The transit problem: ranking Houston’s mayoral candidates

Election season is in full swing here in Houston, and for the first time since 2010, an incumbent mayor is not eligible for reelection. Unfortunately, our charismatic executive, Annise Parker, is coming to the end of her third and final term in office.

Although I do not yet have the fortune to vote in this country, Houston’s mayoral elections are still particularly important to me. The city is a prominent example of the strong mayor-council form of municipal government, so the chief executive can have an immense influence on the operations of the city. Indeed, past Houston mayors have used these powers to almost single-handedly build parks, amend the city code and establish (or disestablish) mass transit plans.

It’s the issue of mass transit that has me particularly concerned with the next mayor. While I’m hesitant to condition my support on a single issue, I firmly believe that nothing is more important to the future of the city of Houston than establishing a proper, metropolitan transit system that is proportional to a city of its size. Five meandering light rail lines is simply not enough, although they do provide an essential and necessary framework for a larger system. The bus system reimagining is not enough, even though it fixes many inconsistencies that have built up over the decades. New freeways will never be enough, and the possibility of expanding many of them any further is nonexistent. Houston is on track to surpass Chicago in population – a city that benefits from an extensive rail system that is hundreds of miles long. Of the nation’s ten largest metropolitan statistical areas, Houston easily lags the most in mass transit, beaten by dense Northeastern cities (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington) and even its similarly-built Southern counterparts (Dallas, Atlanta and Miami).

So where do this year’s candidates stand on Houston’s crippling mass-transit indecision? Since I haven’t yet found a good summary of their positions anywhere on the Internet yet, I figured I would create a handy guide here for reference. The candidates are listed below in descending order of performance on a Houston Public Media poll from May (premature but still somewhat revealing). While there is still a ways to go before November, any candidate who takes metropolitan transportation issues seriously should have at least said something about rail by now.

• Former Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia (D) has obviously not been in a position to comment on transportation issues during his tenure. Therefore, I’m reluctant to apply the same scrutiny to him as I will to other candidates who have performed direct executive and legislative functions within municipalities. Promisingly, he notes on the front page of his website that “the city is seeing more violent crimes, serious financial challenges with few remedies left to use, and infrastructure and transportation issues that desperately need a fresh approach.” The wording is vague, but the implication is there – presumably, a “fresh approach” means looking towards solutions that ween Houston off of its much-beloved automobiles. Unfortunately, however, Garcia has been mostly silent about Houston’s pressing infrastructure issues; he has not even commented on the controversial ReBuild Houston public works program.
• Texas Representative Sylvester Turner (D) has a bit more to say about public transportation – he is, after all, a legislator, and he’s run for Mayor before. His 1991 campaign resulted in a close loss to Bob Lanier, who was a vocal opponent of rail and succeeded in killing an ambitious monorail plan put forth by Metro. As a state legislator representing District 139, which sprawls across suburban areas of northwest Houston, Turner has straddled the fence on Texas Central Railway’s proposed high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas, which would pass through the area. Ultimately, Turner supports high-speed rail – as he should – but seems somewhat vulnerable to the NIMBYism of his constituents. The rail corridor must go somewhere, and simply asking that it be pushed to a more expensive alignment in a questionable effort to protect “property values” and “safety” (where are the studies predicting such impacts?) is an unreasonable approach to transportation planning. His concern is understandable but misplaced. Still, Turner has assisted HSR in the Texas House by helping gut anti-rail legislation – he is far from an enemy of the proposal. Turner has not said much about transportation on his website, but this blog post from May is promising. It seems that Turner will align with urbanist interests, although to what extent remains uncertain. This 2003 interview is also very promising, and it shows a strong commitment to expanding mass transit throughout the metropolitan area. I appreciate Turner’s ability to see beyond the system’s humble beginnings – he definitely understands that rail to the suburbs and airports will eventually be built as long as some lines are laid in the first place, however short they are. He also recognizes the necessity of mass transit to further Houston’s economic interests.
• The candidate that excites me the most on infrastructure is former U.S. Representative Chris Bell (D). Bell makes his position on mobility issues quite obvious on his website:
  

  As Mayor, my approach will be to build on the options we currently have, and expand them in different ways that recognize we have scarce financial resources. In addition to the light rail, I will work with METRO to consider the feasibility of a new modern system, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) for areas not covered by rail.
  (…)

  I will also work with the County to look for more options for commuter rail as well as reaching further out with expanded park and ride options. As our city continues to grow and expand, we simply can’t build more roads to relieve congestion. We have to expand our public transportation options and as Mayor I will work to make that happen.

  Thank God for this man. Even though he polls third, Bell seems to be off to a decent start and has a solid resume to work with. I appreciate his willingness to invest in Bus Rapid Transit, which he discusses at some length in this blog post on his website. BRT is certainly a necessary component of any long-range transportation plan for Houston, and I agree that it has the potential to work just as effectively as light rail at a fraction of the cost. Bell displays consistent interest in long-range transportation planning, as he notes in this Chronicle article.

