TOMORROW Magazine: 15 Years of Change

TOMORROW A Publication of Houston Tomorrow

Fall 2013

Volume 4 / Issue 1

“Suddenly, quality of life is central to Houston’s future”

15

Years of Change

Houston in transition 1998 to now - and beyond

Back to the future: walkable urbanism is on the way

ALL DONORS, 1998-2013 Board of Directors Daniel B. Barnum, FAIA, Chair Mark Nitcholas, Treasurer Janet Redeker, Secretary Stan Bilski Jody Blazek, CPA David A. Brown Peter Hoyt Brown, FAIA, AICP Filo Castore AIA, LEED AP David Crossley R. Kent Dussair Trey Fleming Barry Goodman David Gresham Winifred Hamilton, Ph.D. Ana G. Hargrove Robert Heineman, FAIA Carol Lewis, Ph.D. Miki Milovanovic William Peel FabeneĚ Welch Stewards of the Region Dan Barnum Jody Blazek Barry Goodman Ana Hargrove Board of Advisors Jack Blanton, Sr. Denton A. Cooley, M.D. Jonathan Day Gayle DeGeurin Jack Drake C.W. Duncan, Jr. John Duncan Richard Everett David Graham Jenard Gross John L. Nau III Martha Claire Tompkins E.D. Wulfe Research Council Winifred Hamilton, Ph.D. Health John Jacob, Ph.D. Land and Water Stephen Klineberg, Ph.D. Sociology Carol Lewis, Ph.D. Transportation Bob Randall, Ph.D. Food Marina Ballantyne Walne, Ph.D. Education Staff David Crossley President Kara Niles Deputy Director Jay Blazek Crossley Policy Analyst Matt Dietrichson Communications Melissa Walter Administration Paula Webb Bookkeeping

Cover: manipulated version of photo by Drew Donovan. drewdonovan.com/

$1,000,000+ Houston Endowment $100,000-$999,999 Anchorage Foundation, Anchorage Foundation of Texas, Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, US Environmental Protection Agency $25,000-$99,999 Anne and Peter Brown, Brown Foundation, Citizens for Public Transportation, Marathon Oil, Martha Claire Tompkins, Texas Forest Service $2,500-$24,999 Alice Kleberg Reynolds Meyer Foundation, American Public Transportation Association, Ana Hargrove, Anne and Charles W. Duncan, Sr., Arup, Barney M McMahon, Better Houston, Blazek & Vetterling LLP, Brenda & John H Duncan, Sr., Brenda and John H Duncan, Bricker & Cannady Architects, Center for Houston's Future, CenterPoint Energy, Central Houston Civic Improvement, Central Houston, Inc., City of Houston, Craig E Carr, Crescent Real Estate Equities, Daniel B Barnum, David Crossley, Didner and John Michael Hershey, Edmond D Wulfe, Evelyn Born and Kevin Shanley, Everett Family Fund, Felvis Foundation, Fondren Foundation, Gayle Ross and Mike DeGeurin, Greater Greenspoint Management District, Greater Houston Community Foundation, Hershey Foundation, Joan Hohlt and J Roger Wich, Mr. & Mrs. Howard W. Horne, Jody Blazek, Kilburn Law Firm, Kinder Foundation, Making Main Street Happen, Marjorie and J Albert Schultz, Mary A Van Kerrebrook, Memorial Hermann Hospital System, Metropolitan Transit Authority, Mithoff Family Charitable Foundation, Mob Colossal, Morris Architects, Mrs. J W Hershey, Patricia W Robinson, Post Apartment Homes, Regional Plan Association, Rice University, Richard C Everett, Robert & Mariareve Rucinski, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, San Jacinto Conservation Coalition, Scurlock Foundation, Sierra Club, Simmons Foundation, Sterling Bank, Susan and Barry Goodman, Susan Vaughn Foundation, Tellepsen Builders LP, Texas Cooperative Extension, Texas A&M, The Woodlands Development Company, Union Pacific Foundation, Upstream Insurance Brokers, Urban Land Institute, USDA SARE, Western General Holding Company, Wich Foundation, William L. Peel, Jr., Wray Trust $1,000-$2,499 American Planning Association, ASA Resouce Development Group Inc, Bayou Preservation Association, Ben & Margaret Love, Betty and Frederic Fleming, Beverly and Staman Ogilvie, Blackburn & Carter, C M Garver, Chris Lockwood, Clark Condon, Clark Condon Associates, Inc, David Gresham, David Hitchcock, Denton A Cooley Foundation, Eddie & Cindy Blazek, El Paso Corporation, Emily Leland Todd, FabenĂŠ Welch, FannieMae, Frank and Cindy Liu Family Foundation, Galveston Bay Foundation, Gary & Pat Biggers, George Mitchell, Greater Houston Management District, Guy Hagstette, Hardy Street Partners, Harris County Healthcare Alliance, Harry M Reasoner, Hawes, Hill & Associates LLP, HOK Inc, Houston Area Urban Forestry Council, Houston Chapter AIA, Houston Downtown Management District, Houston Urban League Inc, Howard Horne Foundation, Idea and Design Group, Jack S Blanton, Sr , Jamie Brewster, Jane Dale Owen, Janet Redeker, Jeff Debevec, Jenard and Gail Gross Fund, Jim Love, Joan Wich & Co. Gallery, John L Nau, III, Judy and Michael

McEnany, Katie Kitchen, Kent R Dussair, Knudson & Associates, Laura Spanjian, LaVerne A Williams, Leslie & Shannon Sasser Family Fund, Lucie Wray Todd, Marian & Speros Martel Foundation, Marilyn Frank, Marina Ballantyne Walne, Marjorie Schultz, Mark E Juedeman, Martin Fein Interests Ltd, Michael Skelly, Miki Milovanovic, Nancy Edwards and Robert Randall, Nellie Grose, New Regional Planning Inc, Olive Hershey, Otter Foundation, Patrick S Van Pelt, Patrick Sugg, Paula J Webb, Regional Plan Association, Robert Fazen, Silver Eagle, Southwest Bank of Texas, Stephen & Margaret Klineberg, Steve Barnhill, Strake Foundation, Studio Red Architects, Sueba USA Corporation, Texas Petrochemicals, Texas Southern University, The Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation, TREK, USDA SARE Program, Victoria Harrison, Vinson & Elkins LLP, Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, Whitten Stuckey, Winifred J Hamilton, Wolfe Family Foundation, Wulfe & Co, Ziegler Cooper $250-$999

1000 Friends of Oregon, Alfred Glassell, III, American Institute of Architects, Ann Hamilton, Ann Wier Jones, Anne Davis, Art & Environmental Architecture Inc, Asakura Robinson Company LLC, Beth Deans, Bettina and Martin Siegel, Bike Houston, Bike Texas, Bill Odle, Blackwood Educational Land Institute, BP Foundation, Brandt Mannchen, Carlton Jones, Carol Webb, Charles Perlitz, Chris Williamson, Christie & Yasmine Ballantyne, Christina Huston, Christine and Richard McGucken, Clark Stockton Lord, Claude F Wynn, Claudia Williamson, Cooke Skidmore Consulting Corporation, Cool Films, Courtney and Philip Tardy, Dabfoto Creative, Daniel C Arnold, Danny Marc Samuels, David Minceberg, Donna and Gary Woods, Dr Robert Randall and Nancy Edwards, Drexel Turner & Mary Anne Piacentini, Dunham & Jill Jewett, Edge Creative Strategies LLC, Eleanor and James Tinsley, Elizabeth and PJ Aucoin, Jr, Elizabeth and Robert Phillips, Enervest LTD, Environment Associates. Inc, Eric H Nelson, Evelyn Nolan, Evelynand John Berlinghoff, Food Conference Registrants, Frank Briscoe, Jr, Gateway Planning Group, Inc, Gayle and Bob Eury, Gerald Smith, GFBEDC, Ginny and Bill Camfield, Heidi Vaughan, Hotel Brokers LLC, Houston Corp Recycling, Hugh & Glenda Barrett, Hutchinson, Shockley, Erley & Co, Ian Hlavacek, InterDirect, International Security Detractors, Isabel Brown Wilson, Ivana M Shumberg, Jack Drake, Jacqueline and Carlton Jones, James E Winn, Jane W Elioseff, Jay Blazek Crossley, Jennifer and Larry Nettles, Jim Blackburn & Garland Kerr, Jim Furr, Joan and Bert Golding, Joe H Nelson, Joe Webb, John Baird, John H Crooker, Jr., John H Isom, Jon Edward Boyd, Jones & Carter Inc, Joseph G Havel, Joy Bazzle, Judson Dunn, Kathryn and Jeffrey Taebel, La Plata LLC, Laura Wilson, Laurel and Louis Smith, Letha M Allen, Leticia and John Jacob, Lisa and Clark Martinson, Loli McIlwain, Lonnie Hoogeboom, Louis H Skidmore, Louise and Edward Bukrey, Margaret Lynn and Tynan Kelly, Marie Blazek, Marjorie Jester Milby, Mark Nitcholas, Mary and Thomas Whitworth, Mary Sue Rose, Matthew H Moore, Michael L Catrett, Mike Anderson, Mike McMahon, Minnette B Boesel, Monica Savino, Mr & Mrs C M Hudspeth, Mr & Mrs IH Kempner, III, Murray & Pamela Brasseux, Natalie and Austin Crossley, Nathan Radtke, Norm Wigington, NuRide Inc, O Live Fund, Olive H Spitzmiller, Park People, Patricia Johnson, Patsy Cravens, Peter Bishop, Peter Petkas, Plaza Ten 06 Corporation, Polly and Joe Ledvina, Ramesh Gunda, Randolph & Catherine Schulze, Rebecca Luman, Richard Cagney, Richard G Stout, Richard V Viebig, Jr, River Pierce Foundation, Robert Duffield, Robert Eckles, Roland Strobel, Ron Shaw, Rosie Zamora, Ruth and Douglas Milburn, Samuels Foundation, Sandra Lynch, Scott & Judy Nyquist, Scott Howard, Sheila Condon, Shell Oil Company Foundation, Smart Growth America, Standford & Joan Alexander Foundation, Stephen Fox, Steve Barnhill, Steven Brooks, Steven L Clark, Steven R Spillette, Student Conservation Association, Tejano Center for Community Concerns, Thomas Blocher, Thomas L McKittrick, Thomas R Kelsey, Tom Compson, TPC Group, Tracy Fleming, Trees for Houston, Trey Fleming, Virginia Mithoff, Wayne & Lynne Johnson, Wedelius LLC, Weems Foundation, Wendy & Mavis Kelsey, Jr. Fund, Wendy Kelsey, Westchase District, Heidi Zukoski Sweetnam Continues on Page 33

Mission: Quality of life

We went for the Big Picture, the data-driven long-term 30,000-foot view. From there you can see disaster looming in one direction and health, happiness, and prosperity in the other.

