Enlighten Me

Eddie Sanchez:
This is Eddie Sanchez.

Rodney Crouther:
This is Rodney Crouther.

Eddie Sanchez:
And you are now listening to Enlighten Me. Rodney, so last night was the NCAA Championship game.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah.

Eddie Sanchez:
Here in our own backyard, San Antonio, Texas. I don't know if you had seen, but it was estimated that the event had a $4 billion impact on the regional economy or the city economy, I suppose. And I imagine that that impact is felt all throughout the I-35 corridor, right? Not necessarily just San Antonio, but the entire region.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, I mean it's a big event every year. It's like the Super Bowl and you had a local team practically with Houston in there. So yeah, I'm sure the whole region got a little economic boost.

Eddie Sanchez:
And for me what was most interesting is, for one, I didn't realize that they held those events in San Antonio yearly or I don't know, is it yearly or...

Rodney Crouther:
It rotates, but yeah, they usually host it at some level-

Eddie Sanchez:
Pretty frequently, and it made me realize how big San Antonio is and just how much of a metropolitan area it is. And it brings to mind just how much Texas has been growing and I don't know if you had seen, there was an article that said two interesting things, from 2000 to 2022, Texas had grown by nine million residents.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah.

Eddie Sanchez:
Again, I am kind of just juxtaposing those two ideas, how we're getting these big events in Texas and just the amount of people coming through. And also, I believe that we've grown by four million people in just the last decade.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, I think anybody who's been on the roads around here can kind of feel that.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And you're from Austin, so I'm sure ... How long have you lived there?

Rodney Crouther:
Over 20 years now.

Eddie Sanchez:
So you've seen the growth and you've seen the changes and everything.

Rodney Crouther:
Absolutely.

Eddie Sanchez:
So all those things brought to mind the way that the state is changing, economically, population wise, even how that's affecting us culturally.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, it's a lot of good and bad.

Eddie Sanchez:
For this particular episode, I want to get some information about all the changes that are going on in Texas and how it's affecting us, especially this I-35 corridor, this is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah. This Dallas to Austin to San Antonio.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, that's the Texas Triangle actually, which one of our faculty members talks about. So that's Dallas to San Antonio to Houston.

Rodney Crouther:
I know we've got a lot of great experts in those fields. So who'd you find to talk to?

Eddie Sanchez:
So the first person I spoke to was Dr. Haiyong Liu from the McCoy College of Business.

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
My name is Haiyong Liu. I'm relatively new to Texas State. I'm currently professor and chair of Department of Finance of Economics, and I joined Texas State in '22.

Eddie Sanchez:
Could you talk to us a little bit about your area of expertise and some of the things you do research on?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
Yes. My research specialization is in labor, population, and health economics. I'm also very interested in assessing all types of public policies, especially having profound impact in local economy in general.

Eddie Sanchez:
This episode we're going to be focusing on Texas, looking at economics, looking at population growth, looking at transportation changes. And so, we were told that you were an expert in the economic side. So, we just wanted to get some insights from you. Have you had a chance to do any sort of, I guess, regional economic studies and what did that include?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
Yeah. Absolutely. I think we are living a very interesting part of time as well as geography. As part of the Central Texas, we have four metropolitan centers between Dallas and Fort Worth, DFW area, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. I think that picks up about the majority of the population in this great state of Texas. And among the four urban centers that I mentioned above, they all experienced population growth in the past decade. And some are more rapid than others. So I'll pick the DFW, which just has been a fascinating growth since probably 10 years ago, where the population was a little shy of probably six million population or less. Now, it is being over eight million on population.

Eddie Sanchez:
So in that decade, you grew about two million people.

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
Yeah. In the past five years, on average, the area has added about 160,000 people every year. And in contrast, Austin in the same period has grown from about 700, 800,000 people to close to a million population. Same thing for San Antonio, which has been a very interesting city, has tremendous tourist attraction and also has very interesting makeup in terms of economy. And the population has been hovering above like 2.3 million more or less. And so, all three urban centers in Central Texas have experienced fast growth in population. But interestingly, and even just the magnitude, the site, the makeup of the population growth is somewhat different.
Some tend to be younger in the DFW and Austin area, and some tend to be a little bit older and also has element of retirement, that's San Antonio. So overall these four urban centers have ... compared to the rest of the country, had a healthy inflow net growth of a population. Also, the economic activities have been elevated as a result of the population growth.

