Plenty of us smart-aleck Dallasites, if we try, can work up a crush on hustling Houston, where the air-leave aside the suffocating humidity-has the tang of freedom.
Houston’s historic refusal to direct growth patterns through regulation of private property rights isn’t the only factor in the city’s rise to eminence and success. It hasn’t exactly retarded that rise, either.
Zoning-less Houston leaves it mostly to the marketplace-a/k/a people, doing what people do-to figure out local needs and ways of meeting said needs. Everybody, under the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, has voice in the matter. Yet no central authority, squinting down from Mount Olympus, compels and enforces.
You’re right probably to wonder how much longer the nation’s fourth most populous city can get away with such a generally sensible approach to development.
The state as a whole, and Houston in particular, confront calls to limit or narrow property rights in the interest, supposedly, of the larger good. That a larger good may exist, metaphysically speaking, isn’t the issue here. It’s whether private property rights aren’t part of that “good”-and whether, consequently, they don’t deserve the most scrupulous protection available in a democracy.
At the Legislature, a House committee, responsive to an interim charge from the Speaker, is examining the “effectiveness” of a 1995 law meant to protect property rights but weakened since then by judicial decisions (and too-general language).
Not that Houston voters have had a conversion experience. Yet various political and business leaders are plugging a plan that would let local government-without seeking voter confirmation, as mandated by the city charter-impose development restrictions that could be accused of first cousinship to zoning.
A University of Houston study last March suggested that nearly two thirds of Harris Countians think land-use planning could be a good idea, whereas more than half favor outright zoning. “This is just a city out of control,” says one resident who frets, as do other neighbors, about plans for building a twin-towered, 23-story luxury condominium near comparatively bucolic Rice University.
Well, let’s think. Far be it for a Dallas smart aleck-whose city, heaven knows, has its own problems – to advise non-Dallasites how they should live and move and have their being. Assuming they’d listen in the first place. A set of considerations emerges nonetheless from the intellectual murk. Foremost is the consideration that freedom works better than constraint and all-knowing supervision. I didn’t say, works perfectly. I said, works better, and-yes-for the broader interest. How so?
Consider other states and cities that have gone into the planning business. By the estimate of a University of Washington economics professor the state’s Growth Management Act, which regulates home-building sites, has driven Seattle house prices $200,000 higher than they otherwise would have been. Thanks, folks.
Try heavily regulated San Francisco, where home prices in February, subprime mortgage crisis or not, were 75 percent above the levels of 2000. Try rent-controlled New York City, where a 600-square-foot apartment can sell for half a million big ones. Try New Orleans, whose tentative comeback, as Nicole Gelinas shows us in City Journal, is due to private initiative that didn’t wait for deskbound bureaucrats to make their minds up as to what needed doing-and, of course, how to get it done.
One sees Texas getting to this point…never. (If Texans were as dumb as some of their fellow Americans allege, they’d live in New York, not Houston or Dallas.) Time, nevertheless, to put out some warning flags. Hurricanes swell up from squalls, earthquakes from growls in the earth.
Provided we get the basic principle right-which is that private judgment in economic matters affords flexibility, creativity, and a kind of backyard wisdom generally unavailable to government planners, and that less planning gets the job done faster and better than strangulation by decree-we’ll be all right. Not exactly for the first time in Texas history.
William Murchison is a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.