• City Council Member Stephen Costello (R) has positioned himself as a moderate candidate in a field of Democrats, championing his legislative experience and namesake civil engineering firm Costello, Inc. Costello’s landmark legislative achievement, the ReBuild Houston program, is eliciting some significant controversy yet has made appreciable headway in tacking the city’s enormous street infrastructure problems. Of course, Costello does not fail to emphasize surface infrastructure investment on his website, where it is listed as one of his three main priorities. However, his website makes no mention of public transportation whatsoever, and he has been similarly silent on the issue in his capacity as a councilman. I worry that Costello would fail to embrace rail as mayor due to his close ties with suburban real estate developers and the city’s enthusiastic road-building engineering and construction firms (one of which is his own company). In addition, his slightly conservative leaning leaves him even less likely to endorse mass transit solutions. The fact that he hasn’t said anything about it so far should be enough to dissuade any transportation-minded voter from endorsing him.
• Attorney Ben Hall doesn’t even seem to have a functioning website at the moment. The only comment on public transportation I can attribute to him is from the aforementioned Chronicle article, where he advocates “a twofold approach to reducing congestion that involves both facility and behavior modification initiatives.” That doesn’t really seem like an endorsement of anything.
• Former Kemah mayor Bill King (R) is the race’s most conservative candidate – which also makes him the most likely to lose. Predictably, King has taken a hard line against the light rail system. As a frequent columnist for the Houston Chronicle, King has penned a number of opinions that reveal his position on mass transit with more clarity than any other candidate in the race. I have to at least admire King’s willingness to discuss these issues, even if I could not possibly more strongly oppose his views.King’s criticism of the existing light rail system is extensive. In this 2010 article, he discusses a number of apparent issues with the design and engineering of the lines themselves. However, these issues are pretty pedantic – King grossly overexaggerates the impact of small details like school zones and noise on adjacent neighborhoods. Indeed, he seems willfully ignorant to the fact that opting for multi-lane avenues and dismissing the transit-oriented development that light rail makes possible would be far worse for walkability and resident comfort in these areas; emphasizing mass transit reduces the impact of auto-centric urban planning and vastly improves the pedestrian realm. His comment on 90-degree turns is somewhat contradictory as he states that it is the result of “of attempting to build an at-grade system through already densely populated and developed areas,” even though that’s what he argues successful mass transit relies on in this 2014 article. King says that Houston doesn’t have enough density for mass transit, but even if it did, apparently we shouldn’t be building any because of squeaky rails? As if that were somehow more of a nuisance than the enormous roads and freeways our car culture has demanded for so long.

  The 2014 article itself is painfully unimaginative, opting for a conservative interpretation of mass transit that resorts to the same tired arguments about density and congestion. King is at least correct that mass transit will not appreciably reduce congestion on the city’s freeways, but that was never the point. A good mass transit system offers an alternative to driving for those who want an easier commute. But besides that, King’s assumption that mass transit is impossible in Houston is deeply flawed because he ignores the existence of park-and-ride. No sane person would advocate for a mass transit system without taking into account the popularity of automobiles. Any well engineered system would attempt to strike a balance between driving and riding – something that Houston is already doing somewhat well with the Park-and-Ride/HOV system. While I respect King, his arguments become irritatingly facetious towards the end – yes, cities like New York and Washington have worse congestion than Houston, but that’s not because they decided to invest in mass transit instead of freeways. Instead, they realized that roadbuilding cannot simply continue unabated; freeways can only become so wide and only so many can be built. Instead, offering an alternative form of transportation can help strike a balance in commuting. Houston is quickly approaching the point where it will have to make the same decision.

  King is probably unaware of another sprawling, auto-centric city that has nearly perfected the park-and-ride commuter rail system: Perth, Western Australia. Interestingly enough, Perth is actually one of Houston’s international sister cities, and it has a similar legacy of suburbia. With a population of 2 million sprawled over nearly 2500 square miles (which translates to a population density that is only 22 percent of Houston’s, although the 2500 square mile figure probably includes a lot of rural land), Perth has developed a strikingly similar dependence on the automobile, complete with a well-developed system of metropolitan freeways that lead to a comparatively small central business district. Consider this paper, which bluntly states that “Perth is one of the most car dependent sprawling cities on the planet with low urban density.”

  King would assume that a rail system would be impractical in a place like Perth, but the opposite is true. Perth currently boasts a five-line commuter rail system totaling almost 108 miles radiating out of the CBD. The system attracts over 60 million trips per year (that’s over 170,000 rides per day, or over five times Houston’s average daily ridership of 39,000) and is well-integrated with a bus network that delivers an average of 230,000 rides per day (also beating out Metro’s buses – and this is in a city with less than one-third the population). The system is robust and fantastic. Just skim this exhaustive paper detailing the Perth success story – rail works so well in this car city that even conservative politicians have promised to expand the system. They even address King’s talking points almost directly:

  However Perth’s rail story has proven that rail can be delivered in existing very low density urban environments with long urban corridors. The northern suburbs and southern railways are both examples of new thinking to enable the development of public transportation that responds to the local conditions by adapting the traditional model of mass transit – which achieved mass through penetration into high urban densities – to a low density model of bringing the masses to the railway stations from surrounding areas by bus and car. This has provided a new model for rail which has become a touchstone for the industry nationally (Waldock R, 2007).

  Perth is a shining example of the route Houston should take. We would do well to follow their lead and implement a similar system that works with the car culture. And while I share some of King’s concern that a light rail system is not sufficient for Houston, it does act as a fundamental framework for a wider network. Indeed, Houston is actually denser than Perth, and the Inner Loop is an appropriate environment for at-grade rail. We need to build out that system and then look to a more expansive model that adapts the park-and-ride system to a higher-speed, higher-capacity rail network.

  King is not just all talk, however. He has proposed some alternative mobility solutions, most notably in this 2010 opinion piece. I do think some of his ideas are interesting and practical – particularly the extension of rail out to Fort Bend County (which seems to stand in opposition to his 2014 opinion that rail won’t work at all in Houston) and a Downtown trolley system. However, most of these “solutions” are just short-term patches on a fundamentally flawed transportation system. Improvements to dangerous intersections and a few freeway bottlenecks here and there will have a temporary positive impact on congestion, sure, but in the long-term these changes will do nothing to fundamentally change the way Houstonians get around their city. Even the multi-billion dollar reconstruction of the Katy Freeway into the world’s widest highway only had a temporary impact on commute times; if that gargantuan project failed to shift the status quo, it’s obvious that incremental improvements to sporadic chunks of infrastructure will also fail. I’m also skeptical of King’s proposed “smart streets” (which uncomfortably co-opts an alternative name for the urbanist “complete streets” initiative), which would turn local thoroughfares into awkward freeway-avenue hybrids. While congestion is certainly an enormous issue in poorly planned areas like the FM 1960 corridor, shoving high-speed traffic into commercial corridors is an offensive affront to walkability and accessibility. King is essentially endorsing the stroad, except at a higher speed. These areas would be better served by high-frequency long-range bus service, which also has the potential to improve their aesthetic character.

