David Crossley

Sprawling across the prairie

President, Houston Tomorrow, Mar 23, 09.

Our job now is to imagine a Houston future without the vast prairie, then to try to envision miles of obliteration surging through the Columbia hardwood bottomland, across the Piney Woods, across Bayou wilderness, then through the coastal marshes, disturbing the natural flooding of the Brazos River as it rises out of its banks to cleanse the estuaries that nurture shrimp, crabs, fish.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) says that to open these areas up for development, the Grand Parkway will blaze a 400-foot wide, 180-mile long trail through six ecosystems, breaking the web of life in the richest ecoregion in North America. TxDOT will give stimulus money to Harris County to start building out the segment E of the Parkway for that reason. Harris County Commissioners are eager to do so, repeatedly voting for the project.

A huge developer named General Growth, said to be “on the brink” of bankruptcy, tells us they can’t build out their 11,400-acre Bridgeland subdivision if we don’t use our stimulus dollars to build them a 400-foot roadway out there.

There used to be an attempted transportation argument that Segment E was needed to connect I-10 and 290 to relieve congestion on 290. Of course, it’s not clear why a road that just connects those two highways needs 12 intersections in it, all dumping into the basically unpopulated Katy Prairie.

Increasingly, though, the talk is about how the region will “get out in front of growth,” and it will do that by building another loop road out in those sensitive ecosystems. The type of growth envisioned is identified by Roger Hord, president of the West Houston Association, who told the New York Times “Our interest is to encourage what we call quality growth.” The Times story then says “He said that an existing leg of the Grand Parkway, just to the south of the proposed leg, would give a sense of what the new stretch of the Grand Parkway might look like when it is done. The existing stretch is lined with strip malls and gas stations and drug stores and a huge 7,600-acre residential development.”

Generally, that is what is everywhere called sprawl, a type of development begun in the 1940s by public officials through transportation policies and spending. Many, including the current President of the United States, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the Secretary of Transportation, now believe, as the President flatly said, “The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over.”

It isn’t clear who’s leading who here, but TxDOT appears to see itself as the land use planner for the State’s metropolitan regions, determining which areas to “open up” for development. A growing list of elected and other public officials in the Houston region have agreed to the program, yet no amendment, resolution, referendum, or ballot item has ever asked for a vote on whether to subsidize another generation of car-dependent, sprawl development, and certainly not about whether to go ahead and deprive current and future generations of natural services, agriculture, and recreational greenspace.

As a matter of fact, when the Houston-Galveston Area Council, in their Envision Houston Region initiative quizzed hundreds of citizens about what they want from the next Regional Transportation Plan, their top desire was to preserve greenspace. This sentiment is seen again and again in workshops and surveys. How is it that citizen support for preserving greenspace has turned, in the minds of elected officials, into a call to destroy it?

Next David Crossley post: “Climate change crossroads”
Previous David Crossley post: “Katy Prairie to be developed”

More Commentary