Hurricane Harvey Should Have Taught Houston To Rethink How We Grow. We Haven’t Listened. When it hit five years ago this week, Hurricane Harvey was an unprecedented disaster: 68 people dead, 200,000 homes damaged or destroyed, a half-million cars wiped out, $125 billion in damage. But Harvey also held the potential to change the trajectory of the Houston region so that it would be…

Admit It, Austin — Willie Belongs to Houston Too (At Least Partly) I’m going to start traveling back and forth between Houston and Austin this week for work, which means that once I have to confront the most existential Texas question of all: What music do I listen to while traveling through Columbus, La Grange, and Bastrop? And do I listen to…

Our recent bout with inflation brings to my mind the struggle everybody had understanding inflation the last time it afflicted our country — back in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Inflation was much worse for much longer back then — mortgage rates briefly hit 20% in the early ’80s…

There are few more powerful questions than, “Where are you from” or “Where do you live?” People feel intensely connected to cities as places and to other people who feel that same connection. In other words, people tend to understand and experience place very personally. Yet to understand place —…

As the name of my new book of essays, Place And Prosperity, suggests, I have always believed that place and prosperity are deeply intertwined. A city or town probably won’t be prosperous unless it has lots of place amenities — things that draw people to the location like parks, good…

I am on the edge. Not emotionally or psychologically — although this could be the case — but literally, physically, spatially, geographically. As I write this, I am sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Miami Beach, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Behind me is the whole State of…

I got back on the bus yesterday. And it was fine. It had been 13 months since I road a bus or a train. Ironically — or, to be more accurate, dangerously — the last time I rode on a public transit vehicle was a New York City subway from…

More than 60 years ago, my parents and other townspeople in the small factory city of Auburn, New York, went down to the local ballpark and removed rocks from the field so the town could have a baseball team in the Class A New York-Pennsylvania League. Since then, major-league affiliations…

Sitting here in central Houston this week, with no water, spotty internet, and the looming fear that we would lose power and heat, I kept thinking about John Snow. John Snow, for those of you who aren’t up on your urban history, was the guy who solved the mystery of…