Strong support for land regulation in Houston - KUHF story

A matter of enforcement?

Wendy Natt, Sep 04, 09.

A recent Channel 11/KUHF poll shows that over 80 percent of likely voters in Houston would support tougher land use regulations. The poll was part of a larger survey to assess Houstonians’ opinions on the mayoral candidates and their stated policies, and to look at what issues mattered most to likely voters. KUHF aired a story on September 2 about the results of the land use poll and the current state of land use regulation in our region, speaking with several local experts, including Houston Tomorrow’s David Crossley.

Here is the entire transcript, from the KUHF website:

The first thing you need to know when candidates talk about land use is it’s not the same thing as zoning. Zoning is when cities determine that a particular piece of property can only be used for specific kinds of development. Land use refers to how neighborhoods are planned and designed.

David Crossley is president of Houston Tomorrow, a non-profit that researches urban growth issues. He says the numbers show Houstonians want to change how neighborhoods are developed.

“As I hear this all the time out there that people really do support some form of land use regulations indicates that they are not happy with the really extensive regulations we have right now.”

In fact, more than 80 percent of respondents to the KUHF-11 News survey approve of tougher land use regulations.

“I don’t think our main problem is a lack of regulation.”

That’s former Houston Mayor Bob Lanier. He says it sounds good for the candidates to say they want tougher land use laws. But he questions what that really means.

“But it’s very different to get ahold of the idea ‘I’m for tough regulation.’ I’m for tough rules on clean water, I’d be for that. But what specifically they want to do, we have a lot of rules now on clean water. But it sounds good, but then when you get into it if it’s a debated thing you quickly get into the specifics.”

Houston already has a lot of land use regulations on the books. Rice University Political Scientist Bob Stein says the mayoral candidates know people want to see those regulations enforced.

“Whether it be deed restrictions or city council written ordinances. As you recall, the mayor’s and the council’s study of their land use ordinances identified scores of policies that we’ve adopted in ordinances and one of the conclusions from the consultant who did this work for the city was you’ve many ordinances and they’re not being enforced. So I think you’ll hear the candidates saying we’ve got the ordinances, we just have to be more aggressive in enforcing them.”

David Crossley agrees. He says the city already has what it needs to make land use regulations better.

“There’s, for instance, Chapter 33 of our code of ordinances, which instructs the planning commission and city council to create and adopt a comprehensive plan for the city’s future. That’s been on the books for 15 years or something like that. So it’s not an option, it’s a law. They’re required to do this. But they haven’t done it. So we have no plan for the future.”

Crossley says if the next mayor can dust off the city’s planning playbook, Houston already has all the tools it needs.

“We could come out of this ten years, 15 years from now looking like the city of the future.”

See the poll results on the KUHF website under “Houston Mayoral Survey” (click on “expand all”).

Listen to the archived radio broadcast via the KUHF website.

Comments

Chris Williamson said:

If you look at the full poll results, it’s heartening to see that most voters understand we can’t solve our traffic problems by building more and bigger roads, and that transit is a better solution. But still far too few grasp the need for “communities where people can live closer to where they work and shop.” There’s still much work to do to change Houstonians’ deeply entrenched sprawl paradigm.

That crime was the main issue for 37 percent of voters also concerns me. When people feel unsafe, it’s nearly impossible to have a discussion about anything else. I may be mistaken but I think this is a significant change in voter priorities since Blueprint Houston did its surveys.

Posted on Sep 06, 09 at 11:10 am

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