What Houston lacks is charm. It essentially has none. It's functional, and if the market demand is for a fast food restaurant or an office complex in your area, that's exactly what is going to happen.
The congressman who replaced veteran Bill Archer in Congress, John Culberson, has made it his number one goal to do something about the freeway entering it from the west. We call it the Katy Freeway, but you probably know it as the Santa Monica Freeway. It's a bottleneck because of the explosive growth of the city to the west.
He championed an expansion of the freeway from its current three lanes of thruway in each direction to 24 lanes in total, wide enough to land a Boeing 747 on with plenty of room to spare. Groundbreaking will start in a few months unless the last-ditch efforts of the coalition of leftists stall it.
It is going to be a combination of unrestricted lanes, HOV lanes, and toll lanes, the first time a toll lane has ever been included in part of the interstate highway system. It's a way of rationing access and paying for the project.
I'm not keen on the toll lanes, although I'll glad use them at times if they are substantially faster than the other lanes. The concept is actually quite consistent with the prevalent attitude around here of providing what the market demands.
Interesting link, by the way. I've bookmarked it for further reading.
I think it would make sense to reduce confusion and combine HOV and toll lanes. Having separate lanes for each is going to be difficult for the consumer, I think.
In poking around Malibu real estate, I can certainly say that narrow winding hillside streets do add to charm, and wide ones subtract from it. It's a pity the former are so impractical, and not just for regular traffic - fire equipment takes a real beating, and as you know that's a big concern around Malibu.
Christopher Alexander's masterworks 'The Timeless Way of Building' and 'A Pattern Language' are fascinating because they give ideas for building charm. They are best read together even though that's about a $100 hole in your wallet, even from Amazon. The problem is that they effectively create a parallel view of society, with no big box stores and significantly lower use of the automobile.
I'm not at all clear on whether Alexander's ideas could work in a world that feels a real need for big box stores and SUVs. I don't have any great love for either, but I know the US as a whole has embraced them. I do know that if and when I design a house of my own or have one designed, Alexander's ideas will be very much in use. The books are well worth reading despite their utopian idealism.
Joel Garreau's Edge City is the most reality based book on urban planning I have ever read; he went out and decided to understand how things really worked. It's quite a ride. Unfortunately, what it seems to say is that Edge City lacks charm and is unlikely to find it any time soon.
If I wanted to find a property with pleasant surroundings and a nice view, where would I go in Houston? I would guess that since it's fairly flat, a waterfront property would be my best choice. I'm very curious to see a real world comparison between LA and Houston real estate prices. I don't think it will serve LA very well :-(.
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