Houston at crossroads: Sprawl on or reshape infrastructure
For decades, Houston has been building and building and building so much so that the city has been called — lovingly or not — “the blob that ate East Texas.”
That relentless expansion powered the region’s growth into the fifth-largest metro area in the nation and a robust economy to match. But a buildup of all the same sorts of projects — especially highways — is leaving local leaders straddled between past strategies and unproven alternatives, between more sprawl and urbanization.
With billions in federal investment targeted for the region that could become new highways, water plants, airport terminals, levees, even an Ike Dike, state and local plans do not differ greatly from those of the past. The worry is that the next 20 years could lead to more of the same even as some clamor for change, for cleaner air and less traffic.
Looming over it all is the debate in Washington over a proposed $3.5 trillion national budget and a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Federal lawmakers are likely to spend the rest of the summer coming to a consensus, but many suggest the likely path forward is continuing the same formula spending for many programs while offering grants and incentives for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or favor reducing car travel and increasing transit.
The choice facing Houston, especially as more people and more leaders fret that the region has reached a point where more highways and more sprawl is not sustainable, is how fast it should embrace an end to the old way of doing things and abandon the strategy of additional fringe development that for decades fueled growth.
“If you continue the pattern, and Houston metro grows like they say it will, you are going to facilitate pretty rapid outward expansion,” said William Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. “You’re next question is, ‘Is that a good thing?’”
Almost assuredly, Houston will grow bigger and denser at the same time, with more people living within Loop 610 and more people farther and farther away from it. What remains unclear is whether planners and local officials embrace and encourage less sprawl, or continue the spiderweb of sewers and highways that fueled Houston’s growth.
For all of the benefits that come with both options — change the pattern or continue to sprawl — there are uncertainties: Continue outward expansion and critics of suburban development worry there will be fewer grasslands to soak up future storms and more emissions from even more vehicles driving more miles.
Cut off the spigot of new subdivisions and streets and sewer pipes, advocates of the existing plans argue, and real estate prices will skyrocket, families no longer will have options for affordable homes, and coveted additional jobs will go elsewhere.
Currently, the Houston-Galveston Area Council — the local planning agency that doles out federal money — has projects to continue building the Grand Parkway around the metro region, widen or expand nearly every existing freeway and build a new highway through Brazoria and Fort Bend counties on its books, along with various transit and bicycling projects.
Historically, Houston always has said yes to bigger projects: Wider freeways, larger detention ponds, bigger water pipes. That is natural for any growing metro, especially one where the central county, Harris, jumped from 187,000 people in 1920 to 4.7 million in 2020, according to the Census Bureau.
Strained to keep up with a century of growth, no five-year spending bill can solve Houston’s massive public works needs.
“It is a false notion to think we are ever done with infrastructure,” said Paul Lewis, vice president for policy and finance at the Eno Transportation Center, a Washington-based nonprofit that researches and analyzes federal transportation policy.
Digging in
Since the end of World War I more than a century ago, Houston leaders have sung a near-constant refrain: Growth is coming and an ever-growing number of major public works projects is needed.
Case in point: The Houston Ship Channel has been under construction or in some phase of fundraising to pay for more work throughout most its existence. The channel, which started as a human-made redesign of the lower Buffalo Bayou at 25 feet deep in 1914, was dredged to a depth of 30 feet in 1925, then to 34 feet in 1935. Taking time off for World War II, the channel was dredged to 36 feet by 1948 and slowly deepened by a succession of projects until it reached 45 feet in depth by 1968. For nearly 40 years, various portions have been widened, all with strong public support as area leaders touted the benefits to local jobs.
A nearly $1 billion project to widen and deepen the port — the 11th in the past century — kicked off in May, cheered by local, state and federal officials including seven members of Congress from both parties because of the massive economic benefit it promises.
That benefit, however, comes with a cascade of additional projects: Improving the channel makes room for more and larger ships. That will require new and bigger cargo terminals. More cargo means more trucks, which means wider freeways farther from the port. The economic boost lures workers who want homes, which builders are happy to supply so long as local officials and utility districts supply the roads, highways, sewers and water lines.
