America’s urban experimenters continue to innovate, and growth-minded cities are attracting residents.
Houston is renowned for being the only major American city without zoning. To the chagrin of die-hard believers in zoning’s necessity, Houston proves that you can have a successful, affordable city without it. Yet, counter to those who believe that zoning is at the root of most of America’s urban ills, the city also shows its absence does not make a city that different from its peers. Looking at a variety of metrics on housing affordability, one can see how Houston does well but not too dissimilarly from other middle American cities.
The Houston model has several distinct features that should be more widely emulated by cities whose housing markets have been strangled by land use regulations, but it is one of many worthwhile urban housing models throughout the center of the US that provide lessons that should be emulated.
Perhaps the best measure of housing affordability is the median house price to median income ratio. The median Houston metropolitan house now costs 4.7 times the area’s median income, which makes Houston one of the more affordable growing cities in America (ignoring those declining or stagnant cities, such as Detroit, where low demand keeps housing prices low). Yet Houston is still slightly more expensive than other growing cities such as Oklahoma City (3.6) and Atlanta (4.5).
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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