A future in Houston

Is Houston doomed? The answer to that question is split along distinct political and socioeconomic lines. For the time being, the evidence says no – Houston continues to lead the country in job creation, housing starts, population growth and whatever other economic statistics you could possibly think of. From a business-oriented perspective, there is nothing wrong with this city. In fact, it’s a model for the future of the urban United States. Even Stephen Klineburg of the left-leaning Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice believes so, despite his (and others’) misgivings about the region’s lack of leadership on transportation and quality-of-life issues.

I also don’t necessarily think Houston is doomed. It would be naive and historically ignorant to assume that this city is invincible – by no means are we as firmly entrenched in the national economy as New York, for example. But even considering the uncertain and turbulent future of energy economics, Houston is well poised to retain its economic strength into the future. The city’s economy is diversifying (even though I feel some claims of diversification are over exaggerated), and a critical mass of population is gradually laying the foundation for the sort of self-sufficiency that fuels the world’s great metropolises through times good and bad. It’ll be a couple more decades before that point is truly reached – maybe after we overtake Chicago in population – but it is certainly in progress.

But at the end of the day, I don’t really care about the economics. In this age of climate change and globalization, insular economic projections by local boosters give me little comfort. Nobody these days really argues that Houston is doomed because of money. Yes, we may be facing a slowdown at the moment, but there is no expectation that it is permanent or even that severe (relative to the 1980s, at least). When locals and I talk about the demise of Houston, it’s from a planning perspective. Optimistic conservatives and local politicians often point to Houston’s lack of planning (“We’re the largest city in the nation without zoning!” is a tired boast) as its greatest strength, but the assumption that Houston lacks planning is a gross misconception. On the contrary, Houston is an intricately planned city. It just planned the wrong way.

I support Houston’s lack of zoning. In fact, it’s one of the few things this city has gotten right. My opposition against zoning isn’t firmly based in the frontier libertarianism of like-minded Houstonians, however – while I do believe in property rights, I more strongly believe in urban diversity. Zoning is quite literally segregation. It makes dense and mixed-use development all but impossible in many areas, and it otherwise stifles the organic growth of cities. Urbanism advocate Benjamin Ross discusses the cynical origins of zoning extensively in his fantastic book Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. Ultimately, zoning is a product of suburban NIMBYism, driven by a desire to restrict property rights and prevent the organic densification of cities.

However, Houston has replaced zoning with an equally complex system of building variances and deed-restricted neighborhoods. Ross doesn’t let us off the hook just because we’re the largest city in the nation without formal zoning. In fact, he laments the fact that our city is one of a handful in the country that uses its police power to enforce neighborhood deed restrictions. The distinction from zoning is basically nonexistent here; the same roadblocks to densification and diversification exist in deed-restricted neighborhoods. In some ways, it’s worse because there is no public input on these issues at all – the false democracy of zoning is replaced with the finality of deeds that take decades to expire (if they ever do). The public loses, the private owner loses – the only winner is the dead man who wrote the deed fifty years ago.

Still, the lack of zoning does benefit the large swaths of the city that aren’t deed-restricted – often commercial corridors along freeways and arterial roads and most of the Inner Loop. In those locations, something resembling an organic evolution of the city is occurring. Inner Houston is currently enjoying its largest construction boom in decades, with dense residential, commercial and office development expanding and connecting the city’s scattered walkable districts. Downtown and Midtown are finally being dragged out of their malaise, following patterns prevalent throughout the nation. Dense townhouse and apartment projects are gradually filling in the abandoned lots that surround the core. While many of these new developments are stained with tinges of suburbanism thrust into the middle of the city (enormous driveways and miniature gated communities come to mind), any sort of reversal of urban sprawl is welcome. It’s reassuring that the city has taken steps to encourage this – the Downtown Living Initiative, a new sidewalk ordinance and the raising of Inner Loop density thresholds are just a few of the many positive, progressive policies that have recently been implemented.