It is no wonder then that for more than 25 years, Houston has been called “the blob that ate East Texas.” A 2001 issue of The Economist used that as the headline to describe the region’s growth.
“I’m pretty sure they got that expression from their interview with me, and I had gotten it from somewhere else several years earlier,” said Stephen Klineberg, professor emeritus of sociology at Rice University who founded and conducted the Houston Area Survey for 40 years.
Even if the phrase’s origin is not clear, its meaning is.
“With no natural barriers for 30 miles in any direction, and built almost exclusively by the automobile, the Greater Houston Metropolitan Area covers more than 10,000 square miles,” Klineberg said. ”That’s almost as large as the entire state of Massachusetts and considerably larger than the state of New Jersey.”
It also is a monumental place to maintain. Each road lane built and foot of pipe installed means more work added to the upkeep list. The result is a constant juggle by officials between what to add for growth and what to maintain, even as population-based funding brings Houston and Texas larger slices of the federal pie.
At-grade problems
Despite massive investment, Texas’ infrastructure by many measures is treading water at best lately.
In its 2021 report card on state infrastructure released in February, the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers graded the state a C, up slightly from the C- Texas received in 2017. The 55-person board of engineers around the state tasked with judging 12 categories of infrastructure gave their lowest marks to levees, wastewater systems, dams and roads, while giving their highest grade, B+, to energy reliability.
That latter praise, however, lasted four days as the state’s electrical grid crumbled in the cold on Feb. 14.
The February electric grid collapse, along with the calamity of Hurricane Harvey four years ago, were tipping points for some of the needed changes, not only in the level of investment but in the types of projects.
The current contretemps over rebuilding Interstate 45 is the latest example. After 15 years of planning and support from local authorities, the plan developed by TxDOT has faced criticism from Houston residents, city leaders and Harris County, which has led to additional scrutiny from federal officials.
TxDOT’s plan to add managed lanes and rebuild the freeway, touted by backers as a way to improve transit and create jobs, has been lambasted by critics who say it adds lanes for car travel at a time when every freeway project needs to be focused on carrying more people with the same number of lanes.
‘Paradigm shift’ urged
More so than other metro regions over the decades, the decision-makers in Houston — often developers, engineers and builders — win out.
“I think it has to do partly with the free-market orientation of Houston and the way that has played for the past 100 years in Houston,” Fulton said.
That continuous highway building, critics say, is a matter of choice more than circumstance.
“There is no such thing as objective need,” said Kevin DeGood, director of infrastructure policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “Need is a variable of what your goals are.”
Those needs must change, Mayor Sylvester Turner said on Aug. 18 during remarks touting President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan. Turner, who has called for a “paradigm shift” in local transportation, said the infrastructure bill needs stronger provisions to encourage local officials to tee up projects that meet climate goals.
“It is not only about sending dollars, it is about changing the goals,” Turner said.
Skeptics of the bill note that while it includes many of the offerings they sought — investment in reducing greenhouse gases, funding for transit and grant programs for major projects — it also allows state and local authorities to continue funding the same kind of projects they always have.
Under current terms unchanged by the new bill, state agencies can transfer up to 50 percent of the money they receive through the National Highway Performance Program to other uses. Texas received $2.2 billion last year from the program.
“If TxDOT wanted to, they could turn half of that money into (bus rapid transit), transit, local streets, and all sorts of things other than highways,” DeGood said. “They are not going to, but they could.”
Failing to do so when Washington is invested in supporting innovative projects could mean Houston and other metro areas still building bigger highways are left out of big windfalls, Fulton said.
They also could be setting themselves up for harsh realities ahead.
“I do not think you can run an 8 million- or 9 million- or 10 millionperson region on the single occupant vehicle,” Fulton said. “I just don’t think we can. … I think we are missing the opportunity to reshape the transportation infrastructure.”