Will migration change Texas

Daily Beast:
...
One state that has always tried to dissolve this conflict is Texas, as illustrated by Richard Parker’s beautiful new book Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America. Texas has always had a sense of place—that is why we are told not to mess with it. Texas has also started to become an engine of economic growth. The limitations of Texas’s attempt to combine being somewhere and being successful are apparent in Parker’s gripping story, and suggest that there is still space for new places to attempt new ways to combine place and possibility.
...
Texas offers not just place to its actual or potential new residents, but professional possibilities. It has added more than two and a half many times as many jobs since 2008 as has New York City. The energy economy has always been a fixture of Texas life, and that has not changed. A majority of the world’s major oil services companies are based on Houston. It is not just energy fueling the Texas explosion. Houston has the largest medical center in the world, and the largest export port in the entire country.

The result is that people are flocking to Texas. Since 2000, Houston has increased its population by about 35 percent, between 5 and 9 times as much as the other major metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
...
There is much more.

How did Houston grow so large?  It did "strip" annexation down major highways which gave it estra territorial control over development within several miles on either side of the strip.  If a developer wanted to build houses or manufacturing facilities the city got to approve of the development and had the right to annex the area which it usually did after the property values justified the move.  The other part was it developed an atmosphere that attracted jobs and people as did many other areas of Texas.

The growth around Austin has been equally dramatic.  The metropolitan area now stretches from Georgetown in the North to San Antonio in the south overwhelming what were many small towns.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more