It's the Gulf of Mexico, stupid

After assuming the presidency for the second time last week, one of Donald Trump's first acts was to sign an Executive Order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America." His order also reverts the name of the Alaskan mountain Denali to its former name of Mount McKinley.

Like everything else that Donald Trump does, this is stupid and performative. The Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water - the United States' jurisdiction over it extends only twelve miles beyond its coastline - and has been known as such for centuries:

The Gulf of Mexico has had its name for about 400 years. In his book, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589, English geographer Richard Hakluyt calls the water body “Gulfe of Mexico”. In Mexico, the gulf is also called by its Spanish name, El Golfo de Mexico.

Trump can rename the Gulf of Mexico for his domestic audience, but the rest of the world does not have to go with that name change, since there are no international laws that decide what a common maritime space or a disputed territory is called universally.

The practical effect of this name change is minimal - most people I know, myself included, just call it "the Gulf" - but the idea that the 600,000-square-mile Gulf of Mexico's name can be summarily changed for the sake of political aggrandizement or "owning the libs" or whatever is mind-numbingly stupid. 

Aside from the fact that it needlessly causes confusion (especially given that the word "America" appears in the name of both of the Western Hemisphere's continents) and is wasteful (think of all the money the federal government is going to have to spend re-printing maps and updating geographic databases), it creates an unnecessary, even if minor, disruption to the lives and habits of the millions of people who live along the Gulf of Mexico and have always known it as such.

Other countries will not recognize Trump's new name for the Gulf. A lot of Americans themselves won't, either: a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll indicated that 70% of Americans oppose renaming the body of water. The Associated Press will continue to refer to it as the "Gulf of Mexico" as well. 

One place where you will see the new name is on Google Maps; the company is caving to Trump's decree and will begin using the new name in their maps platforms. That decision is generating backlash here and abroad; it is unclear if other mapping platforms like Apple or Mapquest will make the name change as well. 

I will continue to refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico.

If you're looking for alternatives to Google Maps, here are some apps to consider. Texas Monthly offers some other possible names for the Gulf.

Yet Another Astrodome Proposal

I'll believe this when it happens.

The Astrodome Conservancy unveiled its plan for the future of the Astrodome on Wednesday.

This is the latest attempt to do something with the Houston landmark that has been closed to the public for 15 years.

Wednesday's unveiling is a $1 billion plan known as "Vision: Astrodome," which includes four state-of-the-art buildings under the Astrodome's roof and a retail village.

Part of the inspiration is the High Line in New York -- with a boulevard that would cut through the Dome and connect to other NRG buildings.

Renderings from the Astrodome Conservancy, a nonprofit geared towards the preservation and redevelopment of the stadium that opened in 1965, show what that vision will look like.

The conservancy's founder says she's hopeful the project can attract "significant private dollars" to minimize the burden on taxpayers. Their plan is for $750 million to come from private sources.

I've written a few posts over the years about the fate of the Eighth Wonder of the World (see here, here, here, here and here), but nothing ever seems to happen to it. A 2018 plan by Harris County to repurpose it came to a halt when voters kicked Ed Emmett out of the County Judge's chair that November; this is the first significant proposal for the iconic structure I've become aware of since that time.

And I don't expect anything to come of it, because I don't think private investors are willing to put up the funds to renovate the Astrodome today any more than they were willing to do the countless previous times that new uses for the old stadium were proposed.

Aside from the price tag, there is opposition to the renovation plan from NRG Park's two largest tenants:

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the Houston Texans football team are decidedly cool to the plan.

The Rodeo issued a statement, "We have voiced our concerns on several occasions with the conservancy," they said. "There is no proposed or official plan that our organization has agreed to."

Reportedly, the Rodeo and the Texans favor demolishing the Dome to provide more parking.

Of course, neither the Rodeo nor the Texans have ever bothered to pony up the estimated $100 million it would take to demolish the stadium, either. The fact that the Astrodome has been designated a State Antiquities Landmark complicates its demolition as well.

All that to say that I expect for the Astrodome to continue to sit, unused - a modern-day ruin - for the foreseeable future. 

Kuff has more.

Welp...

I'm not shocked by Donald Trump's victory in yesterday's Presidential election. Disgusted, yes. But not surprised.

He already won once, after all. And he barely lost four years ago. Aside from his rabid cult of supporters, incumbent governments all around the world have been systematically rejected by voters on account of anger over post-pandemic inflation and supply chain issues, so it's no surprise that the same dynamic would play out in the United States. If Joe Biden had not stepped aside for Kamala Harris, or if Ron Desantis or Nikki Haley had been the Republican nominee rather than Trump, the margins would probably have been even worse. 

Donald Trump is a twice-impeached, adjudicated rapist, convicted felon, insurrectionist, malignant narcissist and pathological liar who is in severe cognitive decline and who is on a grievance-fueled rage. Apparently none of that mattered to the American voter. 

Whatever the final margin, the American people have returned this blatantly, dangerously unfit man to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual assaults, the frauds, the lies, or the felonies. Not the raw bigotry of his campaign; not the insults, nor the threats. In the most graphic terms imaginable, the American people were warned of the danger. His previously loyal vice president refused to endorse him; his top general called him a ‘total fascist’; some of his closes aides and cabinet members described in detail his erratic character and his indifference to the Constitution.

Come January 20th, Donald Trump will once again become President of the United States. The incompetence, subterfuge and chaos that defined Trump's term will likely be replaced by a more targeted campaign of nativism, reactionism and retribution. He will be empowered by a Republican-controlled Congress for which extremism is no vice. 

Ego-driven tech bros like like Elon Musk will be in charge of our economy and conspiracy-peddling nutjobs like RFK, Jr will be in charge of our healthcare. The Federalist Society will be loading up the federal judiciary with right-wing extremists and the Heritage Foundation will be free to implement their christofascist Project 2025 agenda. 

There will be a nationwide abortion ban, mass deportations, a gutted federal civil service, and inflation-inducing tariffs. Ukraine will be abandoned, NATO will be forsaken, the Affordable Care Act will be dismantled, and the climate crisis will be ignored. Re-emboldened right-wing militias will patrol our streets and Trump's political opponents will be persecuted. And if anything happens to the 78-year-old man, Vice President and fanatical patriarch J. D. Vance will be ready to take over and carry on with the cause. 

This nation has sleepwalked into authoritarianism because egg prices were too high. A lot of people who are currently celebrating today will likely be changing their tune many months from now, as Trump's "policies," such as they were, take effect. By then, I fear, it might be too late.

Dark and ugly days are ahead of us, folks. I need to start making plans about my future, and whether it involves continuing to live in this nation as it descends into the abyss.

As I said: I am disgusted.

Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler with nukes

I was working on a post about the 2022 Winter Olympics, complete with my latest diatribe on NBC's lousy coverage (which nobody seems to have watched anyway). I was also going to write a post about how College Football Playoff expansion is not happening anytime soon, and why that is not good for the sport. There are also other topics that I might normally be writing about right now, such as the postponement of the start of baseball season, or an interesting new airline service coming to Houston.

But after the events of the last week, I've lost interest in starting and/or completing those posts. They seem rather trivial. 

Make no mistake: with his messianic ambition for a new Russian empire and his paranoid disdain of the west, Vladimir Putin has brought the world closer to annihilation than it's been in decades.

A week ago, the Russian dictator invaded Ukraine with the goal of overthrowing that country's democratically-elected government and reclaiming it as a Soviet-era satellite state, if not annexing it entirely. His invasion of Ukraine was reckless and poorly-planned. The Ukrainians are fighting back. But sooner or later, Russia's strength in numbers is likely to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders. Devastating urban warfare is already underway, as is a refugee crisis. 

Putin will not stop with Ukraine. In his quest to re-create the Russian empire, he will try to slice off some or all of Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, the former Soviet republics in central Asia. And at some point he will likely go after the Baltics: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. All formerly part of the Soviet Union, and all current NATO members that the United States has an obligation to protect militarily. 

He may wait to bring the fight to NATO until after the 2024 presidential election (which he will try to influence in order to get his most valuable American asset, Donald Trump, elected to second term). But he is almost certainly going to do it, because of the Russian irredentist philosophy that drives him. He's willing to bet that we won't have the courage to come to Europe's defense because we don't want to start a nuclear conflict. In fact, he's already threatening Finland and Sweden against joining NATO.

Comparisons between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler are apt. While Putin might not have the same lust for genocide that Hitler possessed - he hasn't singled out an entire people for extermination - he does have the same megalomanic territorial ambitions, and the same indifference to the amount of life lost to achieve it. He also has something that Hitler did not have: nuclear weapons. Do not think for a moment that he won't use them.

And that's the problem: if he threatens to "push the button" anytime the west tries to oppose his neo-imperialist ambitions, where does he stop? Where do we stop him? Do we risk a nuclear exchange in order to do so?

I grew up towards the end of the Cold War, where the threat of nuclear annihilation was distant but real. We might have thought that the threat of nuclear armageddon ended with the Soviet Union. Turns out, it was only taking a break.

This is likely going to be last post here at MGCR for awhile, if not forever. This is normally the time of year when I reduce activity on this blog anyway, but I'm seriously thinking about bringing this blog to a more-or-less permanent close. Posting about trivial shit that hardly anybody reads isn't a good use of my time, and given the events of the past week, I'm not sure how much time I have left as it is.

By the way, fuck Putin for destroying one of my favorite aircraft.

A small measure of justice

In announcing today's news that Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin had been found guilty of murdering George Floyd, Political Wire's Teagan Goddard made this comment: 

Remember that George Floyd’s killing was documented on video for more than nine minutes and yet we were still worried that Derek Chauvin might get off.

Which is as sad as it is true: we've seen this movie before.

Today, the ending was different, and a small measure of justice occurred. 

But we still have a long way to go. 

Getting in the vaccine line

It's March, meaning that we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the Coronavirus pandemic and related social distancing measures that have completely upended our daily lives. Fortunately, with the vaccine rollout now well underway, there is hopefully a light at the end of the tunnel.

My parents got their second shot of the Moderna vaccine last weekend (they were supposed to get it two and a half weeks ago, but there was a delay due to the freeze). That they are now both fully immunized comes as a great relief to me, as COVID could very well be fatal to them were they to catch it (and I'm thankful that they've managed to avoid it for an entire year). 

Corinne's mother, likewise, is due for her second shot in a couple of weeks.

Earlier this evening, working on a tip from one of her co-workers, Corinne found and made vaccine appointments for both her and myself. The appointments are for two weeks from now, and they're down in Brazoria County, but we don't care. We've found our shots! 

(This, incidentally, is the only time being obese will ever be a health benefit for me.)

And not a moment too soon. Thanks to Governor Abbott's stupid and reckless decision today to reopen the state "100 percent" and stop mandating mask use, Texas is likely to see a significant spike in COVID cases - and deaths - in the coming weeks. 

But hey, anything to get people to stop being angry at you about the state's power grid completely collapsing a couple of weeks ago, right, Guv?

It's going to get worse before it gets better

One week ago, Donald Trump - a malignant narcissist and pathological liar who continues to falsely claim that last November's Presidential election was "stolen" from him - incited his followers in Washington, DC to march on the Capitol building, ostensively to protest Congress's counting of the states' electoral votes that would officially confirm Joe Biden as the next President of the United States. 

Obviously this mob did much more than just protest: Trump supporters and adherents of the batshit crazy "QAnon" conspiracy theory overwhelmed police, physically invaded the US Capitol, and forced Senators and Representatives to scramble for safety. It was clear that some of them didn't just want to disrupt the counting of electoral votes; they were looking for elected officials to kidnap and/or kill. Pipe bombs were placed to distract first responders. Guys in tactical gear crawled through windows and carried flex cuffs in Senate Chambers. (Thankfully, two of them have been arrested). Four protesters and a Capitol Police officer died in the melee; another Capitol Police officer apparently passed away later.

While the Capitol invasion may or may not have been an actual coup attempt, it was, at the very least, insurrection: a violent assault on our democracy. It is as chilling as it is outrageous and it is certainly this nation's darkest day since September 11, 2001.

Fortunately, the insurrection did not succeed. Police and federal agents finally got the upper hand, the building was cleared, Congress resumed counting the electoral ballots and, eventually, accepted Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election. The nation's democratic process held firm, but it very easily could have been a different, catastrophic story. 

Both the House and Senate Sergeants-at-Arms as well as the Chief of the Capitol Police resigned following the invasion due to their failures, and a full accounting needs to happen as to why the Capitol Police had such a hard time defending the building. Was security purposely hamstrung by Trump-supporting administrators? Were there sympathizers in their ranks who facilitated the invasion? 

The days since the Capitol invasion have been a whirlwind of activity that ended up with Trump being permanently banned from his beloved Twitter account and, earlier today, being the first President to be impeached twice, just days before his term as the worst President in the history of this nation mercifully comes to an end. 

But while Trump may be on his way out, his rabid and heavily-armed base of far-right extremists, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists lives on, and they're not going to simply disappear. There are reports that extremists are emboldened, that more violence is planned for this weekend or for the day of Biden's inauguration, and that the threat of violence will continue even after Biden becomes President. We may, in fact, be entering a new era of political violence featuring bloodthirsty and deranged domestic terrorists such as this guy.