  Honestly, I don’t know why any transit-minded citizen would consider voting for King. While he is a respectable writer, King seems ignorant of the potential for mass transit and unwilling to embrace a creative solution to Houston’s greatest problem. We need innovation in order to solve our mobility issues, and King simply opts for the same old arguments in defense of a waning car culture.

Hopefully, a greater number of candidates will come out with stronger positions on mass transit. It’s definitely surprising that so many of our potential mayors have been so silent on such an enormous issue. It’s time to recognize that Houston has been moving far too slow on mass transit. For a city of our size, 23 miles of passenger rail is a pitiful amount – and we don’t even have a single commuter line!

I refuse to support any mayoral candidate that can’t look beyond the road-freeway paradigm towards a more innovative solution to our mobility problems. Potholes and police aren’t everything. Houston is a city vying for an increased profile on the world stage, yet it lags so far behind the infrastructure of its competitors that it almost eliminates itself from consideration entirely. How can we compete with Toronto and Singapore when we can’t even push ourselves to invest in some buses on Post Oak? How can we distinguish ourselves in an era when even Los Angeles, the inventor of auto-centric urban planning, has abandoned that vision? What can we say to international visitors who have to dump $60 on a taxi ride from the airport because we don’t care enough to do what every other major city in North America has done and roll a rail line out there?

Please vote in this election and made your voice heard. Houston needs a new vision for transportation – and only a few of your choices are willing to make the right decisions.

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.

Why Rice Needs Urbanism

The West and Greenbriar parking lots glow in this 1970s photo of Rice looking towards Downtown.

We are the students of suburbia. Many of us – probably a majority of Rice students – were raised in idyllic detached homes flanking broad streets and even broader front lawns. Even those of us who grew up in denser apartment complexes or townhomes have been continuously impacted by the suburban ideal. This is a nation where nearly 90% of the population drives to work; it is impossible to escape the auto-centrism that underlies the modern American city. We have all relied on Interstate highways and we have all accepted that the car is the predominant form of transportation. As a result, we also passively accept the control that automobiles exert over our lives. On a micro scale, things like traffic and the “daily commute” influence where we as individuals choose to live and how much money we are able to spend. Many of us have accepted that it is not possible to engage most of our home cities on foot; some of the most basic locations in our lives – our jobs, schools and stores – are accessible virtually exclusively by road. On a macro scale, suburbanization and auto-centrism have defined the physical and social development of our cities for decades and continue to do so. Our society has long been content with sacrificing much of the natural and human environment for an enormous number of freeways, walls, cul-de-sacs and cookie-cutter homes.

Urban policy remains a relatively obscure topic to the American public (and, by extension, the college student). Not many people engage with or particularly care about the decisions that the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Texas Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration or Department of Housing and Urban Development make on a daily basis. While political debates over urban planning have flared on and off since the creation of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, a majority of voter concern remains centralized on more controversial and immediate topics. Infrastructure is always a subject of least concern during election season; it is taken for granted and left to technocrats and government engineers to control.

Part of the university experience – especially the Rice experience – lies in questioning the social institutions that we have long lived under. Throughout our four years at Rice, we’ll lean a plethora of things about the world and use that knowledge to become the empowered citizens that our democracy needs. Many of us will discover or redefine our political inclinations. However, in the discussions we will inevitably have about the problems our nation faces, we must acknowledge the role of the city in the socialization of every individual. The city is where inequality originates and festers. It is where nearly all of us will spend the majority of our lives. We rely on the infrastructure of the city to provide for our basic human needs; we utilize the powerful human framework of the city to fulfill our social and economic goals. Cities provide the environment for all of our individual life experiences and the setting for every national sociopolitical issue. Everything happens in cities. We cannot passively accept the modern American city for what it is – it must be criticized, analyzed and improved.

Luckily enough, Rice sits right in the middle of one of the most complex and unusual urban areas in the nation. Houston is internationally known for its adherence to the suburban form, the automobile and the freeway. No other city matches the sprawl and consumptive excess of this much-criticized metropolis; no city has a more controversial relationship with urban planning. For much of its modern history Houston has ignored even the most conventional planning policies (the lack of a single zoning ordinance comes to mind) and has allowed private forces to dictate the development of enormous swaths of land. As a result, the city has long struggled with insurmountable traffic congestion¹, horrific air pollution², poverty³ and all forms of segregation. Even though the City of Houston sprawls over an area the size of Greater London, it has less than a quarter of London’s population and none of its high-quality public transportation.⁴ As time progresses, Houston’s urban model appears increasingly unsustainable. Urban sprawl exacerbates pollution and, in turn, global warming – the defining issue of the 21^st century. The suburbs, once symbols of American ingenuity and affluence, are now stifling the diverse cohesiveness that is necessary to create cities that are centers of innovation, culture and education. Meanwhile, suburbanization has encouraged physically unhealthy isolation⁵ and clogged cities with absurd levels of traffic⁶. Houstonians often speak of surpassing the handful of cities that outrank it nationally and internationally – powerhouses like Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco – but will suburbia and car culture act as its Achilles’ heel? Obviously, for Rice, a university that is undoubtedly reliant on the prestige and influence of its home city, the future of Houston is of paramount importance and deserves serious discussion on campus.

Rice occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of Houstonians. Few American cities can claim to be home to such a celebrated institution; Rice is one of many things that set Houston apart as a city of national and international importance. As a result, it’s no secret that our school has a significant influence on the residents and government of the city. Houstonians look to Rice as an essential actor in improving the city, whether it’s through collaborations with the Texas Medical Center, donations to various civic organizations, construction of community assets on university-owned land or cutting-edge research on local issues. As an institution, Rice is clearly deeply embedded within Houston.

