Does Houston's large size account for its large population? (San Antonio: sales, find a job)

[HtownLove]

Originally Posted by glorplaxy

What are you talking about? Montrose was its own city and Houston annexed it...same with the Heights, River Oaks, West U, the Rice area, my neighborhood that is close to downtown and all the neighborhoods around it, etc etc. The city of Houston was pretty much nothing but downtown when it was founded, so to say that the cities it annexed had a negligible contribution to the growth of the city is just flat out false. Houston would be incredibly different today if it had never annexed all of the little towns surrounding what is downtown today.

Montrose, River Oaks and Heights were definately not cities.

West U was and still is its own city. The Rice area was never a city.

Towns Houston annexed were towns like Kingwood and stuff. The bulk of areas it annexed were empty land

[jfre81]

Houston Heights was indeed its own city and was annexed into Houston in 1918. The building that last served as its city hall is still standing. It and Montrose were once suburbs, linked to the city not with freeways but streetcar lines.

[tstone]

It's a Texas thing.

The other large cities in Texas did the land grab as well, just to a slightly lesser extent.

[HtownLove]

Oh yeah, I forgot that the Heights was a streetcar suburb.

[stoneclaw]

Houston grew primarily because of the oil boom in the 20th century. People act like those small towns it annexed really had merit. They were tiny towns before Houston annexed it to increase its tax base.

How could Montrose, Heights, and others ever have been their own cities when they're a stone's throw away from downtown? I'm going to have to research that jfre81 because I've never heard that before? Even if they were their own city and Houston annexed them, they belonged as part of the city limits, which is no different than how other cities are structured. Other cities are not only limited to their downtowns, why couldn't Houston have annexed those nearby areas?

[jfre81]

Nobody's saying Houston couldn't. It did. But yes, Houston Heights was at one point its own municipality.

This is not different or unique in any way. LA did the same thing and its city limits are >500 square miles. Brooklyn and the Bronx were once separate from NYC. In fact, here's a link to all former municipalities now part of NYC. I'm really not even sure what we're discussing here.

[buzzpost]

It spread out because it could. Houston, like all other cities in the sunbelt and outside of the older cities (pre 1800s that were well established), grew outward because it could.

[SouthmoreAve]

My point is not that the only reason Houston has a large population is because it ecompasses a large area, but that large area fluffs Houston's population quite a bit, the most of any major city.

Houston can grow to be the largest city in the US, it won't, but it could because it has so much land area. The same could NOT be said about cities like San Francisco,Boston, etc. So when Houston passes cities like Chicago, or when it passed Philadelphia, part of why people think Houston somewhat just cheated its way into that population ranking,is by having the largest land area of any major city. It really doesn't matter, but what you don't seem to grasp is that you act like the fact that Houston takes up 579 sq. miles of land did not help the city become 4th largest city in the nation.

No OKC,Jacksonville,etc are not major cities. I didn't vote in the poll if that means anything.

[jfre81]

Why is the population ranking such a big deal? The metropolitan/urban area rankings are more accurate anyway, so San Francisco, Boston etc. are still near the top.

And have you seen what some other world cities' total land areas are? Guess what London's is.....about 600 square miles. No ****. Or how about Sydney, with its 4.5-ish million over 4,689 square miles?

[crone]

Southside Place, West University Bellaire and other towns got surrounded but not absorbed by COH. The small cities go to HISD hence the belief that they are in Houston. Houston grew because of cheap housing that was enabled by water districts. When what is now Exxon came to Houston in 1961 those employees thought they had died and gone to heaven when seeing housing prices. The builders, surprised at the response, up the prices. Everyboby was thrilled. Most other cities provide utilities to new development, thus having control where development occurs. Any developer in Texas who thought he could sell lots needed only to stick a pipe in the ground to get water. He could put in a sewage treatment plant, pipe the effluent to the nearest creek and have his subdivision. He had only to answer to the state regarding dumping crap into the creek. The State usually did not care. John Hill, the Texas Attorney General decided that the COH could not dump raw sewage into Galveston Bay and issued an injunction requiring the COH to stop any new development until they could provide treatment plants. That coincided with the huge jump in development in Harris County in the late 70's. It has never stopped. Neither has the dumping of raw sewage into creeks, Lake Houston and Galveston Bay.