Two excellent stories

I read two articles today that really made me happy.

First, there was an excellent article about Commuter Rail in Cite Magazine. Author and new Metro board member, Christof Spieler says “Rather than rush ahead with a system based on preconceived, often faulty assumptions [about transit] and driven by political urgency, we need to engage in a discussion about what we want to accomplish and how best to do that.”

Mr. Spieler is absolutely right. Metro needs to have an honest dialogue about its transit system. I would hope that includes average Houstonians. Neighbors should be asked “where do you travel to and from? How do you get there? If you drive, what’s keeping you from taking transit?” I’ll bet the answers would be surprising, and very informative about how to improve transit in our city.

Also today, Mayor Annise Parker announced her new choices for City Attorney and director of the City’s Department of Housing and Community Development (David Feldman and James Noteware respectively). The choices weren’t as interesting as what the Mayor said: “We can put more housing out for more people if we upgrade the multi-family housing we have and we do whatever we need to do to remove the really terrible multi-family apartment complexes in our city that drag down the neighborhoods around them.” I’ve been advocating for this all along; most recently in this thread on HAIF. It’s a relief to have a Mayor that understands.

There are three caveats on this. First, apartments need periodic reinvestment or they deteriorate. It’s not enough to just upgrade apartments and then walk away. Sooner or later, they’ll be back where they started. Second, like Mr. Spieler said about transit – we need to carefully study which apartments are demolished and which are upgraded. Neighborhood Protection has data on the worst apartments; the Department of Housing and Community Development should use that data. Third, they need to do these things in ways that are welcomed by neighbors; not in ways that anger neighbors. This last piece may be the most difficult of all.

These are two very important things. Houston really needs good transit. We absolutely must replace slums with quality, affordable housing for working people. It will be very interesting to see where these two initiatives go.

Good News! The "$50,000 Club" Doesn't Exist in Houston.

The Boston Globe ran a piece about New England Colleges that are in “the $50,000 club”. If you want to study at these schools, and you pay full-fare – it will total over $50,000 a year. Schools include Harvard (of course), Boston University, Boston College, and Wellesley among others.

So, how did Houston’s universities do? I did some research and found out:

Rice University: $44,841

University of Saint Thomas: $42,530

Texas Southern University: $32,068 (non-residents)

Houston Baptist University: $27,400

The University of Houston: $21,994 (non-residents)

Of course few people pay full-fare to go to college. For most, the price tag is greatly reduced by financial aid packages.

Still, Houston should be very proud of these numbers. Our best universities are, on the whole, less expensive than Boston’s. I’ll bet you’d find similar savings if you compared us to New York or Los Angeles. This means a lot for our economy and our future.

Let's Fix What We've Got - The Right Answer to Low Income housing in Houston.

There’s a debate raging in Katy. A company from Charlotte, North Carolina has applied for low income housing tax credits through the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA). The housing project is actually slated to be built just outside the Katy City Limits, but residents of Katy are rightly afraid of the impact it will have on their community. Neighbors to the project aren’t the only ones who should oppose it.

Houston’s affordable housing has been allowed to deteriorate. In some neighborhoods (Gulfton; Alief), apartments that were built for the middle class, now house the poor. These apartments were developed 30 years ago, with life-spans of 30 years. They are in dire need of repair or replacement, but there's little money available to do it. In other neighborhoods (Sunnyside; Acres Homes) poor homeowners desperately need help to repair older houses; but the programs available to them are inadequate.

There is a finite amount of resources available for low income housing. Every dollar that’s spent to build new low income housing, is a dollar that can’t be spent elsewhere. We owe it to ourselves to demand that those funds be used to repair existing affordable housing.

If you want to help, there will be a hearing for the project near Katy. It will be held at the Houston City Hall Annex (900 Bagby) on April 7, at 6 PM.

Reassuring Answers to a Bothersome Question

I was lucky enough to attend the Citizens Environmental Coalition’s “Green Neighborhoods for Green Buildings” symposium last week.

The moderator was a fellow architect and Super Neighborhood President – David Robinson, President of the Neartown / Montrose Super Neighborhood. The speakers were Houston Tomorrow President David Crossley; Jeff Taebel with the Houston-Galveston Area Council (and the author of Livable Centers), and Brian Crimmins, Senior Planner with the City of Houston’s Planning Department.

The Houston-Galveston metropolitan area is set to gain 3.5 million people in the next 25 years, and that means a lot of things. Average Houstonians are right to be concerned about what’s coming. They should ask questions ike: will my neighborhood be demolished to make way for dense development? Will that new development push flooding onto my street? What about other urban problems – noise, traffic, crime….? What if it goes the other way, and my neighborhood is passed-over for new development?

In the Q&A portion of the symposium, I asked: “As Houston grows, do we risk turning our back on post-war neighborhoods?”

The answer was a reassuring ‘no’. First, according to Jeff Taebel, they want to make all of Houston livable; not just the neighborhoods where it’s easy. It may be more difficult to bring the dense, walkable urban core model to a post-war neighborhood; but they’re going to try.

The second answer came from Houston Tomorrow President David Crossley. Basically it’s that neighborhoods know best what type of development should go where. If neighborhood groups are proactive and vocal, we should be able to direct development to where we want it.

I’ve always been skeptical of Houston’s urbanists, because I'm afraid that the parts of Houston that fit the New Urbanist vision will get all the attention; while large swaths of the City will be neglected. The “Green Neighborhoods for Green Buildings” symposium helped a lot with my skepticism. I'm very interested to see how things pan out.

Crime Has Been Lost in Urban Discourse. We need to bring it back.

Seattle is a model of urbanism. The City scores high in the walkability rankings, and they pioneered many urban policies that other cities have followed. Houston Tomorrow actually brought a speaker in from Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, to see what we could learn from them. But last week video surfaced of Aiesha Steward-Baker being brutally attacked in one of Seattle’s bus tunnels.

The relationship between urbanism and crime is not new. Oscar Newman wrote “Creating Defensible Space” in 1974. Jane Jacobs talked about it even earlier. But nobody seems to talk about it any more. I searched for ‘crime’ on two of Houston’s urbanism websites. Houston Tomorrow had just one article that directly addressed crime and urbanism. NeoHouston had an article with a picture of Andrew Burleson climbing a fence. A Google search was a little more fruitful, but not much.

In the absence of educated discourse, people have developed pretty far-fetched ideas on crime and urbanism, and cities have stopped listening to neighborhood crime concerns.

The far-fetched ideas aren’t worth going into. But neighborhood crime concerns are. A perfect example is happening in Northeast Houston. The City is building a bridge to connect the Songwood and Wood Bayou neighborhoods. People in Wood Bayou support the bridge. It will unite the two neighborhoods and make them both more walkable. People from Wood Bayou will have easier access to Brown Park. But people in Songwood are fighting the bridge because they fear it will bring crime to their neighborhood. Nobody is working on ways to help with Songwood’s crime concerns while also giving Wood Bayou the access they need. They’re just building a bridge.

We could change this if we bring crime back to our discussions on urbanism. Aiesha Steward-Baker was attacked in a bus tunnel in one of America’s most forward-thinking urban cities. If that isn’t reason enough, what is?