15 years ago, we set out to change Houston’s story by painting a picture of a healthy future The concept for Houston Tomorrow came on September 24, 1998. That day, at a luncheon event, we heard David Crockett, founder of the Chattanooga Institute for Sustainability and great-greatgreat-great nephew of Davy Crockett, say this: “We were one of the most polluted cities in America.... We had to address everything that was wrong with the city: the economy, environment, DAVID CROCKETT social problems. When you start working on everything, you begin to intuitively understand what sustainability means. All of these things—energy, transportation, storm water, pollution, education, housing, economic development— are connected, and they all affect each other. You have to look at each of the strategies in the context of everything.”

Houston Tomorrow was born in that moment when I turned to Houston Endowment’s Ann Hamilton and said “We need a Houston Institute of Sustainability!” That became the Gulf Coast Institute, which was renamed again in 2010, on our 10th birthday.

I had already spent a lot of time studying sustainability, including the work of Donella Meadows, the principle author of The Limits to Growth, which brought world attention to the idea that our systems on Earth were headed to “overshoot and collapse” around the middle of the 21st century, which is now within the lifetimes of many people.

I had had an epiphany of sorts on April 14, 1992, DONELLA MEADOWS when I watched and heard Meadows and her fellow systems analysts from MIT talking about a future that seemed very bleak unless Donella Meadows: Places we acted quickly to calm to intervene in a system the danger. I was standing in the (in decreasing order of effectiveness) door of a condominium on Mus1. The mindset or paradigm out of tang Island, watching my young which the system arises (its goals, son and his friends running on power structure, rules, culture) 2. The goals of the system. the dunes while I heard about 3. The distribution of power over the this impending disaster. And I rules of the system. thought: They’re doomed.

4. The rules of the system (incentives, I worried about that all night punishments, constraints). and the next day closed my com5. Information flows.

6. Material flows and nodes of material mercial photography studio and intersection. started working on sustainability, 7. Driving positive feedback loops. which I’ve been doing ever since.

8. Regulating negative feedback loops.

Taking instructions from Mead9. Constants, parameters, numbers ows’ list of Places to Intervene in a (subsidies, taxes, standards) System (left), I was working to Meadows later expanded the list to 12 points, adding one higher place she change “the mindset or paradigm called “Transcending the paradigm,” a out of which the system arises.” sort of spiritual solution that was beyond our means to pursue in the beginning.

Our strategy was and is to change Houston’s story from one of economic, social, and environmental problems to one about a bright healthy prosperous future for all of us.

In my previous reading, I had learned that policy analysts were beginning to focus on the quality of human life as the key to all other system health because if the system around us - the environment, both natural and built - is not healthy and strong THE WAY FORWARD The neither will we be. To focus on regional dialog about the quality of life was a new idea in idea of smart growth to improve quality of life the Houston region.

So here we are at Houston To- began at the Citizens Environmental Coalition morrow 15 years later, still plugging away for sustainability and quality of life, still telling the story that all issues are connected, they all affect each other, and you have to look at all strategies in the context of everything. Thousands of people have participated with us in this long, complicated discussion and thousands have contributed cash to keep it going. For all of that we are hugely grateful.

Was it worth it? Absolutely. The conversation in Houston today is completely different from the one raging in 1998. I was saying things in speeches and in print that people told me would never happen in Houston and quality of life was widely belittled as a goal that was just too vague. Today, all of those things are on the civic table and all are slowly becoming the guiding principles for development in the region. The story of Houston today is no longer certain to result in calamity, but actually could be very interesting and good. The horrifying overshoot and collapse scenario is still a threat, but it seems at last we’re beginning to come to grips with it.

So I’m confident we’ve done our part to create a new story in which my children, and grandchildren, are not doomed after all.

And by the way, as we celebrate our 15th birthday , we humbly note that we are accepting gifts (to keep us moving forward for the next 15 years).

- David Crossley Note: Because I was the only constant person in our dense history, all this compilation is by me, and anything that’s left out or just wrong is entirely my fault.

GANG OF FIVE The Making Main Street Happen board, l-r, Anne Brown, Peter Brown, Marina Ballantyne, Mark Inabnit, and Jody Blazek, kicked off a quest for walkable urbanism up and down Main Street. Walkable access to amenities and fun began to be desirable everywhere, but the pilot project was Main Street, which Mayor Lee Brown called our “signature boulevard.”

Photo: F. Carter Smith

1

We started having meetings, and reading books, and studying on the Internet, and attending conferences and it didn’t take long to get the idea: walkable urbanism is the prescription for a high quality of life .

1998Underway Smart growth network explodes Deep in the heart of the City Planning Department a Sustainable Development blister was growing. About 100 organizations were meeting there monthly to talk about how to move Houston toward sustainable development.

In 1998, the committee moved from the Planning Department to the Citizens’ Environmental Coalition (CEC). That later became the Livable Houston Initiative hosted by us. From day one, we had dozens and dozens of partners.

At the same time, the Foresight Project at the Houston Advanced Research Center got underway to address the region’s environmental issues and propose solutions. Houston Tomorrow’s founder, David Crossley, chaired the Long Range Air Quality Tast Force, and we were asked to create a one-sentence vision statement for long range air quality.

Our final vision statement is the one on the opposite page: “A Vision for the Houston Region.” We never got it to one sentence.

That vision described a high quality of life with a lot of greenspace, good air and water, recovering ecosystems everywhere, and a degree of cultural tolerance and interest that made Houston special.

THE GREY STORYAt a worldwide Congress for New Urbanism event in New York, the first presentation used a freeway full of cars headed toward a smogbound downtown in order to note that “The purpose of New Urbanism is to prevent global Houston.” That was the story we set out to change.

A CALL TO ACTION The Gulf Coast Institute’s invitation to a meeting that would begin a collaborative effort to create and bring about smart growth strategies in the Houston region.

The vision was adopted as the overall vision for the Foresight Project report, and in the quest for the 2012 Olympics, it became Houston’s Bicentennial Vision. We were already focused on Houston’s 200th birthday, in 2036, so this was a step toward that far future event.

Air quality was a threat in those years, with EPA potentially denying Houston transportation funds unless the air quality reached national standards.

David Crossley had been president of the CEC and was deeply involved in a Blue Ribbon Committee put together by Mayor Lee Brown to come to grips with air problems in an intense process.

What emerged through all that was that air quality was massively impacted by growth and transportation patterns. It appeared to us that the largest regional plan with the greatest impact had to be the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), which was a long range one that is revisited every few years. At that time, the 2022 RTP was on the table, and we dug into that, beginning our long journey into TransportationLand.

In the fall, a postcard arrived in the mail, inviting us to a Partners for Smart Growth conference in Austin. We had never heard of Smart Growth before that, but it seemed like the right idea, so we went to it. Everything - concepts, best practices, strategies - flows from that event.

-

THE EARLY IMAGES Places like the picture at top – in Seattle – were few and far between in Houston, but were common in most other places. In the center is the light rail train in Strasbourg, France. We used this picture well before Houston’s light rail line was announced. At bottom, a park and garden in Vancouver BC. These images helped people visualize what smart growth is all about and were seen by thousands in the early years.

THE VISION (right) Crafted for the Houston Advanced Research Center’s Foresight Project, this set of concepts launched Houston Tomorrow and set its goals.

A Vision for the Houston Region

We are driven by the need to improve and balance our economy, community, and environment. Our 21st-Century community reaches for the future without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs and desires.

Our Economy We are the crossroads of commerce for the Americas and much of the world, and we are the gateway to the stars. We possess knowledge, human capital, economic goods, and natural resources.

Challenges: We are the world center for energy development and marketing and lead the world in developing non-polluting or low-polluting sources of energy.

Our port, road, and rail systems allow rapid, safe, efficient transport of goods and people in the region, on the continent, and around the world. We have the best transport system on earth.

There is enough work for everybody in the region, with adequate rewards to sustain us and our families. We all do something that benefits one community or another without harming any, and our work is among our passions.

Our technologies are efficient and increasingly benign and we move toward zero waste in all areas, including trash, toxics, excess heat, and other pollutants, which are now understood as symptoms of design failure.

Our most valuable assets are our new generations, who are the future, and our elderly, who possess our wisdom and are our champions and pioneers.

Our Community We are one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse regions on the planet, and as a result our lives are incredibly rich, interesting, and creative.

Challenges: Our 13-county region is based on a web of livable urban, suburban, and rural activity centers with diverse housing and employment opportunities. People move among these areas as their lives change.

We have many pockets of self-sufficient communities where we know our neighbors, and where most of us can work, shop, and go to school near our homes.

Our schools, colleges, and universities produce highly educated citizens who live and work in the region.

Our cultural resources and organizations are among the best and most exciting in the world, and they are accessible to everyone.

We live harmoniously, reducing disparities and working toward fairness in education, opportunity, and wealth.

We have fierce pride in the appearance of our communities and our region.

Sustainability, efficiency, sufficiency, justice, responsibility, equity, and community are high social values.

Our Environment We live in a rich, vibrant environment on the beautiful Gulf of Mexico, at the convergence of the Coastal Plain, the Great Canadian Prairie, and the Northern Forest.

We understand and protect the incredible complexity of our unusual ecosystem.

Challenges: Our air and water are clean, we are healthier than we have ever been, and we have improved our ecosystem.

We protect the prairies, forests, waterways, marshlands, and the second most productive estuary system in America.

Our many waterways have been returned to a near-natural state and support a variety of recreation and wildlife.

