may be mistaken in comparing the locations.
The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).
The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.
Houston is an experiment in what you get when you YOLO building regulations. One should expect them to re-learn all of the lessons of the past that caused those regulations to be written. It's basically a case study in technical debt from an urban planning angle. The lack of regulation made it cheap to build and allowed the city to rapidly expand, but also allowed it to sprawl almost beyond reason and caused it to become the poster child for poor city planning and a costly reminder of how hard it is to go back and try to fix problems after the fact.
Pretty good article that explains the facets. I feel like the article undersells Houston zoning a bit though. You still see far more bizarre stuff in Houston than you would see in other places. The article makes the point that you don’t see churches next to brothels, which is a pretty extreme example, but you definitely do see some stuff you would not see in other cities: residential lands abutting churches on one side and industrial locations on the other with some retail location right behind. It’s a bit of a crapshoot in a lot of places and even if it’s not when you move in it could be later.
Decades ago my aunt and uncle moved into what was at the time a pretty rural neighborhood in northwest Houston with only residents around but years later a church bought the property adjacent to their land and Sundays and Wednesdays moving forward there were noise and parking related issues.
Just about every new housing development in the greater Houston area starts like this: Acquire some cheap farmland not too far from a highway, come in and sub-divide the lots, build some kind of neighborhood amenity (pool, rec center, etc.), and creat a Municipal Utility District with on-site well and sewer.
None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.
With such little regulation, I would have guessed housing supply would be really great and prices quite affordable. But the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for house prices.
> But the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for house prices.
That seems unsurprising, and not sure it's a good metric. Houston is certainly much cheaper than, for example, Austin, and my guess is that it is considerably cheaper than similar sized metros.
I can't find it right now, but I remember reading an article from a few years back that basically called Houston the best city to live if you are poor. That is, don't just look at median prices, but Houston actually has a ton of affordable housing that is simply non-existent (or highly restricted in stupid lottery games) in other cities.
I haven't looked at the numbers but a popular and growing city being below median price?! Surely that is exceptional, probably unique for the USA or anywhere for that matter.
I've read that Houston isn't regulation free per se. Zoning was mostly replaced with neighbor associations of one sort or another which are just as restrictive with regard to dense development.
Compared to a town with 100k people in Wisconsin Houston doesn't look very affordable. But compared to the top 10 largest cities in the US it looks pretty good.
Well, nearly every metro went off the rails in terms of availability/affordability since the pandemic.
For many years Houston was much more affordable than the national average. 2010 seems to have been the inflection point. See the first House Price Index graph here:
Being below the national median is great for a large, growing metro.
Check every other large, economically booming metro area and see what their housing prices are in comparison. I know the last time I checked, Dallas was substantially more expensive, and that city seems like the most obvious comparison to make.
Even without traditional zoning, housing supply is somewhat land constrained, since building further up gets more and more expensive as you go higher. It still helps to be able to build higher, but it's not a panacea that will solve all housing cost problems.
I would expect the YOLO housing and environment approach to never be about equality and affordability. I would expect it to be a signal that NIMBYism is through the roof and that they have the regulatory power to inflate prices.
I’m always shocked that people think supply is the issue…
People will live in the best place they can afford. This means prices will always be driven by the income level of people in the area.
If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You’ll actually just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving there. That’ll drive the prices right back to where they were.
Demand would have to drop, while you expand supply. Remove tech jobs from SF and demand will drop, lowering prices. If enough external people don’t wish to move there and you’re building, then prices drop.
Effectively, demand always massively outstrips supply for living accommodations
As a thought exercise: imagine it was $100/month to live in a 3Bed, 2Br house in Houston. You’d have 100m people want to move there.
Keep moving that number up, at some point you’ll get supply and demand meeting. If you add 1000 new houses, it’ll barely impact demand because you’ll have 1000 people willing to move for a $50/month reduction in cost. Then prices will be right back where they started.
Unless you can build 10k units or 100k units prices won’t meaningfully change from supply side factors alone.
Every urban planning enthusiast online says without artificial zoning, there would be no sprawl and everything would be a walkable paradise with a healthy mix of shops and housing close by. But then Texas comes up and the narrative flips somehow.
The implementation is different, but Texas has zoning. Importantly they have minimum parking zoning which forces sprawl as much as if not more than most zoning laws.
I think sprawl would happen anyway, cars are ultimately cheap and convenient (as % of budget large, but still affordable) and by the time traffic is a problem you have sprawl that transit cannot easily be retrofitted to.
This seems to ignore the reality that developers live in. Build it as cheap and fast as possible and try not to think any more about infrastructure than you are forced to by the local government.
> Well, they're doing something right when a median home costs $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the Bay Area growing up here.