Rodney Crouther:
So has that huge influx of people been a really good thing for each of these areas or has it been a bad thing or has it been mixed?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
I think each of the four urban centers I described has its own journey, and I'll start with DFW, which has been fascinating to me. So probably decades ago, and if you drive to the Dallas area, you still can make it out, where is Fort Worth, where is Dallas? Now, they're completely integrated in this one mega metropolitan area. It was a spring break for Texas a week ago. I drove my family to Dallas and just check out some interesting places. I was amazed by the change it had over a year because I was there a year ago almost to the day, and there are more highways, there are more shops popping up. I think Dallas area definitely benefit from the geography being almost dead center of the state.
And has this major transportation logistic hub between the DFW airport and some important industry leaders. And so you have Tesla, you have Caterpillar, and you have a financial heavyweight, Goldman Sachs, all have important placement in the area that basically attracts massive labor force. It's just very balanced development in terms of the makeup of the economy, but definitely the transportation logistics and these big magnet of population for the still relatively cheap land and the relatively flat geography to the urban development.

Rodney Crouther:
That article we referenced mentioned that San Antonio in particular, a lot more money came in the San Antonio, but it's not really distributed equally. There's still a lot of poverty despite all the growth in San Antonio. Has Dr. Liu studied that phenomena?

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, he actually spoke a little bit about the poverty levels in San Antonio and how even though there's a bit of a population boom or an increase, like you mentioned, they're still struggling in certain industries and economically and he had a chance to kind of touch on that for us.

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
I love San Antonio and interestingly San Antonio is quite different from all of the above. It's different from Dallas certainly because the population tends to be a little bit older and it's known as one of the retirees attractions in this part of a Texas. I think one thing that definitely creates some sort of a barrier for a similar rapid economic growth like what Austin and Dallas experienced is the structure of the city. This is both in terms of the physical structure, also economic structure. Like you mentioned also, I refer to by the article. There is a significant poverty in San Antonio. Currently, about 18% of the population lives under the federal poverty line and also, about 30 to 40 of the population are referred to as abbreviation called the ALICE.
AL is for the asset limited and the IC is the income constraint and letter E refers to employed. So this type of a population and they are working but their income is lagging. As a result, they don't have the greatest resources in terms of the consumption and human capital accumulation. So between the people who are living under poverty and the people who are working but having trouble to make ends meet, that's about 40, 50% of the population who don't have the best financial resources to really further infuse into the local economy. I think another hurdle that oftentimes referred to by the urban planners is the infrastructure or the lack of modern development of the infrastructure.
It doesn't have the greatest public transportation and oftentimes, that's a bad combination between people who are financially constrained and they don't oftentimes have access to private vehicles. And they also don't have the best access to public transportation that basically really limits their employment opportunities. So I think in combination of the significant poverty and that creates some sort of a friction in terms of just all the right allocations to have a booming small business community. I think that has been one of the things actually pulling the local economy compared to say Dallas and Austin.

Eddie Sanchez:
So what are some up and coming industries in San Antonio that you're excited to see as an economist, maybe industries that will grow and evolve within the next five years and that there might be good opportunities for our Texas State students to jump into.

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
I'll start with San Antonio because I always felt like the city has such a great potential. I think the tourist industry certainly is one of the marquee attractions so to speak. I think having improved the infrastructure and public transportation and at last road congestion can certainly add on the attractiveness of all the tourist industry in San Antonio. And there are some ... In the past, some people were complaining that the access to capital, especially venture capital in San Antonio is lagging behind its peers. So certainly, it's lagging behind Austin who has now become one of the ... if not, top 10, close to it, being the venture capital city of the nation. And San Antonio certainly is not there yet. I think Austin, especially through COVID, has proven to be a powerhouse in terms of technology.
So Google, Apple, Oracle and then some like a FinTech company like Charles Schwab and then some financial institutions all basically build headquarters or a main office in the area. And I mean subsequently then you have the matching venture capital interest in the place and that certainly has been the signature change in the city of Austin.

