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Old Posted Oct 19, 2019, 5:06 AM
Crawford Crawford is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: Brooklyn, NYC/Polanco, DF
Posts: 30,551
Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePhun1 View Post
We have nothing but prairie in all directions except Galveston Bay. The coastal areas may suffer a big hurricane and slow down but progess will continue. More flooding, houses get built on stilts.
It's not that you can't build, it's that there's no incentive to build when you can't get anywhere. Houston could never be a city of 20 million, because it would be unlivable at that size, unless it radically transformed (in which case it would be extremely expensive and NIMBY).

The issue in slow growth metros isn't that there's no buildable fringe, it's that it makes no sense to build endlessly when there are no good jobs, schools and services within easy distance. There is nothing, theoretically, stopping LA from sprawling to Bakersfield or NY sprawling to Binghamton, but why would professionals want a three hour commute and live in the sticks and send their kids to crap schools?