You can get a house for $75k (median) if you want in Gary Indiana. I'm not sure how lower housing prices can be directly correlated with "doing things more right".
$1.5m houses is a signal that a ton of people want to live there, and are willing to pay a premium for doing it. That's not a signal that you're doing something wrong.
Of course, it would be nice if you could keep everything you're doing right and bring housing prices down (largely by building more of it). But on the whole real-estate being valuable is generally a positive sign.
On the flip side, the cheapest houses you could find for awhile (maybe still?) were in detroit, that's not a sign that Detroit was doing well - but that demand had plummeted to literally 0 because it was doing so poorly.
The assertion seems to be that it is not going to end well. If it really is unsustainable sprawl with poorly put together civic functions, why do we expect it to go on forever?
That is, sure, houses are cheap for now. But that doesn't mean you will have a place worth living in, given time.
You're making the same mistake as all the people that hand wring about "America doesn't regulate/ban <thing that is regulated/banned at the state level but not federally>. Houston the city doesn't regulate a lot of things. But its various neighborhood associations (which are somewhat comparable to town governments on the East coast and council governments in the UK) regulate at lot of that stuff instead.
That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.
Sprawl and monster trucks everywhere are still a product of intentional government interference in Houston, it's just they call it ordinances and traffic engineering rather than zoning.
From what I remember, houston was surrouded by unincorporated areas that it would eventually assimilate. I believe the unincorporated areas would not have the building requirements of houston and the houses there would be grandfathered in.
Can't comment on the specific contents of the linked research paper, but just a note that space-based measurements of subsidence have become a lot more routine with the development of Interferometric SAR (InSAR). You can get spatial maps of subsidence using the ~monthly/weekly overpasses of the radar, to ~several cm accuracy. It works better over some terrains than others.
People aren't wired to notice subsidence, which has meant that large changes due to groundwater pumping and oil/gas extraction have gone "under the radar", and that's changing ;-).
Large subsidence can cause problems including seawater infiltration into the water table, permanent loss of groundwater storage capacity, and disturbance to infrastructure like roads and pipelines.
Subsidence is also one of the few ways we have to get insight into large-scale groundwater withdrawals (land goes down -> water being taken out and not replaced).
That area is now subsiding at over a meter every year. Luckily the state will bail out the guy responsible for the subsidence by spending billions to fix the aqueducts.
There’s a Houston suburb that sank due to subsistence and had to be abandoned several decades ago. As I understand it, that was a big wake-up call, and things here have improved quite a bit since then. Though not everywhere, apparently.
> His team found substantial subsidence in Katy, Spring, The Woodlands, Fresno and Mont Belvieu with groundwater and oil and gas withdrawal identified as the primary cause.
I lived in Spring for 13 years. In the last 2-3 years in the house, the foundation issues seemed to be accelerating. I assumed it was just old house issues (house was built in the last 1970s) but perhaps subsidence plays a role.
Water rights are going to be a hot topic. There just isn't enough for everyone, and sharing a commons is not something that America (and other western societies) has been good at.
There's enough for everyone, but some large actors are taking most of the water and wasting it or exporting the productive value of that water due to a lack of real market forces on the price of water.
You're absolutely correct there will be water rights issues, I would argue they will become wars in certain places and in others it will result in certain massive cities becoming dead over several decades.
^^^ we have large parts of the country that effectively export water via ag. America has plenty of water, plenty of land, plenty of resources to maintain our current diet and way of life, it is exporting to the rest of the world that we can't do.
There’s plenty for everyone. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of cutbacks in the few regions where we’ve just started getting contentious. Saying otherwise makes you an intentional or unintentional mouthpiece for agriculture which dominates water usage and hardly pays anything for it.
Most of the old place names and literature describing New Orleans use the term bayou. Though I think the core downtown area was originally built on [slightly] higher ground above the surrounding bayou(s). I don't know what New Orleans looked like 100+ years ago, but at least today the area generally looks more bayou'ish, though I'm sure there were also plenty of swamps here and there. Certainly you don't have to go very far to reach a swamp, but neither do you need to go very far to reach a bayou.
I grew up on the Gulf Coast, mostly further east on the Florida Panhandle, but also very briefly in rural SW Louisiana surrounded by actual swamps. I suspect people today will tend to use the term swamp for its more derogatory insinuations when describing New Orleans, and bayou for other areas when they're trying to be more charitable or simply because bayou is more apt.
FWIW, to me a swamp is very stagnant and mostly overgrown with trees, whereas a bayou tends to me more open and dominated more by grasses than trees, though you can still certainly see trees (e.g. in clusters on high spots/islands). That said, the term bayou is more often heard in Louisiana, Mississippi and Eastern Texas than in Florida or Alabama, so I've not had many occasions to ponder the distinction.