Exactly a decade ago, after a shooting in Arizona that killed six people and wounded a US Representative, I issued a call for civility in politics. That post seems rather naïve now. This country is awash in misinformation and conspiracy theories, and its politics are no longer merely polarized but now completely tribalized, wherein it has become more important to hate the other side than to support your own. These trends were evident even before Donald Trump became President; he merely accelerated them.

It's going to get worse before it gets better, and I'm afraid many more people are going to lose their lives.

Very belated thoughts about the 2020 election and its aftermath

Even though the 2020 election was over six weeks ago, there was so much happening in its aftermath - the counting of mail-in ballots, the vote recounts and certifications, the Trump campaign's numerous and fruitless legal challenges, etc., that I decided to wait until after the Electoral College met at the beginning of this week to affirm Joe Biden's victory to write about it. It didn't help that it has, quite frankly, become difficult to summon enough motivation to write about something as depressing as politics in the United States today. This country is angry at itself and dangerously divided, and the results of this election and its aftermath are unlikely to change that fact.

Although some Republicans will likely contest Biden's election when the electoral votes are formally presented Congress on January 6th, this maneuver is all but certain to fail. The end result of this election is that, as of January 20, 2021, Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States, and his four-year reign of chaos, corruption, lies, nepotism, banana-republic authoritarianism and subservience to Vladimir Putin will be gone. If you're a Democrat (or even if, like me, you don't consider yourself a Democrat but just hate Donald Trump), that's good news. But that's also just about where the good news ends. Here are my thoughts:

Biden Won - Just Barely. Since there were no "faithless elector" shenanigans yesterday, Joe Biden received 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump's 232: 36 more than the 270 votes he needed to become president.

Source: Wikipedia. The actual outcome was close to my pre-election prediction (I expected Biden to win Maine's 2nd District but for Trump to hold on to Georgia).

Biden also won the popular vote in convincing fashion, accumulating 81.28 million votes (or 51.3% of total votes cast) to Trump's 74.22 million votes (46.9%). That's a difference of over 7 million votes, or 4.5%: the second-largest popular vote margin of victory in the last six presidential elections. 

However, Biden's victory in several of the states he won - states he needed in order to achieve his Electoral College win - was razor thin. He won Arizona by a total of 10,457 votes (0.3% of total votes cast in that state), Georgia by 11,779 votes (.25%), and Wisconsin by 20,682 votes (0.6%). These 43 thousand votes in these three states is the difference between a solid Electoral College win for Joe Biden and a 269-269 Electoral College tie (with the election being decided in the House, with each state's U.S. House delegation getting one vote to decide the presidency; since Republicans will control the majority of House delegations in the new Congress, Trump would have won re-election under that scenario). Flip another state where Biden's win was narrow (he won all of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada by less than three percent), and he loses the electoral vote outright.

To put it in perspective, 43 thousand is less than 0.03% of the 158.38 million votes cast in the 2020 election (the highest voter turnout, by percentage, for a presidential election since 1900). It's just a bit more than half of the 77.7 thousand votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that gave Donald Trump the presidency four years ago despite losing the popular vote. It's a hair's breadth margin of victory, and it should deeply worry Democrats going forward. 

This is because Republicans maintain an edge in the Electoral College such that Democrats need to win the popular vote in presidential elections by several points in order to have a good shot a winning the actual presidency. Democratic voters are disproportionately concentrated along the West Coast and the Northeast, and are not as numerous in the "swing states" where elections are actually decided.

This is why, even though the Republican candidate for president has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections, he has managed to win the electoral vote twice since 2000, and just barely lost the electoral vote this time around. If demographic trends continue we may be reaching a situation where it's basically impossible for the Republican candidate to win the popular vote, but pretty difficult for the Democratic one to win the Electoral College. This would be fatal to American democracy, which was already seriously tested in the aftermath of this election (which I'll discuss more in a moment).

USA Today has some interesting maps of the 2020 election, including the latest version of the "Purple America Map" (although it's probably becoming less purple over time), as well as good maps indicating each party's margin of victory in each county as well as as how the vote shifted since 2016. Perhaps the best visualization of the 2020 election is by XKCD's Randall Munroe, who shows how Biden and Trump voters are actually distributed:

Source: XKCD. Munroe points out that there are more Trump voters in deep-blue California than red Texas, and more Biden voters in Texas than New York.

Aside from the Presidency, there's not much for Democrats to be happy about. The Democratic Party had high hopes of retaking the Senate, padding their advantage in the House, and winning enough downballot races to take control of some state legislatures. None of that happened.

The Democrats did close their deficit in the Senate by one seat last month, and there's still a chance that they could take control of the Senate outright if both their candidates win the two Senate runoff races in Georgia on January 5th. That would give them 50 seats, and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris will be able to break ties. But I wouldn't bet on it: Biden's narrow win there aside, this is still Georgia we're talking about. The simple fact is that Democratic Senate candidates, in spite of being well-funded, underperformed last month: they failed to flip what was seen as a winnable seat in North Carolina or give the boot to "perpetually-concerned" Maine Senator Susan Collins. 

After convincingly winning control of the House in the 2018 midterms, Democrats took a huge step backward last month, suffering a net loss of 12 seats (including one candidate who apparently lost by a total of six (!) votes).  While they still remain in control of that side of Congress, the Democrats' reduced majority makes it easier for individual lawmakers to throw sand in the legislative gears, and it also puts the Democrats at grave risk for losing the House entirely in the 2022 midterms. 

This is partly because the party in the White House generally does not do well in midterm elections, and partly because the Democrats also failed to flip any state legislatures they targeted last month. The GOP still controls 61 of the nation's 99 state legislative chambers (along with 27 of the nation's 50 governorships). That means Democrats will have little to no control over decennial redistricting in several critical states, and are therefore likely to lose House seats though reapportionment and Republican gerrymandering. (Here's Texas as an example.) 

Even as New York Magazine's Ed Kilgore argues that Democrats didn't do as badly in last month's election as one might think, he nevertheless concedes that "Democrats will pay a large cost for failing to win big across the board, particularly when redistricting arrives next year and Republican control of all those state legislative chambers that was at risk this year gives the GOP an advantage in drawing new districts for the next decade."

Election results aside, there may be more trouble ahead for the Democratic Party in the form a of a struggle between its moderate members and its more progressive wing. If they can keep the center and the left from tearing themselves apart, there's a path forward for Democrats (perhaps it includes consolidating its suburban gains, starting to acknowledge rural needs, and dumping the left-wing "wokeness" nonsense that repels moderate voters), but the party still has some soul-searching to do (as does the GOP, post-Trump) in spite of Biden's win.

