Tory strikes again, over at Houston Strategies. In part 1 of a 2 part series, he discusses metro growth over the last 20 years. Key grafs:

Houston has been extremely aggressive in adding new freeway capacity. It has nine major radial freeways, three ring freeways (with a 180-mile fourth one on the way), and 16 major 4 or 5 level interchanges. Houston has almost twice as many freeway lanes per capita as Los Angeles. As state funding has become more limited in recent years, they have embraced toll roads to continue adding capacity.

The results? Houston has kept affordable housing within reach, with the lowest housing costs of any major city in America. While its job centers are dispersed, the vast majority have stayed within the core and the city limits, keeping up the commercial tax base and avoiding a Detroit scenario. Houston’s four inner-core job centers – Downtown, Uptown, Greenway Plaza, and the Texas Medical Center – combine to have more jobs than any other U.S. central business district outside of Manhattan.

To provide contrast, Portland – which essentially stopped freeway and HOV expansion and focused on light rail during the 1990s – had traffic congestion grow three times faster than Houston during that decade and has experienced a far sharper decrease in housing affordability, even with similar population growth rates of about 26% during the decade.

The full article is well worth reading, as I am sure part 2 will be on Thursday.

Note: title of this article was changed after publishing.