However, Rice’s student body is different. While many Rice students hail from Houston or engage with the surrounding community through various volunteer initiatives, there is little doubt that the undergraduate student body experiences a level of shielding from the adjoining urban environment. Some more outspoken students on campus often talk of the “Rice bubble” and a psychological disconnect with the world that lies “beyond the hedges.” If Rice is such an important asset to the City of Houston, why doesn’t its student body show a comparable level of engagement with local and civic issues? The fact is that Rice students are also students of Houston, and we should use our unique position within the city to push for meaningful changes in local urban policy and development. Rice’s students can create real, physical change in the surrounding city – changes that can directly benefit future generations of Rice students and Houstonians.

Some of this influence should be used to improve the integration of the Rice campus with surrounding areas. Part of the reason why the “Rice bubble” exists in the first place is because of the poor and rather awkward connectivity between the campus and neighboring city districts. Examples of this can be found on all sides of campus. On the long east side bordering Main Street, students and visitors are greeted with a questionable unpaved jogging trial running parallel to what should be Houston’s premier urban boulevard. Meanwhile, the Texas Medical Center does an abysmal job of promoting any sort of pedestrian interaction with the university – the district presents Rice with an undesirable view of blank parking garage facades and no retail or other commercial amenities to speak of. On the north and south sides, Rice is flanked by quaint, leafy neighborhoods – this is hardly a problem, but low-density housing is of little interest to those who don’t live there.

The area that has the most potential for authentic urban vitality, however, is the poorly utilized “wasteland” between Rice’s academic and residential buildings and Rice Village to the west. For some reason, the administration has kept the western quarter of campus covered with an ugly, depressing sea of asphalt parking lots that have virtually destroyed any pedestrian connectivity with the Village. A lack of tree shade, sidewalks and other basic pedestrian amenities is enough to convince many students to take a bus or even drive over a distance that would otherwise be easily walkable. Clearly, this is not the most environmentally responsible design for this land. In addition, the wide swath of parking lots creates a psychological disconnect between the Rice student body and Rice Stadium. Many Rice students and administrators wonder why the school is so apathetic to sports, particularly football – part of the reason may lie in the fact that the stadium is shoved into the most distant and, more importantly, unwalkable corner of campus. With studies suggesting that even a single barren parking lot is enough to dramatically decrease pedestrian interest in an area, the administration should seriously consider completely redesigning the western quadrant of campus.

On a larger scale, Rice students can play a significant role in the ongoing political debate over the implementation of mass transit and other transportation solutions in and around Houston. Rice already benefits from direct connectivity to the growing METRORail system – an asset to inner-Loop Houston that, when completed, will offer an essential framework for a larger regional high-capacity transit network. Unfortunately, development of the rest of the light rail system is in jeopardy thanks to unfounded political opposition and the lack of a unified vision for mass transit in Houston – issues that Rice students can help overcome. Rice has a number of assets that can help produce change: highly ranked engineering, architecture and social science schools, location, and institutional prestige, to name a few. However, few institutions within Rice have as much of a local impact as the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, which is best known for producing the incredible annual Houston Area Survey. Last year, the Kinder Institute named Bill Fulton, a nationally renowned urban planning expert, as its head. As the Kinder Institute continues its groundbreaking local research and pivots more towards urban planning and quality of life issues, it makes sense to have an organization present on campus to follow up on these developments with the student body and add to the voices calling for change in Houston.

Few topics seem as large and impersonal as urban planning. As everyday citizens, we mostly lack the authority and technical knowhow required to redesign streets and neighborhoods and create more wholesome living environments. Rarely do any of us drive down a freeway or take the light rail and consider that we can have any impact on the construction of such massive, complex and expensive government projects. Many of us are content with leaving such big issues to elected officials, bureaucrats and obscure private developers. However, the actions of these groups in allocating money to and building parts of our cities have a direct impact on our collective quality of life. We can have an impact on Houston’s built environment. It requires group coordination and action – organizations like Houston Tomorrow and, in coming years, the Kinder Institute are actively making a difference. As members of one of Houston’s most unique and gifted institutions, there is no reason why the students of Rice University shouldn’t take up the challenge themselves. Even the smallest initiatives can make a significant difference for future generations of Rice students and Houstonians. The city that surrounds our campus is not some bland expanse of suburbs and office buildings. Houston is a city with history and soul, and it is – in the words of Rice’s own Stephen Klineburg – “the place where much of the American future is going to be worked out.”⁷ William Marsh Rice chose Houston as the location for our school because he saw it as a city of boundless opportunity. A century later, as citizens immersed in Houston’s continuing great adventure, we all have a responsibility to better it in some way.

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Sources:

1. Begley, Dug. “Congestion a Constant for Houston Commuters.” Houston Chronicle. Hearst Newspapers LLC, 5 Feb. 2013. Web. 07 Jan. 2015. (Link)

2. Harris, Richard. “Breathing Easier: How Houston Is Working To Clean Up Its Air.” NPR. NPR, 30 May 2013. Web. 07 Jan. 2015. (Link)

3. Raphael, Steven, and Michael A. Stoll. Job Sprawl and the Suburbanization of Poverty. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 2010. Metropolitan Opportunity Ser. Mar. 2010. Web. 7 Jan. 2015. (Link)

4. The City of Houston covers 628.7 square miles and has a population of 2,195,914 (2010). The Greater London administrative area covers 607 square miles and has a population of 8,308,000 (2012).

5. Sturm, R., and D.A. Cohen. Suburban Sprawl and Physical and Mental Health. Rep. Public Health, 2004. Web. 14 Jan. 2015. (Link). This paper from the CDC also gives a good overview of the health problems stemming from sprawl.

6. Cervero, Robert. Suburban Traffic Congestion: Is There a Way Out? Rep. Vol. 17. N.p.: Built Environment, 1991. Post-Suburban America. JSTOR. Alexandrine Press, 1991. Web. 14 Jan. 2015. (Link)

7. Feibel, Carrie. “Kinder Institute At Rice Becomes Think Tank With Urban Focus | Houston Public Media.” Houston Public Media. University of Houston, 29 Dec. 2014. Web. 14 Jan. 2015. (Link)

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 wants walkability (even if it doesn’t want to admit it)

This is the first of a series of posts about Houston that I’ll be completing over the summer. Personal posts will be few and far between.

