[HN Gopher] Houston, We Have a Solution (2023)
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Houston, We Have a Solution (2023)
Author : telotortium
Score : 18 points
Date : 2024-05-18 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worksinprogress.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (worksinprogress.co)
| banish-m4 wrote:
| My mom is from San Anton, and her family is from nowhere N TX.
|
| Houston failed by allowing residential areas to be built in flood
| plains ("sacrifice zones") and near polluting petrochemical
| plants that blow up about once a year. And, it's regularly
| ravaged by hurricanes and just yesterday a derecho blew out
| skyscraper windows, collapsed a brick wall, and knocked out power
| for what maybe weeks. Not much of the HTX metro area can be
| called "a good place to live" with a straight face. Zoning rules
| should prevent people from living in dangerous areas, which HTX
| has clearly failed at.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The flooding issue is huge in Houston. The city was built on a
| swamp and the fact that buildings sit there now does not make
| it less of a swamp.
|
| There are places around the city that are high enough not to
| flood horribly, but even if you live in such a place you still
| have to deal with Houston summers (April through October) when
| being outdoors for any length of time is miserable.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Yeah when I lived there as a kid the joke was that Houston
| has three seasons - Summer, July and August!
| abathur wrote:
| > you still have to deal with Houston summers (April through
| October) when being outdoors for any length of time is
| miserable.
|
| This is a _minor_ exaggeration. Pollen aside, April is
| generally fairly pleasant. May is more dicey, but it isn 't
| necessarily miserable. (I've managed to work from a coffee
| shop patio at least a couple days this month without having
| to call it quits in the early afternoon.) We can even have
| pleasant if humid days as late as early June IME.
|
| But yes, summer can be rough. I generally say summer is 6
| months when I'm speaking loosely to set context for someone
| who hasn't experienced it.
| aegypti wrote:
| This is literally an article about how infill/density became
| easier in Houston, removing the need to expand residential
| zoning outwards to flood plains and refinery backyards to
| continue growing.
| mordymoop wrote:
| The mistake of cyberpunk sci-fi like _Blade Runner_ is that the
| setting is always future Los Angeles or Tokyo, when Houston has
| been a much better candidate for the international, multilingual,
| steel-and-glass-and-concrete megacity of the future.
| xnx wrote:
| Sounds like Houston had minimal rules on land use prior to 1998,
| and then they relaxed land use even further and things got
| better. Seems like a lesson a lot of cities could learn from.
| adamfeldman wrote:
| I live in a townhome in the area talked about in the article
| (inside the 610 loop). As a local, this article felt spot-on and
| matched local understanding of how Houston manages residential
| land-use hyper-locally through deed restrictions and the like.
|
| Curiously unmentioned in the article were TIRZ, but those are
| mostly used to manage commercial areas, not residential.
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