ULI - Houston hosted a lunch on Thursday, July 10, 2008 to present a new report (pdf) that “proposes that the Houston Region embrace a “new paradigm” for defining and thinking about its future in a 21st-century global economy” to a sellout crowd at the Westin Galleria. Mike Snyder from the Houston Chronicle was there and posted about the event on the Chronicle Politics blog, including a quote from Gulf Coast Institute President David Crossley:

Those who did attend, including Harris County Judge Ed Emmett and City Councilwoman Toni Lawrence, heard strategies for how local institutions, notably the Houston-Galveston Area Council, could exert more influence over where and how development occurs. The goal wouldn’t be to restrain growth, but to steer it into more sustainable forms through a series of compact, walkable urban centers connected by roads, rails and trails.

The leader of a local nonprofit who has been promoting similar concepts for years found much to admire in the ULI report.

“This event marks a huge turning point in Houston,” said David Crossley, the president of the Gulf Coast Institute. “The perfect storm of energy prices, climate change, and high-speed growth have energized a civic discussion that can find direction in this report. We have been urging moves toward transit-connected livable centers for 10 years; now that’s front and center on the regional plate. If we can just sort out the vision from the ideology, Houston stands poised to be one of the great cities of the world.”

The Center for Houston’s Future website has video of the initial presentation by this panel in February (the online video service they use seems to be glitchy when we have tried to watch it, but with a little patience you can see the whole thing). They also have started a page of links to regional plans from other parts of the country.

The lunch today included both a presentation from two of the experts from the ULI panel as well as a panel of local leaders to respond to the report. During the local section, several inaccurate myths were repeated, so we wanted to take this opportunity to add a little data to the debate.

One of the comments was that the majority of Houstonians live in unincorporated areas. This is not true. I recently created the map below as part of an ongoing project we are working on studying the various cities of Harris County. As you can see, 71% of the 2005 population of Harris County live within cities and H-GAC forecasts that 61% will live within cities in 2035 (The H-GAC forecasts used here assume that current trends and policies of 2005 will continue. Clearly that is no longer the case and it might be more useful to look at H-GAC’s Scenario D, which gives weight to citizen values in the Envision Houston Region process). By the way, the City of Houston itself is home to 57% of the population of Harris County and 40% of the population of the 8-county region.

data

Within the entire 8-county Houston region, the 2005 population was 5,298,000. Of those people, 3,292,000 or 62% lived in cities. H-GAC forecasts that in 2035 this percentage will change to 51%, so even then a majority of residents of the Houston region will live in cities. Nonetheless, the large amount of people living in unincorporated areas is an important policy issue and the Houston region leads the state and the nation in development and population in such areas.

Another comment was that the majority of growth is happening in the outer parts of the region, a reflection of the often repeated concept that outlying counties are growing more than core counties, because of their rates of growth. In terms of absolute numbers of people, which local, state, and federal policies should be more concerned with than rates of growth, Harris County continues to have a larger population than all 7 surrounding counties combined and is will add significantly more people than all of those combined as well. In 2005 3,774,000 people or 71% of the 8-county population lived in Harris County. H-GAC forecasts that 58% of growth in population between then and 2035 will occur in Harris County leaving Harris with 66% of the regional population in 2035.

By the way, 40% of the population of Texas live in four counties: Harris, Bexar, Dallas, and Tarrant. The top ten counties in Texas are home to 57% of the state’s population. The rest of the top ten is made up of Travis, El Paso, Hidalgo, Collin, Denton, and Fort Bend Counties.

Texas is an urban state and home to the globally competitive Texas Triangle megaregion. State and regional policy should reflect this.

Houstonians for Responsible Growth have posted videos of the four speakers from the Land Use Forum which we cosponsored with them along with Greater Houston Partnership, Blueprint Houston, and Urban Land Institute - Houston. The videos are shown below in the order of the speakers at the event. You can find powerpoints from Arthur C. Nelson and David Crossley at this previous post. Also, here is Wendell Cox’ powerpoint as a pdf.