Texas is still a red state. Here in Texas, Democratic hopes that higher turnout would generate a "blue wave" in Texas were also dashed. Trump carried the state by 5.6%, Senator John Cornyn easily won re-election, Democrats were unable to flip any Congressional seats, and their dream of picking up the nine seats they needed to take control of the state House also evaporated. Democrats did increase their margins in the suburbs, and the state does seem to be gradually trending blue (along with North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona). But it's not there yet, and Trump's strength among Latino* voters in the Rio Grande Valley - a trend that was seen nationwide - should be setting off alarm bells among Democratic operatives. The only thing state Democrats can do is take a look at their failures in this election and prepare for 2022.

That being said, there weren't many surprises here in Harris County, which remains blue. Biden carried the county by thirteen points, and Democrats swept the countywide races, flipped perennially-competitive State House District 134, and fended off the GOP's well-funded attempt to retake the 7th Congressional District.

Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the election are shameful and are eroding faith in American democracy. Being the malignant narcissist that he is, Donald Trump was never going to accept defeat. After all, there's nothing more he hates than being called a "loser," so he and his campaign continue to claim, with little to no evidence, that Biden's victory was the result of widespread voter fraud (because the Democrats were somehow able to fraudulently manufacture votes for Biden but not for downballot House, Senate and state races, right?). At this point, his claims are as stale as they are baseless and impotent. But for several weeks immediately following the election, he and his supporters undertook a remarkable effort aiming at subverting democracy in order to keep him in power.

Almost as soon as the polls closed, Trump's campaign and his supporters sprang into action, claiming that the election was "stolen" and filing lawsuits aimed at overturning its results. This effort, headed by New York Mayor - turned - circus clown Rudy Giuliani and an error-prone conspiracy theorist, met almost no success in the courts because there simply was no evidence that widespread voter fraud occurred; even Trump's own Attorney General couldn't find evidence of widespread voter fraud (and was forced to step down as a result). Recounts in places like Georgia and Wisconsin did not substantially alter Biden's margin of victory in those states, and Trump's attempts to bully election officials into not certifying results or pressure Republican-led state legislatures to bypass the will of the voters by appointing Trump-friendly slates of Electors were rejected as well. As it became clear that the results of the election would not be overturned, Trump began lashing out at his own party: a Republican Secretary of State in Georgia was thrown under the bus by Trump for simply doing his job, and he and his staff received death threats. This tiresome shitshow - even the National Review called it a "disgraceful endgame" - culminated in a ridiculous and spectacularly unsuccessful attempt by Texas Attorney General (and indicted felon) Ken Paxton to sue a handful of swing states in the Supreme Court in order overturn the election.

Maybe it was truly a coup attempt. Maybe it was all just an attempt to grift. Either way, American democracy "has been given a scare:"

As the sense of imminent threat begins to fade, the convoluted inner workings of the electoral system are coming under scrutiny to determine whether it was as robust as its advocates had hoped – or whether the nation simply got lucky this time.

“I had long been in the camp of people who believed that the guardrails of democracy were working,” Katrina Mulligan, a former senior official in the justice department’s national security division. “But my view has actually shifted in the last few weeks as I watched some of this stuff play out. Now I actually think that we are depending far too much on fragile parts of our democracy, and expecting individuals, rather than institutions, to do the work the institution should be doing.” 

What's worse is that this attack on the democratic process - the attempt to subvert, if not outright overturn, the results of this election, or at the very least illegitimize a Biden presidency (85 percent of all Trump voters believe Biden did not legitimately win the election, according to one poll) - was tacitly encouraged, if not fully supported, by one of this country's two major political parties. George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum once wrote that "if conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy." Sadly, he appears to have been correct.

Trump's bid to overturn the election failed (even though he is apparently still plotting) because he, and everybody he surrounds himself with, is incompetent. But he is nevertheless providing a blueprint for the next authoritarian who comes along, who may be smarter, more subtle, and ultimately more successful than Trump. As The New Republic's Jason Linkins and Matt Ford explained a few weeks ago: 

What if Biden’s Electoral College lead were much slimmer and hinged on a more Trump-friendly state like Florida or Texas? What if Democrats hadn’t taken back the House in 2018, and Republicans instead had firm majorities in both chambers when the Electoral College votes were counted? What if the Republican candidate wasn’t Trump, whose authoritarian tendencies and reckless mendacity are already priced in, but a less polarizing figure who could make a more subtle and competent play for power? Thanks to Trump and his cronies, it’s no longer completely unthinkable for a president or candidate to demand that state legislatures try to overturn their own election results. He won’t succeed this time, but a future presidential candidate could make a similar attempt on far more favorable terrain.

This country remains dangerously divided. This country is polarized and tribalized. People realize this fact and are not optimistic that it can be resolved anytime soon. A recent Monmouth poll indicated that over three-quarters of Americans see the country as "deeply divided on its most foundational issues" and that 60% of the county expects that divide to either get worse or stay the same over the coming year. Given how close this election was, and given the attacks on the democratic process that have occurred in its wake, that's a recipe for potential disaster in the coming years.

While I'm glad the election is over and I wish President-Elect Biden well, I have never been more worried about the United States of America than I am right now.

Which may be why it's not a bad thing that the "real" winner of the 2020 election was marijuana.

*Speaking of "wokeness," I refuse to use the construct "Latinx" to refer to the Latino population because they themselves have not embraced it. I can only wonder if the presumptuous insistence of the left that the Latino population use this term may have been one of the reasons why Trump did so much better among their voters.

The conservative case against single-family zoning

Charles Marohn argues that "there is no greater distortion of the market than local zoning codes" and calls for the elimination of single-family zoning on "small government" principles:

The first of many ironies, of course, is that single-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance. 

These onerous regulations were further mandated for new construction by the Federal Housing Administration as well as the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. 

So if you want federal support for your housing, build a single-family home. If you want to live in that downtown shop with the house on the second floor, convert your house to a two- or three-unit building and rent it out—or do any number of normal and reasonable things that humans had been doing with their property for centuries to build their own wealth and prosperity—don’t expect assistance from the government. 

Yet now that we’ve lived with this artificial distortion for a couple of generations, and piled on others like the mortgage-interest tax deduction, some strange conservative instinct kicks in to defend this bankrupt institution. In reality, the Pilgrims built a traditional town surrounded by farmland. Our government paid us to move to the suburbs. Invoking the memory of the former to defend the latter is an historical absurdity.

Marohn's knockdown against single-family zoning was apparently triggered by an article by Stanley Kurtz in the National Review which claimed that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to "abolish the suburbs."  This claim, which has also been made by Donald Trump and is centered around the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing provision of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, is dubious. Marohn argues that, if conservatives were intellectually honest, they would be demanding an end to single-family suburban development on the grounds of economic efficiency: 

The suburbs run on federal subsidies. Without them, America’s suburbs would have to become more financially productive. They would need to get greater returns per foot on public infrastructure investment. That would mean repealing repressive zoning regulations, allowing the market to respond to supply and demand signals for housing. It would also mean allowing the “little downtowns” Kurtz fears to form where demand for them exists. Isn’t that what is supposed to happen with self-government and local control? 