Eddie Sanchez:
How about Houston? We kind of touched on these other major metro areas. What are some of the industries in Houston that are expanding and some new ones that might be coming into the region?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
Yes. Yeah, I think Houston is definitely a very interesting textbook example of urban development. And so, it has been a long time energy hub and because the oil and the gas industry and also, because the Houston port has been one of the biggest and busiest ports in the US, certainly plays a very important role in conducting all the international trade for the nation. There's a textbook example of urban sprawl. I think Houston has basically expanded and there's some small suburb towns are literally merged into the city center. Interestingly, the property value hasn't really grown as much compared to say Austin, which is another interesting phenomenon associated with Houston probably because the urban planner ... There's just so much land and that's low cost to the developer.
Being a traditional energy hub has been the known identity for the city. But now if you look at the medical industry, looking at the pharmaceutical industry and the green energy and there are just so many new modern, more advanced technology that has been associated with this traditional gas and oil and energy hub.

Eddie Sanchez:
With the rapid growth in these cities and I imagine throughout the rest of Texas as well, how has the demand for housing affected affordability and economic stability?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
That's a great question. I think if you had to pick one that's a bigger challenge than other cities, I'll pick Austin. I think Austin has experienced some really dramatic run up during the COVID era where the property value just took off. And even though after the peak of '22, it's kind of slowly coming back but still significantly higher than it was before the pandemic. And it basically coincides with these concerns about affordability because good districts with very good high schools and public schools and oftentimes have just tremendous appreciation in terms of property value that oftentimes priced out lots of people and then, with this pretty high interest a mortgage interest environment.
And that certainly doesn't help the newcomers who are moving to the city for some new opportunities. And you definitely don't want this to be further aggravated because that will just result in some unwanted outcomes where you push out people that make up a significant portion of the labor force and as a result ... and you will have a really unfortunate economy where there's a lot of high paying, high-tech type of jobs where you have a shortage in some service areas.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, as an Austin resident, I can definitely testify that the challenge of affordable housing has affected everything from the schools to the service industry to workers, at a lot of jobs, who can't afford to live actually in the city, which also creates a transportation issue. So I definitely can verify the lived experience of that impact.

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
I think to a lesser extent, I think both San Antonio and Dallas also experienced some of the ... And I think these cities used to be a golden combination being a vibrant community also affordable and I think we're slowly losing that.

Eddie Sanchez:
Do you feel like Texas infrastructure and public services are being able to keep up with the population growth?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
I think certainly the policymakers are trying. So I live in Austin and I think it's evident that they are trying to add more lanes to 35, I'm pretty sure we're not there yet. And also, the cautionary tale is always the more you build and you attract more traffic, it's a never kind of the cure all solution by adding more lanes or building more highways. It's about restructuring the residential areas and the business districts and in a strategic way. But so far oftentimes, we're landlocked. If you go into the central place of a town like Austin and between the lake, between the hills and all the expensive lands and there's not a whole lot of place where you can strategically place affordable housing or reallocate some of the high traffic magnets.

Eddie Sanchez:
Do you foresee any risks or economic downturns to the Texas economy and what are some things that perhaps we could do to avoid some of these issues?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
I will probably pick on Houston. I think one of the challenges with Houston as an energy hub is the fluctuation with energy market. Traditionally ... And the crude oil for example is one of the commodity referred to as a cyclical product because ... and if you look at the long-term trend, it just fluctuates. And that certainly is not the most desirable force in terms of moving an economy where you want it to go up all the time. This is not about competition. This is about a secular trend with a main industry sector for the bloodline of a city. And you certainly don't want to do that or you want some sort of hedging in terms of, you have other economic activities are not highly correlated.

Eddie Sanchez:
So as a educator, Dr. Liu, in the McCoy College of Business, what are some industries that you would recommend our students should maybe begin investigating for opportunities down the road?