Arthur C. Nelson Ph.D.

Wendell Cox

David Crossley

Former Mayor of Houston Bob Lanier

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Land Use Forum.
We had a large crowd and I think it was a really good discussion.
Here are some follow-up items.

Questions that were submitted on index cards by the audience . 86 KB pdf

Powerpoints:
David Crossley . 16 MB pdf . 51 MB ppt
Arthur C. Nelson . 14 MB pdf . 5.6 MB ppt

Chron.com Houston Politics blog:
The P-word! (planning)
Land Use, take two

Houston Srategies:
Intro from the land-use regulation forum Tory mostly just posted his opening remarks on this post.
More on the land-use forum Tory offers his summaries of what was said. We disagree with much of his characterization of what was said as well as much of what Wendell Cox actually said. More on this later.

A “Houston-style” general plan for the City’s future is being developed, according to Marlene Gafrick, the City’s Planning Director. Today at an American Planning Association – Houston Chapter meeting, she told the group that the plan would begin to roll out in the March-April time frame, and that it would begin by bringing together all the existing plans for a variety of City functions.

The last major attempt at a comprehensive plan for the City was in 1929, when the young Planning Commission submitted a program for such a plan to City Council. Since then, a number of efforts have been attempted, none of which has gotten past the Council.

The latest push for a general plan began in 2001, when the Gulf Coast Institute published an ad with a call for “a meaningful and comprehensive planning process with broad community participation, as mandated in the City Charter.” That led to Mayor Lee Brown’s declaration that it was “the right thing to do.” In a letter to the Houston Endowment, Mayor Brown said “Now is the time to begin serious planning for the future of our great city, because the future will soon be upon us.”

The Endowment granted the Gulf Coast Institute $350,000 for what was then the Houston 2025 Committee, and all of that money was used to launch the Blueprint Houston effort to establish a citizens vision for Houston’s future. That vision is now complete, and Blueprint Houston in November last year asked the Mayor and Council “to adopt those values as the fundamental guide to the creation of a set of strategies in a general plan. This plan, in our view, would begin as a framework for all the policies, actions, incentives, and ordinances that would incrementally be adopted to implement those strategies.”

It is still unclear what a “Houston-style” general plan would look like, or whether it will be based on citizen vision, values, and goals. But some sort of process is underway.

The outside agitators brought in to fight against the citizen movement toward planning in the City of Houston just had a field day with parallel opinion pieces in both the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Business Journal(subscribers only).

Wendell Cox, whose polemic was headlined “Houston land policy fosters homeownership,” placed large quantities of baloney on our civic table. Noting that the national homeownership rate is nearly 70%, he touts Houston for policies that support this goal. However, he fails to note that, in 2006, City of Houston homeownership was at 46.5%, near the bottom of the list of the 40 biggest cities in the US. It was badly beaten by the dreaded Portland, at 57%.

In fact, none of the 40 biggest cities achieves 70% homeownership, although Mesa, AZ, comes close at 69%. Ironically, while Cox argues that San Jose is one of the truly horrible planning disasters, the city is way up there, at 62% home ownership.

Of the 40 biggest cities in the United States, Houston is ranked 34th in home ownership. Of the 10 biggest cities, Houston is 8th. Harris County home ownership is well below the Texas average, and the City of Houston is well below that.

The City of Houston is the place Cox was hired to shoot at. (See earlier posts about the Lanier/Weekley/Linbeck political action committee to fight citizen planning in the City). But in the HBJ piece appears to be talking about the Houston region, not the City. The current assault by what one expert calls “mercenaries” is, at least nominally, supposed to be a reaction to the Ashby high rise struggle, which has prompted the City to create an ordinance that changes the rules in the middle of the development.

