Ron Witte

Zoning to catalyze growth

Associate professor at the Rice School of Architecture, Aug 10, 11.

The Houston City Council’s current consideration of a high-density ordinance can be seen in one of two ways: as an attempt to limit growth or as a means of catalyzing potential.

For the most part, cities use zoning to enforce limits on the private sector. Zoning places limits on how a city can evolve: “Here, in this location, you are allowed to build X,” with “X” standing in for the size of a development and/or the kind of use that might take place. Taken in good faith (as they ought to be), these limits are remarkable parts of the urban social contract. They protect our rights to daylight, to clean air, to walk, to shop, to park our cars, to go to school, to sit on a patch of grass … in short, to our quality of life.

What is interesting about the rights that we seek to protect is that they come in volatile, build/don’t-build mixtures. The right to walk to a store is enhanced by building more. The right to sit in a park is enriched by building less. The right to have a car requires more building to park it in and more empty space to drive it through. The right to go to school requires open spaces for kids to play in and a corresponding density of taxes (meaning development) to support education. Invariably, good cities are unpredictable cities. They change at breakneck pace as you move through them. They have landscapes bordered by big buildings. They have 100,000-square-foot grocery stores that let homeowners barbecue in their own 500-square-foot backyard private miniparks. They have world-class health care in shiny glass vertical towers hovering over stretched-out horizontal places where joggers do all that they can to stay out of those towers. Good cities are, in the best sense, unpredictable, dynamic organisms.

Full Story: Zoning to catalyze growth potential
Source: Houston Chronicle, August 8, 2011

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