Audacious city deserves an audacious mayor

The Allen family thought big.

Young real estate touts from New York, Augustus, Charlotte and John Allen wooed would-be Houstonians to their brand-new settlement in faraway Texas with such felicitous terms as “handsome,” “beautifully elevated,” “salubrious” and “well-watered.”

It worked. Many packed up and moved to Houston, although many had to have questioned their good sense once they got here. A young fellow named John Dancy, for example, described the raw, new town as “one of the muddiest and most disagreeable places on earth,” as Jeffrey Stuart Kerr writes in his 2013 book “Seat of Empire.” Another newcomer, a young man named Granville Rose, jumped into Buffalo Bayou to escape swarming mosquitoes the size of grasshoppers, only to discover that the water was aboil with alligators. Frantically splashing his way to dry land, he came face to face with a panther.

And yet Rose and so many others stayed. Despite the mud, the mosquitoes, the periodic yellow fever epidemics, they built a city. Their successors through the years could be almost as audacious as the Allens, digging a 52-mile-long navigable ditch inland from the coast being one of the city’s many outsized achievements.

On the eve of a mayoral election nearly two centuries beyond Houston’s humble beginnings, we seek a leader.

In fact, we dare to hope for an audacious leader, a mayor who can manage the basics — trash pickup, street repair, balancing budgets and assuring public safety among them — and, at the same time, a mayor who has the ability and the inclination to look beyond. We envision a mayor who can imagine possibility, who can inspire Houstonians with a sense of what our big, sprawling, “salubrious” city can accomplish when we’re impelled by common dreams and a larger sense of who we can be.

Those are words, of course. They can be hollow, often are hollow when politicians summon a rousing finale to their campaign speeches. But they don’t have to be. Here are a few examples of what a big, bountiful, confident city can accomplish when it looks to the future:

• Climate change is coming, has come. According to a 2016 World Bank analysis, natural disasters fueled by climate change may cost cities worldwide $314 billion each year by 2030. Over 90% of all urban centers are located in coastal areas, which means that cities like Miami, New Orleans and, of course, Houston are especially vulnerable to storms that, as a result of climate change, are becoming more intense and severe. With a mayor’s dynamic leadership, Houston can show the nation, indeed the world, how to reconstruct a city to account for the new reality. We can be resilience pioneers as we cope with the inevitable.

• Around the world, people are on the move. For tangible evidence, look no farther than our southern border, where thousands every day seek to escape poverty and peril by somehow finding a place for themselves in a land of opportunity. Climate change is a major impetus, along with war and violence, political corruption and poverty. Houston, one of the most diverse cities in the country, can be more of a model than it already is as we welcome newcomers who have been forcibly displaced and integrate them into their new home. We can help them become Houstonians, even as they contribute their skills, talents and energy to the rich mix of a city that’s always in the making.

• A city whose wealth and prosperity, indeed its very existence, is the result of its century-old reliance on the fossil-fuel industry, is the city best equipped to lead the way through the inevitable transition to a clean-energy future. We have the skills, the experience and the infrastructure; we need a mayor who can assure Houston that change, however daunting, doesn’t have to be disastrous. We need a mayor who’s comfortable with big ideas, particularly when it comes to energy.

We’ve been fortunate the last several years. We’ve elected mayors who may have had their flaws, but who also excelled in one way or another. Bob Lanier, Houston’s last three-term mayor, comes to mind. A lawyer, businessman and political power broker — “I take to smoke-filled rooms the way a polar bear takes to ice,” he once told a reporter — Lanier torpedoed mass transit plans but he succeeded in cutting across party and ethnic divides. A few years later, Bill White combined his business sense and political acumen with moral clarity when Hurricane Katrina devastated our neighbors to the east. Annise Parker was obsessive about solving the hard stuff, including chronic homelessness. Sylvester Turner has brought a much-needed focus to pension funds and longneglected neighborhoods.

Elsewhere, we think of Henry Cisneros, San Antonio’s mayor during the 1980s. Smart, eloquent in two languages and a proud son of the city’s predominantly Hispanic West Side, Cisneros managed to win the support of a burgeoning progressive business community, neighborhood activists and the city’s Hispanic majority. In the words of a local political scientist, he “brought San Antonio into the 20th century, way late in the 20th century.”

We think of other great mayors, including New York City’s legendary Fiorello La Guardia, a progressive Republican who governed from 1934 to 1946 and who saw himself as the quintessential New Yorker (even though he was raised in Arizona). As mayor of all the people, “the Little Flower,” as he was known, fought organized crime, restored the city’s economy in the wake of the Great Depression and threw his support behind a state law banning discrimination based on race, creed, color or national origin. (He also took to the radio on Sunday mornings to read newspaper comics to the city’s children.)

Among more recent mayors, we think of Joseph P. Riley,

Jr., mayor of Charleston, S.C., for 10 terms, from 1975 to 2016. When he took office, downtown Charleston was dying and a racial divide made it difficult to get anything done. When he left office, Charleston had tripled in size, its historic downtown was alive with tourists and thriving businesses and racial antagonisms had subsided. The secret of his mayoral success, biographer Brian Hicks told the Chronicle editorial board, was his “boundless optimism.”

Houstonians themselves are swimming in the optimism. Yet Houston typically has gotten big things done through the years by relying on mayors working jointly with public-private partnerships and benevolent billionaires. No mayor that we can recall has relied on the eloquence of a Cisneros, the mutual affection of a La Guardia, the unflagging hope and persistence of a Riley. None has rallied this great city in support of a vision — a tangible, workable vision — of a city even greater than the irrepressible Allen brothers could have imagined.

Frankly, we’re not sure that the inspiring candidate we believe the city needs is on the ballot this time around, however capable several of the candidates seem to be. Driving through various neighborhoods, we don’t see signs popping up like mushrooms for any particular candidate. We heard few intense conversations, for or against. Several on the ballot are competent and experienced — very, very experienced, in fact — but they’re not inspiring.

Still, we can always hope. Elected officials have been known to rise to the occasion. Those Allen boys who got this city going in the first place would expect no less.

Houston’s leader must manage the basics and accomplish big dreams.