Why Am I the Only Person Who’s Bothered by This?

Private Universities have a State Granted Exemption to Houston’s Drainage Fee.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker is now saying that churches and schools should be exempt from the City’s new drainage fees. What nobody’s talking about, is that private universities are already exempt from the drainage fee under state law. We will all have to pay $5 a month (more if we own businesses), but Rice University, the Baylor College of Medicine, the University of St. Thomas, and Houston Baptist University won’t have to pay a cent!

These are wealthy universities. Rice has an endowment of over $4 billion; the Baylor College of Medicine has almost $1.5 billion in endowment. HBU has $85 million. The University of St. Thomas has over $50 million in endowment, and it gets the backing of the Catholic Church. None of us has that kind of money, but we’ll have to pay the drainage fee and they won’t.

Endowments aren’t the whole story. Rice’s campus is 300 acres. HBU has 100 acres. The University of St. Thomas covers 19 city blocks. The Baylor College of Medicine covers a sizable portion of the Texas Medical Center. These are big pieces of land. They get rain. They use the City’s storm sewers and other infrastructure – but they won’t have to pay for it.

Remember, these are private universities. They don’t receive direct tax subsidies. They’re not like public universities or schools, where paying the drainage fee would amount to double taxation (Negligible amounts of double taxation, perhaps, but double taxation nonetheless.)

This strikes me as terribly unfair. We really should eliminate the private university exemption. If that doesn’t happen, then maybe City Hall could convince the leaders of these institutions to voluntarily pay the fees. I’m shocked that nobody else seems to be as bothered by it as I am.

Confusion on Both Sides

Why there are such bad fights over Low Income Housing in Houston

Last year, when a developer from North Carolina tried to build Tax Credit housing in Katy, I wrote about the need to use tax credits to fix existing housing rather than build new. It’s something I stand by, and we’re starting to see some movement in using tax credits to fix bad apartments here in Braeburn. But they’re at it again out in Katy. This time the company is from Indiana, but their proposal is basically the same as the one last year.

It can be really confusing for neighbors to understand what developers are doing. There are many different programs and types of housing for the poor. Usually termed "affordable housing," this can include:

- Public housing, which is owned and run by local governments with federal and sometimes state subsidies.

- Slums, which are privately owned and don’t benefit from tax subsidies or oversight, other than local building codes. These actually represent most of the affordable housing here in Houston.

- Tax Credit housing, (also known as “Low Income Housing.”) built by private developers using tax credits authorized by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program (LIHTC) from 1986. (This is also sometimes known as “Section 42 Housing.”) Basically, developers get breaks on their taxes if they set aside a certain number of apartments at below market rates, expressly for people making less than the area median income.

(You’ll notice I didn’t include “Section 8 housing”. Section 8 is a federal voucher program that fills the gap between local market rents, and what poor people can afford. It’s not actually a type of housing.)

Developers are confused too. When we neighbors fight their proposals, they get frustrated and call us names. But Houstonians aren’t racists. We don’t hate poor people. Our “NIMBYism” comes from the fact that we’ve borne the brunt of bad development for the past 40 years.

The problem started in the 1970s. Lots of people got very rich in that decade, developing apartments in Houston’s suburbs. Neighborhoods were fundamentally changed - at first for the better. Young professionals moved into the apartments, enjoying tennis courts, swimming pools, gyms, even night clubs and movie theaters. Crime rates remained steady. Real estate prices in neighborhoods near apartments actually went up in the 1970s.

Then came the oil-bust of the 1980s. Houston’s economy was hit especially hard. The apartment bubble of the 1970s, burst. One-by-one, apartment complexes fell into foreclosure and started to deteriorate. The deterioration continued through the 1980s and 1990s. Crime rates spiraled higher at apartments. Living conditions for tenants got worse. Property values stagnated around apartments.

Tropical Storm Allison flooded some apartments in 2001. More apartments were damaged during Hurricane Ike in 2008. The credit crisis made it impossible for landlords to fix their properties, so properties went from economically depressed, to completely derelict.

Now, whenever someone proposes affordable housing, we Houstonians immediately think “derelict property.” Of course it's not right to think this way. Low income housing can contribute to our neighborhoods if it is well-designed and well managed; and if it takes the place of slums or derelict property. But it's a hard-sell because of history. I just hope we can move past the confusion, and developers and neighbors can start working together to get the right investment, in the right locations.

Architects need to Tread Lightly on "BIM" - But Defiinitely Go There.

This is unique to my Civic Architect Blog in that it doesn’t directly affect neighborhoods. It is more related to my profession as an architect, and the kind of software that we’re starting to use: “Building Information Modelling” (or “BIM”). This came about because a friend of mine, a civic-minded engineer, co-authored “Visualize, Simulate, Fabricate” in Cite Magazine 87.