Houston is often labeled one of the most – if not the most – automobile-dependent cities in the United States. Of course, that label isn’t without a harsh dose of reality: Houston is defined by its car culture. The freeways are enormous and grow bigger by the year; the mass transit system is woeful for a city of six million; the sprawl keeps sprawling and the drivers keep driving. Empirical data doesn’t help Houston’s case for urbanity. Neither does the media. It’s difficult to argue that Houston’s residents actually desire the walkable urban environments that most of the city so desperately lacks – after all, it’s the people who live here who made the decision to accept the car culture, right? An outsider may assume that the city is stuck in its ways. It’s easy to point to massive highway projects like the Katy Freeway as evidence of Houston refusing to abandon the automobile as the most inefficient form of transit.

There’s a heavy dose of truth to that as well, unfortunately. I could easily drive twenty minutes to the “edge” of town, out on the Katy Prairie, and watch construction crews erect more and more far-flung suburban McMansions. If you drive westward down Westheimer past Highway 6, the cityscape becomes immensely depressing. Houston’s sprawl has finally reached Fulshear of all places – well over 30 miles from the Downtown core – yet nobody has questioned this insane inefficiency. I fear that, in a few years, Fulshear’s cute little sixteen-block town grid could be enveloped by the suburbs like so many rural communities before it (Alief, Clodine, Cypress, and Katy itself). And what happens after that? Will the suburbs and their fleets of F150s and Tahoes march to the shores of the Brazos? Time will tell.

But even in these upper-middle-class enclaves of traditional suburbanism, there is a desire for walkability. Even the most sprawl-inducing developers know better than to eschew the powerful draw of walkability, as much as they contribute to the metro area’s lack of it overall. You’d be hard-pressed to find a new suburban community that hasn’t been blessed with extensive systems of sidewalks and trails that stretch on for miles. Drive through Cinco Ranch on a warm evening and you’ll see a plethora of suburbanites jogging along the avenues. They may be the top contributors to the sprawl, but even they need to get outside every now and then. Jogging is a big deal in Houston.

It should be noted that suburban walkability isn’t true walkability. It’s still hard to access basic retail out in Greater Katy, much less be able to walk or bike to your job. Things like buying groceries or getting haircut still require a vehicle – and in the hot Texas sun, walking for any reason other than exercise on treeless trails (like shown above) is borderline insane. It’s obvious that the suburbs are not built for people who want to be able to walk places – but even they don’t completely abandon walkable environments. Further evidence of this can be found in one of the classic American icons of urban sprawl: the shopping mall.

If you look past the fact that the mall is a dying breed of development that relies immensely on car culture, its high density of shops packed in an exclusively pedestrian environment is inherently walkable. Malls offer a number of key qualities that make them attractive replicas (but unfortunately, not actual representatives) of the sorts of urban environments you’d find near Downtown:

• They are exclusively pedestrian. They provide wide concourses for walking that are far separated from vehicles.
• They feature dynamic and attractive storefronts and public art. Go to any decently constructed mall in Houston (like the Galleria or Memorial City) and you’ll notice that the stores feature “urban” facades that utilize exposed bricks, false windows and other architectural details that imitate a conventional outdoor storefront. Malls usually pay attention to installing public art displays (like the Memorial City clocktower and carousel) and creating plazas where people can meet and relax.
• They incorporate a wide variety of amenities into a small space. More successful malls have gone as far as to construct their own playgrounds, ice skating rinks and other leisure facilities.

When malls are carefully constructed to enhance the walkable environment, they thrive. There’s a reason why Memorial City and the Galleria are so immensely popular: they create walkable environments that their competitors sorely lack. Town & Country Mall was once Memorial City’s chief rival on the westside, but once MetroNational started pouring money into the latter’s revitalization, the former didn’t stand a chance. T&C simply lacked the attractive, lively pedestrian experience that Memorial City continues to offer. It was an outdated, quiet place that never really excited nearby residents. (Of course, being obscured by the monstrous Katy Freeway/Beltway 8 stack interchange didn’t help).

But its location is not to blame, because CityCentre replaced Town & Country a few years ago with incredible success. In my opinion, CityCentre is the prime example of Houston’s potential for walkability. It is a defining development that sets a new precedent for land use in the metropolitan area – one that deviates from the car culture. CityCentre does nearly everything right when it comes to mixed-use.

CityCentre’s main avenue and central plaza in the evening.

CityCentre presents a miniature urban environment in the suburbs. I recall a lingering skepticism when it first opened about four years ago – could an upscale urban mixed-use development really succeed in the middle of Houston’s leafy suburbs? – but that has since given way to immense success. There are a number of compelling reasons why the development has made such an impact on the sprawliest side of the city:

• The development features large, handsomely decorated sidewalks lined with vegetation, artwork and other aesthetically appealing details.
• Ground-level retail is abundant, and the storefronts come right up to the sidewalk, eschewing the traditionally Houstonian habit of separating the pedestrian from the shop (or, even worse, not constructing sidewalks at all).
• The design limits automobile traffic, encouraging visitors to park in garages on the edges of the property. (This in itself isn’t necessarily walkable, but it’s about the best that can be done in the context of Houston’s automobile reliance and lack of transit connections.) Cars that do make it onto the narrow streets travel slowly and yield to walkers.
• Streetside parking separates pedestrians from the road, creating a safer and more comfortable streetscape. In addition, street parking is metered, restricting the number of cars that enter the property looking for a good spot. This cuts down on congestion.
• The development features a central plaza (pictured above) that is surrounded on all sides by restaurants. Live music events are often held there. This creates a lively outdoor environment and nightlife that encourages locals to visit in droves.
• CityCentre also features a large Lifetime gym, a Studio Movie Grill and an upscale hotel. These businesses add immense entertainment value and make the area a weekly destination for locals.
• Finally – but most importantly – CityCentre is mixed-use at its finest. In addition to providing office space, the development is stacked with hundreds of apartments (and more on the way).