Dr. Haiyong Liu:
As an educator, I think that's probably something that keeps us awake at the night. How can we make our classes more relevant? How can we actually focus on training our students with the most marketable skills that's also current. I mean personally, I felt like the finance industry is going to be a very important area where our students will find a great careers in. So between the new stock exchange being proposed in Austin and all the commercial banking activities, especially in some of the smaller rural towns, where they have experienced tremendous challenging, finding talent because all the young people are being attracted to major metropolitan areas that leaves a vacuum in the smaller town between Dallas and Austin and San Antonio.
There's some great career opportunities there and our students just need to be patient, they need to go to these places and build a career so they can be more mobile. And I think another important area is the healthcare, and we're facing an aging population that industry certainly is going to be in high demand for the years to come. And I think another thing is this AI, artificial intelligence revolution that kind of ties up all the technology sectors together. And so, you have this great tool that's ready to be deployed in almost everything you can think of, between communications, banking, financial technology and customer service. And I think all future employees can benefit from having the basic foundation of AI applications in different sectors.
You want to build a career, where the technology can enhance your career. And so, I think rather than shy away from this kind of new technology, I think we should fully embrace it.

Eddie Sanchez:
We will be right back after this.

Rodney Crouther:
I appreciate Dr. Liu putting some context to kind of the growth pressures that we're all feeling and experiencing both transportation and economically. It's like we all know the state is growing rapidly and more people are still coming here. Eddie, did you find anybody who had some perspective on how we can do a better job of managing this growth?

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, I did actually, Rodney, that was kind of the flip side of this conversation that I had with Dr. Billy Fields. He did some research with the Texas State's Translational Health Research Center and he focused more so on green and blue infrastructure and how we can develop this infrastructure in the right way to ensure that we're meeting the needs not only of the economy but also, of our communities and the people, because it's great that we're growing like you mentioned, and there's plenty of opportunities, but there's limited resources and we have to be cognizant of them. And we need to protect these resources as best as we can. And so he touched on that for us.

Dr. Billy Fields:
I'm Dr. Billy Fields, I am a professor in Department of Political Science, studied in public administration, and then I focus on the urban policy issues.

Eddie Sanchez:
Could you talk to us a little bit about your background, maybe some of the research that you've conducted here at Texas State?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, so I focus on resilience and particularly resilience to disasters. So I am from New Orleans originally and got my Ph.D. at University of New Orleans and was working on Katrina recovery issues. So I kind of cut my teeth looking at natural disasters and how to think about natural disasters and that's where resilience came from. And then, my research has focused on disaster recovery and then kind of extended to look at how we become more resilient to climate change and to other sort of natural disaster issues.

Eddie Sanchez:
So when you're talking about resilient communities or that you've studied resilience, could you provide us with the definition of what that means?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, so most definitions of resilience focus on this idea of bouncing back after a disaster. And the work I did with THRC, actually here at Texas State focused on kind of an extended definition of that. Bouncing back after a disaster is great, but if your systems are not in balance beforehand, bouncing back just takes you back to all the problems that you had. So particularly like in Hurricane Katrina recovery, there were a lot of issues in New Orleans and if basically the city and the planners just went back to what they had before, they would've just repeated all the problems that they had. So the definition I focus on, focuses much more on bouncing forward to improving conditions.
And what I focus on particularly is in the transportation sector and the transportation sector focus on decreasing pollution and then, adapting to climate change, focusing particularly on water related issues, because we just have a lot more physical water that we have to deal with and heat. And so transportation systems need to take into account both of those to become more resilient.

Eddie Sanchez:
I'm assuming it was the experience living in New Orleans, was that what led you down the path of focusing on urban resilience and transportation planning?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, I was focused on transportation planning before. I actually got my Ph.D. and was working in Washington D.C. at the Rails to Trails Conservancy. I was their research director. And so, I was really interested in walking, biking and transit. And then Katrina happened and I moved back. I wanted to be part of the rebuilding of the city that I was from. So I layered those two interests together and then, the work that I do now does that. It layers that resilience thinking, looking particularly at transportation and how to create more sustainable communities. So the book that I wrote at Adaptation Urbanism and Resilient Communities came out a couple of years ago and we looked at London, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Miami, and New Orleans and looked at best practices for resilience in those places.

