The Siege of Houston

By David Crossley

US Rep. John Culberson must be pretty smart to get to be a Member of Congress, so you have to wonder about this recent statement: "I am seriously considering the possibility of an election that would abolish the city of Houston's government and merge those services into Harris County."

A Houston City Council member, a conservative Republican, told me about a year ago that he thought Harris County’s strategy was to bankrupt the City and take it over. Culberson, apparently, is getting a little antsy about having to wait for that to happen.

Seventy-three percent of all the people who live in our “region” of eight counties live in the central one, Harris. Fifty-six percent of the people who live in Harris County live in the City of Houston. So Harris County is fabulously important in the region, and the City of Houston is fabulously important to Harris County.

But the City of Houston is also getting to be an important obstacle to the region’s powerful suburban development leaders in coalition with the region’s roadbuilders, in coalition with the region’s engineers and so on. The pot of “transportation” money they control is huge, $43 billion over the next 20 years, and they hope to increase that a lot.

In order for their enormous network to succeed, they have to be able to widen and add high-capacity lanes inside the City of Houston (and, of course, Harris County outside the City, although this is not an obstacle to them.) People in the City of Houston, particularly in the relatively dense, increasingly urban areas, tend to be opposed to this strategy.

The communities that have been severed and partly destroyed by inner-city freeways are already among the City’s historical tragedies. More of that division and destruction is beginning to look excessive to people who actually live in the hundreds of urban neighborhoods that are hoping to either preserve or revitalize their areas.

The recent proposal for a toll road that goes through West University, Afton Oaks, and Memorial Park was certainly seen as excessive by those and other neighborhoods, not to mention the caretakers and protectors of Memorial Park. So far, the Harris County Toll Road Authority (HCTRA) has done as it pleases as it’s built the Hardy Toll Road and the Sam Houston Tollway. It wasn’t until HCTRA began to construct the Westpark Toll Road – a spectacularly ugly, elevated monster – that people in the City began to wonder what’s up with that.
Hardly any neighborhoods knew what was coming, and that’s because HCTRA isn’t required to seek public comment for its great ideas. They incur huge debt that’s expected to be paid off through toll collections, but that in the end are obligations of the taxpayers of Harris County. And, unlike METRO, they don’t have to ask our permission to incur that obligation. So far, in fact, the Sam Houston Tollway is subsidizing the Hardy Toll Road, which is said to have lower than expected ridership. That is, it doesn’t quite work.

Toll roads are a great business for power seekers, as anyone knows who’s read Robert Caro’s book “The Power Broker,” which is about New York’s obsessed road builder Robert Moses. Moses created authorities left and right, with legislatively granted rules of operation that he had written. His authorities took in enormous quantities of money, and he kept them always in debt so he’d always have hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal. He was the sole determinant of how that money was spent. He did as he pleased, and produced a degree of traffic congestion in New York City and its entrances greater than anyone could ever have imagined.

Moses never actually said “the public be damned,” but it was pretty clear in his lifetime of actions that he wanted no advice from anyone, including Mayors and even Governors.

It’s easy, then, to imagine how attractive it is to be in control of a toll road authority in the Houston region and to want to enlarge the scope and number of its operations for several decades. Indeed, HCTRA recently received the power to build toll roads outside of Harris County, and wants to make the first one be a huge bridge across Galveston Bay (in Galveston County) to link Texas City with the Bolivar Peninsula.

HCTRA’s map of its future empire is an amazing picture of ambition. Nearly all the freeways and major arterials are proposed to have toll roads, and now the Grand Parkway, which is planned to be about as long as the trip from here to Dallas, is probably going to be a HCTRA toll project.

Aside from providing access to a continuously growing mountain of money, the other advantage of toll roads is that they don’t use federal funds, therefore require no federal oversight and no public oversight. These things are easy to build and to build quickly.

To move the region’s strategy in that direction is to decide to forgo billions in federal funds, just because they have too many strings attached. So the federal taxes we all pay for transportation projects wind up being used in Dallas, or Atlanta, or any number of other competitor metropolitan regions.

This is all part of a much larger dynamic that is best understood by thinking a little about the Congressional redistricting proposed by Tom Delay, John Culberson’s mentor. The major impact of the redistricting will be to move power in the state’s urban areas to their suburbs. Imagine our region as a pie, sliced in several pieces. The people who live in the small center sections are the urban dwellers, and the ones who are more spread out (and just crazy for roads and cars) would be more numerous than the urbanites and thus control all federal spending in the region.

Urban dwellers in Texas would be pretty much out of luck in Congress. Imagine the effect on urban transit dreams, for one thing.

In the end, it’s that gnarly democracy stuff that gets in the way of these grand schemes. If the people of the City of Houston actually allow John Culberson to strip them of their right to self-determination, that democracy nuisance will be out of the way of a lot of high-energy, eager people, almost entirely white men.

Then we’ll see all the new roads in the City that none of us want, while we yearn for decent public transit that Rep. Culberson and other suburban development interests won’t let us have.