Of course, there’s a limit to how much a “car-independent” development can do in the nation’s most car-centric city. CityCentre still relies heavily on having abundant parking for visitors and residents and has developed an unfortunate conflict with the neighboring Town & Country shopping center over visitors using up their parking spaces. Mass transit connections are virtually nonexistent – which is, of course, an issue that requires government action. (I’ll always dream of a streetcar connection between CityCentre and Memorial City, but that’s best left to a later post.) CityCentre also benefits from being an “upscale” development in a wealthy area – it doesn’t really exemplify the densification that needs to take place in some of Houston’s middle- and lower-class areas (especially around Downtown). Walkability shouldn’t be limited to serving rich urbanites, although it will probably be some time until these new design philosophies trickle down to those with lower income levels.

We can expect future mixed-use developments around Houston to emulate CityCentre’s pedestrian-centered design philosophy. In fact, some proposals further down the freeway are already looking to do so. Along Park Row north of the Katy Freeway at Highway 6 developers are already constructing Central Park, a mixed-use development that may not end up being quite as walkable as CityCentre is but still relatively dense. Even more exciting is a proposed redevelopment of the nearby former ExxonMobil Chemical headquarters into a $1 billion mixed-use center that would feature the same sort of pedestrian amenities as CityCentre. Closer into the city there are high expectations for the Downtown USPS center, which is about to be closed and sold to developers. That site was the focus of an urban design competition by Hines in 2012, which produced some truly incredible visions for how the valuable bayoufront property could be utilized. There’s also two new developments along Westheimer – River Oaks District and the beautiful Azalea Court – that will bring some beneficial density to the area. Across Houston, mixed-use is becoming a mainstay of new development proposals. The city can expect great changes from significant densification in the years and decades to come. Of course, this is all driven by an increasing demand for walkable, urban lifestyles – a national trend that is especially prevalent in Houston, where last year’s Kinder Institute Houston Area Survey by Rice University found 50% of metropolitan residents desiring to live in mixed-use communities. As much as Houston loves its freeways and sprawl, it wants walkability – even if it doesn’t want to outright say so.

Houston, part 3: Land use in the Energy Corridor

In comparison to… well, basically any city in the entire world, Houston is a laughable example of good land use. As I’ve noted in previous posts, the city is the second-largest in the nation by land area and encourages sprawl with lenient regulation and a lack of formal zoning. The suburbs go on forever, and the Downtown area is still in a near-laughable state of affairs when put up against nearly any other city of comparable population. However, as I’ve also noted, there are exceptions to the unfortunate decentralized, low-density pancake that makes up most of the city. Houston has developed a number of cosmopolitan, densified districts spread across the metro area. These hubs serve as centers of business for the surrounding residential suburban sprawl, as well as areas for leisure.

With the sudden resurgence of the energy industry as a whole thanks to increased investment in natural gas and the glorious comeback of North American oil production, there has been a sudden and overwhelming focus on the Energy Corridor district, which lies along Interstate 10 between State Highway 6 (to the west) and Beltway 8 (to the east). I live in this area, and it’s pretty damn cool to be able to watch all of the new development first hand. The transformation has been incredibly swift – ten years ago, the area was just coming out of the stagnation it had been in since the 1980s. During the late 1970s, coinciding with the energy crisis and Houston’s golden age, numerous high-profile energy corporations – Shell, BP, Exxon and Citgo, to be specific – set up sprawling office campuses in the Energy Corridor. At the time, the district was on the edge of the city’s suburban sprawl, and there was plenty of room for further development and an abundance of cheap land. Companies purchased large spaces for their buildings, leaving plenty of room for even more office space in the future. With the corporate presence came a swath of white-collar residents, solidifying the West Memorial area as a wealthier (yet not nearly the wealthiest) district of Houston. However, after the price of oil crashed in the early 80s, the entire metro area was struck by a strong recession. The impact of this slump is most clearly seen today in the proliferation of low-income apartment complexes sprinkled across the area. This has helped feed Houston’s distinction of being deeply integrated along lines of both class and race.

Anyway, excluding continuing suburban development extending the city beyond the western border of Highway 6, there was little commercial development in the Energy Corridor. Some corporations constructed buildings along Enclave Parkway, directly east of thoroughfare Eldridge Parkway and south of the Buffalo Bayou, but there was still much undeveloped land in the district. This Google Earth image shows the area in 1995:

The Buffalo Bayou runs through the center of the image. The corporate campuses of ConocoPhillips and Shell can be seen at the very top, east of Eldridge Parkway. BP’s complex is located south of Interstate 10, to the west of Eldridge. Enclave is near the bottom, slightly left of center. (click on image to enlarge)

Besides the enormous corporate headquarters of three oil giants (BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell), the Energy Corridor resembled most any other area of western Houston. However, a great amount of infill and higher-grade office building construction has transformed the area, as shown in this 2012 image below:

Note the large amount of infill along Eldridge Parkway, and new construction along the renovated Interstate 10. (click on image to enlarge)

There are many defining characteristics of the area that make it stand out as an important example of good land use within the Houston area.

