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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Pitera who wrote (135334)	8/30/2017 3:19:26 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 218043

Houston is a mass experiment in building a city according to a 'free market" concept of building without zoning plans or flood planning. The end result is finished lots for a home can cost less than $2,000 per DU with "nicer areas" costing $5k, but you get what you pay for - a home which can see its foundation self-destruct as the Houston clay expands and contracts as it wets and dries, be totally destroyed in a flood, or become a slum only a few years after you purchase your home. Worse still is the fact that the rapid urbanization of Houston without a flood management plan has not left adequate area for water to percolate into the ground because that would have required a zoning plan, nor was there an alternate system put into place to remove rainwater because that would have cost money. Houston is an ugly city, but people live there because it's inexpensive and you can get a lot of house for your money because you're paying very little for land and virtually nothing for infrastructure like water control. Even the restaurant serving the best Mexican restaurant I've ever had, Las Alamedas, has now become a purveyor of inexpensive crap with bad service. There's very little market for quality in a city like Houston. I have to believe this flooding today repudiates the grand free-market Houston experiment in urban building. I worked with California investors who bought major new projects in Houston in 1983 after the collapse of the oil boom. One large project had been built for $68 million in the established University area and they bought it for less than $15 million. They reduced that purchase cost by a further $2 million by selling off the new high-end appliances still in the boxes and other goodies yet to be installed and replacing them with appliances more suitable for post bubble Houston incomes. So there's always money to be made every time Houston implodes. The good news for insurers is they don't cover home flood damage, although they do cover flood damage in vehicles. Fortunately for the government Flood Insurance program, fewer than 1 in 6 homes had flood coverage. One the the Texas Senators, Ted Cruz, who has consistently opposed government hand-outs following hurricane flooding has had a sudden conversion and is demanding government handouts for uninsured building owners. Whether he gets that is open to debate. But the government entertainer known as Trump has promised the damage will be cleaned-up within days in the best recovery in history, so all of the boobs who believe him will be resting easy for the first week or two until the reality of Trump's meaningless lies set in.