Streams and ponds link all parts of the area, cooling and cleaning area air, and providing places to detain flood waters.

Bikeways and pathways link activity centers as well as waterways, parks, and historical areas.

There are many kinds of convenient green spaces within five minutes walk of our homes, schools, and jobs.

We have learned to use our resources for commerce, recreation, and spiritual regeneration in ways that will sustain them for future generations.

Note: This Vision for the Houston Region is a shortened version of one originally developed in 1998 as part of the Foresight project of the Center for Global Studies at the Houston Advanced Research Center. Original authors were David Crossley, Winnie Hamilton, Miriam Heller, Doug Lipka, Deborah Martin, Mary Jane Naquin, and Janet Redeker.

3

so presentations a year at very high speed with normally about 100 presentation slides. There area more than 1,000 of these information blizzards in our presentations folder.

We began to see our slides in other people’s presentations. Perfect, finding others to carry the Thousands of words and images entered the Houston civic discussion information.

Always, we studied the words and messages By early 1999, the juice was flowing. Bumper got various responses from focus groups and that stickers proliferated while media attention and surveys, and always we felt that we were basing op/eds broadcast our research and ideas to hunour work on the consensual values of the people dreds of thousands of people. of the US, including Houston.

Meetings also proliferated. At right top is a Thomas Jefferson said “I know no safe deposipicture of the first Smart Growth Initiative tory of the ultimate powers of the society but meeting. From the outset, it was clear that peothe people themselves.” He also said “And if we ple who dealt with issues understood that there think them not enlightened enough to exercise was connectivity among the issues that requires their control with a wholesome discretion, the collaborative thinking, pulling from diverse remedy is not to take it from them, but to inknowledge bases. So that’s what we tried to do. form their discretion.”

We talked in pairs, in small groups, in big Okay, we agreed, we’ll groups, in front of really big work from that principle. groups, and every now then How can you go wrong? there would be a big conferTHE BEGINNING A 100-member Sustainable DevelopAfter a first public event at ence where several people ment Committee adopted by CEC from the City of the University of Houston could speak to hundreds of Houston was invited to transform itself into a Livable Houston Initiative at the Gulf Coast Institute. with a panel to discuss smart people and all could talk togrowth principles, we held a gether. full scale conference at UH Our role was to educate in October. ourselves and pass on what FIRST SLOGAN This slogan became a bumper stickThere were top national we learned to the people iner after appearing in an article by architect Peter volved in all the discussions, at Brown. The picture became an icon for the vision. speakers, including the fabulous James Howard Kunstler, every level.

RCLCo’s current managing partner Gregg Again, we were thinking long term from a Logan, transportation researcher Reid Ewing, high perspective of geography and demography. the VP of Bank of America, and the regional adWe quickly realized that we were probably the ministrator of the EPA. Between plenary sesonly ones in the region who spent all day every sions and breakouts there were 35 expert speakday studying and thinking and writing about THE FIRST PUBLIC EVENT A panel of speakers that ers.

The civic discussion took a leap that day. cities. That, of course, required us to give 50 or

1999 Full steam ahead

included the Mayor of Austin explored principles that would be the foundation of growth strategies.

THE FIRST PUBLICATIONS Bringing information from other places to the discussion in Houston was a key strategy from the beginning. The Gulf Coast Report came first and morphed into Gulf Coast Growth.

4

FIRST BROCHURE Called for a dynamic economy, revitalized neighborhoods, more mobility choices, better air and water, protection of greenspace and natural resources, and a sense of place and community.

FIRST CONFERENCE An aggressive conference with national speakers on real estate, development, and transportation began the broad civic dialog about increasing lifestyle choices to allow walkable urbanism.

THE FIRST SMART GROWTH INITIATIVE MEETING Dozens of top nonprofit leaders gathered at the Houston Environmental Center to talk about smart growth and consider how to move forward. There was astonishing agreement that the smart growth principles were appropriate for Houston and matched their organizations’ missions.

Teaching and publishing were aggressive that year. A small brochure was created to explain our mission and define what smart growth actually means. A newsletter was published several times with increasing frequency. It brought short items from all over the world into a monthly electronic newsletter. We opened a

most every presentation was to some extent custom focused on the specific imagined interests of the audience.

In the teaching, concepts for development were beginning to emerge. We learned from papers on “induced demand” that “added lane mileage can induce significant additional travel.”

MAKING MAIN STREET HAPPEN A conceptual program for Main Street, from Buffalo Bayou to the Astrodome, by Ehrenkrantz Eckstuf & Kuhn. These drawings sparked intense discussion about urbanism and walkability and transit. Hope was on the way.

rudimentaty website that grew into the enormous index of Houston quality of life discussion that it is today.

The presentation schedule was hectic, and al-

This implied that the region’s transportation policies could not possibly reduce congestion but would increase it, with more peo-

THE BUILDING CHOICES CONFERENCE In one of the breakout sessions, a panel discussed the Making Main Street Happen project. There were other sessions on mobility choices, housing and urban development, smart growth and air quality, building community - and the first significant regional community discussion of urban farms.

ple driving further to reach more distant places.

And of course the answer from regional land speculators was “Yes, that’s the point.”

We were quickly finding our sea legs, supported by data-driven analysis. And we were beginning to see the difficulties of uninformed opinion in public policy determinations.

GETTING TOGETHER Houston’s Mayor, the Harris County Judge, the director of the Greater Houston Partnership, and others, including David Crossley, right, then president of the Citizens’ Envionmental Coalition, signed a set of clean air princples.

A POST CARD BOAST Houston is famous for its huge freeway system and the scale of its interchanges. This one is at 610 and the West Loop.

5

Photo: Charlier Associates

2000 Concepts Visuals emerge to match the vision A powerful way to understand urban and other kinds of development and evolution is through pictures. In 2000 we started to dig deeper into expert ideas, but also into the expressed preferences of the general person.

We created a visual survey called Picture Houston to compare people’s attitudes about scenes of various kinds of development. It gave us a degree of confidence to discover that people generally preferred the same concepts we did. Sprawl and cars and strip centers - these always scored deeply negative. Walkable places, small streets, trees and porches - always positive.

At a bird’s eye level, we began to see clusters of neighborhoods with walkable centers and surrounding streets, as well as the relatively old but seemingly new idea of transit-oriented development, creating intensely walkable places around transit stations.

And at the continent level, especially in Europe and Asia, researchers and policymakers talked extensively about the same kind of nodes and networks, but at much larger scale, involving an array of large and CENTRAL GOAL The ancient purpose of cities large and small was to enable exchange small urban hubs tied together by commerce, in all its forms. Towns and cities provided increased access to goods, services, and each other. Places like this one in Boston make it all work, enabling constant transculture, weather, or any actions at many scales. Such urban places are also the source of most innovation. number of things.

This “polycentric” idea worked at a regional structure is tying it all together and the efficienscale as well, with the Houston region seen as a ty and convenience of that network would decluster of big and small centers all operating as termine success and high quality of life. an economic engine together. Over time we exThe CNU Charter called for interconnected plored the concept of Megaregions such as the networks of streets designed to encourage walkTexas Triangle, with Houston as its largest city. ing, reduce the number and length of automoThe Congress for the New Urbanism bile trips, and conserve energy. Neighborhoods (CNU) talked about a scale continuum that should be compact, pedestrian friendly, and went from the regional metropolis to the city have mixed uses. and town, and then on to the neighborhood, In those days. we preached that the path to livthe district, and the corridor before coming to ability goes directly through the concept of focus on the block, the street, and the building. neighborhoods so we participated in any numThis kind of thinking requires sensitivity to ber of public and private processes about that. connections, to the idea that a network of infraPREFERENCES A visual survey of preferences for streetscapes revealed a very high approval of walkable urban places and very low opinions of car and traffic-based areas. Strip centers and monoculture sprawl scored low.

PAGE ONE Smart growth and the Institute hit the front pages and we began to produce a long series of op/ed pieces about growth and development, including this one about Big Ideas.

POLYCENTRIC METRO REGIONS In Europe and Asia, researchers began to talk of “polycentric regions” that work together at many scales. Houston Tomorrow began studying Houston from that perspective.

6

Calthorpe

Illustratioin: DPZ

CITIES OF WALKABLE NEIGHBORHOODS Planning concepts emerged for models of sustainable neighborhood systems that provide a high quality of life without the need for cars and with high transit ridership potential.

Processes Goals begin to change Nothing beats face to face conversation to work through issues, so we participated in as many as we could. We developed relationships with people in government, business, professions, and nonprofits as well as hundreds of private citizens, and we learned a lot.

We were stunned by the number and diversity of the processes, public and private. The Greater Houston Partnership established a sensiCONNECTING THE VISIONS ble growth commitAs we collected and anatee and asked us to lyzed many regional plans we reallized there were com- present to it. Their mon themes, and called for board issued a resoa conference to explore them. lution that set forth decent principles for sensible growth.

Mayor Lee Brown ordered a strategic transportation plan and we commented at length, leading to many changes and to the insertion of smart growth and sustainability language and goals.

US Rep. Nick Lampson invited us to testify before a Congressional task force on smart growth and transportation.

The City of Houston launched HOUSTON GREEN A coalian initiative to create tion was formed to produce Houston Clean Air a study and report about the region’s declining Development Poliurban tree canopy. cies. We chaired one

of the two task forces, which produced a plan calling for decreasing the need for transportation by bringing more people closer to amenities, providing effiient transportation choices, specifically to decrease truck and car dependence, and encourage very low emission vehicles.

The report also called for a comprehensive plan for the future, alternate development code, an Urban Redevelopment Authority, more coordination among agencies, a legislative package

First we learned the value of commenting on all public plans. But the bigger trick was to get involved in the process to advocate for quality of life as plans develop.

that supports cities, and the creation of new models for development.

We believe that plan and its details describe a useful path to clean air, and many of those tools are not yet in use in the Houston region.

We had come a long way very fast, to the point that David Crossley was invited to join the planning director of San Antonio to co-author a definition of smart growth development for the Texas chapter of the American Planning Association.

But the big news that year was that Houston’s City Council voted 11-4 to allow Metro to use city streets for the Main Street light rail line.