First of all, the management of the Buffalo Bayou through the creation and maintenance of Terry Hershey Park is probably one of the best exhibitions of proper environmental conservation in the entire metro area. As can be seen in both images, the park borders the bayou along its entire stretch from Barker Reservoir immediately west of Highway 6 to Beltway 8. The history of this stretch of the bayou is one of my favorite things to study concerning West Houston. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Army Corps of Engineers completely modified the natural system of meandering bayous and swamps that covered the existing Energy Corridor. Like in many other parts of the country at the time, the federal government imposed permanent flood control solutions to open the area to suburban development. Two enormous reservoirs, Barker (west of Highway 6 and south of I-10) and Addicks (north of I-10), were zoned out to keep floodwater at bay, and the Buffalo Bayou and its tributaries were all straightened into their current shapes. The bayous were already completely stripped of vegetation and slated to be paved with concrete, like all of their siblings in other parts of the city (and country – picture Los Angeles). However, a group of local conservationists led by resident Terry Hershey petitioned the city to instead preserve the natural beauty of the once heavily forested bayou. While none of the vegetation along it today is more than 50 years old, and the entire bayou is sharply deviated from its natural course, the contemporary Terry Hershey Park is an impressive example of a well-designed greenway within an urbanized area. The city has stayed true to the concept of preserving nature by encouraging a thick canopy of plant growth to obscure the bayou itself from view. A system of both paved and dirt trails is well maintained for hiking, walking and biking – all of which local residents eagerly take advantage of on a daily basis, often in the late afternoon. The city also funds playgrounds, exercise stations, barbeque pits, water fountains and other basic park features for public use. The park makes it possible for residents to easily travel from neighborhood to neighborhood, all around the area. Most residents who own private property along the park allow the public access to it.

The aesthetic attractiveness of the park and its extensive trail system have vastly improved property values in the area and quality of life in general – in the Energy Corridor, residents can access many different places without resorting to the roads, have an isolated area of natural beauty just down the street, and get plenty of exercise through jogging and biking. Thankfully, Houston’s hike and bike trail system is being extended in many other parts of the city thanks to an initiative by mayor Annise Parker, extended all the benefits seen in Terry Hershey Park.

Since the late 1980s the city has been promoting development in the “core” of the Energy Corridor with the beautification of a stretch of Eldridge Parkway from Memorial Drive south to Westheimer, dubbed “The Parkway”. Most of the development along the Parkway occurred during the late 1990s and early 2000s, contrasting it with the much older surrounding neighborhoods. Its youthfulness signifies a clear transition in urban planning and land use philosophy since the 1960s. This area is distinct in its increased density – instead of more suburban labyrinths, The Parkway is an eclectic mix of hotels, retail, restaurants, office buildings and dense upper-class apartment and townhouse complexes. In many of the neighborhoods nearby – including mine – walking to a nearby grocery store or restaurant can take upwards of 20 to 30 minutes. While the situation, as I noted in my last post, is not nearly as bad as the new suburban development towards the Grand Parkway, it is still not pedestrian friendly. In contrast, the Parkway mixes both residential and commercial space. At midday, the area is often filled with pedestrians visiting various restaurants – a sight that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else in the city outside of the 610 loop. The Parkway features broad oak trees along the length of the median and sidewalks, providing ample shade from the scorching Texas sun. Well-maintained sidewalks actually exist along Eldridge, further encouraging walking and biking – and the stretch of avenue is also directly connected to the Terry Hershey Park hike and bike system. The city has done a fantastic job at promoting a densified commercial center to serve as the core of the burgeoning Energy Corridor, and should attempt to apply the same land use concepts to the Downtown area.

Other examples of pedestrian friendly, densified commercial and residential development nearby include CityCentre at the junction of Interstate 10 and Beltway 8. The renewal of the once dilapidated area is truly remarkable – CityCentre occupies the lot of the former Town and Country Mall, which had been stagnating for years and suffered a fatal blow when nearby Memorial City Mall launched an enormous renovation project that stole away almost all of T&C’s major retail anchors. The mall was completely demolished in 2005. Now serving as a model for “edge city” development, CityCentre is a high-density mix of apartments, offices and retail. It puts strong emphasis on walking over driving, with narrow, limited-access streets and lushly landscaped corridors and green spaces.

Aerial view of CityCentre. (click on image to enlarge)

The Energy Corridor District is planning another mixed-use development similar to CityCentre along Interstate 10 between Highway 6 and Eldridge. Currently, the targeted land is vacant, yet lies adjacent to a METRO Park and Ride station, giving it ideal access to public transportation. Preparation for the development of this area is already underway with the extension of Terry Hershey Park’s hike and bike trails north, under Interstate 10, and along the southern border of the Addicks Reservoir. Plans also call for the extension of Dairy Ashford Road westward through the property. The Energy Corridor District’s vision for the area, shown below, is fully laid out in their Livable Centers Study.

While there is still much car-friendly suburban development on Houston’s west side, it is quickly becoming a model for good, mixed-use development. The energy resurgence is bringing with it a flood of investment and even more densification though the construction of new retail centers and office towers. It’s an exciting time to live in the Energy Corridor – it seems like something new is popping up every couple of weeks. I’m definitely enjoying watching the area revitalize from its quiet suburban existence to something much more exciting. Hopefully, the prosperity will continue and more mixed-use concepts will enter into reality. The future is bright for West Houston; it’s undoubtedly one of the most interesting areas in the entire metro right now. With the state of the national economy, it’s difficult to find anywhere flourishing as quickly as the Energy Corridor.

Houston, part 2: Sprawl

I’ve always found it interesting that Arcade Fire’s 2007 album The Suburbs was written with Houston’s sprawling suburbia in mind. The band’s frontman, Win Butler, was raised in the Woodlands and wrote much of the concept album based on his experiences in the outskirts of the city:

We moved to the suburbs of Houston when we were young. Being a very young child, it’s like going to Mars or something. The blast of hot air when you get off the plane at Houston. Just trying to talk about some of the feeling [on the album].

The Suburbs is one of my all-time favorite albums not only because it sounds great, but because the lyrical content and musical atmosphere really do match the environment of suburban Houston. It sounds like where I live, and no other band has created something that hits so close to my own home. Artists can write about coastal California or New York City, but The Suburbs is the only musical work that talks about the most ordinary and, to some, boring of places – the suburbs.

