The Houston metro area could hit 9.6 million residents by 2040, according to the Houston-Galveston area council.
Officials say Houston is likely to be the third-largest city in the country.
“We are now reaching a kind of critical mass at which a few things like commute times become a moment at which you can no longer just kind of expand outward,” Gail Peter Borden, a University of Houston Professor of Architecture, explained.
Houston was never really planned the way most major cities are.
It developed after the Galveston hurricane in 1900 and just kept growing with few restrictions.
You can look back to our major and, frankly, not-so-major storms to see the impact of that uncontrolled expansion.
“All you gotta do is look at an aerial map of Houston over the last 50 years, and you realize we paved 50% of the like, 200-mile radius, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, the water had nowhere to go,'” Borden said.
Recent disasters, such as the Texas freeze of 2021, the Derecho in May, and Hurricane Beryl in July, have shown us the weaknesses of our energy grid and electricity distribution.