Bob in Houston - Be A Light in the Darkness!
89.9K posts
@RobHTX78
Teacher and Jack of a few Trades. Trying to be a good person. Nerdy. Real-Life Roger Murtaugh (w/o being a cop)
Every single one of the 15 fastest-growing US major metropolitan areas is in the Sunbelt. All 15 are also in a state Trump won. Only 5 are in swing states. Dallas and Houston added an entire Wyoming's worth of people.
Trump: I have much more power in my second term. I said I'm going to sign an executive order to ensure that the second Saturday in December, is preserved exclusively, nobody is playing football. Not Ohio state against Notre Dame. Not LSU against Alabama. Nobody is going to play football for four hours during that very special time of the year in December. It's preserved forever for the army-navy game. If you don't want to watch football, you don't have to. But if you want to watch football, you are only watching one game. You are not watching 19 different games.
YOU GUYS. Holy crap. She’s perfect.
crying
Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.
