We all know San Francisco is totes terrif and all, but did you also know that, going forward, the Bay Area’s main rival for America’s Greatest #2 City After New York is going to be Houston?
The Daily Beast thinks so, and lays out the reasons why Chicago and LA are declining, and the evidence for Houston as the stealth challenger. Ultimately, it’s all about energy, with Houston dominating fossil fuels and the Bay Area conquering renewables.
You should always glare at these sorts of things with a smoldering skepticism that verges on the evil eye, because the methodologies are usually abstract and bloodless: Do you really quantify a city’s livability or success by the number of corporate headquarters? But it turns out that the Bay’s inequality and unaffordability are really crushing us.
Meanwhile, Houston, the fourth most populous city in the US is getting bigger, fast, and people can actually raise kids there. The Texas city outgrew two loop highways, so they’re building a third. (This is quite a contrast to the anti-freeway Bay Area, but considering how hard it is for us to get bus-only lanes on Van Ness, hats off.)
Still, something about Houston just doesn’t pass the smell test. Yes, they have a lesbian mayor, the Rothko Chapel, a museum district, and a lot of mid-century modern homes. It’s not only affordable and diverse, but Houston’s housing segregation is actually diminishing. (Well done!) But isn’t it just an air-conditioned, swampland with no zoning? Isn’t Houston, well, incredibly hideous? (Can you imagine the NIMBY synapses exploding if a mid-rise skyscraper went up on one side of a pre-1906 Victorian, and an evangelical megachurch on the other?) And most importantly, should a city really stake its future prosperity on oil refineries?
In a weird way, though, we should all be cheering for Houston to be awesome. If Houston does in fact become super cool, then, as the largest city in the Lone Star State, it could help Texas turn blue. As far as dethroning San Francisco, I’m not going to lose sleep over it – particularly because here I can sleep with the window open without letting every last species of bug in.
[Via: Daily Beast; image via Thinkstock]