URBAN SPRAWL

June 15, 2001
Houston Endowment Offices
Houston, Texas

David Crossley, president of the Gulf Coast Institute, gave a presentation on the challenges of sprawl in Houston and other low-density towns, and the possible answers in Smart Growth, Livable Communities, and New Urbanism.

He began by saying that the US had conducted a 50-year experiment, unprecedented in America and not explored elsewhere, with suburban, car-centered, low-density development that segregated uses, races, and economic classes and reduced the kind of exchange and community that many people seek in a city.

He noted the strong support in votes and polls for alternative modes of development:

• 80% of over 400 US ballot initiatives within the last three years had been approved for buying open space,

• 77% of polled Americans want tax dollars to acquire open space and protect wildlife;

• 83% of surveyed Americans want more protection of green space, farming and forest zones;

• 81% of questioned Americans said that public dollars should go to sustaining existing communities, not building new suburban ones;

• 70% of Americans who were asked said that they were unhappy with the suburb where they lived, but had bought there for lack of an alternative.

Mr. Crossley said that there were some clear measures that could improve a city’s density and liveability, including protecting and planting trees, bringing buildings closer to the street, adding mass transit, and relying more on grid-based layouts rather than isolated cul de sacs. Numerous cities and even states are already developing in less sprawling ways, including

• Portland, which has revived its downtown in a pedestrian-friendly way;

• Denver, which is recreating Stapleton airport as a bunch of villages crossed by a riparian corridor;

• Atlanta, which has established a regulatory committee that can approve or reject mall plans;

• Dallas, whose DART mass transit program has been a great success;

• Austin, which is redeveloping its Mueller Airport and inner-city Guadalupe Triangle in more dense and sustainable ways;

• San Antonio, whose mayor is trained as a planner, and who is leading the city to adopt Unified Development Code; and

• Maryland, which now withholds state matching funds from areas that do not yet have infrastructure in place.

Mr. Crossley hopes that Houston adopts some Smart Growth precepts, since the current pattern of sprawl has a number of downsides, from the loss of forest, the creation of ozone, the worsening of flooding and traffic, to the loss of potential visitors and new workers. Fortunately, he sees a number of positive measures and groups growing in Houston, including the Center for Houston’s Future, Connecting the Visions, Project Row House, City Green, the Strategic Transportation Plan, Houston Green, the Smart Growth Initiative, and others. He is particularly excited by the Gulf Coast Institute’s recent hiring of a GIS expert, who will provide maps and other information to help guide these efforts. These groups’ proposals for a compact city should get a good reception: Ken Lay reported that over 60% of Enron’s 2000 new hires want to live downtown, and Mr. Crossley pointed out that there’s plenty of room there and within the loop (25% of the land inside 610 is undeveloped).

Mr. Crossley urged grantmakers to join the Funders' Network for Smart Growth, so that these sustainable community ideas could be used as an overlay for all sorts of philanthropic projects, from museums to hospitals.

Questions and Answers

Q: How can competing interests be resolved, between pressures to revitalize downtown and other efforts to build planned amenities in surburbia, such as the Woodlands and Kingwood? Mr. Crossley said that Houston was not yet a mature city and its ultimate form was unclear, but that he could visualize Houston as a network of many town centers, rather than an undifferentiated sprawl radiating from a downtown. He said that he did hope that the future held some defined place(s) for the exchange of love, money, and art that attracts people to cities. He added that Price Waterhouse had recently dubbed the traditional dense cities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston as the best places for investment, and had redlined the newer more sprawling cities of Houston and Atlanta as less attractive.

Q: Are there good sources of information about sustainable neighborhoods for young families to settle in? He said that the Post property at Webster and Gray is one promising site, and others might appear on a new website, www.houstonneighborhoods.net. In general, he thought that suburbia had lost a good deal of its appeal, since HISD schools typically matched the performance of outer ring schools, and many people who’d settled in the city’s outskirts had soon realized that the open space and quiet had soon been replaced by other development and busy traffic.

Q: Are there any instances of the successful survival of mixed-income historic sections of downtowns? In Austin, gentrification had recast downtown pretty dramatically. Mr. Crossley said that this was a weak point for many smart growth plans – often lower income apartments and homes in inner-city redevelopments quickly became bid up, and became unavailable.

Q: Had Mr. Crossley gotten many calls since the great Houston flood of June 2001 attributing it to sprawl? He said that he had, and that the billions of dollars in damage and the crippling of the Medical Center and downtown skyscrapers had gotten many people’s attention.

One funder recalled that there had been a great hue and cry about flooding in the mid-1980s and a promise to build detention ponds to relieve runoff. Unfortunately, there had been little follow-through, and flooding had continued and perhaps worsened.