Houston is currently planning its fifth loop. They already have four, and they need a fifth, which mean converting many more square miles of marshland into pavement. Meanwhile there are hundreds of square miles of abandoned real estate in the middle of the city. It's cheaper to just buy and build new than the tear down the old building first. And they can't figure out why each hurricane season is more destructive than the last .... huh. I grew up in Houston and I hated it. I refuse to even visit family there now.

Houston only has three loops: I-610 and Beltway 8, with State Highway 99 under construction. The latter 2 are both toll roads. (I guess the highways around downtown form a loop, but as a former resident of the city, I never heard anyone call that a loop - I-610 was always the inner loop.) If you’re going to shit on Houston, at least get the facts right.

Also, what’s wrong with beltways? The main flaw in the interstate highway system, from an urbanist perspective, has always been the highways cutting through the historic urban core, which tend to attract traffic just passing through. Houston has those too, but not really any worse than most American cities. Beltways are really great at diverting such traffic away from the urban core. Unfortunately, as cities expand, beltways tend to become part of the urban core, so farther out beltways need to be built to retain their advantages.

I recently moved near the 4th loop and - it’s hard for me to imagine anyone crying for the land beyond it. There’s just nothing there. It’s like playing SimCity on an infinite flat map. I’d much rather they put another 2-5 million people here over the next few decades than try to sprawl out from Seattle or Boston or some of the other places I’ve lived.