Last week the Chron stuck an article behind their pay wall asking whether or not Houston's reputation for being affordable was still accurate given the rising cost of real estate. The answer to the question was both yes and no depending on where you were looking to buy.
Inside the Loop, Houston is becoming increasingly unaffordable as prices rise in harmony with falling supply and increasing demand. Outside of normal market forces, and all but unacknowledged in the article, there is the reality that these rising rents and bevy of subsidized projects focusing on "luxury" multi-family dwellings are specifically designed to reduce the affordability of the urban-core, not increase it.
The new density plans for the area outside the Loop to Beltway 8 will move that circle of increased expense outward. The article goes on to mention that the middle-class and poor are increasingly looking at homes in the Ex-burbs, beyond Beltway 8 in areas such as the Energy Corridor, Sugar Land, and even Fulshear.
None of this is occurring inside a vacuum. As New Urbanist thinking continues to dominate the conversation surrounding Houston's development future it is becoming clear that certain socio-economic groups need not apply. Sadly, those who work in Houston serving the ruling and creative classes are being priced out of the market by design.
Furthering the problem is the fact that much of the planning for access to the Inner Loop areas include either rising or new tolls or increasingly gridlocked freeways which make for an increasingly expensive living condition for the servant class who will find it difficult to get around. An additional hurdle is the decidedly commuter-unfriendly vision of the current Metro leadership. This is a leadership which views transit as nothing more than a plaything for the relatively wealthy. Leaving the great unwashed with reduced commuter bus service, no commuter rail to speak of, but some really neat Sepia toned photos of the well-to-do having black-tie wedding parties on the toy-train.
You can find evidence of this trend almost everywhere, from the disputed "Ashby" high-rise that pit developers against a well-off neighborhood who liked the concept of densification in theory, but who balked at the idea that it might interfere with their decidedly un-dense, suburban-style single family neighborhood to Sunday Streets which is less a celebration of neighborhood and place than it is a walking advertisement for things (wealthy) white people like.
The vision of Houston future has morphed from that of a functional city where business gets done to a fuzzy 3D copy of places the courtesans hail from or wish they could live. Instead of upping stakes and moving to say Paris, the Houston elite are trying their level best to re-create it. Minus the couple of thousand years history, a topography and views that could double for God's back-yard, or the suburban riots of the poor who have been omitted from Haussmann's vision.
Or, maybe not. Given the attitude of the current administration toward Houston's poor and the Mayor's penchant for Tweeting out the details of pricey (her words) executive luncheons it's highly probable that the playful elite have identified a friendly leader in Annise Antionette. In Houston however, the poor won't be eating cake because the food-desert crowd has decided they should eat kale.