I’m not a member of the “BIM sucks” school of architects. BIM is more attuned than CAD to how architects should think – in 3 dimensions. BIM links design, visualization, and documentation. It promises to be hugely beneficial to the profession, and besides, it’s fun to use. But there are very real risks and concerns that firms must be aware of, before they dive head first into BIM.

• BIM won’t automatically detail everything correctly. Architects still need to review and redline their drawings. In fact, picking up redlines becomes more difficult because you can’t just change a detail to make it right, and coordinate the plans and elevations later. Details, plans, and elevations are interrelated, so it is painfully obvious if something’s not coordinated.
• Until BIM becomes the industry wide standard, firms will face a learning curve on it. New employees may not know BIM when they start with the firm. It’s a bad idea to throw someone who doesn’t know BIM into a huge, complex, half-finished project in BIM. It’s not fair to the employee or the others on the team; and more importantly it puts the project at risk. This has to be taken into account in project-staffing decisions.
• It is of utmost importance to find the right person to manage a firm’s BIM software. BIM software is incredibly complex, and it needs to be set up properly or it won’t work. Small firms need to contract-out with skilled BIM managers. Mid-sized firms need to make sure they always have someone on staff who really knows what they’re doing. Large firms need to establish BIM departments, with two or three people who know the software in-and-out.
  
• BIM is not a panacea. I keep asking “so, will BIM generate boilerplate specifications based on what I put in my model?” The answer I keep getting is ‘ummm, no.’ This is a huge part of the contract documents for a project, that BIM doesn’t do. Firms will still need to put together binders of cut-sheets, and write their project manuals in a word-processor.

Of course there are many virtues to BIM. I don’t think anyone denies those. Firms absolutely should move towards BIM, but I’m getting tired of articles like “Visualize, Simulate, Fabricate” that extol the virtues of BIM, without acknowledging the risks.

In closing I will apologize to my neighbors and friends who aren’t architects, but read this blog. This post is full of shop talk. I’ll make up for it later – I promise.

Budgets and Magnets - My Letter to HISD Board Member Mike Lunceford

Dear Mr. Lunceford:

In my capacity as Braeburn Super Neighborhood President, I attended both the Budget Conversation and the Magnet Discussion at Bellaire High School. I will, of course, write to my State Legislator and Senator to ask them not to cut school funding. But frankly I have much more faith in HISD than I do in anyone up in Austin. That’s why I’m writing to you first.

Allow me to reiterate what I said at the Magnet Discussion. School budgets are not a zero-sum game. Investment in schools pays off in increased property values around those schools. Increased property values mean more tax revenue for those schools. It might be tempting to slash budgets now. We may have no choice. But if it’s done in such a way that kills schools, it will actually mean less revenue in the long run.

According to the Budget Conversation, magnet funding is only 1% of HISD’s budget. Slashing magnets won’t solve HISD’s budget problems; and could in fact cost more money in the long run. It would be smarter to redouble cuts elsewhere in the budget, and increase funding to the magnets instead of cutting it.

Where should HISD cut? How could HISD raise more money? Maybe HISD could after alumni and parent donations, like private schools do. (There is a vast, untapped pool of HISD grads, parents, and concerned Houstonians who can help.) There are surely other, better ideas. Now is the time for creativity, and doing more with less. Our President summed it up best in his State of the Union Address: “we need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.”

Thank you for your consideration, and I am very happy that you were at the Magnet Discussion at Bellaire High School.

Kindest regards,

The Civic Architect

“Housing First” Goes to Los Angeles

A few months ago I wrote about the benefits of the “Housing First” concept for providing homeless services. The idea is that housing should be the first step in turning lives around. A stable apartment becomes an anchor that allows the homeless to treat addiction or mental illness, gain skills, and eventually find jobs. Now the method is being used in Los Angeles . The LA program is just for Veterans, but it’s a good place to start. And the numbers show that it’s working, despite critics.

As I pointed out in my original post, the “Housing First” model is not only a better way to provide services to the homeless; it could be hugely beneficial for neighborhoods. Rather than taking the homeless in for a few hours and then releasing them back onto the streets; “Housing First” will provide them with long-term homes along with intensive treatment and counseling. Neighbors can expect fewer problems related to the homeless.

Houston’s charities haven’t quite gotten to this level yet. Christian rapper Tre9 (whose real name is Bobby Herring) runs the Feed A Friend ministries in downtown Houston. The effort is all about food and outreach. They don’t do housing. The Beacon provides similar services on a larger scale – but they also do not provide housing. The Housing Corporation of Houston has the right idea about housing, but they don’t provide the breadth of services that the others do. (They also generally build in poor neighborhoods, and they don’t always reach out to those neighborhoods, but that’s a different story).

There is certainly a need for more housing for the homeless in Houston. Star of Hope’s downtown shelter regularly has people sleeping on the floor in their cafeteria. And housing is integral to the rebuilding of lives. If they can do it in Los Angeles; there’s no reason we can’t do it here in Houston. Hopefully we’ll see Houston’s first “housing first” project soon.