By David Crossley

In many metropolitan areas, including Houston, there is a war going on between urbs and sub-urbs. Unfortunately, it is a battle that is pointless, even absurd.

At one end of the scale, the energy that is trying to transform places like Midtown is aimed at creating a highly diverse and dense urban area that takes its form from rail transit.

One reason to create such places is that our young people want that. Recently, when I asked about 40 Rice students how many of them intended to stay in Houston when they graduated, only four raised their hands.

A young woman laid off when Enron failed tells me her friends who worked there are leaving Houston, not because there are no jobs, but because Houston just isn’t a city.

So if we want to attract and keep the brightest young people here, we have to give them a better place to live, work, and play.

Cities are complex places formed for the purpose of intense exchange, and most innovation comes from such places. But a city also evolves at its edges into other kinds of places. Somewhere in the transformation, the form becomes sub-urban, with a different scale and density. Even so, it can have pods of diverse urbanity, from the fast-growing ones likes Westchase pod – soon to have more jobs than any other center, including the Central Business District - to non-places like the Municipal Utility Districts, which have no center and are dependent on the commerce of other places.

In the activity centers like Westchase , Uptown, Greenspoint, and so on, there is increasing momentum to retrofit with the characteristics of true urban areas. These include features like walkability and transit, as well as a variety of living and working opportunities, so people who want to live in a high-rise or a condo can do so within walking distance of employment.

Other people would prefer to live in a small town. In fact, 49 percent of Americans would prefer that, and 53 percent would like to live near a “town center.”

The key feature of a small town is the center, where services and other people are available. Sometimes the town has just a store, sometimes it’s more complicated, like the Rice Village. But the key feature is that you can go there and wander around. Get your gallon of milk, drop off your shirts, talk to a cop, and maybe have lunch with a friend you’ve run into.

There’s nothing revolutionary about this; it’s the theme of human settlement throughout history. What’s new is the experiment in separation that’s been tried around our cities in the last 50 years. In this new form, we put seas of houses here and there, with a street system that usually only has one entrance and exit, and people are expected to crowd onto collector roads in cars in order to get to food and drink and clothing and work and fun. Because land is cheaper further from urban centers, often this drive can be five miles or more.

Many people like these places because they are removed from the city and briefly offer a kind of privacy as well as a lot of open space. Pretty soon, though, there is another subdivision, and then more roads, a lot of traffic congestion, and a kind of stress that the people had tried to escape.

For those who live in distant suburbs, the only hope as we double our population is that other people will live somewhere else. The only way that will happen is if more urbanity is created throughout the region. The urban model can absorb far more people than the sub-urban model.

But in Houston, there is enormous sub-urban criticism of the attention being given to the inner city. This criticism means the pressure on the sub-urban areas will grow because sub-urban voters demand it, for reasons that are a mystery to me.

They also demand that transit systems come to them first. Transit systems attract density, and transit stations produce huge growth pressure from people who want to live near them.

On the other hand, the people who live in dense parts of the city obviously prefer to live in the dense parts. This is a peculiarity that should be enthusiastically encouraged by people in the sub-urbs.
My argument to sub-urbanites is that they should support intense inner-city development and a good inner-city transit system because it will take pressure off their areas in terms of new development, local traffic, and open space preservation, not to mention decreasing some of the growth in freeway traffic.