Demystifying Downtown: an introduction

Downtown Houston gives a false impression of the city it represents. In fact, for the past couple of decades, Downtown has experienced the opposite of the rest of the region: while the city’s population has practically exploded and the metro has become a haven for both mega-corporations and immigrants seeking to flush money into a prosperous resource-driven economy, the Central Business District has stagnated and rotted. Whatever vitality that colored the city in the 1940s – before the Interstate Highway System – has fled to the suburbs. Downtown’s Manhattanized street grid, once filled to the brim with business, is now a high-density relic in a sea of dozens of no-density surface parking lots. Sure, a cluster of attractive award-winning skyscrapers continues to fuel Houston’s national image, but behind that facade is a disappointing story of extreme suburbanization and long-wasted opportunity.

Unfortunately, the story of Downtown Houston is not unfamiliar to many other Sunbelt cities across the country. For many places, urbanism simply ceased to exist for most of the latter half of the 20th century – and the more extreme the rate of growth, the more devastating the impact on the traditional city center. Houston’s economic boom in the late 1970s was nothing short of insane. The region built and then overbuilt, spreading the suburbs to their geographic extremes and sapping the Inner Loop dry of wealth. There are many lessons to be learned from Houston’s poor planning during this time period – and many of the city’s most troubled districts are a direct result of a failure to accommodate any sense of foresight into the region’s growth (not that I don’t have some forgiveness for the leaders at the time, any city would get overly excited about that sort of economic opportunity). I could go on extensively about the garden apartment problem, the food deserts, the suburbs lost in time… but the focus is on Downtown, which is quickly (and thankfully) seeing its fortunes change.

The primary theme of urban development for the 20th century was suburbanization. In the 21st, it will be reurbanization. The suburbs have been ousted as an inefficient and undesirable form of land-use policy. Their propagation has created a society where most are forced to become dependent on homes that are isolated, cheaply built and expensive to occupy (especially when transportation costs are taken into account). These cookie-cutter developments lack a sense of community and force individuals to rely on their vehicles – and the traffic that they create – to have any sort of life whatsoever. This is especially prevalent in Houston, where thousands upon thousands are forced to endure grueling rush hour traffic, accidents ranging from inconvenient to deadly, and psychological degradation that breeds road rage and stress.

The most recent development boom has seen a sudden reinvestment in Houston’s densest districts – Downtown, Midtown, Montrose, Upper Kirby and Uptown. After decades of development being focused almost exclusively on suburban tracts at the edge of the metropolitan area, traditional density has become fashionable again. Indeed, this animation is especially useful at portraying the sea change:

Residential is fast approaching the Downtown core. Indeed, this is in no small part due to efforts by the municipal government, especially a new residential incentive that provides a hefty per-unit discount to developers who construct apartments in the city center. However, supplanting surface parking lots and derelict warehouses with new upper-class residential projects is a tall order. A lot of additional efforts will have to be undertaken to ensure the success of any sort of revitalization vision for Downtown. At the moment, the city center simply isn’t poised to take full advantage of pro-development economic conditions. Downtown lacks grocery stores and basic retail (barber shops, dry cleaners and the like) amongst other things. And, of course, the oversupply of surface parking lots severely detracts from the district’s walkability.

It can be safely assumed that, with time, the basic residential amenities that Downtown lacks will come with the new development. However, if the City of Houston truly wants to turn the CBD from a really big office park into a bustling high-density neighborhood, it’ll have to take some significant initiative. Over the next few months, I’ll present a number of ideas that I feel could help turn Downtown into a mixed-use gem. These include:

• Establishing dedicated retail and shopping districts that provide a true walkable experience.
• Beautifying traditional vehicular entrances to Downtown, especially on the northside of the district.
• De-spaghettifying and rebuilding the freeway infrastructure that surrounds Downtown as well as mitigating the impact of these concrete monoliths on inter-neighborhood transportation and interaction.
• Turning the stretch of the Buffalo Bayou that traverses Downtown into a unique asset to the city.

Houston is among America’s next generation of great cities. However, our lack of a proper urban core – or the mixed-use amenities that Americans are increasingly demanding – will only work to our detriment. What does it mean when Houston is considered one of the most ugly and pedestrian unfriendly cities in the nation? It means this city become unattractive to the newcomers that fuel its economy. And while most outside of Texas far overexaggerate Houston’s negative attributes (and often completely ignore its positive qualities), it’s still important that this city emphasize the availability of a lifestyle that isn’t rooted in the suburbs – an urban approach to city living which is quickly becoming the norm across the nation. Houston should be a city where both the urbanist and suburbanist can live in harmony. A reinvigorated Downtown will go a long way to making that a reality.

