Houston's Urban System

By David Crossley

The core characteristic of urbanity is the continuous flow of people walking on sidewalks and in other public places. In the urban environment, one assumes that the general amenities of everyday life are available a short walk away in one’s own workplace or neighborhood and in a great many other neighborhoods that are accessible on foot or by public transit.

Although many people who live and work in urban places maintain a car for special trips, many others live happily without cars, or rent them as needed.

In urban places, most buildings touch each other, they share walls. One and even two-story buildings are rare in urban places, and the most numerous buildings are between three and five stories.

As a rule, people who live in such places prefer them to car-based places. Are there too many people on the streets? Not for the urban dweller, who is drawn to the human spectacle of the city. People who don’t like urbanity often make the Yogi Berra-like comment that “nobody lives in cities anymore because there are too many people in them.”

Real urbanity is hard to find in Houston. Downtown is the most obvious place to look, but during the last half century downtown was developed as a set of architectural sculptures that made the pedestrianscape increasingly monotonous and without amenities or services.

The Central Business District that was built then is meant to be seen from afar. The Phillip Johnson Bank of America near Jones Hall is a fabulous structure seen from a little distance, but walking along its unchanging stone face on the sidewalk can make the journey seem interminable.

Urbanites like constant change and diversity, so the way has to be lined with shop windows and doorways and an endless variety of new things to look at as you stroll.

In the 1950s, downtown Houston was an active place, with block after block of retail stores and restaurants and even several huge and fabulous movie theaters.

What passes for street life in downtown Houston has moved underground to the tunnel system, where shops and restaurants abound. Visitors who don’t know about the tunnels often find downtown to be essentially deserted.

That is changing. In the late 1990s, downtown began to come to life again. Over the last couple of years, that growth was set back briefly while enormous amounts of street and sidewalk construction kept people away. That will soon come to an end for the most part, and by January 2004 downtown will be transformed into a far more convenient place for pedestrians and have a sleek new rail system running through it. Certainly on Main Street we will see a rich urban place evolve, or re-evolve as the case may be.

The coming of the rail line will reveal that there are other places that have significant urbanity or contain the seeds of urbanity. Today, Midtown, the area just below the Pearce Elevated and extending down past Wheeler/Richmond to just beyond Highway 59, is working hard to enhance the urban nature of the district. Midtown contains three rail stops, and plans are evolving to encourage serious urban development around them.

Some people expect Midtown to become a dense, primarily residential place with as many as 100,000 people living there in the near term. Most of these residents would have jobs either downtown, in the Medical Center, or in a broad variety of other cultural and commercial places along the rail line.

Real urbanity will develop along the rail line, and soon. The only obstacles to that development are an almost total lack of urban development policies and an equally serious lack of local developers and public officials who know how to produce that environment. Indeed, recent actions like the design and implementation of the new sidewalks for Main Street may set that back for quite some time.

But it will happen. Midtown will become the residential, multi-neighborhood, village-like extension of Downtown. The question is, does it become an urban extension, based on pedestrian street life and transit, or does it become a more suburban bedroom community such as you can see up and down the east and west edges of the Midtown district today. Those relatively dense new developments are marketed as places in which the Suburban SUV owner can enjoy a quick car trip home from the Medical Center and enter an automatic gate or garage to be inside his or her secure compound in minutes. That kind of suburban value has so far driven development in Midtown. Whether a sense of daring and adventure can ever emerge there is still entirely open to question.

The model of a single core - Downtown -doesn’t work in the modern city, although metropolitan debate usually is presented as a battle between the suburbs and the single downtown. In most young cities, the core is dispersed, and Houston may well be more poised for creating an intelligent, efficient dispersed but connected urban system than any other city in America.

