Rocky roads ahead
Years of underfunding street maintenance leave Houston’s task of improvement in a deep rut
Jordan Hamil limped her Jeep Renegade into the parking lot, her passenger-side rear tire replaced by the spare. Not an ideal start to the morning, but one a lot of people at the Discount Tire at 20th and T.C. Jester were having.
“I don’t know if I hit something,” Hamil, 31, told store worker Chris Guerra.
He quickly found the culprit: A bubble building on the side, a minuscule slice at its center. A telltale sign that the tire took a beating, Guerra told her.
Countless Houstonians have, like Hamil, lost a few hours and a few hundred dollars to daily showdowns with the city’s rough streets, many of which fail the test the city uses to judge their quality.
By its own assessment, completed last year, one in six segments of Houston streets is low or very low quality.
Houston did not get a patchwork of pocked, and potentially
dangerous, streets overnight. A Houston Chronicle review of three decades of city documents shows it took years of underinvestment or shifting priorities. In some cases, mayors refocused efforts on patching streets at the expense of completely rebuilding more roads; others simply shifted funds from street repairs to other priorities.
Among the Chronicle’s other findings:
• If the city were to completely rebuild each of its 16,500 lane miles of streets every 35 years, the typical lifetime of a road, it would need to average 470 miles of new lanes each year. There is no evidence the city ever has achieved that total.
• Houston Public Works acknowledges the city still struggles to produce reliable figures showing how many miles of streets are rebuilt, rehabilitated, paved or patched, in large part because the metrics used to measure success often changed as new mayors took office.
• Public Works officials for the last decade have estimated Houston should spend at least $650 million each year on street and drainage projects. Even adjusting for inflation, the city never has spent even close to half that amount.
• The city’s current, voter-approved street and drainage program was envisioned as a fix to this historical underfunding, but that program, too, is falling far short of its original revenue projections. The program will produce some $845 million less for repairs over the next six years than first envisioned.
That underinvestment has real effects on trips around the city, and on the frustrations drivers feel.
“Everywhere you go in this city, it’s terrible,” Karen Schaeffer said. “Everyone knows it.”
Middle of the road
The city assesses the quality and smoothness of its streets each year, using a laser-guided vehicle and a 0 to 100 scale. Rather than attempt to characterize a miles-long street with one score, the city breaks its 16,100 lane miles into 73,000 segments. Any segment that scores below 40 is deemed as very low quality, and any that score about 86 are considered high quality.
The Chronicle compared pavement scores gathered from August 2015 to June 2016 with those scored from June 2017 to May 2018 and found the city’s streets improved slightly in that time: The average score rose from 71.4 to 72.7. That change was driven by improvements on segments of smaller neighborhood streets, where the average score went from 69.5 to 72.
Roads most drivers rely on frequently, meanwhile, worsened a bit. Among roads four lanes or wider — the city’s major thoroughfares — the average score dropped from 81.9 to 79.9.
By this standard, the typical city street hovers on the line between medium and high quality. That model, however, obscures what drivers experience. A motorist could all but glide 10 blocks on smooth asphalt before crossing an intersection and hitting a moonscape of potholes and road patches.
It is not the smooth stretches of the morning commute that drivers remember. It’s the ones that splash coffee into their laps, the nearly 16 percent of road segments that score abysmally.
Nearly every driver has a story about a street that did them wrong. For Bill Apple, 55, who lives in Tanglewood, it is a stretch of Rice Avenue in Meyerland so littered with asphalt patches, cracks and poorly-repaired cuts by local utilities that he unconsciously changes lanes to avoid it.
“I didn’t once, and I liked to have knocked my teeth out,” he said.
Jasmine Liu, 30, found her breaking point in East Downtown, where streets around her apartment were so bad she warned friends about them.
“Any time they came by, I’d apologize,” Liu said.
Behind the curve
Houston always has grown faster than its infrastructure could keep up.
The sewer system lagged so badly in the 1970s that the city had to deny building permits until it built more treatment plants. By the time flood plains were established in the 1980s, there already were thousands of homes along the bayous, and Houston’s drainage system never has adequately lessened their flood risk. So it has been with streets. Any explanation for the city’s cratered pavement must account for Houston’s rapid growth, whether because aggressive annexation added hundreds of square miles to maintain, or because the region’s population has doubled since the 1980s, or because that increase has caused the number of cars on the roads to soar.
As developers built streets in new subdivisions, the city became responsible for them but for decades never developed an adequate maintenance routine, said Jeff Weatherford, deputy director for traffic and drainage operations for Houston Public Works.
