Why Houston feels like a young city
Urban researchers’ maps tell compelling story of Bayou City’s recent coming-of-age, with most new development outside Loop
Houston is forever young. Or so it seems.
Whether we love or hate living in Houston, our arguments about the region tend to come back to the same assertion: Houston is young. Our youth explains so much, after all, like how few pedestrian-friendly streets there are and how unfinished the city feels.
Except that Houston is, in fact, old. At least for a city in the United States. It was founded in 1836. Chicago was incorporated in 1837, San Francisco in 1849, Seattle in 1851 and Denver in 1858.
Those younger cities seem older, though. Why do their streets have long stretches of storefronts and walk-up apartments? Why do they have old markets filled with tourists buying tchotchkes? Why do their neighborhoods seem layered with histories? Why not us?
Why does Houston seem young? One reason has to do with when and how the city grew.
“By the turn of the 20th century, Houston was a provincial city even by Texas standards,” says Stephen Fox, a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation who teaches at Rice University and the University of Houston, and is author of the Houston Architectural Guide.
Other cities, though incorporated after Houston, grew faster in their early years. Chicago reached the “big city” threshold quickly with a population of more than 2 million by 1910. That same year, San Francisco’s population reached 416,912. By contrast, Houston claimed a modest 78,800 people.
As a result, the footprint of early-20thcentury Houston is small in comparison to its bigcity peers today.
Using records from the Harris County Appraisal District, Kelsey Walker, a researcher at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, produced maps that show when Houston developed. (The data are from 2015 and include buildings that were expected to be completed in 2016.) Viewed together, the maps present a compelling story about Houston’s recent comingof-age. Walker’s images show the overwhelming majority of development has occurred within the past 35 years, and grand swaths of the “old” city have been replaced with newer buildings.
Walker first created a map showing buildings constructed before 1945 in purple and from 1945 to today in yellow. According to Walker’s analysis, only 6.1 percent of all current buildings inside Harris County were built before 1945. Even within incorporated Houston, only 11.2 percent of current buildings were built before 1945.
That year, coinciding with the end of World War II, was a pivot point for cities in the United States and elsewhere.
“In the 1950s, just about the entire world abandoned continuous block-and-street urbanism and switched over to spine-based urbanism,” Rice architecture professor Albert Pope says.
Most of pre-1945 Houston is inside Loop 610. The post-1945 world of spine-based urbanism — cul-de-sacs not grids, frontage roads not boulevards — constitutes a far bigger portion of Houston, mostly outside the Loop.
And many of the pre1945 buildings, the map shows, were demolished. Houston’s oldest areas, such as downtown, have lost a large part of their historical fabric. Though much of downtown remains vacant or used for surface parking, the blankness is exaggerated in these maps. The single pixels for block-filling buildings tend to underrepresent what does remain. Each little house, however, get its own pixel, so residential neighborhoods come across as dense patches.
So is this why Houston seems so young? Young buildings certainly create a youthful urban context. But there’s more to it, as a closer look reveals that the pattern of post-1945 building tells as much of a story about redevelopment as it does development.
Walker created maps breaking up the later period in two — pre-1945 in purple, 1945-82 in orange, and 1983-today in yellow. The year 1982 marks the end of a major economic cycle for Houston, when the price of oil plummeted and real estate investment paused for several years. These maps represent the incredible pace of Houston’s expansion outward into farmland and prairie.
The new buildings from 1983 on are not only at the outer edges. Rather, they show a trend for redevelopment within the Loop.
“What stands out to me is the amount of rebuilding in older areas going on in the 1983-2016 period,” Fox says.
One can see bright patches of yellow construction close to downtown in historic African-American neighborhoods such as Third Ward, especially the area now called Midtown and just east of the U.S. 288-Interstate 69 interchange.
We can appreciate how working-class and immigrant Houstonians have preserved buildings in a large area between Interstate 45 and the Ship Channel.
When real estate dynamics and city policies shift, however, one can see dramatic changes in old neighborhoods such as the ethnically and racially mixed First Ward and in what were mostly working-class, often Anglo enclaves including Cottage Grove, Greater Heights, Rice Military and parts of Montrose. The near-complete loss of old buildings in Freedmen’s Town appears as a bright patch of yellow.
There are striking examples where the “entire housing stock has been virtually displaced,” as Fox notes, and parts of Houston have “become a new city despite the actual age.” You can drill down on where demolitions are taking place at a neighborhood level using Kinder Institute’s Houston in Flux interactive map.
Also striking is how big the orange belly is. According to the HCAD data, our buildings are 6.1 percent pre-1945, 47.7 percent between 1945 and ’82 and 46.3 percent after ’82
Why does Houston seem young? Almost half of it is young. To put it another way: Houston is half-millennial, half-boomer, but we have a little, old heart that needs preserving.
If we can only give one age for Houston, though, what would that be? Walker calculated the average (median) age of our buildings. The median year is 1970 for Houston and 1981 for Harris County. By these measures, Houston is about 47 (just post-baby boomer, or Gen X’er), and Harris County is 36 (millennial).
Still, Fox points out, the age of buildings is not the only factor to shape perceptions of the city. Dallas not only grew faster than Houston in its early years and has more “density and texture,” he says, but “because the streets are narrower and two grids come together at an angle (around Ross Avenue), you have a sense of closure.”
The old grids of Houston have wide streets with seemingly endless vistas. In addition, the spine-based urbanism outside the Loop that Pope calls our attention to have even less sense of closure and spatial intimacy.
“All of these perceptions color your interpretation and deduction about the character and age of a city and probably make a greater impact than the chronological age,” Fox says. Houston outside the Loop is aging without seeming “old.”
Yet another factor beyond the age of the buildings is who occupies them. Our population is young. The median ages in Houston and Harris County are 34 and 32. Houston’s median age is the lowest of the nation’s major metro areas.
These maps and figures raise a host of questions. What do you see?
Raj Mankad is editor of Cite: The Architecture + Design Review of Houston. You can follow him at twitter.com/mankad.