January 27, 2003

We must create
Houston’s urban core

By David Crossley

Almost every difficult future issue on the agenda of local elected officials would be impacted positively by policies that would have the result of encouraging the creation of a highly urban, dense, and active urban core along the new rail line in the Main Street corridor.

This “Super Core,” as the Center for Houston’s Future’s CEO James Calaway refers to it, is a spectacular opportunity to create a significant urban place that could easily rival Boston’s and maybe someday Chicago’s. Anyone who lives near, say, the McGowen street rail stop and works downtown or in the Medical Center is going to find that it’s possible and enjoyable to live a substantial part of one’s life in that corridor without a car. He or she will have quick and easy access to shops and services all along the line, to work, to schools and colleges, to museums, to theaters, to sports events, to medical care, to parks and the zoo, and to a whole new world of exploration and fun.

This area and its tiers of nearby markets is about two-thirds the size of Manhattan, New York City’s urban core. The City of Houston is more than 20 times larger than Manhattan, yet it contains the same number of people as Manhattan– 1.9 million. Tiny Manhattan also fuels the most successful metropolitan economy in the nation.

Yet Manhattan co-exists synergistically with its surrounding, largely suburban, boroughs, in an overall city and region that allow a huge range of lifestyle choices. We are told that metropolitan Houston will have 8 million people by about 2035. New York City has 8 million people right now, yet they live on only 470 square miles of land, while the 4.6 million people in the Houston region today occupy several thousand square miles – and the people of New York have access to more public open space and green space per capita than any other big American city, far more than in Houston.

Following historical trends without innovation suggests Houston’s 8 million people in 2035 will occupy an area larger than several states. Some developers and business leaders ask, “So what? We’ve got land all the way to San Antonio, Dallas, and New Orleans.” There is already a plan to go beyond the largely unbuilt 170-mile Grand Parkway loop with another ring road called the Prairie Parkway. How long would that road be? 1,000 miles?

There is pretty good evidence and a growing national understanding that following historic trends – spreading ourselves too thin - may be fiscally irresponsible if you consider that it’s already difficult and expensive to provide this kind of growth with all the necessary human services that markets don’t support. Current policies are based on the overall concepts of abandoning the old for the new, of encouraging growing population, and of moving the tax base always away from the center, that is, away from the City of Houston.

Why public officials in the City think this is a great idea is bewildering, but it’s also bewildering why suburban residents would want this, if, indeed, they do. A family that moves to the suburbs to achieve a certain lifestyle soon finds that certain valued assets of that lifestyle change radically as growth around and beyond them continues.

First, of course, is the reappearance of traffic congestion in the suburban area, and then the increasing congestion on arteries into the higher-density areas of the region. Then there is the heart-breaking loss of the bucolic nature of the chosen subdivision, the conversion of fields, woods, and wetlands – not to mention farms - into another subdivision or a zillion-square-foot parking lot and mall surrounded by endless glowing strip centers.

There’s no question in my mind that if I happened to live somewhere out in Golden Paradise River Forest I’d be thinking how wonderful it would be if all those millions of people who are coming lived somewhere else, not join me out here in my secret rural environment. Rail and trains and big buildings and a million people for the inner city? You bet, I’d say. Sounds good to me.

As it happens, somewhere around 30 percent of Americans express a desire for a lifestyle that simply isn’t available in many of our newer cities, like Houston. That lifestyle is urban, with its key characteristics being far more convenient access to shops and service, the ability to walk to stores or schools, and more choices for moving about, including the possibility of rarely being required to use a car or even not be involved in the driving life at all.

That 30 percent is expected to grow as demographics change profoundly in the next decades. One study shows it growing to 55 percent. As it happens, another economic dynamic also shows an important group of people make up about 30 percent of the population. This is Professor Richard Florida’s “creative class.” These are the people Florida says create the metropolitan economy, which is mostly based on innovation.

