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  #1  
Old Posted Sep 8, 2022, 6:05 PM
eschaton eschaton is offline
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Taking "city limits don't matter" too far...

Just curious about the opinions here on the subject of when to consider, and not to consider, city limits.

When making comparisons across metropolitan areas, I personally absolutely believe city limits should be ignored. Many Sun Belt cities are essentially unconstrained in their ability to snap up unincorporated county land (some non Sun Belt cities as well, like Columbus). Hence when you look at just city population, it can make a city seem quite substantial...until you discover it's really something like Jacksonville (a mid-sized metro which happens to have a city-county merger at its core).

That said, there are lots of ways in which city limits are absolutely 100% important.

First, white flight happens on a city (or more properly, school district) basis, not a metro basis. In some metros the dividing line between the urban and suburban schools will shift from majority black to majority white in a single block. White flight has had all sorts of negative implications for city finances, urban revitalization, blight and disinvestment...you name it.

I'm originally from Connecticut, albeit closer to NYC, but Hartford is a great example of this. Hartford had almost complete white flight - the north side of the city is black, and the southern side is Latino (mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican). The West End is the only portion of the city which still has some majority-white blocks, aside from a very early-stage revitalization of Downtown. Hartford does have some diverse suburbs (Bloomfield to the north is a black suburb - the only majority-black municipality in the state. Windsor and East Hartford are also pretty diverse) but to the west/south the city directly abuts suburban areas which are 80%-90% white. Like all of Connecticut, these areas are highly fragmented among different towns.

So people always use Hartford as an example of a place you need to consider the metro, not the city, since it's a city of 121,000 which anchors a metro of nearly 1.5 million. Except...arguing it's really a city of 1.5 million doesn't really work, because there's really not much of anything "urban" outside of Hartford proper (excepting other small, somewhat less troubled cities like New Britain). Top Hartford suburbs like Simsbury and Avon are backwoods areas with no definable town centers. East Hartford is the only one which really has anything resembling a nice downtown. If you have to relocate to the Hartford MSA and want an urban environment with "good schools" you're kinda screwed.

On the other hand, broad city limits can also make a big difference in some ways. Indianapolis is a great example of this. In 1970 Indianapolis had a city-county merger, which became known as Unigov. While municipal consolidation in general is a good thing, this was driven directly by the county Republican Party. Indianapolis had been governed by a GOP political machine, but white flight from the old urban core had given Democrats control of the city proper. With the city-county merger, a Republican-led "suburban" coalition controlled the city as a whole until around the year 2000. Even setting aside political ideology, the interests of the suburban base of the majority were directly in conflict with the urban core. They wanted a downtown which was quick to get in and out of, they wanted to have destination entertainment like new stadiums, and they didn't care what got demolished in order to construct this. So the city had resources due to the city-county merger, but those resources were effectively controlled by the "suburbs."
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Old Posted Sep 8, 2022, 6:14 PM
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I guess city limits matter when we're discussing a specific city due all these things you mentioned. When comparing with other cities, it's useless.

For instance, how relevant is a comparison between Indianapolis city proper and Cincinnati city proper?
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Old Posted Sep 8, 2022, 6:27 PM
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West Hartford is urbanish, urbane, and has good schools. It would be the obvious destination for those seeking a cosmopolitan environment. Also, it's a really small metro, so if you live in say Avon, you get your woodsy home and are just a few minutes from "urban" amenities.

If it were outside the Northeast, West and East Hartford would be Hartford proper.
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Old Posted Sep 8, 2022, 6:40 PM
eschaton eschaton is offline
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West Hartford is urbanish, urbane, and has good schools. It would be the obvious destination for those seeking a cosmopolitan environment. Also, it's a really small metro, so if you live in say Avon, you get your woodsy home and are just a few minutes from "urban" amenities.

If it were outside the Northeast, West and East Hartford would be Hartford proper.
West Hartford isn't all that urban, TBH. It has a decent downtown area, but if you look at the satellite view you can see that there are giant parking lots in the rear of those 1-2 story commercial storefronts, and then it goes right down to detached single-family homes. There's a little node of new urbanism not that far away, but it's relatively recent. The downtown functions as a nice suburban strip mall - most people drive there, park, and then walk around.

