From the April/May 2008 issue of New Urban News

Commentary: Houston, we have a problem

Robert Steuteville
I hold no personal grudge against Houston. I’m agnostic about its lack of zoning — I’m no fan of development regulations that have fostered sprawl throughout the US in the last six decades.
I applaud compact development in downtown Houston and efforts to build New Urbanism in the city (Duany Plater-Zyberk designed three projects in 2007 and other new urbanists are working in Houston as well). That said, Houston is no place for the rest of the nation to emulate in terms of land use policies.
This brings me to the American Dream Coalition (ADC), a group of sprawl advocates led by Randal O’Toole, which is holding its annual Preserving the American Dream conference in Houston in May. According to ADC, “Houston is the nation’s freest and most affordable major city.” It “protects livability through personal freedom and local control. Houston also emphasizes mobility with an amazing highway network that has 66 percent more freeway lanes than the average US urban area.”
Apparently the American dream consists of single-family houses accessible only by automobiles and lots of high-speed freeway travel. Also, it includes wide roads, parking lots, and gated communities — for which Houston is famous. It’s nearly impossible not to drive there — only 2 percent of Houstonians walk or bicycle to work and 4 percent take transit in a climate with almost no winter.
Apparently the American Dream Coalition has been sleeping through reports on global warming, dependence on fossil fuels, and rising energy costs. Just about everybody else realizes that these are among the greatest environmental and economic challenges that we face in the 21st Century.

GLOBAL WARMIING RANKING
Of 66 large US metropolitan areas recently studied by Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Matthew Kahn of UCLA (The Greenness of Cities, March, 2008), Houston is the fifth worst in terms of per capita carbon dioxide emissions. Because no US cities perform well by international standards in this regard, Houston probably ranks as one of the worst places on Earth in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
The conference is co-sponsored by the Cato Institute, the chief libertarian think tank in America, whose corporate sponsors include Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute. Libertarians are supposed to admire small government. But it’s the federal government that mostly built and maintains Houston’s enormously costly freeway system with 66 percent more lanes than the national average.
Without American taxpayer largesse, it is really affordable? Houston has low housing prices, but its transportation costs are high and rising. Working-class families — those with incomes ranging from $20,000 to $50,000 annually — spend 31 percent of household earnings on transportation in Houston, according to a 2006 report from the Center for Housing Policy. That’s far above the national average, and above what such households spend for housing in Houston (24 percent of their income).
Given the lack of transportation choices, moderate-income families in Houston have little alternative to pouring nearly a third of their pay into automotive expenses. Unlike housing, which can build household equity, transportation dollars go down the gas tank. With rising oil prices during the last eight years, this problem is getting steadily worse.
Sprawling cities are also not very safe. Houston’s traffic fatalities are more than double that of a compact city like Boston, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Houston’s pedestrian safety index is one of the worst in the nation. When the American Dream folks say that Houston has good mobility — they mean automobile mobility only. They certainly don’t mean walking, biking, or transit.
I don’t mean to pick on Houston. There’s sprawl everywhere in America. I have hopes that Houston, like the rest of the US, can change. My problem is with a group bent on perpetuating automobile and oil dependency, and foisting a potentially catastrophic global warming on future generations. That sounds to me like an American nightmare.
This article is available in the April/May 2008 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.