Texas Lessons for Glasgow and Liverpool

Since Rick Perry’s campaign theme – assuming he runs – will be It Worked In Texas, it’s worth observing that Texas’s success in recent years is partly based upon the fact that it is easy and often cheap to move there. That’s because, as Matt Yglesias points out, it’s easy to build houses in Texas.

In fact the average family in Houston is actually better off – once housing and transportation costs have been considered – than a comparable family in New York City. Since the great eastern seaboard cities have the advantages of antiquity and immense reserves of cultural capital that will always make them popular places in which to live, sunbelt cities such as Houston, Dallas and Phoenix need to find other ways of competing. Houston’s complete lack of zoning laws is one such way of doing so.