Mind you, if I had to live in the Hartford area, I would want to be a 10-15 minute walk from that business district (and nowhere else) but there's really nothing like say New Haven's Downtown/East Rock/Wooster Square region, where you have a cluster of middle/high income urban neighborhoods which are densely populated.
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Old Posted Sep 11, 2022, 3:10 PM
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Some topics about about administrative districts, like school busing or tax base.

But anything related to the broader "city" or what's on the ground is about something like metro, CSA, UA, or the blob you see from the air. I mean job market, tourism, office space demand, media market, and so on.
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Old Posted Sep 11, 2022, 5:15 PM
llamaorama llamaorama is offline
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I think a happy medium exists between consolidated local government and having balkanized municipal boundaries. Cities need to be large enough to have a stable, diversified tax base and economies of scale in departments so they aren't top heavy with administration. Bigger budgets can pay for cool stuff. On the other hand, big cities get more partisan.

In my opinion the conflict isn't between the inner city and suburban cities anymore. It's between the unincorporated low density exurban sprawl in the county, where new master planned communities have HOA's to provide amenities and three letter special districts like ESDS' and MUD's that provide quasi-privatized services, and the conventional municipal government that has a mandate to use taxes to benefit all citizens in their boundaries.

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Indianapolis is a great example of this. In 1970 Indianapolis had a city-county merger, which became known as Unigov. While municipal consolidation in general is a good thing, this was driven directly by the county Republican Party
Houston had this dynamic from the 1970s to the 1990s which is why it was slow to invest in mass transit and why downtown was allowed to famously turn into massive parking lot. However, because the greater Houston area is so massive, nearly all the suburbs inside the city limits have aged and evolved into more diverse places that tend to be Democrat leaning, with Kingwood and Clear Lake being exceptions.

To me the real problem in Houston is that it's annexation was done in an inherently predatory, corrupt way. Houston's city limits have a large number of "fingers", like the boundaries follow a road or underground water pipe but are only 100 feet across. This allowed the city to grab territory around malls, shopping centers, and industrial parks that would generate a surplus in sales and property tax revenue, but ignore residential neighborhoods that are adjacent to them so as to not have to spend money on giving them services like fire department or trash pickup. People who live there pay sales tax on stuff they buy at the grocery store a block from their home and the money gets redistributed to a city 30 miles away which they can't vote in the elections for. Also these fingers were used to draw boxes around competing suburban cities to prevent them from growing, like Humble for example. In Texas another city can't be established or annex land within a buffer zone of another city's boundaries, called the ETJ. This means that in most of Houston's suburbs it's not possible for other local governments to be created.

The result is most of greater Houston is just unincorporated county. Middle class and rich areas use covenants and HOA's to have nice things. Poor areas can be really, really slum-like and are in a practical desert for services. Law enforcement is handled through an odd arrangement where constables have evolved from being process servers with a badge and gun to being like mini-sheriffs, and they are allowed to be paid directly by HOA's to provide enhanced policing in some neighborhoods while ignoring others. Combined with how rough Houston is in general, this has caused the entire metro area to become kind of scuzzy unless you live on either the outer fringes or in the gentrified core inside the loop. There's a lot of crime, and everything is sort of ugly and there just isn't a lot to do. It's an endless carpet of suburbia.

Dallas and the other Texas cities doesn't have this dynamic. This is because ironically Dallas used to be a lot less progressive and run by the KKK back in the 1950s. I mean, JFK did get shot there. So the white suburbanites all formed their own cities and school districts. But fast forward to the year 2022 and everything has changed. Now all those suburban cities are very diverse, a lot of the original ones are effectively minority-majority and have leadership that reflects that. And they benefit from the power of having their own independent local government. Also the city proper of Dallas never fell apart, the postwar era that crushed other cities was arguably it's golden age.

As a result North Texas just seems to have more responsive local government and a better quality of life. Maybe it's unfortunate how this came about, but in the present day it's a strength.
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Old Posted Sep 11, 2022, 5:32 PM
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The world is rapidly changing. There is an economic case against low-density sprawl. As interest rates start to rise and Federal funds start to dry up, a lot of these suburban communities will suffer as they struggle to maintain operations and maintenance expenses. The municipalities with the higher tax bases will be okay.

Do city limits matter? They do when it comes to municipal budgets and services.