All this would have to happen or the suburbs would go away because they can’t exist without excessive and ongoing federal subsidy. 

The progressive left has discovered that single-family zoning has racist underpinnings. That’s great, because we should now have no problem finding common cause for repealing this most distorting of regulations, one that the federal government never should have forced cities to adopt to begin with. 

In fact, the conservative thing for suburban leaders to do here is to not wait for the federal government to tempt us with more handouts, but to go ahead and show those progressives running the big cities that we live by our principles, that we embrace vibrant markets and free people, by preemptively repealing single-family zoning.

While I'm not sure I agree with Marohn's implication that single-family zoning is largely the result of "big government" (as opposed to a largely locally-driven effort fueled by NIMBYism), I do agree with him that single-family zoning is, like minimum parking regulations, a relic of late-20th-century land use control that needs to be phased out. Zoning started out in the early 20th century as a way to protect residences from nuisance uses such as factories or slaughterhouses, but it has evolved into a tool to enforce socioeconomic exclusion. 

Anybody who has read this blog knows that I, a former zoning officer for the city of Denton, am not a fan of traditional land-use zoning, and am thankful that Houston is the largest city in the nation without it.

Pandemic Link Dump

Passing along a handful of random articles and topics I've come across over the last month or so...

Urban freeways are a product of racial injustice, and its effects are still being felt here in Houston.  I've touched on this before, and in the wake of the protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd, it's become a topic once again. Urban freeways were largely built through minority neighborhoods, dividing and displacing their inhabitants. Decades later, those scars remain:

Thousands of peaceful protesters in the Twin Cities occupied Interstate 94 over the weekend as they marched from the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul to Minneapolis. 

For the region’s African-American community, which has been leading the ongoing protests over the fatal arrest of George Floyd and the use of police force on black Americans, the concrete they were standing on bears significant meaning. 

It was this highway that, in the 1950s and ‘60s, tore apart the once-thriving neighborhood of Rondo — the heart of St. Paul’s largest African-American community — and helped spur decades of racial segregation in the region. 

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz acknowledged as much during a Saturday press conference. "It wasn’t just physical — it ripped a culture, it ripped who we were. It was an indiscriminate act that said this community doesn’t matter, it’s invisible,” he said. “This convenient place to put a highway so we can cross over this place and go from the city out to the suburbs.”

The once and future effects of these freeways remain a topic of controversy today, even here in Houston as TxDOT continues forward in it plan to reconstruct IH-45 north:

Members of the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s transportation advisory committee this week voted to keep portions of the I-45 project in the area’s short-term transportation plan, but with a host of caveats. Chief among those conditions is that the Texas Department of Transportation respond in detail to a set of requests from Houston planners outlining exactly what they can and cannot do to stay within the freeway’s existing boundary and agree in writing to protect displaced residents and businesses. 

The lack of clear commitments worries skeptics, who fear neighborhoods affected by the massive redesign from downtown north to Beltway 8, such as Northside, Independence Heights and Fifth Ward, will continue to bear the brunt of TxDOT and Houston’s highway expansion. For decades, neighborhoods along I-45, I-69 and I-10 north and east of downtown have felt the effects of living within shouting distance of the freeways, as mostly white officials routed the thoroughfares through black and Hispanic communities. 

“A vote on this project that continues those very systems of oppression, disparity and racial inequities without addressing the real problems is only supporting and continuing that system of racism,” said Oni Blair, a member of the transportation advisory committee and executive director of LINK Houston, an advocacy group that has organized opposition to the I-45 plan.

The IH-45 north rebuild provides an opportunity to improve the freeway while at the same time address the impacts that the freeway has historically had on adjacent communities. TxDOT needs to listen carefully, and not repeat the mistakes of the past:

“To leave I-45 as it is currently configured would be a mistake,” said Carol Lewis, director of Texas Southern University’s Center of Transportation Training and Research. 

Ignoring the issue of social justice would be, too, she said. TxDOT has gone to historic lengths to solicit comment but must now reconcile those concerns with its plans and the engineering analysis of how the new freeway and changes to it will affect how people and freight move. 

What is clear, Lewis said, is that TxDOT cannot brush aside how the freeways got where they are now. 

“I think historically TxDOT has been 100 percent guilty of being 100 percent insensitive,” Lewis said, noting what is now I-69 along the east side of downtown gutted Fifth Ward.

How do we get people back on the bus? I wrote a couple of months ago about the essential role of public transportation during the Coronavirus crisis. Now, as local economies reopen, transit agencies need to convince "non-essential" commuters that it is safe to start using transit again:

Masks are mandatory on subways and buses in Washington. San Francisco is betting longer trains will help riders social distance. Crews disinfect New York’s trains daily -- stations twice a day -- and are testing ultraviolet light devices to see if they kill Covid-19 on surfaces. 

As states gradually reopen, transit agencies are taking steps to coax back passengers who’ve been told for months to avoid just such tight quarters with strangers -- an effort that will ultimately influence the economic recovery. 

“For certain businesses teleworking isn’t really an option, so we still need to figure out ways to get those people to work,” said Ed Mortimer, vice president of transportation and infrastructure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

Especially in urban areas, where many people don’t own cars, mass transit will be crucial to reviving economies. But enticing passengers back on board may require adding trains and buses so people can space themselves further apart -- adding stress to agencies already reeling from declining ridership and rising cleaning costs.

Public transportation might not be the disease vector it's feared to be, but it's understandable that people are going to be wary of crowding on board buses and trains with other strangers. Transit agencies are poised for a slow and difficult recovery, especially since people are likely to commute differently in a post-COVID world, and they probably need to re-think the way they provide service and define success both during and after the pandemic. That being said, our cities will not experience full economic recovery unless their transit networks also recover.

Could Houston become a climate policy leader? Maybe:

April was supposed to be a big month for Houston city planning. America’s largest unzoned city was poised to host the American Planning Association’s national convention for the first time, bringing thousands of attendees to town. Walking tours were arranged; awkward cocktail mixers were scheduled. 

Of course, with a global outbreak of the coronavirus, it wasn’t meant to be.

I cannot begin to express how much I was looking forward to the APA's National Planning Conference being here in Houston, as I had never attended this event before. Likewise, I cannot begin to express how bummed I was when it was canceled in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. I hope the APA makes plans to return to Houston with this is all over.

Undeterred, Houston quietly adopted the Bayou City’s first citywide climate action plan on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. If city leaders can pull it off, America’s sprawling oil capital could end up teaching a lot to more traditionally green urban strongholds.

The city's climate action plan is intended to be a blueprint to Houston reducing its impact on the environment. Given the city's characteristics - the refineries, the sprawl - that's going to be a challenge, so the plan includes both standard and innovative elements.

