How Houston Can Maintain Prosperity By Focusing On 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 schools, restaurants and stores, cultural institutions, walkable neighborhoods. And a city or town probably can’t afford all those amenities unless it is prosperous.

And throughout my life, I’ve tried to seek out strong places, often in search of my own prosperity. My hometown in Upstate New York had a very strong sense of place, but larger economic forces limited opportunity for me. I lived in high-amenity locations in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. In Ventura, California, I found a location that provided me with both a sense of place and access to prosperity for 25 years. In San Diego, I lived in Little Italy — one of the most compelling urban places anywhere in the country.

Then I moved to Houston.

If ever there was a city that seemed to undermine the idea that place and prosperity are intertwined, it is Houston. Throughout almost all of the city’s history, prosperity has not been a problem — even when, as during the Depression, it’s been a problem for the rest of the country. As my colleague Steve Klineberg is fond of saying, the line on Houston was, “You could dress a gorilla up in a suit, send him downtown, and he’ll be a millionaire in a week.”