By David Crossley

Okay, friends and classmates, who agrees with that statement under the picture of Thomas Jefferson?
Not everybody agrees with this assertion? Isn’t that odd? Is there some other American value more basic than that the people are the ultimate power, the setters of policy, the creators of vision? Then why doesn’t everybody agree with it?

We’re all over the map in terms of values and principles and priorities in America, and the only way we ever get anything done is either by imposing it with some sort of force, or talking about it. A kind of force is what’s produced the Houston of today and now that force threatens our future. We need a lot more talking, and fast.

There are so many big construction projects planned around the city and there is tremendous pressure to do more of them and do them all faster, and right now. More and more people are thinking – and saying – maybe we should calm down a minute and think about this, and maybe talk about what we’re doing, and why.

There are projects creeping to their beginning that almost nobody wants to happen. There was a street widening last year that had no constituency except that there was federal money to do it. So we did it, and now everybody’s angry, and there’s a great sense of loss (cost us a bunch of good trees, among other things), and you just wish you could have had a little rational discussion before rushing into that project. And there is the proposed re-striping of West Alabama that apparently will not serve its purpose and will create twice as many accidents, yet everybody says it’s a “done deal.”

What frustrates the professional planners in the city when they have public events to talk about things is that only seven people ever show up, and all of them just have some sort of general dread of the proposal. It’s hard to have a fruitful discussion because the disparity of knowledge between the pros and the neighbors is usually huge (not to mention that the pros, who work for elected officials, aren’t allowed to share their knowledge.

It’s annoying to think that you have to be knowledgeable about urban planning and mobility policy in order to keep a freeway off your roof, but, you know, if the people are the safe depository of ultimate power, we are behooved to know what we’re talking about.

Generally speaking, though, we don’t, so we show up at Super Neighborhood meetings asking for some street to be widened and some speed bumps installed, not realizing we’re creating opposite effects, and that both of them are detrimental to our neighborhoods. We have City Council members announcing publicly that they have a solution to a problem that they don’t realize will make the problem worse. We have somebody at a town meeting asking the Mayor what he’s going to do about a neighborhood street that was widened and now all the cars are running through too fast and he says, “Oh, we’ve put some police officers on that and they’ll slow the traffic down.” And what was the purpose of the widening? To speed up the traffic.

So we need to talk. We are going to have plenty of opportunities to do that over the next year as the new process goes forward to establish a vision for the City of Houston that is the result of hearing the desires and ideas of thousands of people. But we have to go into that process with knowledge, we have to be willing to listen to a lot of ideas and explanations from a lot of professionals, and we have to be prepared to learn, to innovate – and to change.

To build a great city, one where people all over the world would be happy to live, requires a far bigger establishment of community and dialogue than many people want to grapple with. Still, the creation of tomorrow’s city is happening in every exchange, every round of discussion. The quality of our lives is dependent on the quality of our dialogue.

David Crossley is President of the Gulf Coast Institute, which leads the Livable Houston Initiative. For more information, go to www.livablehouston.org