I'm also wondering if there will be a greater push towards online education that came into play during the pandemic. Will there be a need for less physical space as families become smaller (seriously, who has money to raise a kid these days and still have a life), and that online education can be provided at a much better price. Will it be for everyone? No, but may be a better option than some of the shithole schools out there in some poor communities.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 6:55 AM
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I think that it largely doesn't matter, but it is interesting to see how many people live under a single administrative division.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 7:08 PM
llamaorama llamaorama is offline
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I'm also wondering if there will be a greater push towards online education that came into play during the pandemic. Will there be a need for less physical space as families become smaller (seriously, who has money to raise a kid these days and still have a life), and that online education can be provided at a much better price. Will it be for everyone? No, but may be a better option than some of the shithole schools out there in some poor communities.
I was actually thinking the other day, I think the pandemic killed all interest in remote K-12 education and also flipped the political right's opinion of it from favorable to unfavorable. Before covid I remember periodically seeing Republicans talk about online charter schools, especially in Florida. Now that's pretty much toast.

There have been countless studies showing that remote learning was really bad for kids. Also there was a trend where parents were taking their kids out of public school districts that maintained strict covid protocols and remote learning and putting them in private and charter schools that reopened to in person learning sooner. Also I this forced at-home learning and the requirement that parents be involved was a huge reality check for families who notionally supported home schooling for political reasons but had never actually done it.

Vulnerable kids from low income or unstable households who make up most of the study body at "shithole schools" are even more in need of in-person classroom instruction to learn based on research into just how badly behind kids got during 2020 and 2021. I read somewhere that some schools in the Houston area, like half the kids pretty much vanished during online classes and became unreachable. Never mind school is a place for them to be in a relatively more healthy and positive environment for socialization, access to free school lunches, etc.

I think remote school for children and teens is going to remain seen as a niche option that only works for students with certain qualities and families that treat it as a form of hybrid home-schooling and have the resources and motivation to actually do it.

Now, what might be interesting would be an 'inverted' class which is both in person and remote. Students would attend a physical classroom in person every day of the week and participate in learning activities led by aides or assistant teachers, so not just sit at a desk in front of a screen with a room monitor doing nothing. But the main lecture component and some of the questions and answers and engagement would be remote. This would lower costs and might work for community colleges but not fond of the idea for normal schools.

Another thought is that student-teacher ratios would stay the same, the student would directly be taught by the teacher while sitting at a desk in an actual school, but the teacher is located somewhere else and the class is a video conference. This would allow one teacher to teach classes across multiple campuses without having to drive back and forth. This would be especially useful for rural education. Small rural schools, especially economically disadvantaged ones, typically struggle to offer more advanced classes. There might be only 2 or 3 students who are ready to take calculus for example and there is no way for the school to pay for a teacher just for them. But you could put those 2 or 3 students into a room with an aide and then they could join up online with the other 2 or 3 students at 10 other small schools just like theirs and have a class led by a teacher who is at home or in an AV room at a different school they teach in-person at during other times of the day but 100 miles away.

Alternatively, it would allow students to be micro-sorted into courses that match their exact level of need and ability. Currently that's not possible for the same reason a rural school cant' teach AP calc, there wouldn't be enough kids to economically justify a course be created. Because that can't be done, we just fail struggling kids who don't master the last 3/4 of a class they've been in all year and make them retake the same class over and over again, which is a waste of time and effort and sets the kids back. Or we advance/graduate them and they don't meet standards. Either way not a good result.

What changes things is scale. If you had enough students in a school, even the smallest category in the groups sorted by ability would be large enough to reach the economical 25 to 1 or so student:teacher ratio. If classroom instruction was conducted through video conferencing remotely, then several physical school campuses could be functionally combined into one massive virtual school with like 10,000 pupils without needing to bus every kid tens of miles to a college-sized campus.

Again, a school like this would still have physical classrooms containing aides and assistants and participate in hands on learning, student teacher ratios would be the same, and there would still some traditional classes with the teacher standing there. Teachers could travel around occasionally to meet all their pupils at least once and there could be open house events for parents to get to know them at central locations. Ideally these virtual school systems would be regional rather than nationwide. And there would be activities and measures designed to create a community inside this school like football and pep rallies. None of that would be lost. It would just be that instead of the teacher standing there they may be at a different school miles away, and most of the time that would not be a big deal.