Map: Charles Tapley & Jim Blackburn

THE BIG PICTURE VIEW Very early we began exploring space photographs of the Houston region to understand how the big system works. Thanks to Charles Tapley and Jim Blackburn we all had a new view of the rich Houston ecosystems. Their map at right below led to more detailed work that showed the region has 11 distinct ecosystems.

7

2001 In search of a plan The most important need in the region? A plan for the City of Houston If face to face discussion leads to innovation and strategies, adding a glass of wine leads to some audacity as well. So a series of after-work events with three or four people participating around a bottle of wine set out to answer this question: What is the most important thing that could happen to improve the quality of life in the whole Houston region?

The answer we arrived at? Create a comprehensive plan for the City of Houston’s future.

The City needed it and without it was floundering in the regional game.

Architect Peter Brown and David Crossley started selling that idea in the summer of 2001.

The previous year Houston Tomorrow had created a fundraising effort called 1000 Friends of Houston. Peter and David decided to use that to raise money and supporters for this idea of a plan.

A City election was underway, so our first act was to send a letter to all candidates for Mayor and City Council. The letter explained the issue and called for them to support a process that would produce a plan to be submitted to voters in 2003.

We raised anough money to run an ad in the Houston Chronicle that included the image at right. We began circulating a more complex proposal for how this could work, and quickly gained the support of Claudia Williamson, a candiate for City Council. During the following several months, that was out team, Crossley, Brown, Williamson.

At a candidates debate, Mayor Lee Brown agreed to explore the idea and asked for a complete proposal. That led to the forming of a larger committee to work for the Mayor’s support.

We immediately started preparing such a pro-

8

posal, which took five months to accomplish.

The rationale for such a plan addressed a lot of issues. First, the City was wasting about 11% of its revenues each year because it had no plan.

Second, it was losing influence at the regional Houston-Galveston Area Council because it didn’t have the kind of vision for itself to match the sprawl vision of county officials and many business leaders. Third, citizens were worrying a lot about their neighborhoods and the fact that they

PROMOTING A GENERAL PLAN The image above was part of an advertising campaign during the 2001 City elections, calling on the Mayor and other candidates to initiate a process to create a general plan for the City’s future. The document below was prepared for Mayor Lee Brown who studied it and agreed the City should embark on a planning process.

had no way to protect against sometimes bizarre development schemes.

One of the first challenges was the accusation that we were just setting the stage for zoning, which citizens had rejected three times. But we were not interested in zoning at all.

Through the intense intellectual processes that drove the Congress for the New Urbanism, it had become clear that much of what urbanists wanted to create was illegal across the country, prevented by zoning. A powerful group of architects and planners began to nibble away at zoning that prevented great cities from happening.

We joined that movement and have said many times that we are opposed to zoning. The major point was that planning is not zoning. Planning is deciding where to go. Zoning is just one of many possible tools for making the trip. Houston Tomorrow favors freedom of uses through better planning for the future of our neighborhoods.

EMERGING SMART GROWTH COHORTS Studies began to appear about the effect of built environment policies on seniors (above, from the Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communites) and on the health of everybody. Conclusion in a nutshell: sprawl won’t support aging communities and is detrimental to general health.

Connecting the visions Analysis of planning processes reveals Houstonians share many values

THE VISIONS CONFERENCE Panelists discuss implications of the report at right, which found a clear set of shared values and goals of people in the region. L-r, Carol Lewis, TSU; Mike O’Brien, Houston Homeowners Association; Bob Eury, Central Houston; developer Ed Wulfe; landscape architect Kevin Shanley; architect Peter Brown.

Part of the process for a General Plan would be to discover the “visions, values, and goals of Houston’s citizens,” and make those the engine for the General Plan. Anticipating this, we had RICE DESIGN ALLIANCE CIVIC FORUMS Houston Tomorrow helped shape a set of civic forums that explored urban issues. One this year was called “Constructing a Vision.”

begun studying many previous Houston plans, from the regional to the neighborhood.

We were pleased to find that, at heart, Houstonians generally agree with the principles of smart growth that we were promoting.

The resulting publication, called “Connect-

ing the Visions,” spurred a partnership of Houston Tomorrow, the Center for Houston’s Future, and the Greater Houston Community Foundation to hold a conference to discuss this idea that a basic vision for the future already existed.

Hundreds of ideas and new partnerships flowed out of that day, and the report is still one of the most comprehensive sources of understanding about what Houstonians want to happen in their region.

This year we also gained a powerful new tool when we hired Peter Price, a master of Geographic Information Systems, to begin producing visuals of data that people could readily understand. That was perhaps the biggest single tactical step we ever took and set the stage for Houston Tomorrow to begin to redefine what the region looks like, and how it acts.

REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION PLAN Houston Tomorrow worked to understand and comment on the 2022 plan, which led to deep analysis of the 2025 plan and a call for more public process.

TROPICAL STORM ALLISON The massive flooding from the storm prompted a conference to study the impacts of various development policies on flooding.

A VISION FOR A LIVABLE CITY Our Livable Houston online magazine published the contents of a local book called Good, which contained an essay by Bob Eury that established our pursuit of analysis of the polycentric nature of the region.

DIGITAL ELEVATION MAP Houston Tomorrow began creating GIS maps early on. One of the most fundamental was this digital elevation map that show the watersheds and flows in the region.

A booklet called “Where We Live” was published.

2002 Midtown & McGowen Green At the heart of the coming rail line, an urban opportunity emerged On February 15, we proposed to Mayor Brown that the City begin a public process to create a General Plan for Houston’s Future. We only described the need and the general description of the purposes of such a plan, using a PowerPoint presentation. (There was no projection screen in the Mayor’s office, so only he and David Crossley saw it on the laptop. The 2025 Committee sat patiently.)

The Mayor said it made “good sense” and was “the right thing to do.” Essentially, the plannin process was underway, 11 years ago.

good intellectual discussion and was ready to go toward walkable urbanism.

Maps and versions of maps were pouring out of our office by now. The first famous one was an early version of the map at left, comparing Manhattan and the Inner Loop. This sparked great discussions and other work about how things compare at various scales.

We were invited to join Midtown’s Urban Design Committee, where we helped devise and communicate a vision for Midtown.

We called our concept “Three Places,” shown

A VISION FOR MIDTOWN This booklet explained the vibrant urban opportunities along the future rail line. The circles surround areas within a 1/4 mile walking radius of the rail stations.

WHEELER STATION This station area was portrayed as an intense transportation hub, ideal for a true mixed-income, cosmopolitan neighborhood.

MANHATTAN IN THE LOOP The red outline is New York’s Manhattan, home to 2,000,000 people. It fits inside the Loop - which contains 500,000 people - four times. Houston Tomorrow began demonstrating scale relationships with this map.

MANY NEIGHBORHOODS The blue outline is the shape and size of Houston’s Midtown, but the underlying map is lower Manhattan. Midtown was seen as one neighborhood, but this map suggested it could become many neighborhoods, with several parks.

Having found a way to work at the regional at right. As far as we know, this was the first scale through the RTP, we now had a way to time the concept of 1/4 mile circles around rail study the municipal scale in the Blueprint stations that support compact walkable urbanHouston process. Needing work in urban ism was seen in Houston. It’s really the most imneighborhoods, we turned to Midtown to exportant concept, intensity radiating out to relaplore the Urban Core. tive calm and spaciousMidtown was totally ness. Millions of these ripe to become Hous“urban villages” solve ton’s next urban place. many problems. One of It would have three the best illustrations of closely spaced light rail that is on the left side stations, a calm Main of the opposite page.

Street, terrific road inMidtown also confrastructure, and a ton tained the best recent of underused redevelurbanism in the Post opable land. It had en- THE OPPORTUNITY This presentation to Houston City Midtown area, which joyed about a decade of Council began to explore urban possibilities. won prizes for the City

10

HCC ENSEMBLE STATION With a community college and a theater, this area was rich in creative possibilities, which are now beginning to emerge.

MCGOWEN STATION With the potential of a great park, this neighborhood was proposed as the most intense value center in Midtown

and set the bar high.

We tried to sell ideas from the City’s Clean Air Development Policies we had authored the previous year. One big one was to decrease need for transportation by designing to bring people closer to more aspects of their daily business.

MCGOWEN GREEN: AN IDEA TOO SOON For the “superblock” going south from the McGowen rail station, Houston Tomorrow proposed a fabulous urban greenspace. The original idea, seen at left, showed a section of the Comal River in New Braunfels dropped neatly onto the block. SWA Group produced the conceptual drawing above, and Ian Rosenberg had the idea of paying for it all with an underground garage. The general idea instead moved to Discovery Green, but some portion of this block will indeed be a public park soon.

Illustration: Dover Kohl & Partners

COMAL AT MCGOWEN The first concept for McGowen Green came from floating on the Comal River and realizing the area would fit into the Midtown Superblock.

PERFECT WALKABLE NEIGHBORHOOD This illustration of all elements of the urban transect became a key graphic, It appears on the cover of Blueprint Houston’s Citizens’ Vision for Houston’s Future.

A modern Houston strategy meant: - Develop neighborhoods as comprehensive planning units around mixed-use centers and corridors.

- Establish traditional street design and create safe, comfortable pedestrian environments.

- Use buildings to create public spaces.

- Safeguard existing communities.

- Establish mixed-use activity centers and corridors within or at the edge of all neighborhoods.

Activity centers should include civic buildings, shops, services, restaurants, offices, and other services. Allow and encourage high-density residential development in the centers, with apartments over retail where appropriate. And so on. All this is very well understood and in common use now.

Our work there led to an EPA Technical Assistance project to do a professional planning process to devise a scheme and story for the area around the Ensemble/HCC rail station. People say that study began a direct line to the later Urban Transit Corridor process and plan, and ultimately to the current Urban Houston Framework. An awful lot of the same people worked on all those projects together. There is clearly now a gang of walkable urban fiends afoot.

That gang celebrated the kickoff of the Blueprint Houston initiative to create a General Plan for Houston’s Future based on citizen vision, values, and goals in Mayor Brown’s big conference room in City Hall.