Perhaps Cox and his friend Randal O’Toole are largely talking about the region because they don’t have information or understanding about the City, and because the dynamics in the City are so different from the rest of the region. As others have noted, most of the successful areas outside the City have planning, regulation, and even zoning. The City of Houston does not have a comprehensive plan, but it does have a huge number of development regulations. Even so, homeownership in the Houston metropolitan statistical area is 63.4 percent, far higher than the City. Yet it is the City that’s under attack here, the place that has plenty of regulations but no plan for the future.

The City of Houston has always had strong central planning and regulation. Once that was done in the famous “suite 8F” of the Lamar Hotel, but today it’s done by a strong Mayor, who makes all the rules. This is not about Bill White, but about whoever is the Mayor of Houston.

Citizens are tired of it. They have been very clear (83%) that they want a general plan for Houston’s future, and they want it to be based on their vision, values, and goals.

To make the charge that planning negatively affects home ownership is to miss the complexity of the issue. For instance, a quick look at home ownership in the US, shows that Whites* tend to have ownership rates of about 79%, while Blacks and Hispanics tend to average about 49%. So if you look at our Montgomery County, you find the population there is 76% White, and the home ownership rate is 77%, while the City of Houston is 27.6% White, with ownership at 46.5%.

If you home ownership rates in all American cities to their ethnic make-up, what do you discover? If you start with the homeowner winner of the 40 biggest cities, Mesa, AZ, darned if you don’t find that White people are 65% of the population.

The City of Houston is one of the most diverse places in the US, and Dr. Stephen Klineberg says it is essentially a microcosm today of a future US. Chicago (heavily planned with lots of transit) is another city with a rich mix of people, and sure enough its homeownership rate is essentially identical to Houston’s.

Is this telling us that the less White a city is, the lower the home ownership rate is? Or is “race/ethnicity” here a proxy for economic status, and that’s the real story? It all needs much deeper examination and discussion than the gunslingers are giving, but obviously it’s not all about the degree of planning and regulation.

For that matter, homeowner rates in the US dropped slightly in 2007, while renter rates rose. Does this reflect job mobility, or falling spending power further down the ladder, or is it all that pernicious planning that’s moving this indicator? Probably not the latter.

* In all the above numbers, “White” means non-Hispanic White.

Road activist Wendell Cox is being brought into Houston next week to talk to Houston City Council members on behalf of the new anti-planning effort led by former Mayor Bob Lanier, developer Richard Weekley, and construction executive Leo Linbeck, Jr. The purpose of the group, called “Houstonians for Responsible Growth,” is to stop what they call “more extensive planning and regulations” in the City of Houston.

Cox has been involved on the anti-transit side of a number of transit referenda around the country. The San Antonio Express-News said, “On point after point, his paper on sprawl is incoherent or irrelevant, making it a perfect complement to his many papers on light rail.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution calls him “A self-proclaimed (though untrained) transportation expert who makes his living writing propaganda for pro-road causes.” About Houston’s light rail line, he says “Its role is to consume money and to give the local ‘railigious’ an altar at which to burn incense.” Former Metro chair Robert D. Miller said “Cox’s arguments simply don’t make sense.”

Cox has been extensively linked to developer Michael Stevens, who led the effort to defeat the Metro Solutions plan referendum in 2003 and is a leading proponent, as chair of the Governor’s Business Council Transportation Task Force, of a massive road-building effort in Houston and the State.

Next week we will post more about the Lanier group’s new effort to kill the citizen-led planning effort for Houston’s future, and their consultants’ efforts to kill transit expansion, as well as looking into the issues they raise and the meaning of the current push for a general plan.

- David Crossley

Former Mayor Bob Lanier, developer Richard Weekley, and construction executive Leo Linbeck last week sent a letter to Houston Mayor Bill White and each City Council member expressing their “growing concern that the City is embarking…down a path of more extensive planning and regulations,” a path that the trio says has “Ill-served cities across our nation.” (See Chronicle story)

Included with their letter was a book and a paper called “Planning and Houston’s Future” by self-proclaimed “economist” Randal O’Toole, a leading critic of urban life, and particularly of transit. O’Toole calls himself “The Antiplanner” and publishes a Cato Institute website by that name, “Dedicated to the sunset of government planning.” He has said “it is likely that planners in our city governments will do far more harm to our personal and economic freedoms than communists in the State Department.”