Last edited by llamaorama; Oct 8, 2022 at 7:20 PM.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 7:40 PM
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As a result North Texas just seems to have more responsive local government and a better quality of life. Maybe it's unfortunate how this came about, but in the present day it's a strength.
I think Houston's issues lie more with socioeconomics and its history as a transient boom-bust town than city limits which no doubt plays a part. Kingwood is still angry about annexation after 25 years but I don't think things would be all that different if the city of Houston were a 1/3 its land area and boxed in by other municipalities. Lots of cities up north and in the south have similar issues with those dynamics.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 7:55 PM
llamaorama llamaorama is offline
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I think Houston's issues lie more with socioeconomics and its history as a transient boom-bust town than city limits which no doubt plays a part. Kingwood is still angry about annexation after 25 years but I don't think things would be all that different if the city of Houston were a 1/3 its land area and boxed in by other municipalities. Lots of cities up north and in the south have similar issues with those dynamics.
Yes and no. I think places like Kingwood would be the same, but not East Aldine/Little York or parts of near-Humble or the zone of soul sucking ugliness around Greenspoint and IAH. My job was scattered around that area with multiple facilities.

East Aldine improvement district was created because until the 1990s there were people that didn't have indoor plumbing there. Pine Village Condominiums at Aldine Mail Route and 59 behind Jeb's hardware was taken over by outside investors and overrun with gangs and only some of the buildings are occupiable while others are burnt shells. Dyersdale, Mt Houston, etc, all have flooding issues and are being gradually cleared and abandoned.

I hate to talk bad about them, by my old employer wouldn't have been caught dead running the paint line evaporator overnight, or letting their material yard catch on fire, if they were in a city.

In some alternate universe, if that area had responsible municipal government, then there wouldn't be so much blight due to low land values. The affordable housing would still exist, but code enforcement would have prevented slumlords from trashing it. Here in Fort Worth our equivalent to Gulfton or Sharpstown is Las Vegas Trail. But Fort Worth has a dedicated detachment of inspectors who fine the ever loving shit out apartment properties that fall apart and there is a community center, a police substation, etc. And there isn't that much crime, I can go to Little Caesar's at 9 pm it's fine. There wouldn't pit bull mixes roaming around, there wouldn't be car-eating ditches with piles of dumped garbage along that road either. There would have been investment in levees and permits needed to add impervious ground cover, so instead of the downstream Homestead Rd. area paying the price for Spring's unchecked growth, Spring would just have more retention ponds.

And then there are little things. Here in DFW all the otherwise working class suburbs still have nice stuff. You see walking trails and elaborate public libraries and playgrounds and indoor aquatic centers and in some areas they buried the power lines and there are no billboards, etc. It's hard to quantify and depending on your political views these things might be wasteful. But it's just a whole different vibe.

And housing in DFW isn't necessarily less affordable that Houston, there's still some dirty cheap poor areas of DFW too.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 8:23 PM
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Yes and no. I think places like Kingwood would be the same, but not East Aldine/Little York or parts of near-Humble or the zone of soul sucking ugliness around Greenspoint and IAH.[/B] My job was scattered around that area with multiple facilities.

East Aldine improvement district was created because until the 1990s there were people that didn't have indoor plumbing there. Pine Village Condominiums at Aldine Mail Route and 59 behind Jeb's hardware was taken over by outside investors and overrun with gangs and only some of the buildings are occupiable while others are burnt shells. Dyersdale, Mt Houston, etc, all have flooding issues and are being gradually cleared and abandoned.

I hate to talk bad about them, by my old employer wouldn't have been caught dead running the paint line evaporator overnight, or letting their material yard catch on fire, if they were in a city.

In some alternate universe, if that area had responsible municipal government, then there wouldn't be so much blight due to low land values. The affordable housing would still exist, but code enforcement would have prevented slumlords from trashing it. There wouldn't pit bull mixes roaming around, there wouldn't be car-eating ditches along that road either. There would have been investment in levees and permits needed to add impervious ground cover, so instead of the downstream Homestead Rd. area paying the price for Spring's unchecked growth, Spring would just have more retention ponds.

And then there are little things. Here in DFW all the otherwise working class suburbs still have nice stuff. You see walking trails and elaborate public libraries and playgrounds and indoor aquatic centers and in some areas they buried the power lines and there are no billboards, etc. It's hard to quantify and depending on your political views these things might be wasteful. But it's just a whole different vibe.

