One Small Step for Anti-Sprawl, One Giant Leap for Houston Economic Development?

Big houses. Big cars. Big hair. Welcome to Texas: the state where “everything is bigger” – including big dreams of turning absolutely nothing into empires.  No city more accurately embodies this spirit than my hometown of Houston.

The fourth largest city in the U.S., Houston is largely known for being the epicenter of the energy industry, home to NASA and site of one of the largest hospital districts in the world.  The city boasts assets like the Houston Ship Channel, which allows oil and petrochemical tankers easy access to local refineries (the city has the largest concentration of oil refineries in the world).

Houston is also a major immigrant hub from cities across the globe. One little known fact: Outside of California, Houston is the largest home to Vietnamese immigrants in the country.  As a result, the city has a dynamic, cosmopolitan culture that has resulted in a diverse local economy that is the envy of much of the rest of the country.

But for every positive thing about Houston, another challenge exists. 

Houston also has a warranted reputation for being crowded and polluted.  According to The American Lung Association, Houston has some of the nation’s dirtiest air. And that air can get really hot, too.  Squelching temperatures are another characteristic of this southern city. 

But perhaps the greatest hurdle that Houston must overcome is a problem that it has brought upon itself—sprawl.

Houston, like many other post-WWII cities, was developed on the basis that land was cheap. This made it easy for real estate developers to build horizontally, rather than vertically like we’d see in our older, dense cities where land is hard to come by.

In Texas, the price of land was a nonissue when building these new-age cities. Harris County, where Houston is located, has a land area bigger than the state of Rhode Island. The result is a geographically vast city where residents drive everywhere. Sure, public transit exists—but it has not been well-executed in terms of either needs or efficiency and as a result, is underutilized by the locals.  

As a native of Houston, it was not until 3.5 years ago when I moved to Boston that I began to really understand the impact of living in such a sprawled city. Boston, in many ways, could be viewed as Houston’s antithesis.  In Boston, there's no good Mexican food, only dismal college football weather that freezes tears to your face. More importantly, I was stunned to realize the lack of density in Houston.

Houston, a city with nearly 2.1 million people, has merely 3,600 residents per square mile. Boston, a city 1/6 the square mileage of Houston, has a population density close to 19,000 residents per square mile. It wasn’t until I moved to such a dense city that I began to recognize the importance of density in our cities.

Density allows me to live closer to where I work. Living in one part of the inner city, and working in another, commuting is a breeze—a commute that I can take by subway, because high population density makes public transit more feasible. As the price of gasoline continues to rise, I’m all the more thankful that I live in a dense city where I no longer need to drive from point A to point B. The fact that Houston has the 15^th longest average commute in the United States is no longer lost on me.

Observations such as these have apparently reverberated within Houston, because change seems to be on the horizon. As the Houston Chronicle highlighted last week, the Houston City Council has voted for changes to the city’s development codes that will allow for more townhomes and multi-family properties to be build within the 610 loop towards downtown Houston. 

Any move to combat Houston’s problem of sprawl should be heralded. For Houston, this could be a giant leap toward new urban economic development possibilities.

In cities where the vast majority of the population must drive to work, long and expensive commutes can be highly problematic towards future economic growth. Housing that is closer to work would shorten commute times, lessen our dependence on oil, put money back in to residents’ paychecks, and help cities reduce their carbon footprints.

Such a change would also be beneficial to local urban businesses. Gridlock makes it nearly impossible for a person to travel from one side of Houston to the other for business purposes. As a result, people primarily shop in their own sections of the city, thereby limiting the markets inner city businesses are able to serve.  As density increases, it makes small businesses more accessible to the population.

As a place to live, Houston is one of our country’s forgotten gems.  While usually thought of as a massive collection of highways and strip centers, Houston also has green space as aesthetically pleasing as anything I have seen in Boston.  Memorial and Hermann Parks are located just outside of downtown, close to where the proposed development would likely take place.  This is an exciting opportunity for Houston.  Similar cities should take note to identify how similar development would change the landscape of their urban areas.

Tell about how your city is developing dense geographies.  What are the small business implications in your community?  How will this affect the long-term health of your hometown’s economy?

BY Alex Rodriguez on January 9th, 2012

TAGS: houston | sprawl | economic development | density | transit | business