O’Toole, whose background is in forestry, is most well known for his long assault on Portland, Oregon, his former home town. Although all of his claims about “failure” in Portland have been repeatedly rebutted by a variety of experts, O’Toole maintains his position.

The letter from Lanier, Weekley, and Linbeck refers to “Mr. O’Toole’s fine book about the pitfalls and the opportunities of modern urban progress.” The book warns against taking into account the public interest when planning road projects, charges that planners intentionally work to create traffic congestion and make roads more dangerous, and includes a chapter on “The Ideal Communist City.”

The paper O’Toole wrote about Houston mentions the idea of the City embarking on a General Plan “based on citizen vision, values, and goals,” and concludes by warning citizens not to attempt that, but instead to “focus on maintaining a responsive government that provides the services people need.” Because we at the Gulf Coast Institute began the push for a General Plan, we disagree, of course, and also note that citizens have the right and responsibility to work together toward a future we all want. As with many other civic ventures, we use our government and our taxes to to do that.

We know we’re in good company in holding this view. In surveys by Rice University sociologist Stephen L. Klineberg, Ph.D., 83% of Houstonians repeatedly say they want the City to have a General Plan for its future. At least one study has shown that the City spends about 11% more than it needs to each year because it has no plan, and if this is true, this kind of waste of public resources seems unconscionable to us and apparently to most citizens as well.

The issue Mayor Lanier and the others are trying to address is sustainable prosperity for the City’s future. We all want that, and need to spend a lot of civic time debating how to get there. But to base their arguments on the ideas of someone who has been discredited so many times seems ill-advised. Over the next few days and weeks we will post a series that explores a little more about O’Toole (and the few other writers who drive the road and sprawl agenda). In the process, we’ll make some distinctions between planning and regulations, and also look at the issue of housing prices and home ownership in major cities.

-David Crossley

It looks like we’ve finally found the building project that lights a fire among citizens to do something about the City of Houston’s outmoded development rules. The prospect of a 23-story tower (with the first six floors being a parking garage) towering over suburban backyards adjacent to Bissonnet has sparked a flurry of news stories, including an article in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle that brings up zoning as a possible solution.

Zoning is not, however, the solution. We already have the solution, and it is known as “form-based code.” The Chronicle article mentions it as a possibility, but fails to note that Houston’s development code, Chapter 42 of the code of ordinances, is already full-fledged form-based code. It’s just really awful form-based code.

The Planning Commission suffers this kind of fight almost weekly, and almost always the citizens leave in a frustrated huff, told that there’s nothing anybody can do to save their neighborhood.

The solution lies in a fundamental fix to Chapter 42 that is simple in concept, followed by a major overhaul of the regulations themselves to respond to the fix.

Chapter 42 divides the City of Houston into two areas: “urban” and “suburban.” The definition of urban in the ordinance is “the area included within and bounded by Interstate Highway 610.” Suburban is then defined as “an area of the city or its extraterritorial jurisdiction that is not an urban area.”

This is a powerful delineation, because it allows the City to set up two different sets of development regulations for the two areas. While the regulations themselves are not very useful, the biggest problem is that the definition of urban as the area inside the Loop is purely nonsensical. In Chapter 42, Afton Oaks is urban and Uptown/Galleria is suburban. The Gulfton/Sharpstown area, which is the densest area in Texas, is suburban, but River Oaks is urban.

Urban and suburban simply do not mean what the Code implies. Urban has characteristics like density, commercial services, walkability, often high-capacity transit service, and larger building forms closer together. Suburban means less than urban, in the sense that buildings are somewhat further apart, less dense, with few if any commercial amenities, and generally are residential (although a place like Manhattan’s upper east side, which is mostly residential, is also clearly urban, so the two terms do not necessarily mean residential vs non-residential).

