The Best Posts from the First 15 Years and 1.5 Million Pageviews

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This week is the 15th (!) birthday of Houston Strategies with our 1,280th post. Wow, time flies. It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for 15 years. We’re also up to more than 1.5 million pageviews, which is an amazing acceleration given that we just hit one million page views only three years ago at the 12th anniversary, and that’s not counting views at the Chronicle, COU, or the Google Group email distribution list. In honor of those milestones, I’ve decided to update my best posts from the first dozen years — which is now over three years out-of-date — by pulling from my annual highlights posts. Since 15 years is still a lot of highlight posts, I’ve created an even shorter list of my fifteen all-time favorite posts. As you skim this list, I hope you find some of interest that you missed, forgot, or may have been posted before you discovered Houston Strategies. Enjoy.

For those of you a little put off by the old-style webpage design, I should take this opportunity to mention again that it is sort of stuck, and that’s because I have a legacy blogspot template that can’t be upgraded to a newer design without either a lot of work outside my expertise or losing my archive of old posts. One of the penalties for being an early blogger, lol. Hope you don’t mind the old format. I’m kinda assuming the content matters more to my readers than a slick modern design 😉

As always, thanks for your readership.
-Tory

Absolute all-time favorites: 15 posts from 15 years (out of 1,280)

  1. A new brand identity for Houston: Houspitality
  2. MaX Lanes: A Next-Generation Strategy for Affordable Proximity
  3. MetroNext’s bold moonshot opportunity
  4. Elements of an Opportunity City
  5. Ten years of Houston Strategies retrospective
  6. Maximizing Opportunity Urbanism with Robin Hood Planning (COU White Paper)
  7. How Opportunity Urbanism can save the global economy (Part 1, Part 2)
  8. The Ultimate Houston Strategy
  9. Seizing the Astrodome opportunity to establish Houston’s new global identity
  10. My TEDx Houston talk, mostly about Houston (a summary of some of my better ideas from this blog)
  11. A Pragmatic Approach to Houston’s Future (part 1, part 2)
  12. A Map to Houston’s World-Class Future (part 1, part 2)
  13. Architects vs. Economists (the planning vs. free-market spectrum)
  14. Applying Jane Jacobs’ 4 tenets of vibrant neighborhoods to car-based cities (mobility/draw-zones for vibrancy)
  15. Why does Houston have such a great restaurant scene?

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This piece first appeared on Houston Strategies Blogspot.

Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and co-authored the original study with noted urbanist Joel Kotkin and others, creating a city philosophy around upward social mobility for all citizens as an alternative to the popular smart growth, new urbanism, and creative class movements. He is also an editor of the Houston Strategies blog.