In answer to John Burn-Murdoch’s Data Points piece “What Texas can teach others about building houses” (Opinion, February 24), I believe the only lesson we should draw from what’s happened in Texas is how not to build new homes.
We only just escaped Hurricane Harvey after selling our Texas home before the devastation hit. But my former neighbours in West Houston can tell you about the consequences of building hundreds of thousands of new homes on natural flood plains “down the bayou” — as they say in these parts.
Now that 500-year floods happen every other year in Texas, that was our first lesson learnt — the hard way. Try getting flood insurance after your whole neighbourhood has been 9 feet under water.
No one can visit Houston and not be completely horrified by the never-ending urban sprawl of homes built mere metres from the jam-packed 25-lane highways that we are told serve the community. It’s easy to build millions of homes from shoddy materials without thinking of a single public transport plan besides traffic gridlock.
Burn-Murdoch writes that in Houston, a 1998 change to planning laws empowered landowners to turn one home into three — instantly creating space for new families. But Houston has gas stations next to strip malls, next to apartment blocks, next to the cheap single-family units which the article praises.
There is no doubt that this is the major cause of Houston being easily one of the ugliest cities in the US, so much so that friends told me not even to look out the car window during my first trip downtown when I moved there or I might change my mind about living there all together.
Bridget van Akkooi
Wassenaar, The Netherlands
