TEXAS-STYLE URBANISM WOOING MILLIONS TO LONE STAR STATE
They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and now it appears that economic opportunity falls into that category. Texas cities are attracting millions from around the U.S. and the world with the promise of decent-paying jobs, affordable homes and entrepreneurial opportunity, according to a new study.
"The Texas Way of Urbanism," a new report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (COU), a Houston, Texas based think tank, details the rise of Texas cities. The Lone Star state's major urban areas provide unprecedented upward mobility, eclipsing the great cities of the coasts, it says. Among the report's findings:
• While many urban pundits look to places like New York, San Francisco and Portlandas future models for American cities, the large urban areas that have added the most jobs and people since 2000 are overwhelmingly in Texas.
• Most U.S. cities are more like Texas cities - dispersed, reasonably priced, liberally regulated - than like older cities on the coasts. Urban policies that worked for the great cities of the past aren't necessarily going to work for the great cities of the present and future.
• Urban policy should be defined not by one approach, particularly one cooked in D.C., but by bottom up strategies reflecting the basic DNA of our very diverse regions.
The success of Texas cities depends on the prosperity not just of the rich but the middle and working class residents who are now flocking there. Soaring housing prices and stagnant job growth are driving middle class families out of the coastal “glamour cities.”
“Texas attracts investors, entrepreneurs, researchers, inventors, and workers who recognize a state committed to reducing barriers to economic success and to creating the financial, educational, and physical conditions for growth and upward mobility,” observes Henry Cisneros, former Housing and Urban Development secretary under the Clinton administration, an author of the report.
