Suburbanites seek ‘walkable urbanism,’ but most fail to find it

A sign at the Vintage Park development in northwest Harris County makes an extravagant promise: “Live. Play. Eat. Everything you need is right here!”

Well, not quite everything.

Vintage Park, near Louetta Road and Texas 249, is an appealing space, replete with shops of every variety, diverse restaurant options, a movie theater and other amenities. And there’s plenty of housing within walking distance, including a big apartment complex under construction across the street.

But a closer look reveals that this development is walkable only within its own boundaries. There are no sidewalks on its edges and no convenient way to walk to and from nearby residences. Vintage Park is a pretty island, disconnected from its surroundings.

This highlights certain findings of the 2016 Kinder Houston Area Survey, which in recent years has extended beyond Harris County to measure attitudes in suburban areas. The survey reveals a big gap between the share of people who desire what planning geeks call “walkable urbanism” and the proportion who actually enjoy this lifestyle.

In the survey, samples of residents in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties were asked this question: “If you could choose where to live in the Houston area, which would you prefer: a single-family home with a big yard, where you would need to drive almost everywhere you want to go, or a smaller home in a more urbanized area, within walking distance of shops and workplaces?” Those responding also were asked which option described where they currently lived.

The difference between aspiration and reality was most pronounced in Fort Bend County, where just 35 percent of those who

expressed a preference for an urban lifestyle actually lived in that environment. The comparable figures were 47 percent in Montgomery County and 63 percent in Harris County.

“It’s worth noting that this same trend doesn’t play out among those seeking single-family homes with a big yard,” Ryan Holeywell of the Rice University Kinder Institute wrote in a post on the institute’s blog. In Harris County, he wrote, roughly 11 percent of respondents indicated they preferred a single-family home with a large yard but didn’t live in such a place; the comparable figures were 6 percent each in Montgomery County and Fort Bend County.

Overall, Harris County residents were split evenly in their preferences; in Fort Bend County, 55 percent preferred single-family homes with big yards and 43 percent wanted urban living; and in Montgomery County, the tally was 67 percent single-family and 32 percent urban.

For years, advocates of urban-style development have argued that most of the area’s developers, steeped in a culture of car-dependency, just don’t get it. As a result, this argument goes, they are failing to deliver sufficient amounts of a product that many of their customers want.

But Kyle Shelton, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute, suggests the explanation is not that simple.

“It doesn’t fall solely on the developers,” Shelton told me. He noted that affordability is a factor, as most “new urbanist” developments tend to cater to the higher end of the market.

In addition, the survey question may not capture the nuances of what people want. A willingness to forgo a “big yard” doesn’t mean that respondent doesn’t want a yard of any size.

“People don’t necessarily want Midtown,” Shelton told me, referring to a densely developed neighborhood south of downtown Houston. “But they’d like to be able to walk to more destinations.”

In other words, they want the best of both worlds. Houston’s Montrose area — honored by the American Planning Institute in 2009 as one of the nation’s 10 great neighborhoods — is a walkable community that still has plenty of traditional singlefamily houses.

Interestingly, some of the best examples of walkable urbanism in greater Houston are in the suburbs. In The Woodlands Town Center, for example, a vast network of trails seamlessly integrates homes with shops, restaurants and offices. I spent a couple of hours recently tooling around the town center on my bike and could easily have done so with only my feet.

I saw kids playing in a fountain, families having lunch at outdoor tables under canopies that shielded them from the sun, and lots of pedestrians and fellow cyclists — even on an afternoon in early May, essentially the start of summer in Houston. The scenes could have been ripped from a brochure promoting the delights of new urbanism.

Making this lifestyle available to more of the people who want it is challenging for lots of reasons. But the survey results suggest it’s a challenge worth taking on.