![Houston, Texas]()
Houston, Texas. Source: Getty
Butler's dismantling at the hands of the UConn Huskies Monday night in Houston played out as it was expected. Less foregone, and less important, was the outcome of the 2010 All-Star game in Dallas, down the turnpike, as we say on the East Coast.
The interesting aspect of both games isn't the scope (70,000 people in Houston, 109,000 in Dallas, respectively), the stakes (national championship/pride), or the Texas linkage.
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Dallas, Texas. Source: Getty
Viewed through the lens of the host cities, the games offer a chance to see what urbanization as a social movement, and city planning, or lack thereof, mean when cities add 100,000 people over a three day period.
First, obligatory backstory: I run a sports startup,
FanFeedr, and sensible frugality is the oxygen that drives a lot of decisions, especially around travel. Whenever possible, I take public transportation, in cities that aren't really built for it, like Los Angeles.
The NBA All-Star game in February last year took place on a cold weekend, and I took a bus from the airport to a train connection, waited an hour at the train stop, which is equidistant between Ft. Worth and Dallas, and then caught the train to downtown Dallas. Dallas has only one downtown, which seems logical, until you visit Houston and understand that the historical rival to its wealthier cousin in Texas has five downtowns.
The NCAA Championship game took place at Reliant Stadium, which is about a quarter mile from Houston's lone light-rail system. The northern terminus of the light rail line is downtown. We started our journey there, on one of the two-car specials, and rumbled south through the Museum District, then the Medical Center area. The latter is another one of Houston's five "downtowns," making the entire journey groundhog-dayish: "We are in downtown, again. Yay." The second to the last stop was at Reliant Stadium.
If you look at just the city populations, Houston is #4 nationally at 2,099,451 people and Dallas is #9, with 1,197,816 residents, based on 2009 Census numbers. This is very much like looking at the un-inflation-adjusted cost of anything: it doesn't really matter and someone who quotes the numbers should be discounted as a fool right off of the bat.
The more valuable number is the size of the relative metropolitan statistical areas. The cities flip rank when viewed through this lens: Dallas-Ft. Worth-Arlington comes in at 6,447,615, good enough for #4 nationally, while Houston-Sugarland-Baytown comes in at 5,867,489, good enough for #6 nationally.
Dallas and Houston have oil and energy money. After that, they diverge, as Dallas is just richer, and has diversified into video games, technology, and now AT&T's headquarters after their recent shift from San Antonio.
The other critical difference is that Houston lacks any city charter for zoning, so it is a pastiche of different flavors thrown together, making the public transportation and lack of pedestrians a foregone result.
Houston is also based near the water and super flat, making venturing outdoors similar to being in the tropics most of the time. Dallas is also pretty flat, but much further inland and less likely to swamp simulations outside.
In Houston, I had Sunday brunch at the Breakfast Klub, which is known nationally, thanks to
this article in the Times. The line went out of the door, and took 1.5 hours, and what was striking wasn't the multiculturalism in the line,
but amongst the couples waiting to go in. It was a small extension of another
trend the paper noted in Mississippi a few weeks ago.
Dallas had similar local establishments, but the mixing didn't extend to either groups of friends or couples, which seems like a less-progressive indicator, to these eyes.
Both cities, zoning or not, require cars, and the car culture means zones of interaction. You can avoid a class or group of people if you wish. While the linkage between progressivism and high-use public transport may seem small, if we do accept the premise, then it is hard to understand Houston's slight leg up on its in-state rival to the northwest.
For me, the games themselves were secondary to the people-watching, the structure of each city, and each city's relationship to its centers of art.
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