The Heights and Montrose were developed as suburbs to the Central Business District. Entrepreneurs established within each of those developments clusters of stores and similar commercial places to serve the immediate neighborhoods. These urban places were largely established at the stations of the massive streetcar system that Houston developed around. So there are urban places scattered throughout both the Heights and Montrose suburbs.

In the accompanying aerial photograph of the area between Main Street and Uptown/Galleria it is absolutely clear where the urban places are and where the suburban places are. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Loop.

If Council were to redefine “urban” and “suburban” to mean what they actually mean, it could then revise the Code to describe the kinds of development that go into each area. Hundreds of these problems would become much more manageable. It would not be reasonable, for instance, to define the corner of Ashby and Bissonnet as urban. So urban building forms would be inappropriate there, as Mayor White and many others are saying.

This distinction is easy to see if you consider the West Ave project and everything else that is happening around Kirby at Westheimer, and its adjacent neighborhoods. Clearly, the intersection and Kirby itself, to the south, are already urban and are becoming much more so. But Virginia Street and Ferndale and everything else extending away from that intersection are clearly suburban. That is entirely appropriate, and for the Code not to recognize that and give protection to such neighborhoods is the cause of the enormous amount of friction in our City. Urban areas of many scales usually have suburban areas around them, and likewise a great suburban neighborhood has a nearby urban center or edge.

Essentially, almost all neighborhoods in the pre-1950 parts of Houston have both urban and suburban areas. If we could recognize that, we could both protect the suburban parts and allow the urban parts to develop more densely, bringing services and amenities to those neighborhoods that they might not have today.

A second problem with the code is that the regulations for the urban area are decidedly suburban in character, and require developers like those for Regent Square, Boulevard Place, and West Ave to seek variances, and for the Planning Commission to spend inordinate amounts of time with such issues. It is why Midtown has been so frustrated with the building form that CVS uses there, with CVS defending itself by saying, correctly, that they are following the Code.

Form-based code does not prohibit or require any particular use of land, as zoning does. However, it does make judgments about many form issues, such as setbacks, curb cuts, building heights, building density, and many other elements. Used properly, it would be up to Council to determine those distinctions between the form in the suburban parts of neighborhoods and the form in their urban parts. There is extensive American experience with these distinctions today.

Ideally, we might see situations where a busy intersection like Alabama and Kirby allows high-rise commercial and residential with retail, while the backs of those blocks allow midrises and then townhouses, and the next blocks back allow only single-family dwellings. This creates a neighborhood of diverse lifestyles. There are many highly successful examples of this form in America, and one of their true benefits is they protect the older suburban parts of the neighborhood, while allowing growth that is appropriate for commercial intersections and streets.

Urban and suburban distinctions are fine-grained decisions that must be made at the neighborhood level. They are not words that usefully describe areas somehow divided by a freeway. I have heard a high City official say that is it policy to densify inside the Loop but not outside. If this is true, it is spectacularly bad public policy. I doubt that the people who live in the quiet suburban areas inside the Loop would agree with that strategy. As a Montrose resident who lives on a suburban street, I take great objection to that strategy. However, there are many places in the Montrose that can be labeled as urban, and those would improve the richness of my neighborhood if they could achieve better urban form.

Urban style development is most appropriate where there is good transit service. In 2012, we will see such service available at about 55 stations, all of which should begin to display some degree of density. Some of those places, like Greenway Plaza, are already enormous and growing. But so far, almost all of the new urban developments are happening away from transit stations. So even if these developments are generally appropriate, such as the Kirby at Westheimer project, they are going to create traffic congestion and they are going to do nothing to support our $2 billion dollar investment in new transit.

This implies that the first places to try out these rational definitions of urban and suburban are the 55 transit stations. But something also has to happen to prevent intense urban development from occurring in places where it is clearly inappropriate.