And housing in DFW isn't necessarily less affordable that Houston, there's still some dirty cheap poor areas of DFW too.
Mostly agree but I disagree a bit with your perception of Houston's overall working class neighborhoods. The area of Houston bounded by 610, Beltway 8, 290, and 59 is probably some of largest continuous extreme poverty in the country. I think Houston probably has some of the worst poverty for any major sunbelt city. However, there are similarly working class neighborhoods with nice stuff, minus the buried powerlines and garages in the front.

NW/N Houston should form it's own city and name it Cypress-Springs, could probably top 750,000 and become like a budding Tarrant County.

I think DFW median home price is about 100k more now.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 8:42 PM
llamaorama llamaorama is offline
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In my alternate history scenario, Houston would be mostly the same size but aside from IAH it would not have any satellite blobs attached to skinny fingers. These skinny fingers of annexation suck up sales tax revenue from Willowbrook and Baybrook Mall but also in Texas there is something called an ETJ which extends out in a buffer a few miles from a city boundary and annexation into it requires approval of the other city. This fractures and creates barriers to other cities in Harris Country from forming or growing.

Humble would be a ~250,000 person city if it was allowed to annex Atascocita and Kingwood in the 1970s and not be boxed in by Houston.

Aldine was in the 1940s a town with a street grid that is almost entirely gone now at the intersection of Aldine Bender and the Hardy Toll Road. It had a school district too. If the COH didn't grow north as much it would have likely incorporated. Beltway 8 and 45 was going to happen regardless and it would have capitalized on that.

Spring would have incorporated towards the east of 45. And by posing a threat to the The Woodlands, that place would have probably elected to be some kind of local government entity like a township or model itself after the Memorial Villages.

There would have been a city of Klein, but going off history it wouldn't be in the area we call Klein today but rather further down 249 and Fallbrook inside the Beltway where the rural community it took its name from was actually centered.

Alief was moving towards incorporation IIRC before it got annexed.

Spring Branch would also be it's own city which was a narrowly defeated referendum item in the 1970s IIRC.

Missouri City would have all of what is now Houston in Fort Bend County.

Jersey Village would be substantially larger.

On the east side I think Channelview would have incorporated as a city if a fragment of Houston around the Jacintoport complex wasn't in the way.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 8:42 PM
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Originally Posted by llamaorama View Post
Yes and no. I think places like Kingwood would be the same, but not East Aldine/Little York or parts of near-Humble or the zone of soul sucking ugliness around Greenspoint and IAH. My job was scattered around that area with multiple facilities.

East Aldine improvement district was created because until the 1990s there were people that didn't have indoor plumbing there. Pine Village Condominiums at Aldine Mail Route and 59 behind Jeb's hardware was taken over by outside investors and overrun with gangs and only some of the buildings are occupiable while others are burnt shells. Dyersdale, Mt Houston, etc, all have flooding issues and are being gradually cleared and abandoned.

I hate to talk bad about them, by my old employer wouldn't have been caught dead running the paint line evaporator overnight, or letting their material yard catch on fire, if they were in a city.

In some alternate universe, if that area had responsible municipal government, then there wouldn't be so much blight due to low land values. The affordable housing would still exist, but code enforcement would have prevented slumlords from trashing it. Here in Fort Worth our equivalent to Gulfton or Sharpstown is Las Vegas Trail. But Fort Worth has a dedicated detachment of inspectors who fine the ever loving shit out apartment properties that fall apart and there is a community center, a police substation, etc. And there isn't that much crime, I can go to Little Caesar's at 9 pm it's fine. There wouldn't pit bull mixes roaming around, there wouldn't be car-eating ditches with piles of dumped garbage along that road either. There would have been investment in levees and permits needed to add impervious ground cover, so instead of the downstream Homestead Rd. area paying the price for Spring's unchecked growth, Spring would just have more retention ponds.

And then there are little things. Here in DFW all the otherwise working class suburbs still have nice stuff. You see walking trails and elaborate public libraries and playgrounds and indoor aquatic centers and in some areas they buried the power lines and there are no billboards, etc. It's hard to quantify and depending on your political views these things might be wasteful. But it's just a whole different vibe.