A steering committee brought together by the Mayor met for the first time, heard presentations by Crossley, Brown, and Willliamson,

WHOOPS! This idea for a monorail line along Buffalo Bayou and through Memorial Park to Uptown was quickly squelched by conservationists, but what a ride that would be! And, of course, parking needs in the Park would be greatly reduced.

worked through principles and logistics for awhile, and the Blueprint Houston General Plan process was underway at last.

BLUEPRINT KICKOFF Mayor Lee Brown, bottom right, hosts the first meeting of the Blueprint Houston steering committee, tasked with putting into motion a process to create a Plan for Houston’s Future.

SPRING BRANCH CHARRETTE Houston Tomorrow joined with the City of Houston to hold a charrette to explore opportunities for revitalization in the Spring Branch area. It was the first of many public planning processes we participated in or led---.

11

2003Defining the urban core Musing about pedestrian intensive places linked by transit Of course, the Internet had caused a ferocious explosion of information and ideas - and pictures - about cities and human habitat. More or less suddenly we had access to pretty much everything people everywhere were thinking and learning on our issues.

The concept of “activity intensity” was coming forward to help planners better see their regions. Activity intensiMAP OF INTENSITY Maps and satellite photos and spreadsheets began to tell the tale of Houston’s vast polycentric nature.

The proximity of the four biggest activity centers suggest an spectacular opportunity to create a walkable urban core with centers and neighborhoods connected by high-capacity transit.

We proposed a backbone, below, to connect many places to the coming Main Street light rail line.

SIX CENTERS Metro used this map to illustrate its high-capacity transit strategy to begin connecting centers together, starting with the two biggest: Downtown and the Medical Center. We began to note that each of these centers has more jobs than downtown San Diego or Miami or a lot of other big cities.

12

ty was simply the addition of a point’s population plus jobs as a proxy for the number of people in a place on a regular basis. With GIS you could readily pick out these places and their relative intensities.

We did that, and the little spots you see down and to the left are Houston’s biggest activity centers as they were in 2003. The biggest one at the time was Downtown. Others included the Medical Center and Uptown/Galleria. Today we arguably have 7-8 such centers, some of the newer ones largely formless but still very large enterprises.

This was the year of exceptional hubris, in which we published a series of illustrated white papers on Houston’s potential urban system and proposed rail on Richmond.

We argued that “In most young cities, the core is dispersed, and Houston may well be better poised for creating an intelligent, efficient, scattered-but-connected urban system than any other city in America.”

We said the core characteristic of urbanity is the continuous flow of people walking on sidewalks and in other public places. In the urban environment, one assumes that the general amenities of everyday life are available a short walk away in one’s own workplace or neighborhoods that are accessible on foot or by public transit. More people traverse New York’s 5th Avenue by foot than by vehicle.

We believed the coming of the main street light rail line would reveal that there are places along the way that have significant urbanity or at least contain the seeds of urbanity, some of it more than 100 years old. We were convinced that urbanism would develop along the rail line, but acknowledge there have been huge public policy issues standing in the way for a long time.

As part of the rail project, Metro built new sidewalks along Main Street, Houston’s “Signature Boulevard,” that turned out to be only 4 feet wide.

When we called attention to that in the Chronicle

LOOKING FOR THE CORE In this white paper we began to define the urban core. It proposed development and mobility solutions based on the ancient tradition of walkable urbanism. Among the proposals: build the crosstown light rail line on Richmond. This general scheme is unfolding rapidly in Houston today. A north-south high-capacity transit line is being built from Westpark to I-10, going through Uptown/Galleria. There is growing impatience over the delays on the University rail line we proposed for Richmond.

the Chairman and CEO of Metro went out there to see this mistake they had made and admitted to a reporter that they couldn’t stand next to each other on the sidewalk.

WHAT MIDTOWN NEEDS Houston Tomorrow edited an issue of the Midtown paper that included dozens of ideas from some of Houston’s creative thinkers about what’s needed in Midtown. Among them: Jugglers, fire eaters, maybe not mimes, and at least one outdoor carousel with wooden horses or plastic space ships, not to mention shade.

Citizen Congress Working toward value consensus On May 30, Houston had its first Citizen Congress, hosted by Blueprint Houston, at the time a Houston Tomorrow project. The Congress was preceded by dozens of smaller events where citizens from various parts of the City came together to swap ideas and record their values as part of the process. Early meetings sought ideas and later ones sorted the ideas into priorities and groups.

The Congress tested 29 ideas, with people discussing them at small tables and then voting with keypads to see instant analysis of what they had just decided. It was astonishing and emotional.

TOP ISSUE: WALKING In a survey conducted before the Citizen Congress, Houston residents chose as their top priority: make it easier to walk in the city.

CITIZEN CONGRESS 1,040 people poured into the George R. Brown for the first Blueprint Houston Citizen Congress. People talked about values and goals and voted on priorities for planning that would be based on citizen principles. One top priority: initiate a process to develop a plan for the future (89%). Most urgent goals: public transportation and air quality. This Congress provided the values for the Citizens’ Vision for Houston’s Future

Many people during the day commented about how “American” it was, this huge number of highly diverse people trying to decide about their futures together.

And it was diverse. Inner Loopers and Asians were weighted a little too heavily, and the age range was a little high, as was the income level.

Even so 11% of the attendees had household incomes of less than $15,000.

As the top priority, they decided they want the City to produce a General Plan for Houston’s Future, and they wanted that plan to be based on their vision and values as decided that day. Their Top Ten Most Urgent Goals were public transportation, air quality, government and leadership, infrastructure provision and maintenance, and economic development. But all the goals were

popular and all are recorded in the Citizens’ Vision for Houston’s Future, which began to emerge that day.

Mayor Brown encouraged the group to go for approval by the City Council of the Citizens’ two strategic goals to begin the planning process. But a new Mayor was soon elected and the plan to plan went on the back burner.

That election campaign also brought forward a new Metro Solutions Transit Plan that needed voter approval. That plan came under fierce attack by a well funded coalition of transit opponents, including many who didn’t see the improvement and new attractiveness of an urban center as positive for sales at the fringe of the region. We did our first high-speed online information campaign then, and won, 52-48.

CONNECTING MORE CENTERS With Downtown and the Medical Center connected by light rail, Metro proposed to connect that line to Greenway Plaza and Uptown/Galleria. In a later phase it connected to Greenspoint and Intercontinental Airport.

BUSINESS UNUSUAL WHITE PAPERS As we dug into transportation policy and funding, curiosities sometimes emerged. Two white papers investigated transportation funding equity and the seeming mismatch between public preferences and government spending.

THE METRO VOTE Metro’s long-range plan, called Metro Solutions, went before voters in 2003. Houston Tomorrow led an online information campaign to counter the financial clout of transit opponents and the referendum won 52-48.

13

2004Past present future Houston’s urban past, strange present, and great future

OUR TOWN We mounted an exhibition called “Our Town: Houston Past Present Future” at the Joan Wich Gallery across from the Preston Street light rail station. Historic photos of early sidewalks and rail (both before paved streets!) showed urban life lived in a street plan designed for walking. Maps and photos and drawings depicted aspects of the City today, and others suggested ideas for the future. A sign saying “Future” hung over a window looking down on the new light rail line. The exhibition was part of FotoFest so the opening was a large and festive event.

In our free time we studied Houston’s 2025, was one we studied closely in concert history, its plans and photographs and with several organizations and many individuals maps and began to accumulate what felt in a study group intended to shine new light on like an exhibition. Perhaps with all our the curious H-GAC process of creating long the shiny new rail car making its way south.

Becurrent reporting we could combine the past term plans and policies based on even more cucause earlier that year, on January 1, light rail and the future. And, we had just been gifted a rious values that seemed not to be in line with transit service became available in Housbig poster printer. citizen values. ton, and that was clearly the future, or so Joan Wich asked This group bethe sign over the window said. us to hang the exhicame a force Of course, one of the things a lot of bition at her gallery to be reckpeople learned with us was how very exin Downtown, right NEW FORCE Several members of a oned with, Houston Tomorrow study group cellent the original plan was that Gail on the rail line, formed the Citizens’ Transportaeven today.

Borden drew up for the Allen Brothers. across from tion Coalition, a strong new We also heard that none of the buildings the station platwatchdog and proponent of smart from then are there now, only the perfect form and Mia transportation policies.

RAIL SERVICE BEGINS Mayor Lee street grid of one of the most walkable Bella’s.

Brown drives the new light rail train downtown designs in the US. through a banner and service gets We called the underway on Main Street.

There were more conferences and show Our Town: events that Past Present Future, year and a first look 2025 RTP ANALYSIS Maybe the and had a wonderful several weeks’ experience most powerful determinant of the at another Regional talking about Houston with hundreds of peoHouston region’s shape and funcTransportation ple, as we stood in the corner looking out the tion is the long-range Regional Plan. This one, for Transportation Plan. By now window at the people down on the street and DENSITY CONFERENCE We joined with H-GAC, A&M, and others to look at what density means in city building.

As more people move in, how do you preserve the good parts of the environment? National experts brought plenty of ideas.

14

we’d been studying it for five years, and when the 2025 draft came out, we went into it. This series of email bulletins provided large numbers of people knowledge and comment on transportation policy and spending. Our biggest comment: Next time the values and goals should be based on citizen vision.

The rural to urban transect

T1

Unfolding a vision scheme for walkable urbani development code

T2

HUMAN HABITAT The Transect identifies a set of habitats that vary in a continuum from rural to urban. The transect provides a rational basis for allowing maximum lifestyle choices. It also helps organize components of human habitat: buildings, lots, land use, open space, streets and sidewalks, and all the other built work. It is the basis for Smart Code, a development system that dozens of cities have adopted, including Miami.

T4

Illustration: DPZ

The high density at the intersection just two The amazing mind of urbanist Andrés Duany blocks from those single family units, enabling has cooked up a lot of stuff, but one of the most convenience and access to stores and restaurants. foundational is something he calls the rural to Duany and his urban transect. These shop, DPZ, then few drawings have inspawned the Smartspired thousands of Code, a municipal new ones and been at development code the core of entirely new system based on the communities. Increastransect that has ingly, it’s a tool in use been open source in pretty big cities, inand free since 2004. cluding Miami.

