They may not be paying taxes. When I worked with this in other states, most of time, it's commercial property that property owner LLC just walked away from because it's worthless. LLC exists on paper owning the land but has no money/assets besides the land so nothing for government to take. Bills just go into shredder and arrears continuing piling up.

County does not want to seize the land because they know they can't get tax amount owed and would be stuck with worthless property it has to maintain.

Probably need some form of tax amnesty system where counties can seize these properties, sell them off for any amount and wipe tax bill clean. However, that's process would be ripe for corruption which thinking about TX, I'm surprised they haven't allowed that.

The second paragraph of the article attributes the hot spots to abandoned buildings and parking lots; vacant lots with vegetation are not the problem.

It's extremely unlikely the land in question (paved lots and abandoned buildings) is agricultural.

"finds that vacant lots with vegetation can help cool surrounding areas. Abandoned buildings and paved lots do the opposite"

Beekeeping is popular, too. I know some wealthy people who pay a beekeeper to keep bees on their land and receive jarred honey with personalized labels as a little bonus on top of their tax break. "<Name>'s Honey" with a head shot.

>> including large ranches owned by hedge funds and foreign nationals.

Hedge Funds and Foreign Nationals owning large american ranches???

We keep the happiest pet cows in the old field in front of the family farmhouse after the farm downsized and sold most of the land so the city and state wouldn’t try to include it in the house plot sorts front yard acreage.

Different state but I think a similar conundrum. They’re old dairy cows living their best life.

Did you even take a cursory look at the article?

Urban Heat Islands are far stronger than people generally realise.

I live in a forest. When it’s 28C here, it’ll be 36C in the village a few km away. It’ll drop to 16C overnight here but they have a low of 28C.

All that masonry, concrete, blacktop, the absence of shade, and you basically just have a great big passive thermal accumulator.

I would never expect the temperature 60 miles away to be anywhere close to mine. Is that normally the case in Texas?

When I lived near downtown Houston, during the summer, I had to change into my work clothes after I got to the office. Just the 100 yd walk, at 8 am, from my house to the bus stop, left me sweaty. The city definitely holds a lot of heat.

Fancy way of say The Woodlands?

I'd take the 10-20 extra degrees of heat if it meant living somewhere fun (Montrose 10 years ago or East Downtown today). The Woodlands is depressing.

Urban heat island effect is a strong one!

Welcome to real Northern Living :)

>On a scorching Texas afternoon,

Something I'm very familiar with, and the drone data speaks for itself as far as what it's like in the hot sun of southeast Texas.

Then how about at night?

Those buildings can then act like heat islands that can take more than one night for the heat to dissipate too.

Some cool off that much, some don't. Thermodynamics at work.

Based on heated mass is how long it takes to cool back off to ambient temp by morning. Good air circulation can help a lot too.

If everybody's roof is soaking up heat all day, the structures underneath that are being actively cooled at the same time are not expected to have nearly as much heated mass that needs to dissipate, and the only time for that might be at night.

But maybe that same amount of heat was actively dispersed into the surrounding air all day by the air conditioning units of the cooled structures, plus some of the night. And how efficient are A/C units anyway? That's got to make a difference too so it's not just abandoned buildings but any time people are not running A/C even while dwelling there. At least the windows are open then.

So the drone data on the buildings looks realistic so far, but everything else is just beginning to trickle in.

Regardless, I'm just fine without A/C in the summer in Houston if I'm in a proper place like a 100-year-old home that was built for it.

But I grew up in Florida when about the only places with A/C were supermarkets and banks, not even most college dorms or classrooms had it when I got there.

You just sweat more in Florida, because it may not reach 100 Fahrenheit all summer but the humidity makes Houston feel like a desert by comparison, and it sure doesn't cool off as much at night like it does in Houston with its milder type of "Northern Living" :)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6950486/#sec5-ijerp... "Based on the 45 quantitative and qualitative papers summarized here, we can deduce that the presence of parks and other green space reduces urban crime."

Would say blacktop rather than concrete.

Some of that is climate change worldwide. Crazy snowbound winters were a thing of my childhood in the Midwest, and also in southern Pennsylvania where I now live. Neither see those extremes anymore.

Having a lot of buildings under trees brings up a big problem when heavy rainstorms, wind, or hail occur. Texas has all three. Old trees are particularly troublesome since heavy limbs can snap off with very gentle stimulation.