Today, Weatherford said, it makes little sense to add 30 years to the life of a street by fully rebuilding it when his crews — patching asphalt and replacing broken concrete panels — can extend its life by at least a decade at a tenth of the cost.
“You look at these limited funds, and the model that we’re going to rebuild every street every 20 to 30 years doesn’t fiscally work,” he said. “We’re looking at how to make them last longer.”
That shift includes building city streets more like interstates, where a concrete base is covered with asphalt. As the top layer wears down, crews scrape it off, patch the concrete where needed and top it with fresh asphalt. City officials also hope to replace more concrete panels — 1,276 this year, by far the most in at least a decade.
“For every mile that we completely rebuild, I can fix 10 miles of street,” Weatherford said. “That’s where we’re shifting to. I don’t think we’ve got any choice.”
Keeping streets intact in Houston has meant contending with soggy soil, weather extremes, and the region’s rapid growth. Some civil engineers and neighborhood leaders probably would add to that list the misplaced priorities of any one of the last handful of mayors and city councils.
Such grousing was common in 1991 as Mayor Kathy Whitmire sought re-election amid a crime wave and concern about street conditions. Voters sought investment, and change.
Enter Bob Lanier, a swaggering 6-foot-4 real estate developer who focused on core services, led by policing and street repairs.
Though hiring more police officers was his top priority, Lanier quickly got to work on roads, prioritizing residential areas through a “Neighborhoods to Standards” program aimed at making the inner city competitive with the suburbs.
He spent huge sums installing sidewalks and rapidly increased the lane-miles of streets repaved, soon reporting tallies more than five times that reached in his predecessor’s last year.
City maintenance records are inconsistent, at best, but all available measures show the miles of streets paved annually today remain below the levels reached in the mid-2000s, and both eras rank far below the totals reported from the mid-1990s through 2001.
Lanier’s strategy was popular — longtime Houstonians lionize him for getting things done — and reached more residents for the same dollar, as paving a street is cheaper than rebuilding it.
Nearly 30 years later, however, any asphalt Lanier laid is long chipped away. City Hall observers and press accounts from the period suggest his approach was not as aggressive at rebuilding streets from the ground-up, something Houston struggles to keep up with today.
A less visible part of Lanier’s legacy is the way he funded his priorities. He raided Metro’s coffers for roughly $200 million and spent that cash, once meant for mass transit, to pay for police and to fix streets.
To free up more funds to grow the police force, he shifted the city tax rate to operations and away from debt service. That resulted in more debt payments being delayed years into the future.
The move started a domino effect of sorts, city records show, leaving climbing debt payments in successor Lee Brown’s early years, which led Brown and, to varying degrees, his successors, to also push debt payments into the future to give themselves room to implement their own initiatives.
The ReBuild reality
By 2010, this pattern had constrained Houston’s ability to borrow to keep pace even with its previous level of street repairs.
That year, voters approved ReBuild Houston, a new program that ended the practice of borrowing money to fix streets and replaced it with a monthly drainage fee on property owners that averages $5 per house. The program places those drainage fee dollars in a fund along with grants, road repair money from Metro, and roughly a fifth of the city’s annual property tax revenues, the amount typically devoted to paying down past road debt.
From its launch through the end of June, about $2.1 billion had flowed into the ReBuild program — which Turner recently renamed Building Houston Forward — including an estimated $902 million in drainage fees.
Despite residents paying a new fee, however, the city is not doing more street and drainage work.
Inflation-adjusted figures show Houston spent, on average, $192 million per year on those projects in the seven years preceding the program, and $189 million in the seven years after.
And the program continues to lag its original revenue projections: Public Works data now shows a cumulative $845 million less will be available for projects over the next six years than was envisioned when voters approved the measure in 2010.
There are two key reasons for this.
First, a math error — proponents said the fee would average $5 per house but that turned out to be an understatement, so former mayor Annise Parker granted all property owners a discount; the City Council also exempted existing churches and schools.
The charter amendment voters approved to set up the program required the city to collect $125 million from the fee in the first year, and city documents show the intention was to maintain that level in perpetuity. The most the city ever collected in one year, however, was $118 million; on average, the annual collection has been $110 million.
Second, there is Houston’s voter-imposed limit on the amount of property tax revenue the city can collect. Since 2014, amid rising property values, the city typically has had to cut its tax rate each year to avoid taking in more revenue than the cap allowed.