In one form or anThe concept divides other, smart, formtypes of human habitat into six categories plus THE LIVABLE CENTER This transect illustration shows the based codes have a “special district” grab evolution of a city intersection from a low density surbur- been adopted in 279 ban environment to high density walkable urbanism renbag. The general feel abling transit access to other such centers, large and small. towns and cities.

Those include not of each place is graphionly Miami, but Dallas, Denver, El Paso, Baltically defined and simple to understand. more, Natshville, and so on. Smart code is where At the far right, you see an illustration of how all cities will go, and it is actually a little surpristhat might play out in what appears to be a Euroing that Houston’s development code, until just pean setting, moving from rural countryside recently, divided the City into two zones and through sprawl and right into several stages of urCentral Business District. It prescribes different banism. forms for the two zones and just stays out In the center of the SMARTCODE of the way of the Central Business District, page is an illustration which obviously has developed as urbanism. demonstrating how This is form-based code. the transect can evolve from rows of single TRANSECT ILLUSTRATED Illustrations like family houses to townthe one at right provide visual access to the houses then apartprinciples laid out in the transect plan. Carments and condos and based open country and suburbs evolve at some commerce, some the center into urban spaces with broad sidewalks and tallish buildings sharing walls. stores, a few offices.

T3

T5

Illustration: DPZ

T6

15

2005 Garden Cities Walkable urbanism and access to nature too Garden Cities of To-Morrow, published by Evenezer Howard in 1902, was a gamechanger in thinking about how to build ideal societies, complete and diverse with access to nature, clean air, work to do, churches and schools to attend, and all the rest.

Howard built two of these towns, Letchworth and Welwyn City, outside London.

His land use concept is described below the plan at right above. Note the warning to the right: Howard did not intend that Garden Cities would be round and contained in a sort of arc of countryside, although he did another drawing showing more of these wedges forming a sort of dispersed metro region with a super city at its core (Central City had 58,000 residents on 12,000 acres, a reduction in density).

Howard was a social reformer, not a land planner, but he obviously enjoyed portraying his ideas as visuals. Generally, he saw a large swath of land with a small city at its core, where people worked and lived in a walkable environment that was itself full of greenspace, while everyone was within a mile walk of rural countryside.

We began showing these ideas around Houston in 2005. People loved the idea of small cities surrounded by greenspace and were stunned by

EBENEZER HOWARD’S VISION His garden city consisted of a 6,000-acre tract of rural land with 30,000 people living in an urban core of 1,000 acres.

The modest density included a central park and a green Grand Avenue where churches and schools would be. Everyone was a fifteen minute walk from rural countryside.

GARDEN CITIES IN HOUSTON At least 64 garden cities of 32,000 people would fit inside the City of Houston, shown below. The total number of people would be 2,048,000, approximately how many live here now. Big difference? 83% of the land in the City would be rural or natural.

TOWN AND COUNTRY TOGETHER AT LAST Howard’s essay included this illustration of how the town-country nature of the garden city combines the best characteristics of the two separate environments.

GARDEN CITIES IN HOUSTON

16

the idea that the City of Houston, completely carpeted with these garden cities, would contain as many people as it does today, but 83% of the land would be greenspace, not counting the large parks within each city.

Only about 25% of City land is undeveloped today.

But what’s built is built, and as one master-planned WALT DISNEY’S VISION city executive told Howard’s book lay open on Disus “I’m not going ney’s desk the day he died. This is a concept for Disney Europe. to build a round Victorian city.” But building a new small City in the region, connected to the rest by transit, is a far less destructive plan than building the same number of houses in sprawl fashion. And the econom-

DISNEY’S REALITY Disney Europe poses as a garden city in a ring of French garden cities. Disney wanted more, a real garden city. Still, this is pretty good.

ics are far better than sprawl.

Additionally, we could look at existing neighborhoods for dynamics that might resemble these. One example we used was the Sharpstown area, which has the bones for such an idea, as do the Greenspoint, Westchase, and Energy Corridor districts. It’s just a set of principles.

A PRECISE DIALECTIC Leon Krier made many drawings of how towns and cities can work best.

Here he calls for focused centers surrounded by agriculture, forests and countryside.

Publications, participation Spreading what we learned and applying principles to planning As our region grows, we have choices to make about our wild and natural areas, our historic heritage, our mobility, our sense of community even our health and safety. So we began to publish essays about this. We based our approach on a Funder’s Network study of American attitudes about urban growth that found consensus about the following values: “Let's keep the good things we have. We have choices to make about our natural areas and farmland, about our historic buildings, about our existing and future infrastructure.

“Let's fix, reuse, and conserve our assets and solve existing problems, No one wants to let our neighborhoods and infrastructure fall apart in one part of town in favor of new CHOICES FOR GROWTH This sheet described our set construction in anof values and included this other part.” from the Funders’ Network: Americans agree Let's keep the good things that one over-riding we have.We have choices to value takes precemake about our natural areas and farmland, about dence: conservation our historic buildings, of what we have. We about our existing and fu- Houstonians are not ture infrastructure.” different. We struggle to save neighborhoods, trees, historic structures, schools, and even community character.

Our job we saw as bringing to Houston's decision makers the trends and best practices for urban growth around the world. We wanted to 2025 RTP We commented extensively on the draft of the 2025 Regional Transportation Plan from H-GAC. Our strongest comment was that future plans needed to have public processes to arrive at the vision, values, and goals that drive the plan, a significant omission in this one.

enhance the ability of the region to get reliable information and analysis. We intended to inform the process of making civic decisions by providing independent research into best urban practices around the world.

We did that, week after WEBSITE 2 The goal for the website was always to make it the go-to place week, through conferences, for information about regional planning, public processes, open dialog, publications, small forums, tes- and patterns that were emerging in Houston and around the world. This new version allowed more graphic ideas to come forward on the web. timony, and participation in planning processes. We brought historical and other units, including Transportation Analysis contemporary trends into the big picture disZones (TAZ). TAZs, amazingly, change size as cussion about our most important decision: they change densities. So in the maps the numWhat and where to build next? bers of people were apples but the geographical We brought livable cities commentary into areas were grapes and watermelons. It consisently the 2025 Regional Transportation Plan from Hshowed dark colors, representing a lot of people, GAC. We laid out the key issues for the people: as out in the suburbs. Therefore, we had to build • The vision is contrary to citizen values more highways in those areas. We were only • The public process is inadequate. marginally looking at information.

• The forecasts skew to suburban expansion.

This became a focus for us and we worked • Why do TxDOT and H-GAC transportation with H-GAC to move to a new system with do land use planning? equal-sized geographic units - a grid. That hapThe issue about the forecasts was about the pened in the next round of forecasts, for 2035. nature of the maps and other graphics we were To cure the lack of citizen input in determinseeing. The 8-county region is divided by the US ing vision and goals, we called for a large public Census into tracts and block groups and some process to gain those values in preparation for the 2035 forecasts. We got that, and Blueprint Houston would join with H-GAC to do it.

DANGER ZONE A number of studies were pointing at the danger to children of toxins in the areas withDuring this period, many nonprofits were in about 1,500 feet of high capacity roadways. We hearing from us about issues they’d not really mapped the schools that were in those zones. grappled with before, particularly transportation policy and spending and how that affected their missions. Of course we were also telling them that a generation of smart growth policies would reduce the intensity of all their issues, and reduce the need for some of their services.

TOMORROW This early publicaton about the forecasts for growth used the term Houston Tomorrow as an idea. Prreviously, the term was used in a tagline that said “Research, education, and dialog for Houston’s Tomorrow.”

17

2006Green Cities, Garden Cities The power of nature in the towns and cities, supporting good health In the garden city concept there is copious greenspace, both natural and cultivated. The point of having that was to soothe the savage beast, allow contemplation, increase the sense of connection with everything, and much more.

In 2005, a book called Last Child in the Woods documented decreased exposure of children to nature in American society and how this "nature-deficit disorder" harms children and so-

INSPIRATION This photo used for the invitation to the exhibition was taken on the Comal River, which was the inspiration for McGowen Green in Midtown.

ciety. The book concludes from research that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults.

Health is crucial to our mission of improving the quality of life in the Houston region, so this exploration of nature turned into a theme we called “Green Cities, Garden Cities,” where the garden cities idea was still key, but the garden itself was a rich place for this exploration.

We mounted a large print exhibition at the Wich Gallery on Montrose Boulevard that was visited by hundreds of people. It explored Howard’s Garden City through research and 3D images produced by a UH architecture class.

There were dozens of giant pictures of flowers and bugs and other nature miracles, and, of course, it featured lots of huge maps. The maps showed problems, opportunities, and interesting views of our Houston regional data.

The struggle that goes on in the cities about concrete and greenspace has a powerful solution in the scheme of aggregating both forms.

THE LECTURE David Crossley presented many slides from the exhibition in the Brown Auditorium at the Museum of fine Arts, followed by a panel discussing Houston’s garden assets and opportunities.

MONTROSE ORCHARD In this Montrose front yard are trees growing grapefruits, peaches, pears, Meyer Lemons, Capitol Oranges, tangerines, and Mexican Thorn Limes. Lots of tomatoes and roses too.

IMMERSION The walls were covered with big photographs, maps, and prints of 3-D renderings. At left are local flora and fauna and a few landscapes. At center, on the far wall, are 3-D renderings of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities ideas, based on extensive research into his work by UH students. These showed that Howard’s 30,000-person city had no multi-family housing. These kinds of pictures have never been seen before. Around the room and on other walls, were maps and illustrations of the Transect.

18

Looking at Houston’s future Numbers start to tell a different story, explored in two new magazines This year, through our GIS work and cooperation with H-GAC, we went deep into the agency’s forecast for 2035. First, the numbers were staggering: 3.5 million more people in the region by 2035. That’s adding an entire City of Los Angeles.

The land use map showed a picture of pretty total devastation of the vast forests in Mong-

gomery County and sprawl incursions in half a dozen delicate ecosystems, including grasslands and prairie, forest, marshes, not to mention a huge swath through our most productive farmland. Our estimate was that some 1,200 square miles of greenspace would vanish if the forecast is right, twice as much land as the whole of the City of Houston, which is one of the world’s biggest.

