Mayor Parker believes Houston needs a general plan

“I believe in planning”

Jay Blazek Crossley, Mar 15, 10.

“I believe in planning…and believe we need a General Plan for the City of Houston,” Mayor Annise Parker told an Urban Land Institute - Houston luncheon on March 9.

Mayor Parker was responding to the following question from Doug Childers, with Morris Architects: “What is your view of the role comprehensive planning could have for Houston in terms of maximizing and leveraging our investments?” This was at the end of the Q&A session following a half hour discussion between local developer Ed Wulfe and Mayor Parker.

Mayor Parker: It’s that comprehensive word that starts giving me a little bit of heartburn.

Ed Wulfe: Your answer should be that you believe in it.

Mayor Parker: I believe in planning. I absolutely believe in planning and I believe we need a General Plan for the City of Houston. If I were building a General Plan for the City of Houston, I would start very basically, not coincidentally, with some of the things that are going on in the Public Works Department, which we are doing a watershed look at flooding and drainage in the City of Houston, where do we want houses to go, where do we want houses not to go, and what do we need to do in terms of our drainage infrastructure to support the development around it, so I would start from there. Then I would put our major commercial nodes - and this is where we’re not a one downtown city, we have multiple downtowns, in effect - I would put them on that map. Then I would look at our significant intact residential neighborhoods. And then finally I would look at whether our transit system we are planning connects any of those major retail commercial nodes and what it does to the significant areas of intact residential neighborhoods. So that is where I would start for the General Plan for the City of Houston. It’s that word ‘comprehensive.’ We are going to be an unzoned city, but we are going to be a city that plans for the future and we are going to plan from the physical realities that exist.

The City of Houston Planning Commission has been required by Chapter 33 of Houston’s development code to conduct a comprehensive plan since the early 90s, but has so far neglected to do so, although a series of individual plans are now referred to as a “general plan.”

A Comprehensive (or General) Plan would assess the vision of the citizens of Houston for their future and would attempt to better coordinate City of Houston actions toward achieving the goals identified as key to achieving the vision of the citizens for their future. Blueprint Houston believes that their Citizens’ Vision for Houston’s Future already fairly represents the visions for Houston’s future upon which Houstonians generally agree, normally the first phase of a comprehensive plan. This has been developed over 9 years with almost a million dollars of private funding to conduct a series of public meetings and develop this vision.

Zoning is not a part of comprehensive plan, but is one tool that many US cities use to implement the plan. However, many of those cities are now overhauling and replacing their zoning regulations to allow housing and transportation diversity with form-based codes.

[Note: Houston Tomorrow does not support the use of zoning as the solution to achieve the Citizens’ Vision for Houston’s Future, but instead has advocated for a comprehensive rewrite of the City’s existing Form-Based Code (Chapter 42) which currently hinders the development of walkable urbanism and meaningful housing and transportation lifestyle choices for Houstonians.]

Audio of just Mayor Parker’s response to the comprehensive planning question (.mp3, 1.7mb)
Audio of Mayor Parker’s March 9, 2010 talk at ULI - Houston (.mp3, 18mb)
ULI - Houston Press Release on Mayor Parker’s March 9, 2010 talk
ULI - Houston Report Back from Participants—Responses on March 9, 2010
Blueprint Houston: What is a General Plan? (.pdf)