> very little changed at least as far as the climate is concerned.
I've lived in S. Florida and in Houston. Humidity is similar, but Florida is far more comfortable because it is surrounded by ocean, there's always an off shore breeze, and whenever it does get too hot, it always thunderstorms for about an hour pretty much every afternoon when it gets hot. With the ocean breezes and the daily short sunbursts, the air is really clean.
I recall once getting back to my apartment in Houston after work, and I took a shower like I did everyday after work. Had to, always got soaking wet from sweat on the commute home, even with AC. I forgot my wallet in the car, and I knew never ever to leave my wallet in the car in Houston. Walked out to get it, maybe it was all of 30 yards through the parking lot and back 30 yards. I had to take another shower. Never forgot my wallet again. And when it rains in Houston it rains for days on end. And you just know with all those refineries and traffic that Houston air is horrid. Must smell like money to the residents. The only thing I miss about Houston is the Tex-Mex, which is just as good in Austin but without the humidity.
It gets hot and humid, but not that hot and humid. Your car ac wasn't working properly and it sounds like you might be... prone to sweat a lot more than an average person?
Readit News
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
USGS has a network of sensors that you use to see subsidence here: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e5c75a...
Of note is Katy's subsidence, which I believe is from hydrocarbon withdrawals.
I believe what this study does that's new is analyze Sentinel-1A data and correlate it to hotspots in the Houston area, which is actually super cool.
The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).
The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.
[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/15/3831# [1] https://hgsubsidence.org/GPS/2021/P050_HRF20_neu_cm.col
[1]http://explore.museumca.org/creeks/z-subsidence.html
1: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/forget-what-youve-heard-ho...
Decades ago my aunt and uncle moved into what was at the time a pretty rural neighborhood in northwest Houston with only residents around but years later a church bought the property adjacent to their land and Sundays and Wednesdays moving forward there were noise and parking related issues.
None of this was connected to a more robust regional water system with surface water. Each one of these neighborhoods was planned on its own without any thought into how it fit into the bigger picture of its surroundings.
Deleted Comment
That seems unsurprising, and not sure it's a good metric. Houston is certainly much cheaper than, for example, Austin, and my guess is that it is considerably cheaper than similar sized metros.
I can't find it right now, but I remember reading an article from a few years back that basically called Houston the best city to live if you are poor. That is, don't just look at median prices, but Houston actually has a ton of affordable housing that is simply non-existent (or highly restricted in stupid lottery games) in other cities.
I suspect some of this is market moves (e.g. people moving into apartments during COVID, and business relocations: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/business/20...).
Los Angeles, California – 3,849,297 - 710k
Chicago, Illinois – 2,696,555 - 252k
Houston, Texas – 2,288,250 - 192k
Phoenix, Arizona – 1,624,569 - 308k
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 1,576,251 - 240k
San Antonio, Texas – 1,451,853 - 175k
San Diego, California – 1,381,611 - 620k
Dallas, Texas – 1,288,457 - 225k
San Jose, California – 983,489 - 1,160k
Compared to a town with 100k people in Wisconsin Houston doesn't look very affordable. But compared to the top 10 largest cities in the US it looks pretty good.
[0] - https://www.kiplinger.com/article/real-estate/t010-c000-s002...
https://www.understandinghouston.org/topic/housing/home-affo...
Check every other large, economically booming metro area and see what their housing prices are in comparison. I know the last time I checked, Dallas was substantially more expensive, and that city seems like the most obvious comparison to make.
Even without traditional zoning, housing supply is somewhat land constrained, since building further up gets more and more expensive as you go higher. It still helps to be able to build higher, but it's not a panacea that will solve all housing cost problems.
This lists Houston as 19th on affordability and a price of $247,000
People will live in the best place they can afford. This means prices will always be driven by the income level of people in the area.
If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You’ll actually just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving there. That’ll drive the prices right back to where they were.
Demand would have to drop, while you expand supply. Remove tech jobs from SF and demand will drop, lowering prices. If enough external people don’t wish to move there and you’re building, then prices drop.
Effectively, demand always massively outstrips supply for living accommodations
As a thought exercise: imagine it was $100/month to live in a 3Bed, 2Br house in Houston. You’d have 100m people want to move there.
Keep moving that number up, at some point you’ll get supply and demand meeting. If you add 1000 new houses, it’ll barely impact demand because you’ll have 1000 people willing to move for a $50/month reduction in cost. Then prices will be right back where they started.
Unless you can build 10k units or 100k units prices won’t meaningfully change from supply side factors alone.
