Wolff Companies Featured in Wall Street Journal about Houston’s Pro-Growth Attitude and Economic Success
The Wall Street Journal recently featured Wolff Companies’ David Wolff and David Hightower in an article titled “Success and the City” by Joel Kotkin and Tory Gattis. The profile highlights Houston’s pro-growth mindset, diversity, low cost of living and overall economic success.
The article recognizes that naysayers see Houston as “a little slice of Hades: a hot, humid, and featureless expanse of flood-prone grassland.” To this, Wolff counters that “growth makes up for a lot of imperfections.” As a real estate developer in Houston for over 40 years, Wolff has seen a lot of growth. He is a leading developer of The Energy Corridor, which was farmland when he purchased his first tract there in 1971. Today The Energy Corridor boasts over 22 million square feet of office space and houses the headquarters of key energy firms such as BP America, ConocoPhillips and CITGO. It is also home to numerous non-energy employees like Sysco and The Texas Medical Center West Campus.
Even in this context, Houston’s most recent growth spurt has generated some stunning statistics:
- Houston will enjoy the highest growth in new households of any major city between 2014 and 2017.
- Houston’s economic success over the past 20 years rivals the performance of any large metropolitan region in the U.S. For nearly a decade and a half, the city has added jobs at a furious pace–more than 600,000 since early 2000.
- Houston now has among the highest, if not the highest, standard of living of any large city in the U.S. The average cost-of-living-adjusted salary in Houston is about $75,000, compared with around $50,000 in New York and $46,000 in Los Angeles.
Other highlights within the story include:
- Houston’s growth is more than oil-industry luck. The city and its unincorporated areas have no formal zoning, so land use is flexible and can readily meet demand. Building permits are relatively easy to obtain–no arbitrary approval boards make development an interminable process.
- The flexible planning regime is also partly responsible for keeping Houston’s housing prices relatively low. On a square-foot basis, the same amount of money buys almost seven times as much space in Houston as it does in San Francisco, and more than four times as much as in New York.
- A growth-friendly attitude holds everything together in Houston. Houstonians see their city as a place that works–for minorities and immigrants, for suburbanites and city dwellers–and few want to fix what isn’t broken.
A more extensive version of this article titled “America’s Opportunity City” was published in the City Journal.
In this thriving market, Wolff Companies has only four sites still available in Ten Oaks and Central Park, both in The Energy Corridor.
Ten Oaks, adjacent to the Texas Medical Center-West Campus, has a 6.6 acre site remaining, which is perfectly located for high density residential, medical and office uses. At the corner of Park Row and Barker Cypress Road, 3.3 acres are available for retail, financial, food services and other complimentary uses.
In Central Park we have two sites available, 15.3 acres fronting on I-10 and 10.4 acres on Park Row. Both are perfectly located in The Corridor for corporate office, executive/conference hotel or high density residential housing.
Wolff Companies is proud of our legacy of contributing to the growth and prosperity of Houston. For more information about Wolff Companies and available properties in the thriving Houston market, including Ten Oaks and Central Park in The Energy Corridor, please visit www.wolffcompanies.com or contact us at 713-626-8050.