At the same time that preservation of land appeared to be out the window, citizens met in Envision Houston region to make it clear their priority was preservation of that greenspace.

ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK AT THE ISSUES The map at left is H-GAC’s presentation of population dispersion across the 8 counties. The map at right, a collaboration between H-GAC and us, shows each geographic unit as the same size as all others. Both maps have the same data. At tleft, it appears that most of the population is out in the fringes of the region. At right, it’s clear that is not true. Additionally, the changed colors made it obvious to most citizens what was going on in the maps.

TOMORROW MAGAZINE IS BORN We published two issues of a highly graphic magazine that explored the Houston region’s forecasts and the policy implications of adding 3.5 million people to the region, followed by a deep look at transportation.

HOUSTON 1.0 This map by Christof Spieler for the Citizens Transportation Coalition shows the City’s massive streetcar system at its peak in 1927. Houston was transit-oriented walkable urbanism for its first 75 years.

NOW WE SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING H-GAC and Houston Tomorrow began to exhibit identical maps about jobs and population. Here we see at left that, while there are jobs spread all over the region, the intense clusters of them are in the center west along the biggest arterials. At right we see population clustered around jobs but also into moderately dense areas ripe for urban amenities and walkability. Both maps suggest a broad rational transit scheme.

MEGAREGIONS We joined the National Committee of America 2050, a research project that is exploring the concept of megaregions, giant agglomerations of towns and cities that function as economic entities.

CITIZENS LOOKING FOR VALUES Envision Houston Region, hosted by H-GAC and Blueprint Houston, produced a new vision to support land preservation, stronger communities, and more transit.

19

2007 Ecocities Europe sails straight for sustainable development

ANCIENT INSTINCTS In an ancient Italian river town, the city is ventilated by the prevailing breeze rising from the cooler valley bottom.

"The European Union plans a future in which regions with multiple centers organize into collaborative economic clusters that form sustainable networks of access, mobility, and green infrastructure."

This was astonishing to imagine that an entity with as many moving parts as the European Union could come forward with such a value statement as that one.

Europe2020, led by the European Union, reached agreement that the economy should be "smart, sustainable, inclusive.” One strategy to move in that direction was the Ecocity Project, which studied five European cities in

search of workable urban strategies at several scales. The report’s overview said “During recent decades, urban growth usually happened in ways contradictory to the concept of sustainable settlement development, although this concept is theoretically agreed on in many of the relevant policies. Suburbanisation produced spatially diffused and functionally segregated settlement structures – sprawl – in belts around cities and towns, while the population of the generally more compact historic parts declined. This continuing trend causes growth in traffic volumes, resulting in increased pressures on the environment (such as pollution from exhaust fumes or climate problems due to carbon dioxide). It also compromises the effects of many measures aimed at promoting sustainable transport modes.”

What more is there to say? How could a gigantic enterprise such as the European Union come to such understandings, while Texas pursues policies going in precisely the opposite direction?

With the Rice Design Alliance, we explored this concept in Houston in a discussion that put new images and strategies in people’s minds and began to align our strategies with the feedback we were getting.

We realized through this that highly advanced thinking about human habitat was going on out there in the world, and that even with Portland and New York, the US was very far behind.

CAR FREE ZONES? Increasing acreage of European cities is being restrictive about cars, some places banning them entirely. This drawing suggests pockets of density close together with different sets of rules for the public realm to reduce and limit car use what are small walkable urban villages.

20

VISION AND VALUES The Ecocity Project put forward these qualities of an ecocity, and arrived at the idea that the key was “City of short distances.”

THE ECOCITY is composed of compact, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use quarters or neighborhoods, which are integrated into a polycentric urban system in public-transport-oriented locations, according to a report from the European Union.

THE RANDSTAD A conurbation of what are basically garden cities of many sizes includes Amsterdam and Rotterdam and more. The light green areas are not sprawl but greenspace, mostly agriculture. The network of places is one of the best performing in Europe with some of the highest quality of life.

Planning for change Ballooning citizen input starts to change the narrative. Now for policy.

TRANSIT CORRIDORS A City project was underway to determine what corridors should be considered transit corridors to incentivize TOD there.

CITIZENS VALUES Blueprint Houston held a community leadership event to nail down the final language in the Citizens’ Vision, Values, and Goals.

It was a hot year for citizen input processess and some of their outcomes. Blueprint Houston wrapped up years of work on the Citizens’ Vision for Houston’s Future with a leadership event that took off the rough edges and created a document true to the ideas and priorities heard in the Citizen Congress four years earlier.

The City of Houston was conducting an Urban Transit Corridor study with stakehold-

ers and public processes. The 2035 Regional Transportation Plan was out. Pearland was talking about a smart growth new urbanist downtown. People were beginning to talk about the Texas Triangle megaregion. The Metro rail map was beginning to reveal a lot about neighborhood possibilities, some 50 square miles of prime urban land with rail transit service to thousands of jobs and amenities.

You could see it coming, this wave of urban enthusiasm coupled with the strong desire to preserve land and historic buildings and infrastructure. People were looking for choices.

2035 RTP H-GAC’s Regional Transportation Plan broke new ground in explaining how access and mobility work, but projects remained old school.

TRANSIT NEIGHBORHOODS There would be more than 60 neighborhoods with light rail transit stations, so we began exploring that real estate.

TOMORROW ON FOOD An issue of TOMORROW magazine was published on the topic of Houston’s food supply and its sustainability.

THE YEAR GREEN TOOK OVER Our end-of-year report highlighted the astonishing tipping point that “green” went over to became the default option.

PEARLAND URBANISM City leaders in Pearland created a vision for a walkable urban downtown. Sugar Land had already built one.

Smart growth plans were beginning to be discussed all around the region.

THE TEXAS TRIANGLE The shape of the megaregion begins to emerge through UT and A&M white papers produced for America 2050.

21

2008 10 years of change 10

Celebrating our work, changing our name, and getting in deeper Ten years didn’t go quickly.

We saw no popular Years The density and depth of support - in fact pasof Celebrate at the Crystal Ballroom sionate opposition for the programs, the events, the research, the publicayears - for building Change tions, the participation, the The Board of Directors of the Gulf Coast Institute are throwing State Highway 99, a a birthday party for the organization, and you are invited. endless conversations, and $6 billion 186-mile A GUSHY NIGHT Our birthday soirée at the Rice Crystal Ballroom Steve Barnhill 7-9 pm September 24, 2008 Crystal Ballroom at the Rice Lofts Jody Blazek, CPA the high-speed calls to unloop around the re- brought out board member and City Councilman Peter Brown to deAnne S. Bohnn There is no charge, however clare his affection fir Houston. Folks at Hobby (HOU) loved it too. gifts arehistory welcome.

Hoyt Brown, FAIA to pull population from expected action made it look likebirthdaythe of gionPeterdesigned David Crossley RSVP 713-523-5757 or party@gulfcoastinstitute.org Kent Dussair and cities and set it down in an ancient and gigantic enterprise that had been the towns THE BIG PICTURE The concepts we were selling were clearer and A private celebration of our Barry Goodman will be held from 6-7 pm going on forever. But no, just 10donors years. unincorporated areas in the forests, David Gresham clearer to us, but we had to show a lot of pictures for it to make To become one, just go to Winifred J. Hamilton, PhD, SM gulfcoastinstitute.org. sense. We used this slide for a very long time. It’s all in there.

The complexity of the issue analysis and the prairies, andAIAmarshes that people in Robert Heineman, Thanks for your support.

Carol Lewis, Ph.D. Please join us for some fun. ensuing web of solutions Mark Nitcholas The Houston band The Mathletes Janet Redeker will play for dancing and general was as intricate, it seemed Marina Ballantyne Walne, Ph.D. carousing around 7:45. to us, as Hobbit lore. We Gulf Coast Institute A NEW BRAND After years of listening to people had gotten deeply into phi- wonder what the Gulf Coast Institute was about, we losophy and our continuing began a branding exercise that lasted several years and came up with a new name that was introduced self-education program at the birthday party. Now when we say Houston took us into places that Tomorrow, people respond with a nod; okay, I get it. seemed to be taboo topics in Houston. As we outlined the directions that many surveys were saying were needed to move toward a higher quality of we should protect. life and more equitable prosperity the goals, When people said they strategies, and tactics were often the opposite of wanted more transit, they and walking, plant and protect trees, build parks those adopted by elected officials. got more highways. When people said they and preserve natural areas, and find ways to live We saw in the Houston Area Survey that wanted safer streets, the City acted to increase that might cut down on the time we spend in 83% of citizens wanted a plan for Houston’s fuspeed on them, making them less safe - the most cars and even slow the growth of their numbers. ture, yet two City of Houston mayors in a row dangerous in the State.

The City of Houston, to the contrary, refused to rejected the idea.

This was a period of frustration. But through act to make walkable urbanism legal, let alone it all, with the long view, we could see that the THE GOOD NEWS We were pretty optimistic in 2007, the preferred development type, at least around arrow of time was moving in our direction, that mostly because of coming rail progress and the promthe rail stations. no matter how bizarre our governments became, ise of 64 (or so) transit-oriented neighborhoods.

Still, we could see that this new world was the wisdom of the citizens was constantly going coming, and believed on our 10th birthday that to aa more sustainable vision. City after city it would keep coming and would eventually be adopted new codes and ordinances and other manifest in the Houston region. programs to add public transit, encourage bikes The Goodman Corporation

Independent research for Houston’s tomorrow

COLLISION We joined brilliant demographer and scientist Chris Nelson to debate land use philosophy with Mayor Bob Lanier and someone named Wendell Cox.

22

JUST DO IT Walkable urbanism is essentially illegal in the City of Houston except in the Central Business District. We were cooking up a lot of schemes to change that.

But the most fun was the “legalize urbanism” t-shirt that began showing up in Council chambers

Networks & nodes Keys to innovation and wealth, with Houston sitting pretty For some years we had been working with maps to reveal intensity patterns in the Houston region. Our outside research in the meantime was increasingly about the networks of human settlements and the connections among them.

We had also been working with a committee on long range transportation at the Congress for the New Urbanism and were asked to chair a task force on “Networks and Modes,� to look at the kind of mobility solutions you could expect in a network. We tried to refocus that to net-

works and nodes and authored a collaborative white paper on the topic, which is at the heart of much of our work.

