From: houston strategies
July 10, 2009
The NY Times had an interesting story yesterday about how the transportation stimulus funding is overly biased towards rural areas, which doesn't surprise me at all given the geographic nature of politics and the obvious fact that a road network will be more expensive per capita for a dispersed population than a concentrated one. We have more people inside the 610 Loop than in the entire state of Wyoming - whose road network do you think is more expensive to build and maintain?
But the really interesting item from the story was the graph below. Not because it shows Houston underperformed securing transportation stimulus vs. most other cities (inc. DFW), but because of the interesting GDP share numbers.
Note that Houston is the 5th largest GDP metro in the country, and ahead of DFW and Philly, even though they have larger populations. Atlanta and Miami have similar populations to us, but are significantly farther behind in GDP. San Francisco and Boston, which are 1 to 1.5 million smaller than us, but packed with highly productive, educated, creative class types still end up notably below us in GDP share - and Detroit, Phoenix, and Riverside with populations similar to both of them fall well below them in GDP. LA has more than twice our population, but less than twice our GDP share. Chicago has 67% more people than us, but only 41% more GDP share. We even slightly edge out NYC proportional to our populations.
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