March 14, 2024
driving through Houston is bleak. my daily drive to work involves leaving the one walkable area inside the loop (Montrose), driving north through the heights, careening west onto I10, sitting in traffic as clueless drivers attempt to pass each other at the last possible moment to extract precious seconds from their commute, taking a brief detour north onto 610, then on the state highway northwest to Austin, passing billboards screaming “meat is murder”, “get tested for hiv today”, “naloxone clinic”, “gun show”, and a particularly heinous billboard for spec’s liquor which says “we hate adulting too”. i exit after passing multiple toll roads which offer the ability to get somewhere faster by a few minutes, though only barely as the other sluggish cars choose to try their luck. from above Houston seems as a series of pipes slowly filling, pressure ramping up and down twice a day; the purpose of the city to accommodate ten million cars a day.
the value of the city is premised on an access to energy. first, Houston was a port. as oil was found at spindletop, it boomed, sending and receiving energy-rich fuel. now, with the recent advances in fracking, it is again poised to become a major natural gas exporter (though hampered by poor policies on the federal level). millions of scfs available for trade daily as the channels grow thick with ships, refineries lining the coasts, building-sized vents with sodium lights shining at night, the occasional flare lighting the swamps around it, organics spewing into the sky, poisoning those on the coast and especially a crescent between baton rouge and new orleans. the gulf and Mississippi light up in sickly yellow when you check cancer rates by country, second to the Appalachians where the previous beneficiaries of energy profit from a similar unchecked growth.
Houston is in a line of sunbelt cities which should not be habitable. it is above 100F often in the summers, with high humidity reducing the rate of evaporative body cooling to near-zero. that which the city produces makes the situation that much worse and to compensate, a/c units must run longer and draw more power; cars work harder to exchange their heat with the environment; residents hole up and avoid the fact that the city wasn’t meant to be habitable for people.
at night the concrete sprawl releases its pent-up heat. Houston itself suffers from a sort of cancer, an unchecked growth outward such that its former suburbs are now as part of the city as downtown, of which Houston now has multiple. at one point this freewheeling sprawl and the promise of jobs made Houston enticing for poorer people hoping to make a steady living in manufacturing, new immigrants looking for opportunity, businesses relocating to make a profit off this growth and their employees with them. and with them came children born into this metastasis who now inecessantly defend the city, not realizing that the culture they attempt to defend is not enabled by their location, but incidental to it, and that the city will consume that too as the universalizing culture eats everything they hold dear as successive waves move outward for cheaper housing and longer commutes and opportunity.
Houstonian culture is mostly incidental to location as it is transplanted to the city. prior to the waves of growth that now define it, Houston had three cultures: a richer old-money culture which now has moved to gated communities, suburbs, or river oaks, who’s opinions on busing motivated these relocations; a small Tejano substrate which has now grown and intermingled with later waves of Mexican immigration; and African-americans who descend from the horrors of the south that have not truly been repaid as Houston seeks to underrepresent them again and again. all other cultures are more recent.
even in such a structure which encourages individualism, culture and people sprout through the cracks. bahn mi restaurants, diy venues, taco trucks, community centers, reading groups, running clubs, all grow in an inhospitable environment. harris county is six times larger than it was in 1950. with it the culture which once defined it has fallen to the wayside as with all other cities in the sunbelt.
the city, county, and suburbs are still growing at a breakneck pace, houses with finger-jointed studs flying up, farmland paved over and floodplains filled, all the while Houston produces more and more energy, still oil, but now wind and solar as renewables find their way to Texas. ten million people, billions of dollars, all in the way of a future katrina which will clear the city off the map leaving a ring of suburbs around a hollowed city. the platonic ideal of urban planning.