Houston Seeks the Refugees

If a single bond unites the oil barons of Houston, it is belief in the manifest destiny of their freewheeling metropolis. Having established Houston as the premier city of the Southwest, local businessmen are engaged in one of their brashest ventures--a multibillion-dollar development program to attract corporations from the problem-plagued urban areas of the Northeast.

Houston businessmen are convinced that the leaders of many major corporations are so fed up with the congestion, transport snarls and high costs of New York and other Northeastern cities that they are eager to relocate. The discontented Easterners are being avidly courted by many communities, but few if any developers are spending as much doing it as those in Houston. Construction is under way. for example, on Developer Kenneth Schnitzer's $400 million Greenway Plaza office-and-apartment development, located on 127 acres about seven miles from the city's center. Some sections of the project are already completed, and when the entire development is finished nine years from now, it will accommodate 25,000 persons in its high-rise apartments and 5,000,000 ft. of office space.

A few weeks ago, Texas Eastern Transmission Corp., the gas pipeline giant, spent more than $55 million to acquire 46 acres on the edge of downtown Houston. In association with Brown & Root, the big construction company, Texas Eastern intends to build a $1.5 billion office-and-apartment development. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. is financing a commercial-entertainment complex on 15 acres, and Tenneco recently bought three square blocks near its Houston headquarters.

It's the Humidity. Corporate operating expenses and living costs in Houston are well below those of the Northeast. To live on a moderate scale, according to the U.S. Labor Department, a family of four needs only $9,212 annually in Houston, compared with $11,236 in New York City. Houstonians note other benefits: cleaner surroundings and a less hectic style of living. What they fail to mention is the city's less than salubrious climate; in July and August the humidity is exceeded only by the 100DEG temperatures. Politically, Houston's conservatism could irritate some younger executives, and the city's cultural life, while commendable for the Southwest, pales beside that of New York or Boston.

For all that, an estimated 5,000 executives and middle-echelon employees have been transferred to Houston in the past three years. Shell Oil Co. is in the process of moving about half its staff there from Manhattan. Other recent refugees from metropolitan New York include Occidental Chemical Co. and Cooper Industries, an engine and tool producer. At some point, Houston may want to adopt as its official motto: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.

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