Judge Hidalgo announces $2.6 million program to fight crime in unincorporated areas of Harris County

[LocalPlanner]

Originally Posted by Dopo

So … land for schools shouldn’t be purchased until the demand requires it and the land cost 10 times more?

In many cases, developers work with the districts to identify and reserve school sites when the site is being planned.

[DabOnEm]

Originally Posted by LocalPlanner

Those of you pining for "planning" seem to mean zoning, where elected officials / bureaucrats think they should decide what land uses go where. That's unambiguously bad in most cases; the market should decide on uses and density. And you don't need zoning to plan for connectivity and streets, urban design standards, and other planning features. Houston already has the power to do those things in its ETJ. I would agree that the City could do a better job at those things. But, you don't need to incorporate to do that.

And sorry, but I don't see Collin County as that dramatically different from unincorporated Harris County except that it just is a consistently bigger mass of affluent population, which is not necessarily desirable, because lower-paid workers also need places to live in proximity to their jobs.

Zoning is not a bad thing considering that's what most places do. I'm all for the city being how it is but the unincorporated areas should have been built different. The city needs to do a MUCH MUCH better job in its ETJ. When you look at unincorporated Harris vs other areas, it is really not a comparison. The equivalent parts of Harris County, let's say Greater Spring and Garland, are stark IMO. And it's like this for most of unincorporated Harris vs an incorporated equivalent, and we're using DFW since it's most similar to Houston and the biggest competition. There are several things I think you're missing that cities can do. And it's not that unincorp Harris is a bad place to live but there's a reason MPCs there are so popular. People want that resemblance of being in a city. They like the planning and MPCs tend to have better sheriff patrol.

As far as Collin County and its similarities to unincorporated Harris, we can agree to disagree there. I was actually just in DFW and the side which resembles Houston most in a few ways is the Fort Worth side. I have a friend that lives in North Fort Worth and when I went through there it reminded me of how unincorporated Houston is built, and it makes sense because that part of FW was unincorporated for a while before Fort Worth started to fully annex it in the 90s.

The part I do agree with you on is the housing for service workers. Collin County had a problem with this but has built more apartments and low income housing (particularly in McKinney). Plus Houston wouldn't have this issue even if the unincorporated areas were incorporated because it's not built like DFW. Houston has the major employment and cultural centers whereas DFW has always been more multi-nodal due to Dallas and Fort Worth. Incorporating Harris would have given it a better look even if it a lot of it would have just looked like H-E-B (Hurst-Euless-Bedford).

On that note why do I feel like the state uses Houston as a testing market before spreading the idea to the rest of the state? Houston had the first tollway in the middle of the freeway in the state and it was grand when it opened. Then years later DFW gets the same thing, but better because they have direct connector ramps to other center tollways and get higher speed limits as an incentive to use them. Stop shafting Htown!