By David Crossley
Recently James Howard Kunstler, whose books include “The Geography of Nowhere” and “Home From Nowhere,” wrote, “the battle for America's hearts and minds on the sprawl issue is over.” He may be right about America, but there’s still a long way to go here in Houston. Even so, there have been massive changes in attitude and vision in the last couple of years.
Citizens here are generally far ahead of both business and political leaders. Surveys in recent years have said we need to change the way we do things, to clean up our air and protect our natural ecology, that we need transit more than we need roads, that we need more parks and green space, and that governments have to learn how to work together in the region. Dr. Stephen Klineberg’s surveys, in particular, show big changes in attitude, with significant majorities favoring new ways of doing things.
The document “Connecting the Visions,” which I described here recently, shows that people in the Houston region have been calling for decades for the kind of attention to smart growth principles that are now guiding change in every other city in the country. The business community, through the Greater Houston Partnership, the Urban Land Institute, and other groups, appears to be coming to the conclusion that the principles of Livability should be included in planning for the region.
The “can’t do” attitude that has pervaded civic discussion in the last couple of decades is nurtured by mythology about Houston as a place where people are fundamentally different. Most of this pessimism is based on the difficulty of progress in the private realm. But as you engage in conversation with people working for change, you quickly discover that almost all their time is focused on public policy, and that a lot of the monumental drift in the wrong direction is within the public realm
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The “public realm” is an interesting concept, because it turns out to be the real focus of a lot of the Livability/Smart Growth struggle. Everything from street design to trees to sidewalks to building placement to transit to affordable housing is largely about the public realm.
And it is not an issue of zoning, but rather is about design and performance standards, about such matters as build-to lines and sidewalk and shade requirements, about how public housing is mixed into – or isolated from – the rest of the community, about what we expect from Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones, about what we plant in our parks, and so on. An intelligent comprehensive plan for the public realm would transform the city into a much more livable and healthy place. If there was a set of principles that guided all use of public assets, the places we live, work, learn, and play in would be far different than they are today.
It is in the public realm that the most important lack of awareness about livability remains. Even there, lower-level staff in public agencies often are attentive to the national debate and know about the fast-emerging best practices that are guiding the public arena in other places. But in the Houston area, and particularly in the City of Houston and Harris County, most elected officials appear not to know what’s happening and continue to espouse policies that are essentially dead in the water among the citizenry, professionals, and even some business leaders. I don’t know of a single elected official in either of those jurisdictions who could be said to be a leader in smart growth or livability, while political platforms based on those concepts are winning elections in other regions.
Why is that, and what can we do about it? Quite a few people are thinking about that now, and one place where there is real power for change is within neighborhoods, especially the Super Neighborhoods. Also, the people who have been involved in the Livable Houston Initiative for the last couple of years have worked hard to develop policy initiatives that could be used to guide the election debate. Finally, there is talk among some younger politicians about some sort of “New Politics,” related to the enormous change in demographics in Houston and Harris County. Big changes are coming, and the immediate question is, will we see them this November, or not until two years after that?