Harvard economist lauds Houston's "urban growth machine"

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has a fascinating op-ed in the New York Sun today (apparently a shortened version of a forthcoming City Journal article) that compares earnings and cost of living in New York and Houston and concludes that Houston has some significant strengths:

Houston's success shows that a relatively deregulated free-market city, with a powerful urban growth machine, can do a much better job of taking care of middle-income Americans than the more "progressive" big governments of the Northeast and the West Coast.

The right response to Houston's growth is not to stymie it through regulation that would make the city less affordable. It's for other areas, New York included, to cut construction costs and start beating the Sunbelt at its own game.

Isn't it interesting how so many Houston elites are in hot pursuit of the "world classness" of other cities, at precisely the time that elites in some of those cities are beginning to give Houston its due?

BLOGVERSATION: Chron Houston Politics, Lone Star Times.

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 07/16/08 10:22 PM | Houston Miscellany | Technorati | Sphere | Comments (8)

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