Helltown Houston, Annise Parker, Ed Abbey, Chicago

Trust me, as normal on blog posts like this, I'll wrap all these things together.

On Thursday, a large chunk of the east side of Helltown shut down for hours, including the U of Houston and many, many restaurants, when an 8-foot (sic: foot not inch) water main broke in the area of the east I-610 loop. Can we thank former mayor Annise Parker for not having this maintained better? Can we thank her for ignoring  Ed Abbey's dictum about growth for growth's sake and cheerleading to pass Chicago while ignoring this? Yes and yes in my book. In the schadenfreude world, I've long awaited Helltown flooding without a hurricane, without even a weak tropical depression, and now it happened without a drop of rain. Seriously — Houston has infrastructure problems (obvious, now) on top of public service pension issues, just like Chicago and those other northern cities Parker wants to sheep-steal from.

This could certainly happen to Big D, too, which like Houston has had a succession of neoliberal mayors of all races, but in Houston it's made worse by the mayors with the strong-mayoral government system. So Parker doesn't have a city manager to blame. Nor did Bill White before her, nor Sylvester Turner today.

Oh, Abbey's whole dictum, for the unfamiliar?

"Growth for growth's sake is the theology of the cancer cell."

Still true today.