A hundred years ago, a handful of brave souls discovered that you could plop down a city on a mosquito-infested swamp and, apparently, spawn a deeply resilient housing market (even if a little bit prone to bubbles around the edges). We’ll explain.

As we mentioned last week, Houston mirrored the awesome August recently experienced by the Austin and Dallas housing markets. According to the Houston Chronicle:

The local housing market continued to favor buyers last month, although that may be changing.

At the end of August, there was a 7.1-month supply of homes for sale – meaning it would take that long to sell all the homes on the market based on recent activity, according to the Houston Association of Realtors. A year ago, the area had an eight-month supply. [...]

Single-family homes sales rose sharply in August, jumping 30 percent over last year, the association said. Sales totaled 5,543, marking the third straight monthly increase this year. All segments of this area’s housing market saw higher sales in August – from properties less than $80,000 to the $500,000 and above range. Townhouse and condominium sales jumped 19.5 percent.

Houston has several factors working in its favor. Simply put, it’s one of the most recession-proof cities in America. Let’s take a look at what makes the Bayou City tick:

1. Jobs

Houston has lots of ‘em. Unemployment in Houston is currently hovering somewhere around 8.6 percent, compared to 9.1 percent nationally. Why? Its strengths aren’t things like finance and real estate (which suffered severely in the 2008 crash). It’s energy, shipping and medicine.  America will always need ports. America will always need energy. America will always need healthcare.

Each of these sectors is volatile in their own way (especially energy), but they’re more resilient than most industries. Houston is in good shape until we all stop driving, aging, and ordering cheap goods from China.

2. Land

Houston has lots of land. Tons of land. It could expand all the way west to Austin and all the way north to Dallas if it wanted to. There’s simply nothing hemming it in.

Look at many of America’s classic cities: Manhattan. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Seattle. Each of these cities are largely walled in by some combination of a coast and mountains, limiting sprawl and driving up housing prices. Mountainous and coastal areas also pose expensive infrastructure challenges, limiting the availability of cheap, massive highways like the ones found all over Houston.

Houston can build and build and build — both houses and roads — keeping housing costs low.

3. Labor

Without getting into political issues, large immigrant populations do help fuel construction booms, especially in housing and infrastructure. And Houston has an excellent diversity of skill in its labor pool. When conditions are ripe for a housing boom, it can quickly tap into the labor supply needed to do it.

These factors, combined with all the other state-wide elements that make Texas an excellent place to start a business and the fact that the 1980s oil crisis culled many of the weaker businesses that would’ve collapsed in the 2008 economic crisis, make Houston abnormally resistant to a recession-fueled housing crisis. Here at Texas Lending, we’re proud to offer a full line of Houston home purchase loans, Houston home equity loans and Houston home refinance loans for folks looking to take advantage of this environment.

Of course, there are a couple negatives that limit home price growth in certain parts of the city as well, which makes housing both accessible and a poor investment. We’ll explore those — and similar negatives in Dallas and Austin — next week.