The plan includes plenty of mainstay climate-policy prescriptions, including calls to electrify the city’s fleet of vehicles, switch to renewable sources of energy, and improve energy efficiency in buildings. But then things become rather unique. The city’s first bicycle master plan, adopted in 2017, gets a lot of play, as does the MetroNEXT Moving Forward plan, a widely lauded $3.5 billion push to overhaul mass transit in the notoriously auto-oriented city. The emphasis on mobility makes sense, since nearly one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, and Houston maintains one of the highest rates of automobile use in the country. 

Toward this same end, one of the plan’s more innovative proposals calls on policymakers to eliminate minimum parking requirements by 2030. While Houston famously lacks zoning — meaning that it doesn’t segregate uses or restrict densities — it still enforces some conventional land-use regulations. These include minimum parking requirements, which mandate that developers build off-street parking for each project, regardless of actual demand. In Houston, this can mean up to two parking spaces for every apartment or four spaces for every thousand square feet of office space.

Houston's lack of zoning, furthermore, might make it easier for the city to redevelop in a sustainable manner, featuring more walkable, mixed-use, higher-density development, than other cities that are incumbered by an onerous development process that is subject to NIMBY interference.

The city has a long way to go before it becomes anyone’s idea of an environmental exemplar. But if all goes according to plan, Houston could soon rank among those cities that have scrapped out-of-date parking requirements — a group that conspicuously doesn’t include progressive stalwarts like Portland and New York City. In a city otherwise famous for its supposed lack of planning, easing up on the right rules might just turn Houston green.

Stay tuned.

"The right thing - just at the wrong time." Take a few minutes to read this excellent XFL postmortem by ESPN's Kevin Seifert. The article takes a look at why the well-funded league suddenly folded (it might not have been completely due to Coronavirus), it's prospects for revival, and the potential for spring football generally:

"We still don't know that spring football works in this country," said Andrew Kline, founder of the investment bank Park Lane, which specializes in sports investments. "Football season is so intense, and it's just associated with the fall season. You wonder if part of the cycle is that people need to come down from it for a while."

I'm obviously a fan of spring football, but its track record is dismal, and as even as the XFL winds its way through bankruptcy proceedings, I'm skeptical that we'll ever see another Houston Roughnecks game again. At any rate, it appears that we could have to go for awhile without any football at all. Which will make my fall miserable, to say the least.

The removal of Confederate statues and monuments should not be a "liberal" endeavor. I can't believe I'm actually linking to Rich Lowry in the National Review, but in this case he's right:

Conservatives […] reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense. 

They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington. 

They value tradition and worry we are trashing part of our history.This impulse, though, is a mistake. Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed. 

The statues are an unnecessary affront to black citizens, who shouldn’t have to see defenders of chattel slavery put on a pedestal, literally. 

It is impossible to evaluate these monuments without considering the context of why they were created. Many of them were erected as part of the push to enshrine a dishonest, prettied-up version of the Confederacy.

Lowry ends by noting that "secession was a traitorous act that threatened to destroy the American nation, to create a rump republic built on slavery, and to make impossible the subsequent rise of the United States to a world power." Liberals and conservatives alike should understand the fact that the Confederate States of America was, quite simply, a racist and treasonous enterprise that was defeated over a century and a half ago.

I occasionally come across the argument that the removal of Confederate statues and monuments is somehow "erasing history." This is bullshit. There are no monuments to Hitler or Rommel or Göring in Germany, but we still know that county's history - a history the German people of today most certainly do not want commemorate.

These statues and monuments belong in museums, battlefields, and military cemeteries. They do not belong in our parks, our squares or our capitol grounds.

Last but not least, congratulations to Liverpool.

What a difference sixteen years makes

In November of 2003, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County held a referendum seeking bonding authority to implement its METRO Solutions transit plan. The plan, which envisioned a significant expansion of its (at that time still unopened) light rail system, was extremely controversial.

It garnered significant, well-funded opposition, and narrowly passed: 51.7% in favor to 48.3% opposed. The geographic disparity of the vote - urban, largely-minority precinct were generally in favor, while suburban, largely-white precincts were opposed - was stark.

The amount of bonding authority being requested was $640 million ($891 million in 2019 dollars).

In November of 2019, METRO held a referendum seeking bonding authority to implement its METRONext transit plan. The plan, which was focused on bus-based improvements but still contained a light rail expansion element, was relatively uncontroversial. It attracted only token, underfunded opposition, and was overwhelmingly supported by voters.

Factoring in the results from Harris County as well as the bits of the METRO service area that are in Fort Bend, Waller and Montgomery Counties, last week's METRONext referendum passed by a margin of 68.2% to 31.8% - a split of just over 2 to 1. Geographically, the plan was supported in precincts representing all ethnicities and income levels, and opposition to the referendum was limited to a handful of suburban and rural areas.

The amount of bonding authority being requested in last Tuesday's vote was $3.5 billion.

Certainly, some of the difference in the level of support between the two plans may have to do with the contents of the plans themselves. The 2003 plan was centered on light rail expansion, which is by nature expensive and controversial, whereas the plan approved last week is more focused on bus rapid transit (which works well when done right but which is currently unproven in the region) as a high-capacity transit technology.

That said, I think the greater reason in the difference in support between the two plans is simple demographics. Houston, Harris County and the surrounding region have grown and changed significantly over the last sixteen years, and local voters are more supportive of public transportation today than they were in 2003.

Traffic congestion is currently the number one concern of area residents, and highway widening projects that were once routine are now generating significant opposition. Local voters are looking for other ways to get around.

Jeff Balke has more.

The legal supremacy of the automobile

In the United States, people are compelled to use the private automobile to fully participate in our society. Those that, for whatever reason, cannot or do not operate their own vehicle are essentially second-class citizens. University of Iowa law professor Gregory Shill aregues that this is by legal design:

It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it. 

Let’s begin at the state and local levels. A key player in the story of automobile supremacy is single-family-only zoning, a shadow segregation regime that is now justifiably on the defensive for outlawing duplexes and apartments in huge swaths of the country. Through these and other land-use restrictions—laws that separate residential and commercial areas or require needlessly large yards—zoning rules scatter Americans across distances and highway-like roads that are impractical or dangerous to traverse on foot. The resulting densities are also too low to sustain high-frequency public transit.

Further entrenching automobile supremacy are laws that require landowners who build housing and office space to build housing for cars as well. In large part because of parking quotas, parking lots now cover more than a third of the land area of some U.S. cities; Houston is estimated to have 30 parking spaces for every resident. [More on this in a moment.] As the UCLA urban-planning professor Donald Shoup has written, this mismatch flows from legal mandates rather than market demand. Every employee who brings a car to the office essentially doubles the amount of space he takes up at work, and in urban areas his employer may be required by law to build him a $50,000 garage parking space.

