Abandoned Land Drives Dangerous Heat in Houston, Study Finds

This is exactly the problem that Land Value Tax proposes to fix. The tax doesn’t go down if the land owner destroys their structures and ruins the site.

Seriously tho, I once tried tracking all transactions in a nearby 4 storey condo building (these transactions are public where I live). I tried graphing $/sqft by the floor of the building and there was definitely a revealed preference in the form of higher $/sqft but it was for higher floors rather than lower. However on an infinite scale, I'm sure your point stands, that at some point the inconvenience would outweigh other considerations.

However, as it often is, Houston is a weird outlier because its development is so recent. The majority of its current footprint was built after 1970, with many neighborhood pools and community pools. Some are limited to residents of the area and their guests, others are fully public, such as this one:

https://epconservancy.org/aquatics-center/

Your thoughtful reply made me reconsider what I posted as if I had been serious. Seeing another instance of someone attempting to build a coherent picture in the reader's minds eye about the size of one thing relative to another (10000 acres is roughly 1/4 of a Lichtenstein), dredged up the recurrent memories about the all-too-commonly misused Olympic swimming pool comparison. I felt compelled to to reply and ended up building an implausibly plausible narrative about mitigating some of the issue with the overheated abandoned buildings by repurposing them as community improvements.

I am surprised that you would prefer the temperature there to be 10 degrees warmer. This reminds me of a time when I was out of state, in Mississippi, on a wellsite and I had picked up a copy of USA Today at the hotel before I left. I read the interesting parts and finally got to the weather forecasts on the back page for major cities across the US. As I scanned the forecasts they were all positive - Sunny, Breezy and Nice, etc until I got to Houston. For Houston their forecast header said "Oppressive". I checked all the other headings for all the other cities listed and none had negative connotations, only Houston. That gave me the chuckle I needed to get through that shitty day on muddy the wellsite and it continues to provide a pleasant memory all these years later.

I lived in Houston and the Houston area for 10 years and commuted for work to Houston for another 16 years. I'm pretty familiar with most of the pros and cons including the climate, the traffic, many of the communities, the abundance of delicious food options for any price range, the stormwater drainage issues due to over-development, problems created by lack of zoning, etc. and being a geoscientist, I can see advantages to repurposing these abandoned buildings for community use.

I don't picture any of the swimming pools as outdoor pools. They would all be built as indoor pools where families from the neighborhoods around these abandoned buildings can bring their kids on those hot spring days. In many cases it would probably not be necessary to remove the existing building, only to gut it and add pool facilities. I have my doubts about whether functioning outdoor pools are significant sites for mosquitoes to breed due to the agitation of the water surface from the pumps and the chlorination so I don't think your concerns about Aedes aegypti and the pathogens they spread are worth worrying about. For control of that problem you have to look at how Houston and other municipalities handle their stormwater retention ponds, their channelized creeks and bayous, and storm drains across neighborhoods in the city. Storm drains that are not regularly graded tend to have water pooling due to debris traps and that water becomes the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. It is also a huge hill to climb to get people to manage standing water on their property by dumping accumulations after rain events.

We looked at buying homes when we lived there and frankly, Houston will always have issues with water because of the gulf coastal plain geology which left them with wide areas of very clay-rich soils which have low permeabilities and thus it is imperative for runoff to be a critical part of every infrastructure project in the region. Even knowing all this they still sold off all the Katy Prairie land where rice and sugarcane was grown and which regularly flooded for generations. That land was a winter ground for migratory birds from all over North America until they turned it into poorly-drained subdivisions with homes on concrete slabs that crack and buckle and keep foundation repair contractors busy.

I think it would be a useful project for a GIS pro to map these abandoned properties and short-list some of them for repurposing as described in communities where kids have few options for recreation. It would provide facilities for people of all ages to learn to swim, practice diving board skills, remain physically fit, and some of them could be fitted with wave pools to simulate beach conditions and make it more fun. Jobs for young teens in the neighborhood, community building, physical activity that one can do on a hot Houston day, etc. I see nothing but positives here. Maybe my whole post needs a /sh though.

Stock them with carp, which will eat the mosquito larvae, and you can also eat the carp. Win-win.

Why wouldn't this land immediately be forfeited to the city?

Which is well recognized as even dumber.

You don't see anybody trying to point out when actual zoning was enacted, or that Houston was founded where it was when it was for any other reason than to be the industrial powerhouse of the independent nation of Texas.

Except to serve as the Capitol of the new Nation too, but those guys moved to higher ground one day, I wonder why.

No brag, just fact.

Enquiring minds wanted to know.

Remember what Davy Crockett said when he was going back to Texas that time?

To some people it applies more than others.

Texas is bigger than that.

They have always taxed more carbon and more land in ways that make them rich as hell, at the average citizen's expense.

To the envy of other states' greedy taxing entities.

That wasn't so bad when there was still enough widespread prosperity for the average citizen to be able to afford it.

The land is vacant after they tore down the buildings because the taxes were already too high, and rising too fast.

No brag, just fact.

"How far up is the river now, Ma?"

"Six feet deep, and rising . . ."

If not, you cannot make the land cold with air condition. You can just move heat around, with AC from the inside to the outside, but that costs extra energy -> more heat

Most Rust Belt cities had to do something like this because it turns out that just letting derelict property go resulted in neighborhoods death spiraling.

That's not an accurate explanation. In the PNW, in many cities, older more expensive neighborhoods tend to have more trees, not less. It's a serious equity issue, given the heat island effect.

The difference in foundation damage is because of soil profiles, not planting behaviors. We don't tend to have expansive soils around here. Take away the clay and you lose the hydrological forces which allow tree root to inhabit previously occupied pores.

That's evident. You are extrapolating your experience across the rest of the world, and it simply doesn't jibe with the reality that we live in.

Yes trees fall, and so does every building and everything else under the Sun, which itself will die. Trees have long lives, centuries for many. That's a pretty minor risk. Buildings need maintenance too.