The solution to Houston’s development problems

David Crossley, Oct 02, 07.

Tagged with urban planning, form based code

It looks like we've finally found the building project that lights a fire among citizens to do something about the City of Houston's outmoded development rules. The prospect of a 23-story tower (with the first six floors being a parking garage) towering over suburban backyards adjacent to Bissonnet has sparked a flurry of news stories, including an article in Sunday's Houston Chronicle that brings up zoning as a possible solution.

Zoning is not, however, the solution. We already have the solution, and it is known as "form-based code." The Chronicle article mentions it as a possibility, but fails to note that Houston's development code, Chapter 42 of the code of ordinances, is already full-fledged form-based code. It's just really awful form-based code.

The Planning Commission suffers this kind of fight almost weekly, and almost always the citizens leave in a frustrated huff, told that there's nothing anybody can do to save their neighborhood.

The solution lies in a fundamental fix to Chapter 42 that is simple in concept, followed by a major overhaul of the regulations themselves to respond to the fix.

Chapter 42 divides the City of Houston into two areas: "urban" and "suburban." The definition of urban in the ordinance is "the area included within and bounded by Interstate Highway 610." Suburban is then defined as "an area of the city or its extraterritorial jurisdiction that is not an urban area."

This is a powerful delineation, because it allows the City to set up two different sets of development regulations for the two areas. While the regulations themselves are not very useful, the biggest problem is that the definition of urban as the area inside the Loop is purely nonsensical. In Chapter 42, Afton Oaks is urban and Uptown/Galleria is suburban. The Gulfton/Sharpstown area, which is the densest area in Texas, is suburban, but River Oaks is urban.

Urban and suburban simply do not mean what the Code implies. Urban has characteristics like density, commercial services, walkability, often high-capacity transit service, and larger building forms closer together. Suburban means less than urban, in the sense that buildings are somewhat further apart, less dense, with few if any commercial amenities, and generally are residential (although a place like Manhattan's upper east side, which is mostly residential, is also clearly urban, so the two terms do not necessarily mean residential vs non-residential).

The Heights and Montrose were developed as suburbs to the Central Business District. Entrepreneurs established within each of those developments clusters of stores and similar commercial places to serve the immediate neighborhoods. These urban places were largely established at the stations of the massive streetcar system that Houston developed around. So there are urban places scattered throughout both the Heights and Montrose suburbs.

In the accompanying aerial photograph of the area between Main Street and Uptown/Galleria it is absolutely clear where the urban places are and where the suburban places are. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Loop.

If Council were to redefine "urban" and "suburban" to mean what they actually mean, it could then revise the Code to describe the kinds of development that go into each area. Hundreds of these problems would become much more manageable. It would not be reasonable, for instance, to define the corner of Ashby and Bissonnet as urban. So urban building forms would be inappropriate there, as Mayor White and many others are saying.

This distinction is easy to see if you consider the West Ave project and everything else that is happening around Kirby at Westheimer, and its adjacent neighborhoods. Clearly, the intersection and Kirby itself, to the south, are already urban and are becoming much more so. But Virginia Street and Ferndale and everything else extending away from that intersection are clearly suburban. That is entirely appropriate, and for the Code not to recognize that and give protection to such neighborhoods is the cause of the enormous amount of friction in our City. Urban areas of many scales usually have suburban areas around them, and likewise a great suburban neighborhood has a nearby urban center or edge.

Essentially, almost all neighborhoods in the pre-1950 parts of Houston have both urban and suburban areas. If we could recognize that, we could both protect the suburban parts and allow the urban parts to develop more densely, bringing services and amenities to those neighborhoods that they might not have today.

A second problem with the code is that the regulations for the urban area are decidedly suburban in character, and require developers like those for Regent Square, Boulevard Place, and West Ave to seek variances, and for the Planning Commission to spend inordinate amounts of time with such issues. It is why Midtown has been so frustrated with the building form that CVS uses there, with CVS defending itself by saying, correctly, that they are following the Code.

Form-based code does not prohibit or require any particular use of land, as zoning does. However, it does make judgments about many form issues, such as setbacks, curb cuts, building heights, building density, and many other elements. Used properly, it would be up to Council to determine those distinctions between the form in the suburban parts of neighborhoods and the form in their urban parts. There is extensive American experience with these distinctions today.

Ideally, we might see situations where a busy intersection like Alabama and Kirby allows high-rise commercial and residential with retail, while the backs of those blocks allow midrises and then townhouses, and the next blocks back allow only single-family dwellings. This creates a neighborhood of diverse lifestyles. There are many highly successful examples of this form in America, and one of their true benefits is they protect the older suburban parts of the neighborhood, while allowing growth that is appropriate for commercial intersections and streets.

Urban and suburban distinctions are fine-grained decisions that must be made at the neighborhood level. They are not words that usefully describe areas somehow divided by a freeway. I have heard a high City official say that is it policy to densify inside the Loop but not outside. If this is true, it is spectacularly bad public policy. I doubt that the people who live in the quiet suburban areas inside the Loop would agree with that strategy. As a Montrose resident who lives on a suburban street, I take great objection to that strategy. However, there are many places in the Montrose that can be labeled as urban, and those would improve the richness of my neighborhood if they could achieve better urban form.

Urban style development is most appropriate where there is good transit service. In 2012, we will see such service available at about 55 stations, all of which should begin to display some degree of density. Some of those places, like Greenway Plaza, are already enormous and growing. But so far, almost all of the new urban developments are happening away from transit stations. So even if these developments are generally appropriate, such as the Kirby at Westheimer project, they are going to create traffic congestion and they are going to do nothing to support our $2 billion dollar investment in new transit.

This implies that the first places to try out these rational definitions of urban and suburban are the 55 transit stations. But something also has to happen to prevent intense urban development from occurring in places where it is clearly inappropriate.

I have been assured by a knowledgeable land use attorney that using the code for these form-based purposes is within the law. We actually do this now, but we have badly defined urban and suburban, on the one hand, and prescribed regulations for each that don't make sense, particularly for the urban part.

While I said that the solution was simple in concept, it's also obvious that a significant amount of public process would be required to determine the interfaces between urban and suburban. But this would be just a fraction of the angry, recurring public mayhem that goes on today. Such an intense new process would result in a comprehensive approach to preserving and improving neighborhoods. Chapter 42 is Houston's most powerful tool for both protecting suburban neighborhoods and allowing urbanity, and it can be used to produce a future we all care about.

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