And housing in DFW isn't necessarily less affordable that Houston, there's still some dirty cheap poor areas of DFW too.
Sounds like I’m glad Houston annexed it.
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 9:01 PM
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Old Posted Oct 8, 2022, 9:14 PM
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Mostly agree but I disagree a bit with your perception of Houston's overall working class neighborhoods. The area of Houston bounded by 610, Beltway 8, 290, and 59 is probably some of largest continuous extreme poverty in the country. I think Houston probably has some of the worst poverty for any major sunbelt city. However, there are similarly working class neighborhoods with nice stuff, minus the buried powerlines and garages in the front.

NW/N Houston should form it's own city and name it Cypress-Springs, could probably top 750,000 and become like a budding Tarrant County.

I think DFW median home price is about 100k more now.
Houston has so much poverty and bombed out areas that are so cheap that it does skew the the overall median housing prices down. Where people actually want has become expensive. Other big TX have this but far less overall. Houston has some significant issues in this regard. I watched it get much worse in the 25 I've been there.
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Old Posted Oct 9, 2022, 3:39 PM
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Houston has so much poverty and bombed out areas that are so cheap that it does skew the the overall median housing prices down. Where people actually want has become expensive. Other big TX have this but far less overall. Houston has some significant issues in this regard. I watched it get much worse in the 25 I've been there.
I don't disagree to an extent. Your neck of the woods in NE Houston has some of the worst bombed out, desolate inner ring "suburbs". Pretty much the entire middle of North, Northeast, and East Houston is blighted, extreme poverty. However, the other half of Houston is a different story as there's been some real progress. I usually roam around West Houston/Central Houston.

Kingwood/Atascocita is still pretty isolated out there. I somewhat recently went out to Summerwood, pretty nice MPC. Some good potential along BW8 with all those tall pines. I probably haven't been out that way in about 10 years.
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Old Posted Oct 9, 2022, 7:44 PM
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I don't disagree to an extent. Your neck of the woods in NE Houston has some of the worst bombed out, desolate inner ring "suburbs". Pretty much the entire middle of North, Northeast, and East Houston is blighted, extreme poverty. However, the other half of Houston is a different story as there's been some real progress. I usually roam around West Houston/Central Houston.

Kingwood/Atascocita is still pretty isolated out there. I somewhat recently went out to Summerwood, pretty nice MPC. Some good potential along BW8 with all those tall pines. I probably haven't been out that way in about 10 years.
Yea, I am glad Kingwood is separated by the San Jacinto River and relatively isolated though I do think Kingwood will have some issues of its own over the next 10-15 years,
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Old Posted Oct 9, 2022, 11:12 PM
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San Antonio is horrible with this lol. I've always said the north side outside of 410 between I-10 and 35 should be its own city. At the very least Stone Oak should be.
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Old Posted Oct 10, 2022, 10:11 AM
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Originally Posted by eschaton View Post
Just curious about the opinions here on the subject of when to consider, and not to consider, city limits.

When making comparisons across metropolitan areas, I personally absolutely believe city limits should be ignored. Many Sun Belt cities are essentially unconstrained in their ability to snap up unincorporated county land (some non Sun Belt cities as well, like Columbus). Hence when you look at just city population, it can make a city seem quite substantial...until you discover it's really something like Jacksonville (a mid-sized metro which happens to have a city-county merger at its core).
But then you have other situations in the Sun Belt such as where the state governments of both Carolinas are openly hostile to the very existence of cities and forbid them from expanding their borders, except under very specific circumstances that usually bring in commercial properties but almost never residential ones. That's how you end up with Greenville, with a population of almost 71,000 anchoring an urban area of more than 400,000 people. Add Spartanburg with its population 39,000 and its urban area of about 181,000 to the mix, and, with the other handful of incorporated towns and their suburbs in between Greenville and Spartanburg, that's how you get a contiguous urban area of about 928,000 anchored by "towns" whose population on paper isn't at all impressive. On the ground this takes the form of you being able to tell when you're inside the city limits because all of a sudden the landscaping and architectural standards get better, and there's more art. There used to be a big strip mall on the north side of Greenville that was half in, and half out, of the city and you could clearly see the line of demarcation. The side inside the city and subject to its standards looked much nicer, was better-maintained, and had trees and bushes planted in regularly-spaced planting wells all across the parking lot. The side that was just subject to the county's rules was a barren plain of cracked asphalt and nothing else.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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