By David Crossley

Somehow, we need to get past the contractor/elected official dynamic that continues to produce development in which most of us are forced to get into a four-wheel drive mountain vehicle every time we need some milk, or a sandwich, or some light bulbs.

The chaos and even corruption of high-speed real estate speculation and development and its grip on our political system is wearing us down, and the increasingly ugly sameness – the “products” that “work” in the development market – is driving us nuts and diminishing the quality of our lives. There’s something fundamental going on that we don’t like.

Last month, I described a kind of development pattern that would produce real neighborhoods, with “town centers” and a range of housing types to satisfy the diverse desires of Houston’s people. (All these Progressive articles are available at www.livablehouston.com) These places would bring the amenities of daily life much closer – within walking distance – to homes and jobs, and would produce a new sense of community and interest in many places around the city.

A lot is now known and understood about this world-style of development, but there are really no local models where the “complete package” (as the urbanist Andres Duany calls it) has been established and played out. The Post Properties development in Midtown is a great start, but it will only work over time if the next two corners develop in similar fashion. It’s easy to stand in front of the Italian restaurant at Webster and Bagby and imagine what that place could become.

Unfortunately, it can only play out if there’s either fabulous luck or good planning, with an intentional vision guiding development of the neighborhood. Being right on the edge of downtown, that neighborhood should be and will be much more urban and dense than the Upper Kirby vision loosely described in the last issue of the Progressive. Buildings could commonly go to five floors in Midtown, which might be more than people in the Upper Kirby District have the nerve for. Indeed, a lot of what has already happened in Midtown is undersized, inadequately dense, and there will be regret about that soon.

The picture of how urbanism should work, along a continuum, or transect, that is essentially repeated over and over in varying scales and styles in thousands of places throughout the city and region, is becoming very clear. There are many existing, older examples in America, and there are several hundred new or recently developed models around the country. Planners at the City of Houston and Metro have recently been studying the genre and its appeal is taking hold very quickly, with a real interest in how to spur this kind of development around the coming transit stations of the new light rail line.

There is a hopeful effort now underway by the Houston District Council of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) to find ways to enable the realization of the Main Street Master Plan. Developed by the Main Street Coalition, this ambitious vision describes a “signature boulevard” that is truly urban, pedestrian-oriented, and would provide a fabulous model for redevelopment in other places in the city. But lack of standards makes it very difficult to achieve the plan, and some of the City’s existing ordinances – particularly about parking and setbacks – make it almost impossible to achieve. The ULI team is exploring these issues and soon will bring forward a package of tools that the City and developers could use to make Main Street happen.

Even so, in the end we desperately need some developers to work out the complicated financing that mixed-use projects require, and we need to keep our fingers crossed that they will get the complete package right and not cripple the future by leaving out an important piece. There are many mistakes that are easy to make in trying to come up with some sort of hybrid that feels less risky than real urbanism. One of the biggest mistakes would be to focus urban developments on a small range of upper-level incomes, thus perpetuating the growing economic segregation of people. And it is not just developers responsible for this, but also the City of Houston, which tends to build low-income housing separate from market housing.

In an ideal world, some Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone will fashion a truly urban comprehensive plan, and we will begin to see what the next Houston might look like, how it might work. And the 30-50 percent or so of the market now not being served at all will become happy urban denizens, meeting at the corners and watching the innovation of the city blossom into a rich and sustainable quality of life.