Since metropolitan economies now make up about 85 percent of the nation’s gross product and jobs – a number that continues to grow decade by decade – this group of people hold the key to not only America’s future, but the futures of each of its metropolitan regions. As it happens, Florida’s research shows that those people generally are interested in – guess what? – the urban lifestyle, as opposed to the suburban one.

But in Houston there is only a miniscule but nascent urban option. The Central Business District is the major one, with a little intelligent development occurring around it. Other urban places may begin to appear in ten years or so in places like Uptown/Galleria and Westchase, and if we can find a way to institute useful public transit there are many smaller areas that could quickly gain urbanity.

Urbanity is pretty simple in concept, but proving to be very difficult for most Houston policy makers and other officials to understand, let alone implement. Its primary principle is that innovation is generally the result of exchange (of ideas, service, money, love, and so on) and that exchange requires access and that access requires decreasing travel distances.

While it is true that decreasing travel time is another important concept, decreasing distance calls for far less infrastructure and technology. That is, if you can walk to your access need (or desire) you don’t need any support and not much thinking, either. Hankering for a cup of coffee and some human theatre? In the city, you just get up out of your chair, go outside and walk around the corner, and there you are.

There are many advantages to that kind of world, but one important one is that people who live in these environments tend to be able to get enough exercise to stay fit without having to consciously devote some portion of their day to going for a walk.

Because the urban environment is based on people as they are (pedestrians), rather than as drivers, there tend to be a lot more people in smaller areas, which makes the delivery of both commercial services and goods much easier and makes the delivery of public services easier as well.

The word that urbanists use to describe this environment is “place.” Obviously, because there are a lot of people, all of whom have different needs and desires, there need to be a lot of places. And because people are constantly in need or desire of something different, they need to be able to get quickly and easily to other places. This is the purpose of public transit. (Urban transit doesn’t have to be public; it just generally is, with a few exceptions.)

So there’s the basic concept: easy access to exchange and the means to move easily from one place of exchange to another. The details of creating these places and linking them with transit are complex, although they are obviously clear to those who study and understand them and less so to people who don’t think about it very much.

The most obvious attribute is the existence of a safe and comfortable environment in which to walk, which is to say a good sidewalk. If you see what’s happening to the new sidewalks in Midtown, the heart of the much-vaunted Main Street pedestrian-oriented Master Plan, you’ll see that no one involved in the creation of it understands how to do it. While Harlem’s fabulous 34-foot wide sidewalks may be a little too rich for this town, the 4-5 foot sidewalks now being installed (in a 12-foot or so right of way) won’t produce urbanity any more than Metro’s insistence on a variety of anti-pedestrian policies on Main Street and the parallel bus transit streets.

The place where urbanity should first blossom is Downtown and Midtown, then all along the Main Street corridor and then the accompanying areas east and west of the corridor. Seeing places like Montrose and the Museum District as markets for urban amenities in Midtown allows thinking about delivering commercial services there. And considering the already dense Medical Center, which has an improving urban face on Fannin but a distressing suburban office park approach to its back areas, there is enormous opportunity there, as well. Why shouldn’t people who work in the Medical Center be able to live there? What prevents it from becoming one of our most significant 24-hour, seven-day urban places?

And then there’s the rest of the corridor to the south, which is all opportunity for years to come, as is the area east and west of Downtown if decent transit could be installed there. The trick is to realize that now, and at least try to prevent development that will make it more difficult to realize the goal in the future. Ending the encroachment on and degradation of the pedestrian environment is the most important challenge.

Could the Super Core have a million people in it someday? If it did, it would still be less dense than Manhattan, the people who live in it would be people who do so because they want that choice, and those people would not be twenty miles away, destroying the suburban and rural environments, let along the natural environment. Sales and property taxes would be huge, delivery of public services would be more efficient, and the honey to attract the creative bees who will build the economy through innovation will be in place for a long time to come.

The primary keys to creating this place? Plan to do it, think ahead, and stop doing things wrong.

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