I have been assured by a knowledgeable land use attorney that using the code for these form-based purposes is within the law. We actually do this now, but we have badly defined urban and suburban, on the one hand, and prescribed regulations for each that don’t make sense, particularly for the urban part.

While I said that the solution was simple in concept, it’s also obvious that a significant amount of public process would be required to determine the interfaces between urban and suburban. But this would be just a fraction of the angry, recurring public mayhem that goes on today. Such an intense new process would result in a comprehensive approach to preserving and improving neighborhoods. Chapter 42 is Houston’s most powerful tool for both protecting suburban neighborhoods and allowing urbanity, and it can be used to produce a future we all care about.

- David Crossley

I gave a presentation last week at the monthly Livable Houston / Smart Growth Initiative meeting that we co-host with the Houston-Galveston Area Council on the 2006 Residential Permits data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We looked at data on the City of Houston and Harris County and compared those to the nine other largest cities in Texas and their surrounding county as well as the nine other largest cities in the country and their surrounding counties.

The talk turned into an interesting discussion, which was the intention, because we really were exploring this data and trying to figure out what it means. Houston and Harris County are unique in many ways, most importantly in that we saw a building boom in 2006 and the Metropolitan region had more permits filed for new residential units than any other region in the country. Much of the discussion was spent dissecting this fact and looking at what type of units we are building and the share that is going into the central city or into unincorporated areas of the county. Looking at it from one point of view, the City of Houston is doing a bad job of capturing its share of the growth that is occurring in the region. When we looked at multi-family units, though, we found the opposite is true, in that the city is developing multi-family units at a much higher rate than the county.

One of the final graphs presented, shown below, shows the unique character of Harris County compared to both other counties in Texas and those that surround the biggest cities in the country. In those areas of Harris outside of the City of Houston only 11% percent of new units are multi-family units, the lowest figure for this variable of any of the counties we looked at in the study, except for Collin County in Texas, in which you will find Plano, one of the cities that is developing drastically differently than its surrounding county.

I think that there is more to be learned from this data, so we are making our work available so that others can look at it easily, do their own analysis, and continue the discussion. Please share any further work with us and we would appreciate credit if anyone uses the variables we created in any reports or publications. An obvious next step that I haven’t taken yet is to obtain this data for all the cities in Harris County (or in the whole region) and run the same numbers. Obtaining the data in the same way as we did for the current study would take a long time, so I think I would spend some time seeing if the Census provides for downloading the data in one step or if contacting them directly could lead to a simple email of all the data for the region.

The compiled data and variables in Excel 240 KB .xls

Powerpoint presentation from Livable Houston meeting 2.3 MB .ppt

Descriptions of the variables 293 KB .doc

UPDATE: Excel of just the Census data 34 KB .xls

Slight Disclaimer - An observer with an exacting lens will note a discrepancy between the data for Harris County on the worksheets for US and TX cities. The Texas data was collected when the U.S. Census had newly published the data. The annual totals at this time were only available in the Cumulative Year to Date columns of the December 2006 report, whereas the US cities data was taken from the actual annual figures which were published later. At this time, the online building permits data still show this discrepancy. To see what I mean, select Harris County and set the date to December 2006 and compare that cumulative total to those shown by selecting Annual 2006 from the pull down menu. The difference is tiny and I don’t think actually affects any of the variables in the report, so I didn’t feel like redoing the worksheets to have perfectly matching data.

The League of Women Voters - Houston has published its voters guide for the May 12 election and one of the questions is “Would you support a comprehensive plan for the City of Houston? Explain.”

Eight of the eleven candidates answered yes. Of the remaining three, one did not answer the question, one seems to misinterpret the question, and one candidate thinks it is a bad idea.

A pdf of the complete voter guide is available here Polls are open tomorrow from 7 am to 7 pm. You can find your polling location at harrisvotes.com