Houston is the epitome of suburban America. An abundance of cheap, flat land and a lack of development regulations (zoning) have made Houston ripe for suburban development over the past 40 years. The city extends nearly 600 square miles, larger than any other city in the United States (save for Oklahoma City). Of course, this just encompasses the City of Houston – not the multitude of suburban developments that lie outside the limits yet within the metropolitan area. Greater Houston, as it is known, encompasses 1,300 square miles of urbanized area. The entire metro statistical area (not just urbanized), as measured by the Census Bureau, spreads 10,062 square miles over ten counties. Houston’s population growth rate between the 2000 and 2010 Census’ was 25.2%. This ranks among the highest in the nation, and with solid economic growth (mostly thanks to continued investment in energy), low taxes and a development-friendly attitude, it will continue. In addition, the city maintains nearly 800 miles of freeways, which radiate out of Downtown in all directions. These major thoroughfares – Interstates 10 and 45, U.S. Highways 59 and 290, and State Highways 6, 8 (the outer beltway), 99 (the outer-outer beltway, under construction) and 288 – have encouraged an unmitigated explosion of ultra-low density suburban sprawl in a rough circle around the city, with a radius nearing 30 miles from Downtown.

As discussed in my last post, this has left the inner city relatively undeveloped. To compensate for the lack of a dense urban core, Houston has developed a multitude of urban “pockets,” districts like Uptown and the Energy Corridor. These commercial centers, distributed pretty evenly throughout the city, encourage continuing suburbanization. In effect, Greater Houston is simply a series of successive “edge cities” – densified commercial pockets on the edge of a city’s developed area – that continue to push people further and further away from the center. This map highlights the major commercial districts and edge cities within Greater Houston:

Note how most of the “edge cities” are to the west of Houston – which is also where a majority of the suburban sprawl has been constructed.

I put together this animation of the last 25 years of Landsat imagery of Greater Houston to show the continuously moving boundary of the urban area:

Source

Clearly, developers are not afraid to consume increasing amounts of land – which, in Texas, is an overly abundant resource.  With the controversial construction of an unprecedented third arterial loop around the city, Texas Highway 99 – the “Grand Parkway” – suburbia will continue to crawl across the flat western prairie.

I enjoy the suburban life. It’s comfortable and roomy. While I may not life in the biggest house, there is definitely plenty of space for everybody, and the atmosphere is nice. There are few scenes I enjoy more than my neighborhood in the late afternoon, with its abundance of greenery – a canopy of oak trees, blooming flowers, lush lawns and a dazzling mix of orange, white and blue in the sky. However, I’m fortunate enough to live in a part of town that has existed since the late 1960s – that’s the only reason why there is so much dynamic scenery. The newer suburbs lack anything close to the aesthetic diversity of those east of Highway 6. Each house in my neighborhood is different, with varying architectural styles and characteristics. No two houses are identical. Yet newer developments outside of Houston are the definition of cookie-cutter; every house is constructed with the same materials, and they all follow mass-produced blueprints. They are each the product of a single developer. There are no trees in the new suburbs.

I may have gone off on a tangent, but there is an essential point that needs to be emphasized – if we continue to encourage suburban sprawl, Houston will lose its character. Nowadays, developers seem to lack interest in building anything interesting. There has become an established norm to the sprawl. New neighborhoods feature many planning ideas that contrast sharply with those from previous decades:

• a lack of intersections – new subdivisions feature more cul-de-sacs and dead ends
• a lack of vegetation
• increased sparsity and reduced density – new developments aren’t built right next to each other; they stretch further into undeveloped areas instead of connecting with already developed areas
• cookie-cutter methods – houses are more similar than they are different

Compare these two images. The first image is of a part of the Memorial district, just west of Beltway 8, which was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s. The second is of an area just east of the Grand Parkway, built in the mid 2000s.

While it’s difficult to compare development from two different eras and areas, the trend is clear. New subdivisions lack almost any foliage. They champion out-of-the-way road layouts that encourage an already problematic car culture. And they bypass the concept of landfill altogether – Houston has plenty of pockets of land closer to the city that would be ideal for new residential development, yet construction continues to radiate out of the city at a disturbing pace.

The environmental consequences of such trends are disappointing. Houston has been feeling the pressure on its road infrastructure for quite some time. Just recently, the city finished a multi-billion dollar reconstruction of Interstate 10 from Katy to Interstate 610, widening it to over 20 lanes (including frontage roads) at some points. The massive project involved completely demolishing and rebuilding the stack interchange with Beltway 8, which was barely 20 years old. Plans are being developed to bring similar renovation to other roadways nearing capacity, such as U.S. Highway 290 northwest of the city. Houston already has a reputation for poor air quality, securing its place as one of the nation’s most polluted metros. The spreading sprawl will only contribute to this problem, and require more government investment in roads – already a black hole for taxpayer money. In addition, the quality of life of many Houstonians is severely diminished by suburbanization. New suburbs lack the aesthetic qualities of their older counterparts. The lack of dynamism further removes the already weak relationship with nature that is an essential part of our existence. New developments abandon the beauty of nature. They don’t encourage the planting of trees and give homebuyers little land to work with, which is ironic in a region where there is plenty of it to use. They turn what could be scenic waterways or parkland into linear ditches and barren plains. The incentive to go outside at all is nonexistent. A lack of road intersections or easy routes to commercial development or parks makes walking a ridiculous and pointless exercise. If it takes over half an hour to get anywhere at all, why walk? Car culture is already an enormous burden on the average American’s quality of life. It encourages the obesity epidemic and uses absurd amounts of energy. Houston’s outer subdivisions are the primary culprits for this continuing trend.

A friend of mine lives in a neighborhood near Katy. Like most of the surrounding area, it’s a master-planned community full of cookie-cutter houses and almost completely without trees. A sign along the entrance road ironically emphasizes how it’s a “green” community The sort of urban planning that developers champion nowadays – where neighborhoods are labyrinths of concrete roads, fences, and rows of identical houses – is the exact opposite of green. It destroys our relationship with nature – and nature itself. Houston is heading towards a future where, if unchecked, a multitude of suburban developments will cripple quality of life and hamper inner-city development and densification. If Houston wants to establish itself as a healthy and sustainable metropolis, it must counter the explosion of the suburbs and reinforce urban infill, back into the city itself.

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.