I was in college when this issue of Time came out and it caused quite a stir. Leaving aside the fact that many high school and college boys (raises hand) thought that Molly Ringwald was hot, look at the top right corner. They billed the article as a tale of two states, but what it really was was a comparison of Boston and Houston. At the time Boston was peaking thanks to the rising stock markets and Houston was in the absolute pits of hell. It wasn't a local recession. Houston was experiencing a localized economic depression, which has traumatized many of us to this day.Time got a lot of it wrong. They wrote about downtown streets being deserted during business hours, neglecting to mention the fact that downtown workers travel beneath the streets via the Tunnel System. They also said the the largest employers were Houston hospitals, failing to mention that the Texas Medical Center has always been the largest employer. It's a city for sick people.
But the gist of the article was accurate. Houston was completely hosed, and Boston was boomtown. Then came the 1987 stock market crash and the end of the last real estate bubble. Boston tanked, Houston slowly crawled back. By 1993 the Houston economic depression was over.
15 years later I am seeing a new oil mania unwind and I don't like what I see. Spec commercial buildings are still being thrown up along I-10. A new 30-story building in Memorial City has a "please lease space here, pretty please?" banner hanging from its sides. I am glad that residential housing starts have dropped dramatically, but the strip shopping centers are still being built. Hello? Doesn't anyone remember?
Except for some locations inside 610, Houston didn't participate in the real estate appreciation mania, and high oil prices have shielded us from what has gone on the rest of the country. That shield has fallen and Houston is about to get wacked in a big way. Bill White is hoping to keep the leaks in the levee plugged until he gets his chance to run for the US Senate, but I don't think the flood can be kept in check for his candidacy that long. It will get very bad here.
Update: My memory is faulty. Here is the article from 1986. Hey, it was 22 years ago, give me a break. I think I am mixing up that Time article with other articles that appeared during the same period. Fellow Houstonians, remember that 9.2% unemployment rate? I do. I remember coming home from college one summer and working a fireworks stand with the parents for money to pay for a new roof on our house.
10 comments:
I had just graduated from college a couple weeks before that issue came out.
I remember in the spring of 1986, when most of my classmates and I had secured our first jobs at either oil companies or defense contractors. I remember hearing about Shell announcing that they were laying off X-hundred, or was it X-thousand?, employees, and thinking, gosh, does so-and-so still have a job waiting for him?
Considering I lived on campus and was for the most part oblivious to anything happening outside school, the news must have been HUGE for me to have heard it.
I drove through Midland in Spring of 1986 on the way up to Vail and couldn't believe the misery I was seeing. A friend of mine's dad had been layed off by one of the oil companies (he was a geologist) and he had found work at a McDonalds. When I graduated later in May, there were no jobs for communications majors, so it was off to grad school in California for a couple of years. By the time I got back to Texas in Fall of 1988, there was a little bit of hiring going on again, and I found a job with HL&P near Bay City.
Now, I'm up here in NYC and there's a building boom going on up here, too. The new Goldman, Sachs building looks to be a bout three quarters done. Looking around the city, you see the recent new buildings for Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns with new plaques on them and apartment buildings going up all over Manhattan. It does give you pause...
The Bust sucked, especially as a kid picking up on negative vibes when there was nothing you could do to help your parents out.
I am still somewhat hopeful that oil will gravitate back towards $50-$60 within 18 months or so...but boy, the plunge to $38 right after OPEC and Russia announced their cuts does not make my Pollyanna scenario look very likely.
I read the whole story, here's a link: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,961436,00.html
Just curious, I couldn't find where in the story it says Houston's streets are deserted. Hotels, yes. Streets, no. Let me know if I'm missing something.
I ask because I've been looking for that apocryphal story by an out-of-towner journalist (I've heard New York Times, but no one can ever find the exact article) in which the writer says the streets are deserted because he doesn't know about the tunnel system.
Carrie Feibel Houston Chronicle
Carrie,
Do you have access to the old Post morgue? There may have been an article in there from one of the editorial writers referring to it.
I have a very clear memory of the article because it pissed off a lot of Houstonians.
"We can avoid, for example, the kind of modernist sterilization that turned Houston’s downtown into a zone of empty streets dominated by glass boxes, linked by underground tunnels and interlocking subterranean food courts. As downtown Houston retreated below ground, the public space of the street became deserted."
http://www.downtownkc.org/content.aspx?pgID=875&newsID=91&exCompID=82
Thanks, Jean. I guess it is easy for KC urban planners to knock Houston's tunnel system, but I'd like them to come to Houston anytime from April to the end of September and stroll around for more than 2 minutes. :-) The tunnel system was built because during our long summers it is unbearably hot and humid. Moreover, the writer of that article clearly hasn't been to Houston for 10 years. Downtown streets are hopping now at night. At NIGHT.
Montreal also has a similar tunnel system, only to protect workers and residents from bitter cold. Seems to work fine for them. We have the same.
the resident assistant in the dorm my freshman year at LSU was graduating in petroleum engineering in spring '86. he went from having an offer at exxon to taking a job at a coke distribution center and being happy to get it...
First time I went downtown I didn't know about the tunnels. I arrived at the client's office covered in sweat. doh!
Very nice real estate stuff I ever seen! Thanks for the info.
Click here for : Homes For Sale Fort Lauderdale
I found this blog informative as I have interest in real estate and I bookmarked this link. Thank you for good job!
Click here for : Homes Bal Harbour For Sale
Post a Comment