Why does that affect street repairs? The program was designed to use about a fifth of the city’s property taxes for street and drainage projects, with everincreasing amounts of money leftover for repairs as old debts were retired. Though residents focus on the new fee, those property taxes, over time, will be the fund’s largest source of revenue.
As the city’s tax rate has shrunk under the revenue cap, however, mayors have reduced the share devoted to the street and drainage program, leaving that cash in the general fund for other things. This was possible because the charter language that set up the program called for “an amount equivalent to” the revenue generated by 11.8 cents of the property tax rate to be devoted to the program. The Parker and Turner administrations have used the dollar amount the 11.8 cents generated in the first year of the program — $157 million — increased it annually based on inflation and population growth, and transferred whatever was left over after paying old road debt to the program.
This is now the fifth year in which the city has transferred less than the full 11.8 cents, reducing the program’s funding by $203 million — by $9.7 million under Parker in 2015 and a combined $193 million over Mayor Sylvester Turner’s four budgets.
Turner defended the decision, saying the alternative would mean cutting nearly $50 million from this year’s general fund budget.
“That would mean cuts to essential services like police, fire, solid waste and other services,” Turner said. “I don’t support that.”
The city’s program still can be effective, he added, by embracing Weatherford’s focus on rehabilitation work and by leveraging grant funds that will arrive after Hurricane Harvey and other storms.
Turner’s top mayoral opponents are quick to highlight poor street conditions.
Businessman Bill King said Houston would have ample road repair funds if the full property tax amount was devoted to
streets and drainage and if more Public Works employees were paid from general revenues rather than the Metro grants that otherwise could pay for more roadwork. King said he could soften the impact of those changes on the general fund by drawing more heavily on revenues from the city utility system.
King also repeatedly has said Turner is “diverting” half of the drainage fee revenues, though the fees fund many “street and traffic” projects that replace the streets and the drainage pipes underneath, just as many “storm drainage” projects do. In an interview Wednesday, he acknowledged some street projects have a drainage component, but said his proposed changes would let Houston devote the drainage fees entirely to drainage projects and still have enough money to improve streets.
Trial lawyer Tony Buzbee also decries the diversion of property tax revenues from the program on his website, and has floated the idea of privatizing “some, if not all,” road repairs.
The city already hires outside crews for all major street reconstructions and many maintenance jobs, depending on the type of work.
Sense of doom
For drivers, it is less political and more personal. Cory Anderson, 27, laughed when asked to identify Houston’s worst street. It is a hard question, not because a bumpy ride is hard to find, but because there are so many choices.
“There’s one, I drive it all the time,” said Anderson, who drives all over the region as a technician for a company that examines pipelines. “Off Industrial Road. I think it’s called Miles Road. It is really bad.”
He is right. On the city’s 0-100 scale, portions of Miles scored from a low of 39 to a high of 76 in a 2018 analysis. That is down from portions that scored a 94 just four years ago.
Miles is hardly the worst, according to the city. In the latest yearlong assessment, completed in May 2018, the street with consistently the worst scores was
Campbell Road in Spring Branch, parts of which scored a zero. Others with single-digit street grades were Fulton in the
Northside area, near Hogan and Quitman, Ennis and Blodgett near the Texas Southern University campus and Crenshaw
Road, a major street for residents in southeastern parts of the city, south of Pasadena.
“Depending on where you are, they can be really bad,” Hamil said, after she squared away the replacement of her Jeep tire. “I don’t think it is that bad in the Heights, but cross Cavalcade and Airline and they are another world.”
Drivers routinely have that specific spot that drives them crazy. For Hamil, it’s Westheimer, a street nearly every insidethe-Loop driver has grown to grumble about.
“I would avoid it until I turned on four-wheel drive on my Jeep,” Hamil said.
Those who cannnot avoid the problems find themselves dealing with them in the repair shop. At the Discount Tire on T.C. Jester, manager Brian Symcox said tire repairs have soared.
“We’ve seen an 8 to 10 percent increase in wheel replacements because of potholes,” Symcox said.
Outside the Discount Tire is an ever-changing memorial to the madness of Houston roads. A shipping container is loaded with popped tires and bent rims, all casualties of the carnage on the streets. There is a tire off a Ford truck that looks as if it has been shot, with a hole in the sidewall large enough for Symcox to push his finger through. There is a BMW rim perfectly round, except for the fist-size spot where the lip of the rim is punched in.
Every week, the pile of punctured tires and pounded rims is removed. And every week, more take their place.