Rodney Crouther:
So what exactly do we mean when we say sustainable community?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Basically the idea of sustainability has been around for 25 or so years. We have a sustainability master's program here at Texas State and basically, sustainability is about balancing three different concepts. Economic, social, and environmental. And so, it's not just environmental sustainability, it's about figuring out a balance between them and their tensions as society develops and focuses on that. So I take those kind of three variables and I'm always looking at them, and looking at how they play together. And then resilience is kind of a newer term that is very, very similar. So you'll hear lots of academics kind of throwing those terms around, but resilience is kind of more focused on disasters and sustainability can apply more broadly.

Eddie Sanchez:
Texas is growing, right? The population is increasing dramatically. How's this growth affecting urban planning, resiliency, transportation, infrastructure from your viewpoint and from what you've studied thus far?

Dr. Billy Fields:
After you study this for a long time, you come to a perspective and I have a perspective and it is difficult to hide and nor should I. So in the book "Adaptation Urbanism," we argue that more resilient communities will have four variables, and we surveyed the best practices from around the world. They start with more compact communities that are linked with sustainable transportation like walking, biking, transit, and they have green infrastructure, and green infrastructure soaks up water. It kind of creates these little mini sponges and it also deals with heat. When you weave all three of those items together, you create places that are in high demand. And so the fourth part of that is equitable, affordable housing options.
And you can deal with that in a lot of different ways, but when you just let the market go on its own, it is going to make it really expensive if you do those three things. So figuring out how to create an environment that works for lots of people, those are the best practices. So now, how do we apply those to Texas? That's a challenge, right? We have a much more sort of market-oriented approach. Our planning systems tend to not be very prescriptive when it comes to those four variables. And so, it's really a choice of what type of city we want to be creating in the future, because there are regulations either way, you can regulate and get a compact city or you can regulate through parking regulations and investments in transportation and get a more sprawling environment.
And in Texas right now, we are operating in the sprawl zone on one hand, but on the other hand, you're also seeing redevelopment happen in downtowns across Texas. So you see this demand for these type of walkable urban places, happening in Texas. At the same time that we're spreading out. So it's a strange sort of thing where you see two things happening at once and I tend to be on the focus of the downtowns and how to redevelop the downtowns. So that's sort of my focus. But we also have both of those things happening. And what happens is that you just end up stuck in traffic for hours and hours and hours. And our broad approach has been, not just in Texas but across the country, of investing in more lanes, and empirically investing in more lanes on highways does not decrease congestion.
It just spreads transportation, and spreads land use out. And so, we just have a choice about what types of communities we want to see in Texas and those are the types of things I look at and I look at the tensions that develop as there are different policy tools that are brought to bear on that.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, so that's fascinating that our experts are coming at it from different directions, but they both agree on the point of when it comes to more roads and highways that if you build it, they will come. It just brings more traffic.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, definitely. And I think one of the biggest takeaways is that there are solutions and there are ways that we can kind of change our transportation system and allow things to be a little bit better. And that's what Dr. Fields kind of gave us some insight into.

Dr. Billy Fields:
There was a famous study that came out like 20, 25 years ago. If you build it, will they come in terms of biking? And what they found is yes. Yes, if you do, and so that's some of the research that I do, but we sort of forget that the infrastructure that you build guides people and provides opportunities for them. And the same way if you provide different opportunities, there are different choices that people can make. So I kind of look at the choice side of things and look at a city that has lots of different choices as being a better city. There's a deeper question that happens here. What is a good city and their tensions and politics around defining that good city.