These steps forward are stymied by two major obstacles, however: an archaic, inflexible building code and the continuing outward march of suburban sprawl. In fact, the former seems to (at least partially) feed the latter. The City of Houston’s building regulations are housed in chapter 42 of the city code. While there is no formal zoning, the guidelines outlined in chapter 42 go a long way towards restricting organic, walkable development from forming in a vast majority of the city. Houston’s building setback regulations play a major role in enforcing suburbanism in the center of the city: for major thoroughfares, the city enforces a default building line of 25 feet from the street; exceptions are possible for retail buildings but are rarely taken advantage of (partially because these exceptions are only possible for major thoroughfares with a right-of-way of less than 80 feet, which is certainly not universal in Houston). A local planner I met recently explained that these setbacks, implemented in the 1980s, were designed to maximize driver comfort – motorists react differently to their driving environment depending on the proximity of buildings to the road. However, this implies that our urban roads should be designed to acquiesce the desires of only motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists be damned. With new research suggesting that “uncomfortable” roads with narrow lanes and visual obstacles are inherently safer than streets designed to maximize driver comfort (this excerpt from Tom Vanderbilt’s book Traffic provides a good layman overview), it may be time to rewrite the city code to encourage denser, sidewalk-oriented development. Many of Houston’s most urban streets, including Montrose Blvd., Westheimer Rd. (inside the Loop) and Washington Ave., are classified as major thoroughfares that are subject to the default 25-foot building line. While it is possible to obtain a variance in the building line from the Houston Planning Commission, variances require proof of “hardship” by the developer. If we really want to encourage walkable development in the city, we cannot place the burden of proof on developers. Walkability should be the default in these scenarios, not the exception.

Houston’s infamous suburban sprawl, however, is an entirely different beast. It is arguably unstoppable, driven by an entrenched industry of developers that retains strong ties to the region’s municipal governments. In some ways, Houston needs its sprawl to survive – for years, this city has attracted new residents by virtue of its impressively low cost of living. However, there is surely an equilibrium between Sunbelt sprawl and the high-cost compactness that defines the world’s global metropolises (like London and New York). Houston is nowhere near this equilibrium; this city is far too suburban. I don’t even have a problem with suburbia – despite contemporary misgivings about its march across America, suburban communities are desirable for families and demanded by a large segment of the population. They aren’t going anywhere. Any good city has a proportional mix of urban and suburban areas. Unfortunately, thanks to a complicated system of government incentives and planning orthodoxy established over the past sixty years, American cities are unnecessarily skewed towards an extreme version of suburbanism, one riddled with nonsensical auto-centric design. It is no wonder that places like New York and San Francisco are so expensive – besides unreasonable regulatory burdens, demand for urban settings is simply outstripping supply. We are seeing this same problem in Houston, where home prices and rent inside the Loop have skyrocketed over the past decade as quirky urban cultural enclaves like Montrose and the Heights have been thrown into the mainstream. As I mentioned before, the regulatory environment’s bias in favor of suburbanism, combined with the high cost of urban construction, makes meeting this demand difficult for many developers. In the end, homebuyers are priced out to less stringently regulated master-planned communities at the edge of the city. Only a few adventurous souls are willing to participate in the gentrification of places like Near Northside, the East End and the Third Ward.

There are a few initatives the city can take to extend urban environments to a greater swath of the metro and increase access to more homebuyers:

• Reduce or eliminate parking requirements for new apartment and townhouse construction and replace them with consolidated parking districts featuring centralized parking garages;
• Eliminate sections of the city code that incentivize a “hierarchy of roads” in residential areas, instead encouraging greater intersection density and uniform, linear street grids with small blocks;
• Construct narrower roads with wider sidewalks, tree canopies and bike lanes;
• Increase pedestrian activity by constructing pedestrian-exclusive public plazas, trails and right-of-ways;
• Fund and build more mass transit, specifically bus and rail;
• As suggested previously, amend the city code to reduce setbacks and make walkable development the norm instead of the exception;
• Create tax incentives for urbanist developments (possibly a generalized extension of the existing transit corridor program).

Most of these things are easier said than done. Some of them are in the works (special parking areas and complete streets come to mind), others are little more than pipe dreams. And at the end of the day, few of these initiatives can guarantee any appreciable impact on the direction or cost of urban development. The western half of the Inner Loop will likely remain expensive and exclusive; the eastern half will probably undergo a hasty and awkward gentrification that will only offer a brief window of entry for the middle class while completely evacuating the poor. Mass transit will always take longer than expected; it has been fifteen years and only three lines of the paltry light rail system have been constructed.