I think sprawl would happen anyway, cars are ultimately cheap and convenient (as % of budget large, but still affordable) and by the time traffic is a problem you have sprawl that transit cannot easily be retrofitted to.
The argument I've heard is for thoughtful mixed-use zoning: not a free-for-all. Downtowns in several Texas cities bear this argument out.
You can get a house for $75k (median) if you want in Gary Indiana. I'm not sure how lower housing prices can be directly correlated with "doing things more right".
The 9 county area of the Bay Area is 7000 square miles... and that includes a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a city on.
If you take the land area of the cities in the Bay Area ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_th... ) and sum them all up, you've got something on the order of 1,600 square miles.
The land constraints within the Bay Area contribute significantly to the price of a house.
Of course, it would be nice if you could keep everything you're doing right and bring housing prices down (largely by building more of it). But on the whole real-estate being valuable is generally a positive sign.
On the flip side, the cheapest houses you could find for awhile (maybe still?) were in detroit, that's not a sign that Detroit was doing well - but that demand had plummeted to literally 0 because it was doing so poorly.
That is, sure, houses are cheap for now. But that doesn't mean you will have a place worth living in, given time.
My heavily zoned hometown Oakland does.
That said, looking at how places that have gone hard the opposite direction have turned out YOLO sounds like a pretty damn good compromise. Technical engineering problems related to groundwater resources, pollution, etc, etc, are but a trifle compared to politicking yourself into a situation where things suck and no progress can be made because of entrenched interests that benefit from the suck.
Also, speaking of groundwater.
never drain your pool in houston.
bad things will happen.
People aren't wired to notice subsidence, which has meant that large changes due to groundwater pumping and oil/gas extraction have gone "under the radar", and that's changing ;-).
Large subsidence can cause problems including seawater infiltration into the water table, permanent loss of groundwater storage capacity, and disturbance to infrastructure like roads and pipelines.
Subsidence is also one of the few ways we have to get insight into large-scale groundwater withdrawals (land goes down -> water being taken out and not replaced).
Here's a summary with a nice motivational picture showing meters of subsidence over multiple years in the California central valley: https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/land-subsidence
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
I lived in Spring for 13 years. In the last 2-3 years in the house, the foundation issues seemed to be accelerating. I assumed it was just old house issues (house was built in the last 1970s) but perhaps subsidence plays a role.
I'm not qualified to speak to which of the two they found in Spring/The Woodlands, but it's not restricted to oil and gas drilling.
According to https://www.texas-drilling.com/harris-county/spring there are 2 gas drilling leases in Spring. https://www.texas-drilling.com/montgomery-county/the-woodlan... shows 2 oil/gas leases.
There's enough for everyone, but some large actors are taking most of the water and wasting it or exporting the productive value of that water due to a lack of real market forces on the price of water.
You're absolutely correct there will be water rights issues, I would argue they will become wars in certain places and in others it will result in certain massive cities becoming dead over several decades.
I moved 1000mi from Florida to here and very little changed at least as far as the climate is concerned.
https://www.bayouswamptours.com/bayou-vs-swamp-whats-the-dif...
I grew up on the Gulf Coast, mostly further east on the Florida Panhandle, but also very briefly in rural SW Louisiana surrounded by actual swamps. I suspect people today will tend to use the term swamp for its more derogatory insinuations when describing New Orleans, and bayou for other areas when they're trying to be more charitable or simply because bayou is more apt.
FWIW, to me a swamp is very stagnant and mostly overgrown with trees, whereas a bayou tends to me more open and dominated more by grasses than trees, though you can still certainly see trees (e.g. in clusters on high spots/islands). That said, the term bayou is more often heard in Louisiana, Mississippi and Eastern Texas than in Florida or Alabama, so I've not had many occasions to ponder the distinction.
I've lived in S. Florida and in Houston. Humidity is similar, but Florida is far more comfortable because it is surrounded by ocean, there's always an off shore breeze, and whenever it does get too hot, it always thunderstorms for about an hour pretty much every afternoon when it gets hot. With the ocean breezes and the daily short sunbursts, the air is really clean.
I recall once getting back to my apartment in Houston after work, and I took a shower like I did everyday after work. Had to, always got soaking wet from sweat on the commute home, even with AC. I forgot my wallet in the car, and I knew never ever to leave my wallet in the car in Houston. Walked out to get it, maybe it was all of 30 yards through the parking lot and back 30 yards. I had to take another shower. Never forgot my wallet again. And when it rains in Houston it rains for days on end. And you just know with all those refineries and traffic that Houston air is horrid. Must smell like money to the residents. The only thing I miss about Houston is the Tex-Mex, which is just as good in Austin but without the humidity.