IT’S TIME FOR THE FOURTH ERA
A lousy pedestrian environment adds to Houston’s reputation as an ‘un-city’ among urban planners
If ever there was a city that seemed to undermine the idea that place and prosperity are intertwined, it is Houston. Throughout almost all of the city's history, prosperity has not been a problem — even when, as during the Depression, it's been a problem for the rest of the country.
As my colleague Stephen Klineberg is fond of saying, the line on Houston during its '80s oil boom was, “You could dress a gorilla up in a suit, send him downtown, and he'll be a millionaire in a week.”
And while Houston has some well-known high-amenity neighborhoods, place was rarely viewed as being high on the list of priorities. By “place,” I don't just mean a location — I mean the sense of belonging you get when you are in a location that has distinctive characteristics you can relate to, such as architecture, trees or amenities such as shops and restaurants. A place speaks to you as a location where you want to be, not just a location where you are.
Houston is rich but utilitarian. What other city would tolerate an at-grade railroad crossing in its most affluent neighborhood? River Oaks was built with a freight rail line along its western edge and posh apartments now line the other side. Like Los Angeles, Houston is designed as a driving city. Even if you wanted
to, you really can’t walk down the street because the sidewalks are so narrow, cracked or simply nonexistent.
As the name of my new book of essays — “Place And Prosperity ”— suggests , I have always believed that the two concepts are deeply intertwined. A city or town probably won’t be prosperous unless it has lots of place amenities — things that draw people to the location like parks, good schools, restaurants and stores, cultural institutions, walkable neighborhoods. And a city or town probably can’t afford all those amenities unless it is prosperous.
And throughout my life, I’ve tried to seek out strong places, often in search of my own prosperity.
My hometown in upstate New York had a very strong sense of place, but larger economic forces limited opportunity for me. I lived in high-amenity locations in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. In Ventura, Calif., I found a location that provided me with both a sense of place and access to prosperity for 25 years. In San Diego, I lived in Little Italy — one of the most compelling urban places anywhere in the country.
Then I moved to Houston.
Sharing amenities
I can still remember when I first got scared as a pedestrian in Houston.
As I’ve written before, it was a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2017, and I was at the intersection of Waugh and West Dallas in Montrose. When the light changed, I got the walk signal, and I stepped off the curb. First, a car making a right turn from southbound Waugh onto westbound West Dallas cut me off by a foot or two. Then a car making a left turn from northbound Waugh onto westbound West Dallas did the same. When I finally made it to the other side of the street, I felt myself shaking. I haven’t been the same since.
Street-level design is central to a strong sense of place, and throughout Houston, street design is ordinary at best.
The Texas Medical Center, for example, has an employment density comparable to London or Sydney — but it is notorious for its lousy pedestrian environment.
That’s part of the reason why Houston has a reputation among urban planners as not a city but an un-city. In other words, despite some areas having the density of high-rises block after block, there isn’t much street life, or at least the kind that’s enjoyable.
And yet.
Houston has challenged me as an urbanist unlike any other city I’ve ever encountered.
It’s made me question everything I have ever believed about place and prosperity and the relationship between the two. It’s an exciting mishmash of people, cultures and activity, even if most everybody goes from one place to another in a car. As in Los Angeles, its best neighborhoods are truly great. It’s a city of dense business districts: TMC (for all its faults), Uptown, the Energy Corridor. Remember where the gorilla had to go to become a millionaire: downtown.
And people do walk. Just not on the streets.
They walk along the bayous — perhaps the nation’s most impressive set of linear parks — in enormous numbers, though most of this walking is for recreation, not to get anywhere in particular. And they walk all the time to get from one place to another through the tunnels downtown and the skywalks in the TMC. (Really, what other city would actually have tours of their skywalks and tunnels?)
There’s little question that in the future, Houston will have to become more urban — and more amenity-rich in an urban way — to compete with other cities for the best talent.
Up to now, it hasn’t been hard to attract folks to live in Houston. If you wanted to get rich in a week (like the gorilla), where else would you go? If you were a petroleum engineer, where would you go? But as Houston’s economy diversifies — and as the energy industry becomes more dependent on technology talent — the city finds itself in competition with Seattle, San Francisco, New York, D.C., and other hot cities.
And there’s no question that Houston’s urban amenities must be spread around more equitably so that everyone can thrive.
Houston may be one of the nation’s most prosperous cities, but it is also one of the most inequitable, and that inequity is baked into the city’s geography of neighborhoods.
As gentrification creeps across historically African American and Hispanic neighborhoods, the city has to find ways not only to increase urban amenities but to ensure that all share in those amenities. Dealing with gentrification is a tricky business, but Houston is a can-do city.
I believe all these goals can be furthered if we knit the city together more tightly in ways that help connect neighborhoods so they are not so dependent on the car.
A few years ago, Charles Birnbaum of The Cultural Landscape Foundation came to town and presented an interesting idea: that Houston’s built environment was moving into a third era.
The first was the era of infrastructure: the freeways of the 1950s and ’60s. The second was the era of monuments: the office buildings of the ’80s. Now we are in an era of “natural connectivity,” as we improve and connect the bayous with great linear parks.
We need to move into a fourth era, where we truly connect our amenities across the city — and with our business districts — in a way we have not done before.
Miracles of place
Despite my fear of walking these days — partly because of my eyesight, partly because of the way Houstonians drive — for me it is a short and easy walk to most of the things I need on a daily basis, including restaurants, the drugstore and even Houston’s most prominent liquor store. My wife and I live 1 mile away from Minute Maid Park, where the Astros play, and Toyota Center, where the Rockets play and Beyoncé sings.
Indeed, living without a car and the ability to drive, I often reflect on how I manage to get around. I use the light-rail train, which runs every six minutes, and the bus, which runs every 15 minutes. I use Uber and Lyft on a regular basis. Before I stopped driving, I regularly traveled and shopped using Zipcar, a by-the-hour car rental service with many locations in my neighborhood. For my regular business trips to Austin, I have my choice of several private intercity bus services, all of which begin their trip within walking distance of my house.
Quite literally, none of these options existed at the start of this century — not even the 15-minute headways for the bus. As a city-oriented person to begin with, and now one who cannot drive, I could not have lived the life I now have as recently as 2000.
The miracle of cities — indeed, the miracle of place — works to my advantage even here in Houston, seemingly the most suburban of cities. It doesn’t work for everybody — Houston is as inequitable as it is prosperous — but the possibility is there for the first time in many decades.
To be successful in the future — and to be a city that works for everybody — Houston will have to improve its quality of place and connect that quality to its prosperity in a whole new way. It’s time to turn the un-city into a city.
Bill Fulton was the mayor of Ventura, Calif., from 2009 to 2011 and was the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University from 2014 to
2022. A version of this story appeared on the institute’s Urban Edge blog. Fulton will be discussing his latest book, “Place and Prosperity” (Island Press, 2022), at Brazos Bookstore at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 6.