More importantly, much of Houston’s fate lies outside of its own hands. The metropolitan area has expanded far beyond the City of Houston’s jurisdictional limits; the extraterritorial jurisdiction that the City holds over vast swaths of Harris County does not allow it the same ability to enforce or encourage many of the sustainable, urbanist development practices that exist within the city proper. Strained by controversial pension obligations and the burden of maintaining and constructing infrastructure for hundreds of square miles of urbanized area, the City struggles to find ways to pay for innovative solutions to urban problems. In some ways, the suburban sprawl that feeds so much of the area’s economy may be suffocating it. The master-planned enclaves that line the Grand Parkway are neither interested in nor obligated to abide by Houston’s urban visions. Independent entities like Sugar Land, Pearland and the Woodlands are similarly disinterested. With a collaborative vision for urbanism lacking in the region, existing issues with traffic, the environment, infrastructure maintenance and community decay will continue unabated, and Houston will end up consistently behind in the national quality-of-life competition. This may sound pessimistic, but it is simply mind-boggling that equally sprawling cities like Dallas and Atlanta are able to form regional transit authorities and build extensive infrastructure while Houston has failed.

These are points I have emphasized dozens of times over the course of my writing on this blog. There are times when I have a strong sense of optimism about Houston. This usually happens after a trip into the city, where driving on flyover ramps reveals a glorious view of construction cranes, dense townhouse developments and a true urban vibe. My time at Rice has more sharply revealed both sides of the coin. On one hand, I’ve really enjoyed living with such proximity to some of Houston’s best areas – besides the university itself, there’s Rice Village, the Medical Center, the Museum District, Midtown and Montrose all within easy walking, driving or riding distance. There are obviously some amazing pockets of urban vitality, places that are uniquely “Houston” in their atmospheres and ambitions. However, there is also a lot of work that must be done. Despite the rapid densification of the core, much of the city still suffers from immensely stupid development decisions, poor infrastructure maintenance, antiquated road design, and abandonment. New development only moves block-by-block and does almost nothing to make these areas more affordable.

Meanwhile, I am consistently depressed by the scale of Houston’s exurban development. The suburbs are expanding at a breathtaking pace, and they will not be slowed by any stereotype of millennial desires. In these new master-planned communities I see everything wrong with suburbanism and auto-centrism. While I’m aware that the city has a pressing need to house thousands of newcomers, I wish it were done in a more sustainable way. Instead, the western and northern peripheries of the city have been spaghettified by private developers who carve out convoluted enclaves that make no effort to communicate with each other. There is no connectivity, walkability or environmentalism in these acres of tract housing. I have yet to see a single example in Houston of the “smart development” that has appeared in some suburbs of Austin and Denver. What Houston produces is the worst of the worst, untamed by the slightest consideration for transit, community, sustainability or accessibility.

And I know these suburbs will go through the same boom-and-bust cycle as their inner-ring ancestors. This is already evident in decaying areas like Greenspoint and the FM 1960 corridor. At that point, what are we to do – build out again, or work with what we already have? For all of Houston’s history, save for the relatively small revitalization of the inner-city over the past ten years, the answer has been the former. But this cycle of decay, traffic and conspicuous consumption cannot go on forever. There are limits to these trends; that is the definition of unsustainability. Will Houston be able to overcome that hurdle – possibly the greatest hurdle it will ever face? And what are we going to do when the menace of climate change inevitably demands greater sacrifices from every one of us?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. I love Houston, but it is fundamentally incompatible with my ideas for the world. Indeed, many of the civil engineers in this city are invested in practices that I feel are dangerous – the arrogant road construction practices of the Texas Department of Transportation come to mind. Like many in my generation, I feel the powerful attraction of more sustainable locales like Seattle, Boston and Portland. I fell in love with those cities the minute I stepped foot in them.

My life in Houston has taught me a lot. I can appreciate things about this city that many outsiders cannot. However, if there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifteen years here, it’s that this is not what I want the world to look like. Houston has taught me what I don’t support – but it has also taught me that great and beautiful things are possible regardless. This city is the ultimate American experiment. Take from it what you will.