Houston has several cores. After downtown, the largest is the Uptown/Galleria district. Others are Greenway Plaza, the Medical Center, and further away, Westchase and Greenspoint. There are more, including the three major Universities, Rice University, University of Houston, and Texas Southern University. The huge Houston Community College is centered at a rail stop that will open in January. The Energy Corridor, the Museum District, Hobby and Bush airports, Clear Lake City, and several others are all inside the City of Houston.

Smaller cores like the Rice Village and the Upper Kirby District have a wealth of amenities and could be far more walkable.

All of these places will certainly slowly transform into pedestrian-oriented places connected to each other by transit, or the ones that do not will always be limited in the number of people - and transactions - they can attract. Cars require so much acreage to accommodate them that only a relatively small number of people can access a car-based place. Imagine the inside of a Wal-Mart as a small shopping district and then imagine if everybody’s cars had to be inside the store. As it is, just looking at a Wal-Mart parking lot full of cars is all it takes to understand how little commerce can actually happen in a car-based place.

The core areas that evolve into pedestrian-oriented places and provide fast easy transit access to other such places will form the urban system, regardless of their distance from each other or their discontinuous development.

A visitor attending a conference in the Convention Center downtown who goes for a ride on the rail system will only visit urban places, if development occurs intelligently. That is, the visitor staying in one of these places will be able to make spontaneous decisions to get off the train and walk around several places, or will specifically go to some event or attraction that exists in one of the places and is accessible by train and foot.

The impression such a visitor will have of Houston is of a sophisticated urban place with a fantastic array of attractions of all scales that are accessible by train and foot. Clearly the more dispersed suburban world will still occupy most of the land, but the carless visitor nevertheless has plenty to see and do without getting involved in the suburban system.

The challenge, while the region is spending nearly 90 percent of its public infrastructure money to produce a suburban world for a maximum of 70 percent of the region’s people (and more likely to soon be around 45 percent), is to find ways to also create the small urban world - small in the sense of using very little land and resources relative to the suburban world - that will house and amuse the core economic force that will produce the innovation - and thus the wealth and jobs - that everybody in the region wants and needs.

And for many people, it would be nice to change the image that the rest of the country and the world has of us as a wasteful, toxic, selfish, kind of place that doesn’t care about quality of life.

A single, elevated monorail line, with a columnar footprint of about 6 feet spaced roughly 100 feet apart would make the priceless connection to create the systems. The line begins at Hobby Airport, goes through the University of Houston, Texas Southern University, crosses the Main Street rail line at Wheeler, continues west on Richmond with stops at Montrose, Shepherd, Kirby Boulevard in the Upper Kirby District, Greenway Plaza, and Weslayan, and then turns right at Weslayan to go up to Westheimer and turn left, stopping at Highland Village, Post Oak Boulevard, Sage Road, and a couple of other places on the way to Westchase.

This line, coupled with the Main Street light rail line, would link more than 30 percent of all the jobs in the region and provide a rich urban tapestry to those who want that. It would enable a variety of affordable housing opportunities from which people would actually be connected to economic development in the city without having to own a car.

Shuttle services running up and down major north-south connector streets could greatly multiply the number of people with access to the system as well as the number of destinations available from the system. Small places with interesting shops and services, not to mention public and cultural places, would enjoy the arrival of visitors that would be beyond possibility in a purely car-based mobility system.

Many of the core areas are Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone or Management Districts, and each of these already has principles and plans to move toward their own brand of urbanism. Post Oak Boulevard in Uptown could become a sort of “magnificent mile” to rival Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. Midtown could have areas that evolve to become the most eclectic in the region, testing the power of art and performance, as well as providing the most complex cafe culture.

As time goes by hundreds of thousands, and even potentially millions, of people could live and work in the urban system, acting as magnets for thousands of satellite suburban systems. Houston would become a place that offered a complete range of lifestyles, from near-rural country life to conventional suburban subdivisions and on to the dense accumulation of people exploring the limits of exchange that is, after all, the purpose of cities.

(A related article called Houston: A Vision for a Livable City by Bob Eury is available in the menu above left.)