But what is meant by quality of life? The Urbanist Andres Duany, one of the most influential planners in the US, likes to say that “Americans have a much higher standard of living than the people of some Italian hill town; but the people in the Italian hill town have a much higher quality of life.”

The pursuit of happiness is a declared American right, and people in the US – like people everywhere – want to live happy, healthy lives, and want to be safe, and to have something useful to do, and by and large to have broad and rewarding relationships. Surely everybody wants a better quality of life.

As the quality of life movement has gained momentum in recent years, it’s been about three environments: the social environment, the built environment, and the economic environment. Ultimately, all must be addressed and in concert with each other, but most of the energy today is focused on the built environment, both public and private. As many public health issues – both physical and mental - are found to correlate with the built environment, we are also hearing in a growing number of surveys that we want to live a different way, we want to have our homes and businesses in places where we can go for a walk, stop at the store for something, maybe see a friend and sit down at a sidewalk café and have a cup of coffee and talk and watch the people moving around the town center.

We would like to spend less time in cars and more time with friends and family, we’d like bike paths and sidewalks, we’d like trees along the streets, we’d like traffic not to go so fast through our neighborhoods, we’re sick of signs and billboards and poles and wires, we’d like our neighborhoods to be safer and less threatened by bulldozers and particle board, and we’d like more diversity in our surroundings and our lives. We want more choices. We are growing weary of mass-produced lifestyles.

Among the top quality of life values uncovered in surveys across the nation are health, safety, diverse recreational and cultural opportunities, a sense of community, a sense of place, and a sense of beauty. All the terms are vague, and meaning is defined in the interwoven relationships of millions of personal agendas and desires. Vast diversity of opinion makes the search for shared vision an awesome challenge, and one person’s problem is often another person’s livelihood.

Even the rich have to confront the brutalism of freeway life occasionally. For many others, a new minimum wage job can greatly reduce the daily search for food and shelter and open up appreciation for some less basic desire – better clothes, better furniture. Concern about planting trees along urban boulevards is probably not a regular passion for the single mother of two who washes dishes for $5.35 an hour. Nor is the dream of moving her family from a one to a two-bedroom apartment a typical ambition of the wealthy citizen who works tirelessly for more parks. How many of us would imagine that for some families from Guatemala a tumbledown shack with indoor plumbing in the Western Fifth Ward is a huge step up?

Some people are getting a lot of more of what they want or think they need than others are. While this is nothing new, what seems new is that a very large percentage of people – more than 30 percent and rising –aren’t getting what they want even though they are perfectly capable of paying for their desires. Quality places and environments just don’t exist in ample supply to meet demand. Thirty percent of homebuyers say they buy what they buy because they can’t find what they want.
In one survey, the top desires of homebuyers were these:

• Natural open space
• Walking and biking paths
• Sidewalks

Respondents also said they want “town centers,” “pedestrian-friendly design,” and “community gathering places.” But communities and neighborhoods with these attributes turn out to be hard to find and most people who live in developments surrounding golf courses do so because they like the open space, not because they care to play golf.

Obviously, this is a huge market opportunity. Disney, in its visionary development initiatives in Florida, notes that it will be perfectly happy to completely own 30 percent of the market and let hundreds and thousands of other developers split the rest.

The demographic that will only consider a house with a yard in the suburbs is shrinking somewhat. Less than 25 percent of households have children living at home, a drop from 40 percent a couple of decades ago. Many in the older generation, the empty nesters, appear to be tiring of maintaining yards and of the distances to services. Thriving inner city areas are becoming magnets for young, ambitious, educated people, and for older people looking for easier access to cultural and other riches of urban life.

Many people who move to a suburban subdivision to get close to the country awake one morning to see bulldozers in the field or forest next door, and by nightfall the country is gone. The homeowners watching this are not happy about it. In the urban environment, disappointment and sorrow comes from the felling of a single tree for a townhouse, or the bulldozing of a historic building for several townhouses.

It appears to be an important point that there is no fully generalized “people want” beyond life, air, water, food, shelter, clothing, maybe tools, maybe a few more. Having accepted that, it can probably be safely argued that there also is no “everybody,” and that we all want as many choices as we can get.
So the quality of life movement – and it may well be the dominant social movement of the American moment – is primarily about choices and differences, even about novelty and excitement. One thing that is increasingly clear to the people who are pushing the quality of life movement forward in the Houston region is that the constructs and philosophies that brought us the metropolis we now live in have not been up to the task of creating quality places, or of nurturing interesting and just communities, or of preserving a quality natural environment.

The challenge of the moment is to be creative and collaborative in finding a new way to recognize and leverage our considerable assets and to build and preserve a city and region that we can all care about. Houston deserves to be a better place to live. Houston needs a plan.