2019 Highlights

Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays.  Time for our annual round-up of the best posts of 2019.  Looking at the list, I think it was a very good year relative to most of my others.  Hard to believe we’re coming up on the 15th anniversary of this blog. I’ll have to do a big retrospective post in March for that.

These posts have been chosen with a particular focus on significant ideas I’d like to see kept alive for discussion and action, and they’re mainly targeted at new readers who want to get caught up with a quick overview of the Houston Strategies landscape. I also like to track what I think of as “reference posts” that sum up a particular topic or argument; and, last but not least, they’ve also been invaluable for me to track down some of my best thinking for meetings or when requested by others (as is the ever-helpful Google search).

Don’t forget we offer an email option for the roughly once/week posts – see Houston Strategies blog (bottom of the right sidebar). An RSS feed link for newsfeed readers is also available in the right sidebar here at URI (I’m a fan of Feedly).

As always, thanks for your readership.

• Getting METRONext 2040 from B- to a real A+ (Chronicle op-ed)
• Dallas Light Rail Ridership – A Cautionary Tale for Houston and MetroNext
• Houston energy salaries vs. tech and others
• MetroNext’s bold moonshot opportunity
• Should “Be Someone” be Houston’s official motto?
• A new big-name urban planning book advocating the Houston model
• Houston Carbon Council
• A proposal for our next “giant leap” beyond the moon: the Solar System Explorer
• Reimagining the $7B 45N project
• Benefits of the I-45 Expansion and the High Cost of Electric Buses
• Response to Jeff Speck’s anti-45N expansion op-ed
• Atlanta is a cautionary tale for Houston
• Proposing an autonomous transit service for Houston
• Why METRO should eliminate transit fares

And don’t forget the highlights from the first few years. For what it’s worth, I think the best ideas are found there, often in the first year (I had a lot “stored up” before I started blogging) and most definitely in the best posts from the first dozen years and million pageviews.

• 2018 Highlights
• 2017 Highlights
• The best posts from the first dozen years and million pageviews
• 2016 Highlights
• 2015 Highlights
• Ten years of Houston Strategies retrospective (March 2015)
• 2014 Highlights
• Best posts of the first 1,000 (February 2014)
• 2013 Highlights
• 5th birthday best-of-the-best retrospective (March 2010, updated thru 2012)
• 2012 Highlights
• 2011 Highlights
• 2010 Highlights
• 2009 Highlights
• 2008 Highlights
• 2007 Highlights
• 2006 Highlights
• 2005 Highlights

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.