Peakster -
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peakster
I went to an urban planning seminar in my first year university and remember someone saying that Texas has some of the most expansive suburban sprawl in the USA. I wonder what makes it that way? Is it just a huge population and people are more choosy to where they live?
|
In LA I took an urban planning course in the mid 1980's. The professor stated that in every city, there is a fundamental "force", aka the main economic engine that shapes the urban environment. For example, Pittsburgh would have been steel, NYC would be Wall Street, Dallas would be oil, and for LA, it has always been real estate (Hollywood came later).
Segway ... People like to jump up and down and say how LA used to have the best public transportation system in the USA, and that is true, But! The trolley car systems were originally created in order to facilitate sale of real estate. They were created with bonds in order to be able to sell the previously worthless land that they led to. Real estate brokers would use access to the "Modern Trolley Car" as part of their ad campaign. Then they were pawned off on people (suckers) that would try to run them for profit. The problem was, the debt load of the bond was such that it was impossible to ever make a profit. Since the trolley car line was not built with the intent to be profitable, it was "pre-doomed" from the start. The oil companies did help "push" the trolley cars to their doom, but they were always easy prey, and probably would have gone extinct anyway.
Now, what does this mean for LA? Since the force of real estate wants to sell LAND, sprawl is inevitable. To keep the engine going, you need more land. To get more land, you need to go farther out. To go farther out, you need to commute farther in. Quid pro
go.
In Texas, what would be the main economic force? In my opinion that would be big oil. I would think that in Texas, "cheap oil" would have been a birthright assumption of urban planning.
CarloSW2