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Ten per cent of Americans now have "negative equity" — they owe more on their mortgages than the value of their houses. Here in Texas, the housing meltdown is on everyone's lips, even the lead singer of country band Southern Culture on the Skids. About to launch into his trio's funky paean to mobile-home living, Doublewide, lead singer Rick Miller asked the largely wide-beamed and Jim-Beamed crowd at Houston's Continental Club last Saturday night: "Y'all gettin' settled into your 'trouses'"?
A "trouse," this Alberta cowboy learned from his Texas friends, is local slang for a "truck-house." This means a sleeping bag in the back box of a pickup truck, home sweet home after the sheriff repossesses your dwelling.
If B.C.'s housing market ever gets as grim as that of the southern United States, we Vancouverites may have to coin our own phrases for such improvised living spaces. May I propose "SkyTownhouse" for those who temporarily abide on our conveniently circular Millennium SkyTrain line, or, inspired by those newly homeless Texans, a "Smouse," which of course is the rather cramped day-and-night occupation of a Smart Car.
More than any American city save perhaps Orlando and Phoenix, Houston has cast its urban lot with the car-fired, no-deposit-down, suburban dream. I was surprised to learn this is the fourth largest conurbation in the entire U.S. — only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago have more residents.
You would never know this from driving the Sam Houston Tollway — the freeway surrounding the city — because the lush magnolias and southern pines are only occasionally interrupted by shopping malls or oil field service towers. Everything else cowers under this green canopy, with most of the buildings being somewhere between the height of a Cadillac Escalade and two-storey executive rancher.
Houston provides a useful contrast with Vancouver, home of superstar city planners. Our urban expertise is now jingling the bling of global attention and rich Emirati imitators — a Vancouver clone in the UAE is marketed as "Dubai Marina," but I prefer to call it "Very False Creek" (our former head planner Larry Beasley is now an urban consultant to the Emir of Abu Dhabi.)
To begin with, Houston has no city planners, at least not those all-powerful czars of condo-town we worship in Vancouver. What is more, Houston does not have land-use zoning as we and most other North American cities know it. What, a city without the civic leadership provided by edict-issuing urban planners? What, a metropolis without the framework of rigid classifications of what can, and what cannot, be built on each and every plot of land?
In the recent past, with cheap energy and an endlessly buildable flat South Texas plain, Houston worked surprisingly well. In place of publicly accountable city planners, the Bayou City has use-restriction clauses and building density covenants on private property deeds.
While Vancouver has staked out its future with technocrat urbanists, Houston's urban landscape is structured instead by lawyers and codicils on land titles.
You have to look closely to find differences between Houston's residential neighbourhoods and those in Burnaby or Langley.
Unimpeded by land-use zoning, one does find plastic surgery clinics mid-block in otherwise posh housing districts. Touring Houston, it does seem that Vancouver may be planned to death.
I snapped out of this sentiment after spending four days in a downtown convention hotel here. Squint your eyes, and downtown Houston seems a clone of its little brother oil town, Calgary. Look closer, and it is apparent that the vacant streetscapes and total lack of housing could not be more different from Canadian cities. Like Calgary or Vancouver, virtually all of downtown Houston has gone high-rise, but the streetscape is dismal.
Almost no one lives downtown, and the belt around downtown is seeing only modest densification. The newly completed multi-block "Metro" development advertises itself as "Ultra Urban Midtown Living." But to this Canadian's eyes it seems only a rather crisply detailed and (by the bland standards of Vancouver) brightly coloured walk-up apartment complex.
At times we take our civility, our urbanity and, yes, our urban planners for granted. While Vancouver is well-prepared for the changes to come, the new realities of expensive energy will at least temporarily make oil-town Houston something of a "southern city on the skids."