Eddie Sanchez:
I believe it was when one of the reports that I was reading that you had been a co-author of. You had mentioned green and blue infrastructure, I'd never heard of blue infrastructure. Could you kind of break down those two ideas for us?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Basically, green and blue infrastructure are fancy terms for natural systems that you apply to deal with water, heat and other sort of ... For example, if you put in green space, there's green space and trees all over, but green infrastructure is the targeted use of trees and natural systems to address some of the concerns that you have. Now, blue infrastructure is the same thing, it's just putting in water systems. And my experience in New Orleans, when I was in New Orleans, there was a thing called Dutch dialogues, where the Dutch came over and taught different techniques on how to incorporate water and think about water. And so I got really, really interested in that and that's kind what blue infrastructure is.
And then, we take Texas State students over the Netherlands, this is going to be my 10th anniversary of taking students over and studying those systems, and they have things called water squares where if it rains a lot, it just fills up with water and the rest of the time it's just like a natural place. We have some systems like that in Texas. We've got one here in San Marcos as well, but over there, it's just a really sort of natural thing that they're doing. Basically, what they've done in a lot of other places is taken the kind of depression where the water is going to fill up and turned it into a space that you want to be. Because it's not going to flood every day. And so, the times that it's not flooding, there's one in Rotterdam in the Netherlands that's a basketball court.

Eddie Sanchez:
That's cool.

Dr. Billy Fields:
And it just fills up when it fills up with water, they come through and they hose it out and then it turns into a basketball court again.

Eddie Sanchez:
That's cool.

Dr. Billy Fields:
There's one in Copenhagen where there's a little cafe and there's a depression in the ground, like a glorified hole, but there's rocks that come down so you can sit in this green space and then, it fills up with water, but it only does that for one or two days a year. The rest of the time it's just this lovely square. So that's the idea of being much more focused on your use of these natural systems and figuring out ways to integrate them into the landscape. And those are the kind of things that I study and try and figure out how we can do more of them to solve a lot of our problems. It's cheaper to do it that way than to build giant pipes and be putting in pipes everywhere.

Eddie Sanchez:
Would you mind talking a little bit about some of these infrastructure projects that you're seeing taking place across these major Texas metro areas, including San Marcos?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, so we were just talking about blue infrastructure. The San Antonio River Walk is the original blue infrastructure in Texas. It was intentionally designed as a flood control system, but then became this sort of great land use development tool.

Eddie Sanchez:
I didn't know that.

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, there was a big flood and then the River Walk was a series of dams that basically prevented the water from flooding downtown San Antonio. And then, you create this really lovely beautiful place and then, it attracts development and then, you have to manage tourism and then, you have all sorts of other issues. But really, that type of thinking is what I've seen happening in lots of places around Texas. So there's a number ... Even in San Antonio, there's a number of those sort of green and blue infrastructure projects, kind of smaller scale happening, that sort of attached to the river walk as well. In Houston, there's a really amazing trail system with green infrastructure attached to it, that's kind of hanging out below the interstates of Houston and you can have this amazing bike ride that links together all these places.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, my brother lives in the downtown area and I feel like ... I don't know if that's close to-

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, that's part of it.

Eddie Sanchez:
I mean you're running under the highways and whatnot, but it's still very beautiful and there's water and whatnot. I mean it's a very nice-

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, there are different versions of this. There's the river walk kind of nice, pristine. And then there's like, "Oh wow, we have these highways," but there are all these bayous underneath there. In Dallas, there's a series of bioswales and small scale green infrastructure to deal with flooding. We've got that here in San Marcos like a block from us right along the road along the river, where they just redid it maybe two years ago. And if you look, there are these little bioswales that move off to the side, that basically filter the pollutants out before they get into the water. They kind of stop that big pulse of water. And then across the street, there's a little mini water square that does all the things that I was talking about as well.
The project that we did with THRC was how do we rethink those spaces and kind of extend them. Now, there's a green alley project that's just started in San Marcos, the old Kissing Alley spot. They're putting in more green space. Yesterday afternoon I was driving around and there was this new mural project that's taking place just outside of downtown where they're putting in art murals right into the streets, kind of as crosswalks. It was really cool. Those type of projects, all of those are like what I study. So I basically look around the world for the best practices.
And then, when we come to Texas, you've got all these amazing examples. Now, I will say that the differences is that in European cities they then connect together so that you can walk an hour in one direction and kind of connect together. We have these great little nodes of development and what we need to do is try and figure out how to connect them together. That's really the next step.