Working in the transportation planning profession, I frequently hear the claim that private automobile use is the dominant form of transportation because "people love their cars," and that attempts to plan and promote alternative forms of transportation, such as pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure or more public transportation, are at best frivolous and at worst wasteful because "nobody chooses to use" them. As Shill points out, however, the automobile's dominance in our society isn't so much a "choice" but rather a "necessity" promogulated by almost a century's worth of policies that have favored its use over all other forms of transportation.

In addition to the factors he described above, Shill goes on to list policies such as tax deductions for mortgages and parking, design standards for vehicles, insurance requirements, and criminal law as examples that have prioritized the automobile. He continues:

Since the dawn of the automobile, governments have been slow to address its downsides. “We have gloated too much over the usefulness of the motor car,” said The New York World in a 1913 editorial. “We put it into reckless hands. We make no effective laws against its misuse.”

In the years since, American government at all levels crossed a line. Instead of merely accommodating some people’s desire to drive, our laws essentially force driving on all of us—by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions. To page through the law books today is to stumble again and again upon evidence of automobile supremacy. The range and depth of legal supports for driving is bewildering. But these laws, which are everywhere we look, are also opportunities.

Shill argues that all of these policies and laws encouraging and enforcing automobile supremacy could be reversed by the legislative bodies that enacted them to begin with, whether at the local, state or federal level. At the local level, zoning ordinances are one such example; city leaders could relax and reform these rules if they had the will to do so.* Other local ordinances that favor automobile use pertain to minimum parking regulations; in fact, and in regards to Houston and its parking-space-per-resident ratio that Shill mentioned earlier, City Council took a (small) step towards addressing that issue last week when it voted to exempt Midtown and the East End from the minimum parking regulations that the city imposes on development:

Market-based parking exempts areas from the citywide parking minimums, allowing property owners to provide the number of off-street parking spaces "they believe are necessary to service their customers," according to the planning department. "This change gives property owners more flexibility in the use o their property and removes a bureaucratically-imposed minimum that is based on one-size-fits-all analysis." The area, notes the planning department, has "sufficient multimodal transportation system, high transit ridership, and the existence of significant surface and parking garage spaces."

The expansion was supported by the East Downtown Management District and the Midtown Management District.

Even so, the "we need parking minimums because nobody chooses to walk" argument still made an appearance, courtesy of one councilmember who doesn't even represent any of the areas being exempted:

Councilmember Greg Travis, the only council member to vote against the amendment, insisted parking spaces were necessary because people wouldn't walk to destinations. "Today? Walk for two blocks, it's not going to happen."

In response, Mayor Sylvester Turner was quick to point out that the majority of businesses in the affected areas were supportive. The Kinder Houston Area Survey, meanwhile, has tracked the increasing desire for walkable urbanism among Houston-area residents.

Look: no realistic person is going to argue that private automobiles don't provide tremendous advantages when it comes to personal convenience, comfort and mobility. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't question the countless hours of our lives wasted by the congestion they cause, the 40,000 people killed every year by their use, the way they dictate our physical environment, or the way they essentially relegate those who don't own or operate them to second-class citizenship. It's well past time we as a society re-examined the laws and policies enacted at all levels of government that mandate automobile supremacy.

* I'd like to see more cities abandon conventional land-use zoning ordinances not only because they necessitate driving but also because they have become horribly misused. What started out as a way to protect residences from nuisance uses (e.g. factories, junkyards, slaughterhouses) has evolved into a tool to enforce socioeconomic exclusion. I witnessed this when I worked as a zoning officer in Denton and I am glad Houston does not have it (even though the lack of zoning obviously did not prevent Houston from becoming an automobile-dominated metropolis).

Governor signs UH medical school into existence

Obligatory update to a story I've been following for a while:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has signed a bill creating a medical school at the University of Houston amid concerns about a physician shortage in the state. 

Under the legislation signed into law Wednesday, the University of Houston's College of Medicine will be the 13th medical school in Texas. It will be based in the UH System's flagship campus in Houston. Nearly half of the Texas medical schools are in the Houston area. 

On Thursday, Abbott described UH as on the way to being "one of the world's preeminent universities." He said he plans to do a ceremonial signing of the bill in Houston. 

“The University of Houston continues to cement itself as a top tier University, and I was proud to sign HB 826 into law establishing the University Of Houston College Of Medicine," Abbott said in a statement. "As Governor, I have pledged to elevate Texas’ institutions of higher education and this bill furthers that goal."

My understanding is that the only hurdle remaining for UH Med is approval from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. If that happens, the college would enroll its first students in the fall of 2020. Stay tuned.

Brief, belated election thoughts

The much-anticipated midterm elections were two weeks ago tonight; I haven't had the time to write about them until now (which is okay, considering how many close races there were that took a couple of weeks to call). I have a few thoughts:

• The most surprising thing about this election was how unsurprising it turned out to be. The Democrats were overwhelmingly favored to retake control of the House of Representatives, while the Republicans were heavy favorites to retain control of the Senate. There might have a few individual races that raised eyebrows, but the overall results were accurately predicted by pollsters and pundits alike many months ago.

• Even though they managed to retain control of the Senate (and, indeed, pad their margin by a couple of seats), this was not a good election for the Republican Party and Donald Trump. They lost the House of Representatives, which will be under Democratic control for the first time in eight years and which will spend the next two years aggressively investigating the myriad transgressions of the Trump administration. Taking back the House was the Democrats’ primary goal of the 2018 midterms, and they did it with several seats to spare (they needed to flip 23 seats for a majority; now that most of the votes have been counted, it looks like they picked up 39). Many of these flipped seats were suburban districts that were formerly reliably Republican, but which have been trending Democratic as the Republican Party, under Trump, hemorrhages college-educated white voters and is increasingly reliant on blue-collar, rural whites for its base of support. Given the nation’s evolving demographic profile, that’s probably not a recipe for long-term success.

• Furthermore, although the Republicans picked up (barring a miracle in the upcoming Mississippi Senate run-off) two Senate seats, they really could have done even better, considering the mix of states that were in play. They weren’t able to flip seats in deep-red states such as Montana and West Virginia, nor were they able to claim Senate races in the Midwestern states that were the key to Trump’s victory in 2016: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Arizona, furthermore, elected a Democratic Senator for the first time since 1976. Even here in Texas, Beto O'Rourke lost to Ted Cruz by a mere 2.6 percentage points (Cruz won his 2012 Senate race by about 16 points).

• Republicans also lost 7 governorships and control of six state legislative chambers, a byproduct of flipping about 350 state legislative races nationwide. Three (very red) states also voted to expand Medicaid, which is a cornerstone of Obamacare (which itself is safe from repeal for at least the next two years, by virtue of the Democrats controlling the House). To reiterate: this was not a good election for the Republican Party. 

