Tomball works to preserve its small-town feel amid booming growth
Tomball is the rare Houston suburb with a true Main Street, a treelined strip with stores that local folks own. There’s a music hall, rustic furniture emporium, saddlery and Ricca Boot Shop, which has made custom footwear for 39 years.
But like other places on the urban edge, Tomball is changing rapidly. So its leaders, hoping to hold onto a sense of place, are looking at ways to bring visual harmony to the 3-mile corridor before unsightly strip malls and metal industrial buildings overwhelm the northwest Harris County city.
One option is to require brick façades for new and renovated buildings along FM 2920, or Main Street — a small touch but a big change for a regulation-averse place.
“I want to maintain the small-town character so that it doesn’t just become another thoroughfare,” said Denise Davis, who owns an insurance agency on Main Street and lives in Tomball. “There aren’t too many places like it that are left.”
Tomball’s new focus on Main Street follows the old notion that appearances matter. To energize communities and local economies, several Texas cities — from Richmond to Bastrop to Mineola — are pouring millions of dollars into the preservation of their historic commercial districts, while others are employing strong design and planning policies to make their neighborhoods prettier.
Being finicky
The Woodlands, the booming Montgomery County enclave, is wellknown for being finicky about its look because of its exhaustive covenants and restrictions. In Fort Bend County, rapidly growing Fulshear requires at least 90 percent of street-facing exteriors to be brick or stone, while Sugar Land’s design standards fill 252 pages.
But the approach isn’t for everyone. Houston doesn’t utilize zoning or design standards, while Katy is trying to preserve an authentic look to its city center without the rigid rules of Cinco Ranch, the neighboring master-planned community. Just last year, a Katy board proposed regulating the appearance of new and renovated commercial buildings — with a desire for storefronts in earth and sky tones and the use of brick and stone — but the plan was shelved.
Tomball, which has a population of more than 11,000, already has design standards for a few blocks of Main Street known as Old Town. But beyond those borders, it’s a development hodgepodge — banks, tire shops, fast-food restaurants, U-Haul dealers and motels.
New shopping centers, meanwhile, have sprouted up along Texas 249, which cuts a north-south path through Tomball and might be extended in the future to connect Houston and College Station.
City Council began to talk about tidying up Main Street after being asked to expand fee waivers for new development beyond Old Town. The emerging consensus: the city should demand higher-quality buildings for the wider use of incentives, city planner Harold Ellis said.
The hope is that Main Street will become a more attractive gateway for the city. Most of the property is already developed, so it will take time before the street is fully transformed, he said.
Ellis, who previously worked as a planner in Pearland and Sugar Land, plans to present possible design standards to the council in August.
“We won’t see results overnight,” Ellis said. “We don’t know when the land will be redeveloped. There’s more vacant land to the east, so we might see it there first.”
Tomball would start the beautification process with an advantage, of sorts — there is not much in the way of historic architecture. Many Main Street buildings were built in the middle of the 20th century, making it easier for new construction to blend with existing structures, said Stephen Fox, a historian at Rice University’s School of Architecture.
In contrast, Old Humble is an example of how small towns in Texas looked more than a 100 years ago, while Galveston’s Strand features building designs from the Victorian era.
Fox said Tomball’s Main Street reminds him of Rice Village, with its one-story buildings, sidewalks and parking along the street and behind stores.
“Design standards will create coherence,” he said, adding that the city also should invest in trees and other plants, sidewalks and public spaces along Main Street. New rules and public investment could draw more people to the thoroughfare.
“Towns lose their sense of place and identity when businesses gravitate to highways,” Fox said.
End to stereotype
Bruce Hillegeist, president of the Greater Tomball Chamber of Commerce, said some merchants might see new standards as “big brother telling us to do this or that.” But design policies would help Tomball to compete for businesses and residents by putting an end to the stereotype of it as the scruffy neighbor of The Woodlands.
“We have to look the part,” Hillegeist said.
At the same time, he said, the city should keep and maintain the things that make it special, like a Main Street that’s more representative of rural Texas than metropolitan Houston.
“It will be a challenge to keep a hometown flavor as the area grows,” Hillegeist said. “Bellaire used to be apart from Houston, but now you can’t tell where it begins and ends. We want to maintain Tomball as a unique place.”