Eddie Sanchez:
Do you study what is known as active transportation?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah.

Eddie Sanchez:
Could you describe I guess what that means and what your research has shown?

Dr. Billy Fields:
Yeah, active transportation is just walking and biking.

Eddie Sanchez:
OK.

Dr. Billy Fields:
It's being active and moving. There was a research that started around the year 2000 in the public health community and the idea was that we need to be more active. And so the term active transportation was a way to sort of play into those sort of ideas of being about more healthy and active.

Eddie Sanchez:
I know that there is an actual economic benefit as well, because the healthier your population, then the less time spent being sick, which means less time away from work or less time being productive and all these various avenues. And so, I guess that's kind of an aspect of active transportation that maybe people don't always necessarily consider.

Dr. Billy Fields:
Right, the idea behind active transportation is that basically we've taken out a lot of the normal everyday movement that we would do. We're in a car all the time, and the idea is really ... It's out there. People think of they're counting their steps that came from this movement. And if you start to integrate just small trips, little trips around your neighborhood, it adds up over time and then you become healthier and then, you don't have to go to the doctor as much. So that's a good thing.

Eddie Sanchez:
Save a little bit of money from those trips as well.

Dr. Billy Fields:
It can save a lot of money because when you look at the cost of obesity across a population, I think I was looking at some research and it was like, I shouldn't quote the stat, because I can't remember it. It was a significant amount of our medical spending that flows because of these problems that flow from obesity epidemic, and that's where the public health community got really engaged in this.

Rodney Crouther:
So given all his experience and research in green and blue infrastructure, does Dr. Fields think Texas is finally starting to move in the right direction?

Eddie Sanchez:
So I feel like he definitely saw some pros and cons. There's definitely improvement, but there's also opportunities in areas that we need to change our way of thinking.

Rodney Crouther:
All right, so we're taking some positive steps, but we still got some room to grow.

Eddie Sanchez:
Room to grow. Yes.

Dr. Billy Fields:
We are doing two things at the same time and one of which I think is very positive in terms of redeveloping our downtowns and there's incredible demand for these type of places. At the same time, we are maybe the sprawliest place on the planet, and that isn't sustainable over time. It's really expensive in terms of transportation infrastructure. So there's really two things. So, I have a lens that I operate from, and there are different ways that you can evaluate these projects. So my lens that I usually use is sustainability. And so, I see those two trends happening at the same time.

Eddie Sanchez:
So you wrote a book called "Adaptation Urbanism and Resilient Communities." Could you talk a little bit about what that means and how these issues are being used to address environmental changes in the state?

Dr. Billy Fields:
So the basic idea is that we can use good city design, urbanism, and adapt our communities to climate change over time. That's adaptation urbanism. And then, when we surveyed best practices around the world, it was those four components. Again, compact, development, sustainable transportation, green and blue infrastructure as the base. When you do that, great communities happen. In demand, you have to manage affordability. And so those are the kind of central elements, and we reviewed a number of resilience plans from around the world to see how close or how far they were from meeting those best practice standards.

Eddie Sanchez:
The project that you conducted with THRC, that was the Texas Resilient Streets and Green Ways.

Dr. Billy Fields:
Right. Exactly.

Eddie Sanchez:
I'm curious just what is a resilient street?

Dr. Billy Fields:
There's this movement of creating safe places. It's called Vision Zero broadly. And so, Vision Zero design, or Safe Streets design in kind of general parlance, if you have safe streets and then you integrate green and blue infrastructure together, you're creating resilient streets. And safe streets means safe for drivers, people who walk, people who bike, people who take transit. When you create that sort of safety, you create options and opportunities, which gives you choice. The green and blue infrastructure deals with climate change. It's getting hotter. There's more rain. Streets accommodate, streets are about 30% of all city space, and it varies by city, but 30% of our cities is streets.
We don't ever think about them. Repurposing how that space is used can really be valuable. And then if you add parking on top, it can be like 40% of all city space. So essentially, adaptation urbanism is a way of rethinking the use of that space and really focusing on safety and then green and blue to sort of address heat and water management.