• Does Beto O'Rourke's close performance mean that Texas is now a purple state? I don't know if I agree with that - Republicans still won all the statewide races and maintain solid control of the legislature - but he had some coattails: two US House states, a dozen state house seats, two state senate seats and innumerable county positions flipped from red to blue. O'Rourke shifted the map in Texas; time will tell if this is a one-off blip or a sign of things to come (if it's the latter, the Republicans are in big trouble).

• One of the House seats that flipped was my own - the 7th Congressional District - where John Culberson was booted from office by Lizzie Parnell Fletcher. I was not a fan of Culberson; aside from showing little leadership when it came to the city’s flooding uses, he was a staunch opponent of mass transit along Richmond Avenue and used federal lawmaking processes to circumvent what should have been a local process in deciding where high-capacity transit lines should go. That may change now that Fletcher will represent the district, but a lot will depend on voter approval of the long-range transit plan METRO is currently preparing. 

• Texas might not be a swing state yet, but Harris County has become a Democratic stronghold. Democratic candidates swept all of the county races two weeks ago. One casualty of this wipeout was Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, who lost his seat to a 27-year-old law school student and community activist with no political experience. I hope Lena Hidalgo is a quick learner, as it is inevitable that this county will experience another major flooding event on her watch. (One also wonders why the Harris County Democratic establishment did not anticipate the possibility of a wave election last spring and run a more qualified candidate in the primary, but that’s a discussion for a different day.) 

• Donald Trump is still an authoritarian, a narcissist, a pathological liar, and an all-around piece of shit. Don't expect the results of this election to cause him to "change" in fact, expect him to become more aggressive and erratic now that he knows he's in trouble.

• Midterm election results are not predictive of subsequent presidential election results - Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all suffered significant losses midway through their first terms but were easily re-elected two years later. That being said, these results do indicate that Trump's base alone cannot carry him to re-election.

I'll end that note. I really don't want to think about 2020 just yet.

UH is one step closer to a medical school

Since I've been following this item for over a decade, I need to make note of this development:

The state higher education regulatory agency gave its stamp of approval Thursday to the University of Houston's plan to create the city's first new medical school in nearly half a century.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board unanimously approved the UH proposal, which calls for a focus on training primary-care doctors to practice in underserved areas. UH plans to enroll its first class of students in fall 2020.

"We're hopeful this school will have a great impact," Renu Khator, UH's president and chancellor, said after the vote. "It's the right thing to do for Houston and Texas and a natural maturation of our existing health-care programs."

See here for some background. The University of Houston still needs to secure accreditation from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education as well as secure the support of the Texas Legislature before its medical school is a done deal, but the THECB's decision is a huge step forward in the process.

Astrodome, again

Last week, Harris County Commissioner's Court voted to spend $105 million to renovate the venerable and vacant Astrodome. This vote, which was actually the second step of an action that the Commissioners took two years ago, seeks to transform the derelict structure into parking and event space.

As readers of this blog know, I've been following the saga of the Astrodome for several years, and although I have a soft spot in my heart for the Eighth Wonder of the World, I'm also highly skeptical that it can be renovated and put to use in an economically viable fashion. This may be a $105 million money sink for county taxpayers. Furthermore, the optics of this spend are especially bad in light of the damage this county suffered from Harvey, as the Press's Cory Garcia notes:

Houston needs flood reform. Just the idea of another Harvey-level storm crashing into the city is enough to make the skin crawl. And yet every time the idea of flood reform comes up it seems like it’s followed by the question of “where will the money come from?” Now sure, $100+ million is a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed to make sure the city doesn’t drown again, but at the very least it can be acknowledged that any excitement about what’s going on with the Dome — especially after voters decided against saving it back in 2013 — is tone deaf.

I get it: Houston is a city that is often seen as one that doesn’t respect or take care of its history. The Astrodome has sentimental value for many sports, sports entertainment and music fans. The building is the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” or at least the coolest contender on the list; no offense to the Palm Islands intended. It makes sense that some people think preserving it for future generations makes sense.

And yes, in the future your kids and your kids’ kids might park their car under it on the way to go see Brad Paisley play his 60th RodeoHouston show and think to themselves, “wow, I bet a ton of people got concussions here!”

That may be harsh, but I’m just not sure that turning the Astrodome into the “8th Wonder of the Convention Hall Circuit” is something worth celebrating while people are still rebuilding their lives and hearing that only so much can be done to prevent it from happening again. I’m sure we’ll host some grand conventions and meetings in the future, but the optics of it all still suck.

The Chronicle's Lisa Falkenburg, on the other hand, thinks that the county's investment in the structure is wise:

To some, investing in the dome seems a nostalgic indulgence in the face of urgent needs. Harvey victims are hoping for a tax break on properties that lost value. Those who use the criminal courts are calling for swift action on the flooded courthouse - either massive repairs or relocating the ill-planned complex once and for all. 

All of the above should be priorities for County Judge Ed Emmett and the four commissioners. 

But here's the thing: leaders have to balance today's needs with tomorrow's. The long view has its virtues. And frankly, it's been all to absent in the decision-making of Houston and Harris County. Shortsightedness has gotten us into a lot of trouble - from poor investment in flooding infrastructure to irresponsible growth that increased the region's vulnerability during storms and rain events. 

It has led us to pave over prairies. To bulldoze historic architecture and old trees and character. And yes, to leave an expensive, beloved, world-famous landmark with a lot of tourism potential rotting away in full view of visitors and homefolk alike. 

So, sure, it may seem tone deaf to pour money into the Astrodome right now, but the decision seems to be in tune with Houston's future needs. 

And critics of the decision either don't understand the facts, or willfully ignore them.

Falkenberg then launches into a point-by-point rebuttal of arguments made by opponents of the renovation project, including the claim that Harris County voters decided to demolish the Dome in a 2013 bond referendum (she's technically right; the vote was to issue bonds to refurbish the Astrodome and said nothing about tearing it down; however, it was clearly intimated by elected officials that, if the vote were to fail, the structure would be demolished). And, while Falkenburg concedes that the optics of this vote weren't particularly good, she correctly notes that this action is the second step on a path that the Commissioner's Court had begun back in 2016, and would have been taken regardless of Harvey. 

At this point, I'm tired of all the political bickering and I'm tired of seeing the grimy, derelict Astrodome sit next to NRG Stadium; I just want the saga of the historic stadium to come to a final resolution. This vote hopefully accomplishes that. I can only hope that things turn out as planned, and that the repurposed Astrodome does indeed generate a return on investment for the County. It's worth noting that the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo does seem much more sanguine about this project than they have towards previous renovation proposals; hopefully that's a good sign. 

The funding sources for the $105 million construction budget are general revenues (i.e. property taxes), hotel occupancy taxes, and parking revenue. Construction is expected to begin later this year and take about 17 months to complete.