Houston, part 1: Downtown

I love Houston. For most Americans, I’d assume it’s an easy place to overlook. This is strictly a business city; although it’s the fourth-largest in the U.S., it simply isn’t as interesting as the competitors (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, ect.). Houston doesn’t have the cultural or aesthetic clout to outrank the others on a national or international scale. It seems that the city has embraced this characterization – the mayor, Annise Parker, has fairly noted in past speeches that Houston’s accomplishments are almost entirely economic. Indeed, numerous publications have lauded the extravagant growth of the metropolis over the past few years – The Atlantic recently labeled Houston “unstoppable,” and Forbes enjoys putting us on lists.

However, as I said before, Houston does not have a reputation for aesthetics. At all. Excerpts from the Lonely Planet Guide to Texas (2nd edition, 2002) include two outsider perspectives of the city that, while outdated, point out some unfortunate aspects of the area’s appearance. First:

In his 1979 book The Right Stuff, about the early days of the US space program, Tom Wolfe describes Houston as ‘an unbelievably torrid effluvial swamp with a mass of mushy asphalt, known as Downtown, set in the middle.’

Then, there’s this quote from some European tourists:

Houston does not cater for tourists at all. It was extremely business oriented and couldn’t recover from this because the city has no heart. Unlike say, Austin or San Antonio, there is no one center, just a spread-out urban sprawl.

While these are from many years ago – 1979 and 2002 – there is still quite a bit of truth to them today. Downtown has come quite a long way, with the addition of a few new office buildings, entertainment complexes, the Dynamo’s BVA Compass Stadium, and Discovery Green. However, the district is still recovering at a snail’s pace from the contition it was in in the 1970s:

Downtown Houston, looking southwest from U.S. Highway 59 (the east border of the district), in the 1970s. The city managed to erase some of the surface-level development through tax hikes and the construction of two stadiums and the George R. Brown Convention Center.

This sprawl has left the downtown core devoid of meaningful medium and high density development. One of the most disappointing things about Houston, aesthetically, is its lack of density. It’s simply not attractive in the slightest. While the Lonely Planet did predict a revitalization of the area back when it was published – and, since then, there has been some development – the area is still overrun with weedy parking lots and empty space. The lack of a proper “urban core” is, in my opinion, one of Houston’s greatest weaknesses. It’s a major reason why the city fails to gain the same international recognition as Seattle or other smaller metropolises. While Houston has the larger economy, it lacks the vibrancy to make it meaningful to the outside world. Houston has the nation’s second largest theatre district, renowned art galleries and museums, hundreds of acclaimed restaurants sporting a culturally diverse pallet of foods – yet it continues to give off the image of a bland concrete sprawl. Take this satellite image of the downtown area, with all of the parking lots and unused land highlighted:

While there is an understandable need for parking in a commercial district, the distribution of almost entirely surface level parking lots – downtown contains only a handful of actual multi-storey garages, unlike other cities – causes the downtown district to, aesthetically, stick out like a sore thumb. While most photographers will attempt to get the most dense view of the skyline in a shot, the proliferation of low (or no) density development severely stifles downtown’s appearance. Take this shot, for example:

As opposed to this shot of downtown Seattle:

Although Greater Houston’s GDP is far higher than Seattle’s, and the metro population is twice as large, Seattle appears larger visually simply because of increased density in its CBD. Houston has nine buildings over 700 feet and two over 900 feet in the downtown area, while Seattle only has four over 700 and one over 900 – yet it appears much more lively from the air.

Of course, I can’t claim that Houston and Seattle are similar cities in any way. However, it’s obvious that density makes cities seem more alive. Houston is famous for being the largest city in the United States without formal zoning laws. While the local government does enforce some regulations on land use, ultimately, developers have more flexibility in Houston than in most any other metro area in the country. This is what has caused a lack of density within and around the downtown area. There are benefits to the lack of development restrictions: Houston has many vibrant “districts,” giving the urban area a more unique character than just endless residential subdivisions (although it comes close to that anyway). Places like Uptown (where the Galleria and Williams Tower reside), Montrose, West University, the Museum District, the Medical Center, Memorial City and the Energy Corridor help encourage a variety of commercial and residential development. However, they also keep that development away from Downtown itself. Over the past few years, the Inner Loop (within Interstate 610) has been undergoing densification as the suburbanization trend slowly begins to reverse. If the city wants to encourage this buildup of Houston’s urban core, it needs to impose new restrictions on land use within Downtown.

The city now offers incentives for new development through the Downtown 2025 plan, which calls for turning the district into an internationally recognized cultural hub – with increased density. The plan is exactly what Houston needs, but there has been little publicity surrounding it. Few developers have taken advantage of the new directives. If the city really wants to recreate Downtown, it must enlist both public support for this comprehensive plan and conduct some more focused urban planning. It’s time Houston gets rid of the long-standing stigma of being a concrete sprawl and firmly establish itself not just as an international center of business, but of culture as well. The assets – in the form of museums, theaters, and restaurants – already exist. The infrastructure and aesthetics to tie everything together are what’s missing.