Eddie Sanchez:
So we hear often about artificial intelligence, for instance. How do you see technology in helping to shape the future of our infrastructure?

Dr. Billy Fields:
We don't need any new technology to create more resilient streets. It's a political choice for us. We have the technology right now to make it way safer and to adapt our cities, but we're choosing not to do that. So we'll just start with that. Technology can be great. We can add electrical vehicles into the mix and it can begin to drive our greenhouse gas emissions down. When you do the math though, what you find is you need electric vehicles and decreases in vehicle miles traveled to meet the targets. And so, it's a technological issue in creating better systems, but it is a rethink of the way cities are built, and that is much, much more a political sort of issue than a technological issue.
Then you have the potential for autonomous vehicles. I read this research that sort of walks through how we have used autonomous vehicles since the 1950s. They're always out there. They're just on the horizon. This time, they might actually be. I mean, you can see actual autonomous vehicles moving around, creating an entire system of autonomous vehicles, opens up opportunities to rethink space or it opens up the sort of opportunity to continue to do what we've done in terms of cars and car dependence. And so it's really, again, a political choice about what future we want. But it's not the technology that should be driving it, it's the vision of what type of city that we want to live in.

Eddie Sanchez:
What are some challenges or some areas of opportunity?

Dr. Billy Fields:
So we talked about safety being one of the key components of what a resilience street is. Right now, we're headed the wrong way in terms of safety. We have higher fatality rates from car drivers, higher fatality rates for pedestrians, higher fatality rates for bicyclists. And in that type of setting, it's like an arms race, where if it's unsafe, you keep getting into a bigger vehicle and you don't want to walk or bike. And then, you get into a bigger vehicle and it weighs more and the crash has more impact. So we're really in a very challenging place right now. And the way I think to get out of that is to begin to rethink what streets are and who streets are for. So at a base streets should be for people in neighborhoods and the residents who live immediately next to those streets, it should be safe for them.
Then, we can add on other components and move forward. What we do now is we plan for distance and we don't necessarily plan for access. So planning for local access first is the way to sort of start thinking about it. So it's funny, because you want to have this technological silver bullet that solves it, but it's a change in the mind and the way that you think about the system. That's important to start with because we are the only sort of advanced nation that's having this sort of problem. If you look around the world, broadly speaking, crash fatality rates are going down. In Spain, for instance, Spain had the exact same fatality rate as us in the early 2000s and went a different direction with how they designed streets, and now they're much more in line with the Netherlands. So over 20 years, you can really radically change how, your fatalities.

Eddie Sanchez:
That's relatively quickly-

Dr. Billy Fields:
But we went the other way. And so, that's the sort of really big issue is, is it something that we're really willing to tackle or is it something that we just are willing to accept? And so those are the sort of political issues that I'm interested in studying and looking at how they play out.

Rodney Crouther:
That's good to hear that not only are there actual solutions out there to some of these issues, but they're ones that can have a really tangible impact in just a few years.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, and I think ultimately, like Dr. Fields had mentioned is really just kind of changing our mindset on these things and also, putting them into action. We know what we need to do. We have the ability to do it, the technology to do it, we just have to get it done.

Rodney Crouther:
That's why we even conceived this whole podcast just to get discussion started and information like this out there so hopefully people can make better choices and put their focus on leaving a better community than we have grown up in.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, there's definitely hope and I think that's one of the biggest takeaways for me, from this conversations is we can make the change.

Rodney Crouther:
And I love that we've got so many people on campus here that are actually working every day toward those solutions. Eddie, thanks for bringing us to this topic this month.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, definitely. I hope you learned a bit, and I hope that our listeners take away some good information from this and they start investigating a little bit more on their own so they can be the change that we need in the state.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, absolutely. Now I'm coming out of this episode feeling pretty hyped. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next month.

Eddie Sanchez:
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