Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Long Island alone would have around 300 contiguous miles. NJ alone would probably have around 300-400 contiguous miles. The entire corridor along the Boston Post Road (but right along the road, only, not inland) is pre-suburban basically from NYC to New Haven.
And LA basically all the way south to Newport Beach and all the way east to Ontario.
In contrast, Houston leaves the grid pretty quickly, which makes sense, as the city wasn't particularly large in the pre-grid era. You're already off the traditional grid 6 miles or so from downtown.
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I feel like Houston might have kept using the grid for longer than other cities. Or maybe it just platted out large swaths of land using the grid and built up the lots at a time when other cities had already stopped using the grid.
Also Houston was never dense. Basically, imagine two cities:
City A) Pre-1880 (pre-streetcar) it is built up at high densities of 60,000 ppsm with 8 million people (=125 square miles). Then from 1880 to 1920 it grows by 4 million people at 20,000 ppsm (=200 square miles). Then from 1920 to 1950 it grows by 2million at 10,000 ppsm (=200 square miles). Total is 525 square miles and 14 million people.
City B) Hardly any population pre-1880. By 1920 it has 500,000 people at 10,000 ppsm (= 50 sq miles) then grows by another 1 million at 5,000 ppsm (=200 sq miles) to the end of the grid era. Total is 250 square miles and 1.5 million people.
City A would be pretty similar to New York. City B would be pretty similar to Houston. I might have exaggerated the differences in density, but only slightly (measuring the areas
again I'm getting 225 sq mi and 675 sq mi. I'm not including Northern Long Island, and I think there's too many gaps between New Rochelle and New Haven to include much (if any) of CT as contiguous. Not including the Meadowlands either.
The difference in weighted density is nothing new, it was already about 6 fold around 1950. Houston didn't have New York's density constrains, it had cheap oil, and probably less poverty. It was mostly built in the late grid era when densities were lower thanks to streetcars and automobiles (1910-1950/1960 or so). Houston might have already been less centralized then, although I'm not sure. But the lower densities and even more important, small size, meant that even the 1910-1960 era growth was less dense than in New York since you had less congestion.