It's nice to build a house under a tree. It's a bad idea to buy a house that was built under a tree.

You haven't explained what you'd do for the car-based infrastructure, which seems to be the main problem here

One of my neighbors has a sycamore tree that practically covers the entire house. It does look really nice, but I'm glad It's not my house, because the tree is constantly dropping debris on the roof, and if a branch fell of in a wind storm, it could do significant damage to the house.

Sometimes you we just have to look backwards at some old designs.

There are still significant tradeoffs though when living that close to nature.

For example, I've stayed in cement/stone homes that are more dome-shaped. Completely surrounded by trees and a garden.

Water ponds all around that catch rain and feed under stone canals to different areas of the land and grey water systems feeding bamboo.

Wonderful, genius water retention system. But cold and rainy weather means you're surrounded by the cold and humidity of those same beautiful ponds.

This exists in many parts of the world. And is usually reserved for the ultra wealthy, especially if you want it to be near a big city. One famous example is Karuizawa.

Also, if you're not already familiar, you might look into Earthships. Lots of really cool ideas for building homes in a different way.

The gradient should be pretty obvious here https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7512376,-95.5104388,10129m/d...

In Houston, any tree over your house could lead to much worse hurricane damage, or damage when there would otherwise be none.

This is becoming obsolete with roof-mounted PV. You'd want it exposed all year.

The PV panels, with the air space above the roof, would also act as a bit of insulation.

The summer shade makes sense, but a tree without leaves in the winter does not provide more sunlight than no tree at all.

We could also talk about the potential for the roots of the tree crawling under the foundation and wrecking it or the tree itself falling on the roof of the house.

But it is a very nice quote if you don't think too much about it.

It loses the leaves in winter but you still don't have more sunlight than you had before the tree.

Any tree will eventually extend roots beneath your foundation and do damage. They will shift and crack the foundation (unless you use pillar construction), break pipes and structures and will penetrate your sewer lines. If you're lucky you will kill them before they do any severe damage.

Though it sounds absurd, rather than a tree, it might be better to put up a shade (i.e., two poles and a sail cloth between them) to block the lith/heat. It would definitely be cheaper than having a tree although your neighbors might not like it.

A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed. But then a new problem arises: the dying tree roots, which extend entirely across and below the land, and which had previously remained placidly underground and invisible, now begin to rot, swell and rise irregularly everywhere. They thrust upward at random ruining the lawn's former level appearance. You can no longer mow your lawn: the lawnmower strikes the rising roots and either breaks the blade or the lawnmower stalls. The surface is no longer level. You can let your lawn lie fallow for 20 more years until the roots rot completely or...

... you pay someone enough to remove all the roots and fill them in with soil, then re-level and re-sod the lawn. That likely triples the cost of removal.

Trees look great - from a distance.

It is a tribute to the old "pier and beam" construction techniques that their use evades these problems somewhat by allowing you to raise/lower the piers in response to tree growth/intrusion, thus maintaining a level house (so your grandkids can play marbles on the wood floor in the living room).

Root barriers may be a reasonable solution too, but they must be maintained. I am unfamiliar with their success rate.

I recently saw an 11-story high-rise whose foundation is endangered by the "nice trees" that were planted at its base to form a park for the building's inhabitants decades ago. The trees are moving everything: the building, the streets around the building, *everything!! Imagine having bought a condo in that buiding! What a disaster.

10,000 acres of abandoned buildings?

That's 1/4th of a Liechtenstein.

Surely no one can just simply be betting their vacant building will become valuable with so much competition?

This doesn't make any sense. Allowing people to build infinite height towers with no parking instantly makes land worth far more, and the people that pay for this "movement" are all large-scale landowners. Holding land and keeping it trash is an investment; they're sure that pouring money into YIMBY groups will eventually make them a fortune, and the fact that they're leaving the land trashed will just help YIMBY arguments.

The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."

Texas has some of the highest property tax millages in the U.S. they’re closer to a land value tax than most other places

How? If it’s not profitable nor possible to build anything profitable right now, making it more expensive via taxing will make the situation worse.

Can you name a time this has ever happened?

".. and your smart watch detected that you've exceeded the methane footprint quota this month, here's your fine and please consider upgrading your greenhouse gas tier, otherwise we're disabling the bean buying flag in your CBDC UBI"