CRAIG HLAVATY
Houston as it might be 20 years from now.
The end of 2020 seemed to have marked the end of an era in Houston. A positive vibe and outlook somehow vanished. Maybe it was the concussive sports controversies, the pandemic, an economic free fall, or just adrenal fatigue. The past 20 years in Houston wasn’t for the faint of heart or wallet for that matter.
I began to look ahead at the next 20 years, with an eye on 2040. When I asked my local social-media peanut gallery what they thought Houston would be like in 20 years, they all said “underwater.” Literally and figuratively. Oceanfront property in EaDo. Buffalo Bay, oh my!
But my vision was much more rosy, temperate and full of corporate space travel. Four years after its 200th birthday, Houston’s traffic still sinks, our esports teams test our patience and we finally air-conditioned the entire city, meaning summer heat baths are a thing of the past. Take that, independent nation-state of Austantonio.
(Yeah — San Marcos, Austin, New Braunfels, San Antonio and the rest all sorta merged into a massive metro blob, with the Alamo encased in Lucite, like an autographed Nolan Ryan baseball.)
With the city once again in flux
and tastes changing, chipsters (hipsters with AI chip implants) are moving back into the inner city, leaving behind their trendy nests in Crosby and Manvel, escaping the artsy burbs for simulated suburban life in Montrose, the Heights and EaRivDo.
José Altuve retires as an Astro at the age of 50 as the team’s playermanager. His daughter throws a no-hitter during the last regularseason home game at Minute Maid Park before the team moves into its new stadium in Pearland.
Traffic snarls and road rage are worse now that you can yell at people without having to watch the road. A YouTube feed of Houstonians screaming and cursing at each other from the passenger seats of their self-driving cars gets millions of views an hour.
Houston gets an NHL hockey team, sorta. The Houston Humidity plays its home games at the $5 billion Whataburger Arena in Conroe.
Although the city limits have been fully air-conditioned, you can pay for a special retro experience at Olde Houston Park. The stateof-the-art Katy theme park lets patrons walk through a re-creation of Houston from 2017, complete with 100 percent humidity and blazing furnace heat. It’s very popular with aging millennials and their grandbots. Since millennials stopped having kids, they started creating AI grandchildren of their own to spoil.
Montrose dies for the seventh time when the original Burger Joint is bulldozed to make way for Burger Joint Tower, a mixed-use building with complimentary burger drone service for every resident.
A consortium of Houston restaurant owners is tasked with developing the first near-Earth orbit food hall to service office workers on the International Space Station. President Beyoncé Knowles is the first customer at the grand opening, arriving directly from vacation along the moon’s ritziest crater with first gentleman Jay-Z.
Speaking of the moon, Ninfa’s opened the first Tex-Mex restaurant there in late 2038. U.S. Sen. Simone Biles is the first customer to try their zero-G fajitas, meant to be eaten as they float in midair near your table.
With global warming raising the sea level, Galveston builds the Seawall up a few more feet. You can take the Metro rail down to see it every half hour. Pay an additional $25 and you can get there in five minutes. The speed of the rail has revolutionized Sunday Funday on the island. You can have coffee downtown and brunch on the beach in the span of a few minutes.
Gov. J.J. Watt celebrates the Astros’ second World Series championship by declaring the day of the parade a state holiday. Dallas residents protest by still going to work.
Houston installs a statue of Megan Thee Stallion on the lawn of Discovery Green, pairing nicely with the ZZ Top statues nearby. Next door, the Texas-shaped pool at downtown’s now-historic Marriott Marquis is immortalized in the first-ever, straight-to-TikTok, feature-length (now just 36 minutes) film. Titled “Lulz, What It Do,” it won best picture at the 2031 Oscars.
Ronnie Killen’s zero-waste vegan restaurant in Olde Pearland gets rave reviews for Beyond Meat brisket and edible plates and utensils. Don’t wanna wait in line? Send a BBQ drone.
The Astrodome is still a nostalgic, abandoned destination, forever fodder for news packages and plaintive editorials. Watt Stadium, next door, is perpetually under construction, as yet another few hundred million dollars are pumped in to stay relevant. A graying relic in a world with hyperexclusive stadiums built on offshore barges — for gambling purposes — still has never housed a Super Bowl champion.