Busker’s legal victory is a win for Houston

It could’ve been a Pixar film: one accordion player’s years-long journey to perform on Houston’s sidewalks — if only the plot weren’t so bogged down by all the boring paperwork.

Four years after the multitalented musician, composer and performance artist Anthony Barilla first took on the city ordinance that restricted busking to a tiny stretch of the Theater District, he’s now won his lawsuit in a victory that could resonate in ways he might not have imagined. The city said it doesn’t plan to appeal and that it will instead rework its ordinance.

Across the globe, busking is not only a way for performers to earn a little cash but for cities to enliven their thoroughfares and bring a bit of delight to passersby. Ordinances vary city by city but Houston’s was particularly restrictive and information about permits was difficult to access, the lawsuit noted.

For Barilla, the win is a victory for his whole creative community. For Houston, it’s a win for anyone who wants a more vibrant, engaging city, the kind where creativity isn’t always in a committeeapproved form but instead blossoms in sometimes unexpected and felicitous ways. If Barilla’s quest seems lonely — one man, his accordion and a dream — it shouldn’t. Since the decision was announced Dec. 20, Barilla has received a steady beat of messages celebrating the win, from business owners and artists alike.

His favorites are from fellow street performers, especially the younger ones, including JaKeithen Green, or Stickaholic as the percussionist goes by. Green tagged Barilla in a social media post with a video of himself performing on the street with his signature embellishment: fire.

“That is fantastic, that I had a small part in making that happen,” Barilla told the editorial board.

Green told us he has encountered different reactions as a performer over the years. Sometimes he’d hear that he could play but not accept tips. Other times he could get tips but couldn’t use a speaker. Still, he found a few spots outside the Theater District where he could more or less reliably perform, including just outside Discovery Green.

The Theater District, it turns out, just wasn’t that desirable for busking, which naturally finds its way to denser, more pedestrian-friendly areas. But how many of those does Houston have? Now that they can, where will the buskers flock? And what will those hubs tell us about our efforts to be a lively, creative city?

Houston has been slowly awakening to the need for smarter street designs, more engaging and accessible parks and tweaks to finally break up the monotony of parking lots, at least downtown, where there should be homes, businesses, libraries — anything other than another lifeless slab of concrete. It’s been a coordinated effort, involving a reimagining of the city’s public transportation, privatepublic partnerships that brought to life long-neglected waterways, and the unsexy work of combing through city code to find opportunities to improve our streetscapes.

Collectively, the work signals an important, if sometimes slow-to-come, shift in a city that feels built for cars and suburbs.

Take any of the three major parks projects currently underway, including Buffalo Bayou East, which includes 70 affordable homes, a new public library research center, improved street connections and two trail bridges over Buffalo Bayou in its master plan that was approved by city council in September.

Hermann Park’s redesign includes a 26-acre upgrade to its underutilized southwest corner, including a carousel and themed play areas to rival the pricier options out of reach for many over at the zoo.

Memorial Park, likewise, is targeting early 2023 to showcase several improvements, including its prairie restoration that supports broader flood mitigation goals.

These blockbuster public-private projects, the kind a city likes to hang its hat on, encouragingly, meet some vital needs as well: affordable housing, accessible green space and flood control.

Such big-dollar projects are only part of the city’s shift in thinking.

Smaller-scale interventions, such as the renovated multimodal stretch of Bagby Street by City Hall, show what the city is capable of. Complementary efforts are sometimes less visible, such as the city’s 2019 decision to switch to what it called “market-based parking” requirements for several downtown neighborhoods, allowing businesses to determine how much parking. In 2020, the city approved ordinances that incentivized denser, more walkable-style developments.

These more incremental approaches to improving the city’s streetscapes can be frustrating for those of us who want to see Houston more fully embrace its potential. Too often, it seems, Houston’s leaves some of its biggest hopes up to the buy-in of stakeholders, developers and big donors, and relies on funding sources that can drive inequitable development.

Even as buskers intuitively head for the city’s more walkable corners, design alone won’t bring vibrancy to our streets. An affordable place to live is essential.

That’s what Barilla found when he moved here in the 1990s, along with a thriving, rag-tag art scene where it was easy to get a foothold.

“It was the kind of scene I had been looking for,” he said.

Houston’s creative world is known for its openness and ingenuity, the kind of spirit celebrated in the “No Zoning” exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2009.

“In a way, the art history here is all those beautiful, lucid dreamers who started alternative spaces, who one day screwed up a car and just started driving downtown with their Art Cars and went against the grain,” then-curator Toby Kamps told the Chronicle.

So much of Houston’s cultural life has been built from this repurposing and reimagining. Think: Urban Animals in the 1980s, cruising down parking garage ramps. Or Slab Sundays in MacGregor Park. Or cowboys riding down the grassy medians of the city’s “rurban” neighborhoods.

There’s still plenty of that spirit, but for how much longer if we don’t protect and nurture it?

Granted, some of the change in Houston’s art scene has been welcome maturity: “While it wasn’t hard to find a cheap punk rock club to put on a play back in the ’90s, it was hard to find a real theater,” Barilla said. That’s no longer the case.

The bigger change, though, has been the rising cost of living here that’s sent many of Houston’s artists from neighborhood to neighborhood, seeking cheaper rents.

The more the city invests in big projects, the greater the need for affordable housing becomes. If we want an artsy, lively city, we need to make space for the artists, to work and to live.

JaKeithen Green understands the economics of it all well. He lives in Humble but makes the trip to downtown Houston to perform. “I like the experience down here,” he told the editorial board. “It’s very multicultural, you meet new people every night.” Plus, he has his regulars.

Humble doesn’t have the kind of foot traffic Green needs to get that sort of audience. Drumming since he was a toddler, Green said his parents were always encouraging. After graduating from Prairie View A&M University, there wasn’t a clear next step for him as a musician.

One day while he was playing in Buffalo Bayou Park, a fan insisted that he accept her tip and told him it was a normal thing for street performers. Three years in, he’s only had a few run-ins with police or security and he always errs on the side of just packing it up once that happens. His act has only gone wrong once, when he bumped his drum and sent flames into his tip jar. Luckily, his specially engineered solution burns bright but not hot. The tips were saved. That’s the beauty of live performance. “When people actually get to see you in person, you might make a mistake, but that lets people know that you’re human,” Green said.

There is something magic about not just live performance, but the delight of stumbling upon it in the street and the opportunity for interaction.

“Seeing a person do something beautiful reminds you of human potential,” Barilla said.

And also of Houston’s potential.