One of Houston’s many alluring qualities is the depth and variety of affordable housing, so those local businesses or institutions in competition with New York entities for employees should take note of this recent NY Times article:

As the [New York City] apartment-hunting season begins, fueled by college graduates and other new arrivals, real estate brokers say radical solutions among young, well-educated newcomers to the city are becoming more common, because New Yorkís rental market is the tightest it has been in seven years. High-paid bankers and corporate lawyers snap up the few available apartments, often leading more modestly paid professionals and students to resort to desperate measures to find homes.
While young people in New York have always sought roommates to make life more affordable, they are now crowding so tightly into doorman buildings in prime neighborhoods like the Upper East Side that they may violate city codes. [. . .]
. . . The rents for one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan average $2,567 a month, and two-bedrooms average $3,854 a month, . . . but rents tend to be far higher in coveted neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and TriBeCa.
Because landlords typically require renters to earn 40 times their monthly rent in annual income, renters of those average apartments would need to earn at least $102,680, individually or combined, to qualify for a one-bedroom and $154,160 to afford a two-bedroom.

In this NRO op-ed, Greg Kaza compares the economies of Texas and Arkansas over the past generation and concludes that talent and capital really do react logically to choices:

State Line Road is the boundary that separates the Arkansas and Texas sides of Texarkana, a border town that is sometimes described as ìthe Gateway to the American Southwest.î State Line, to the casual observer, is merely another road separating two states. But for those in the neighborhood, the road represents something of a great divide.
Of course, on the cultural side of the ledger, we have the date that will live forever: December 6, 1969. Thatís when the top-ranked Texas Longhorns edged the second-ranked Arkansas Razorbacks, 15-14, in a dramatic college football game witnessed by President Richard M. Nixon and George H.W. Bush, a congressman at the time. ìThe Game,î as it is known locally, is still talked about on both sides of State Line Road.
But in terms of economic growth, the divide is much more lopsided: Employment growth in Texas has been significantly higher than in Arkansas during periods of economic expansion. The population in Dallas has nearly tripled in the post-WWII period, while the population in Little Rock has barely doubled in size. Per capita personal income in Texas is 94 percent of the U.S total. In Arkansas itís 77 percent of the nationís total, a level that has hardly budged since the 1970s.
The list of statistical disparities is long, and thereís a good reason why: While Arkansas and Texas share a common border, each taxes income and capital in radically different ways.
Arkansas has a top income-tax rate of 7 percent, the highest among the bordering states. Texas, however, does not impose an income tax. The imbalance is the same for capital gains: Arkansas taxes them. Texas does not.
As a result, we can see a very basic economic principle at work: Talent and capital always will flow toward higher returns.

Read the entire piece.

This post from awhile back noted that what it costs to rent a parking space in New York City could rent a nice apartment in Houston. But if you think that’s pricey for a parking space, you haven’t seen anything, yet.
At 200 Eleventh Avenue — a new 16 unit condo project in Manhattan (HT Felix Salmon) — the developers are offering an “en-suite garage” for a prospective owner’s automobile in 14 of the units. The website has a simulation that shows how the owner would drive his or her car into the building and into an elevator, which then takes the car to the owner’s unit, where they then drive into their 300 square foot “en-suite garage.” The cheapest unit in the development costs $4.7 million for 2,353 square feet, so that en-suite garage costs a cool $600,000, which would buy one very nice entire condo in downtown Houston.
I wonder if the developers throw in a workbench with that garage? ;^)