Patterns we had only glimpsed a few years earlier were now totally apparent, and it was possible to examine the Houston region through the lens of networks and nodes. In many respects, what happens between the nodes is literally beside the point. Imagine coming from a dense activity area in Manhattan, descending to the subway, taking a ride in a tunnel, and coming

CONNECTING MARKETS Walter Christaller made this illustration of various market sizes and their relationships, here centered on Stuttgart. He believed centralization is a natural principle and that human settlements follow it. Big hubs are surrounded by smaller hubs, small hubs have smaller satellites.

Rural areas relate to nearby small areas.

THE LOCAL NODES The map at left above shows a heirarchy of three sizes of centers in the Houston region, derived from intensity maps similar to the one at far right. This work proposed a rational transit network among these centers, beginning with the biggest (and without concern about routes but just using straight connections). In the Center, a progression of transit lines begins to connect all the centers in the region that are capable of supporting some sort of transit service, mostly buses. At right, greenspace is shown as is existing sprawl in yellow. Transit cannot reasonably be delivered to such places but there are nearby centers people could drive to to get transit service.

A FAVORITE Another Christaller illustration showing densification in centers, reduced density at edges, and rural greenspace beyond.

Most of Europe and even the earlier parts of the US developed in this pattern, which is visible today in places like New England.

out in another activity center. Who cares what happens along the way?

This is a fundamental difference between road-based planning and transit-oriented development. The former spreads services and amenities everywhere, and in Texas highways act like driveways to businesses. In transit, the nodes are everything, and people who don’t use cars work and live in a world separate from the road based one. At the moment, all freedom is given to car users, but largely denied to the other 40 percent.

SERIOUS BUSINESS We hosted the annual meeting of the national Growth Management Leadership Alliance and at the event David Crossley took over the chairmanship of the organization, donning the semi-traditional hat, which keeps changing and which no one remembers the meaning of.

FOOD! A year after a failed attempt to hold a food conference, this one sold out and produced a day of expert testimony with small group discussions that immediately led to the formation of a Food Policy Workgrout that we host today

COMMUTER RAIL As stakeholders for this H-GAC project, we objected to the focus from the beginning.

The study only looked at existing rail lines, proposing a commuter rail network that would cost three billion dollars, miss nearly all of the activity centers, and have less ridership than the Main Street rail line.

23

2009 Texas Triangle Building a coalition for a giant megaregion It is not possible to look at thousands of maps and not want to look out beyond the local boundaries. In our work on megaregions with America 2050 we found a set of enormous nodes in the national network that arguably worked together economically and certainly shared a lot of cultural and natural resources. Was there a planning regimen at this scale? We thought so and invited America 2050 to co-host a conference in Houston about the idea of the Texas Triangle Megaregion.

Apart from looking hard at the area, we were intent of beginning to form a Texas Triangle coalition, and the groups we invited welcomed that opportunity. Nonprofit leaders, public officials, and elected officials gathered in the Rice Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom for a day of presentation and big-picture discussion.

For our part, we pulled out all the stops on our array of theories about polycentrism, networks and nodes, agricultural urbanism, and even happiness. Our goal was to persuade the group to focus on centers of many sizes throughout the megaregion, improve the connections among them, improve and enrich greenspace, including agricultural land, remove “sprawl” from the lexicon, and make human quality of life the highest priority.

One item we put on the table was the idea of adopting a Triangle-wide vision for the future. We offered one based on one the European Union uses but substituting the words Texas Triangle for Europe (and slipping in a little stuff of our own): “The Texas Triangle is a sustainable megaregion with multiple clusters of cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods with improved access to people, goods, services, and other amenities in healthy green infrastructure.”

We all liked it, we bought it, and we hope that soon there will be another conference, with that vision at the beginning instead of the end.

The group has managed to collaborate on a few issues before the Texas legislature and there will be more of that in future sessions.

In the end, looking a maps and satellite photos of the Triangle, we’re back to the same story: nodes of human activity connected in networks.

AGRICULTURAL URBANISM New Urbanism co-founder Andrés Duany spoke to public officials at a Houston Tomorrow event with H-GAC called “Agricultural Urbanism: New Economic Development Opportunities for Texas Counties.” The concepts combine dense new urban development with food production.

24

HASHING IT OUT Participants in discussion at the conference discussed a wide range of issues, including high speed rail, the topic for this group of elected officials. L-r: Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, Fort Worth Councilmember Jungus Jordan, Travis Councy Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt, College Station Mayor Ben White, and KTRK reporter Miya Shay. 37 speakers participated.

TOP JOB CENTERS One of the most important maps we ever produced, created by Jay Blazek Crossley, is this one showing the top 25 job centers, with the largest being Downtown in orange and then next biggest in blue, and so on. Each green circle is a 5-mile radius around the center. Amazingly, 59% of all the people in the 8-country region live in those circles and 75% of all jobs are there. Go out 5 miles further, and you’ve captured 79% of all residents and 86% of all jobs. All but The Woodlands are in the Metro transit service area. The blue lines are our proposal for a regional Bus Rapid Transit system in the highways we already own.

LIVABLE CENTER One of the first Livable Centers studies funded by H-GAC was in Waller, a small city of 600. A push for a mall out on highway 290 gave way to a vision of a reborn downtown. Here we see almost perfect urbanism depicted in a town that could easily be a plan for an urban neighborhood in the heart of the city.

Walkable urbanism is on the way Change seemed to be coming and it was in our direction. We began to speak of “Houston 3.0,” a return to its 1.0 roots of transit-oriented walkable urbanism that was replaced for decades by 2.0, the explosion of car-based sprawl that underpins most of Houston’s big sustainability issues.

In 3.0, these livable centers we talk about so much begin to proliferate, which they are doing now. Places like Sugar Land Town Center, City Centre, and Post Midtown all succeed and are growing. People can live and work in those places and go shopping and have fun without getting in a car.

True, City Centre and Sugar EMERGINC CONCEPT An essay Land require a in Change magazine explored car to get in and the possibility that Houston was evolving into its third big stage. out of there, but that’s not for long in Sugar Land and probably not for long in City Centre. Gradually, places are appearing where they will demand transit service and it will be smart to provide it.

In the major activity centers, leaders there are forming plans to move toward walkable urbanism. Uptown/Galleria has a redevelopment plan that is all about walking and transit.

Westchase has a transit plan (that we worked

Photo: Charlier Associates

Houston 3.0

on) and a vision plan that has walkability at its heart.

The Energy Corridor has built bike trails and knitted buildings and campuses into walkable and bikable places - with a transit plan.

It’s happening everywhere.

Tomball has a smart growth Main Street plan. Conroe is working on transit and downtown revival.

And the City now has a Citizens’ Plan for Houston’s Future, produced for Blueprint by us over many years.

We’ve started the first Health Impact Assessment in Houston, with TSU and Baylor, examining the health effects of TOD around the coming Quitman rail station.

THE ICONIC SCENE This image, of a street in Boulder, became the Houston 3.0 visual. Lots of people walking in the shade, having fun - city folk.

COOPS The Houston Access to Urban Sustainability project, begun at Houston Tomorrow, is dedicated to providing affordable, sustainable, cooperative housing within walking distance of light rail. The first coop opened in January 2011.

HAUS is now a stand-alone nonprofit.

We appeared on a PBS panel about growth, and worked with Central Japan High Speed Rail on a line to Dallas. We helped found CNU Houston, a great partner for walkable urbanism.

We saw a smart growth bill pass the State Senate unanimously and the House overwhelmingly only to be vetoed by the governor.

THE CITIZENS VISION The final Citizens’ Vision for Houston’s Future was produced and work began in earnest to put it to good use in a plan.

COALITION WORK We joined AARP and others for a town hall meeting with Transportation for America, a national group housed at Smart Growth America, where we sit on the board.

TRANSIT PLANS WE worked on the Westchase District’s transit plan (left) and saw the ideas about using the freeways for more transit begin to show in visual form when the Energy Corridor District trotted out its idea for light rail in the middle of I-10.

ALLOWING URBANISM The City of Houston’s urban transit corridor study came out at last, and it offfered a way to produce urbanism near transit stops.

FOOD We host the Houston Food Policy Workgroup dedicated to nurturing the growth of a sustainable local food system, accessible to all, through education, collaboration, communication, and creation of a food policy council for the Houston region.

25

2010 Health happiness prosperity We set out after a vision and a birthday party as the milestone for success From the beginning, people told us our mission - to improve the quality of life - was vague, couldn’t be measured, just confused people.

What did quality of life mean? Isn’t it different for everybody? We said no.

Years of parsing this, explaining it, studying it led us in search of a vision statement that would demonstrate what we think quality of life means, one that would be meaningful to anybody.

Weeks of creative chatter later we began to focus on health, happiness, and prosperity.

What about safety? We argued that anyone who is healthy, prosperous, and happy is probably safe, which would be one of the reasons for being that way.

Okay, people said, health and prosperity are probably universal basics, but happiness? How do you measure that? Turns out a lot of people are measuring it; the New York Times publishes its happiness report at least once a year. Gallup measures happiness by cities - and we stack up pretty well. In the meantime, the driving value in the Kingdom of Bhutan is the Gross National Happiness index; the country has a Secretary of Happiness, and he has nine principles. Happiness, it turns out, is pretty well documented.

So then we began to research the components of health, happines, and prosperity. They appear to be those areas surrounding each of the core issues in the matrix below. For example, health inpacts are genetics, environment, and inputs (water, food air, exercise). Somehow we

had to get our fingers into all of those. Or did we? Others were doing a lot of those things, why not just begin to collaborate and exchange ideas? So that began our new intensity of collaboration.

And as we worked on that, we gave briefings to the CEO of Metro and the City of Houston Housing Director, joined the US Green Building Council advisory committee, and started a new collaborative forum, MyHouston2040, which takes place monthly in a Montrose bar. And started doing presentations about the economic benefits of smart growth policies - which turn out to be stupendous.

In the meantime we convened transit re-

HAPPINESS We imagine these people being excited because they just saw on Mindbook that Houston had been named the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous region in the nation, a prospect we are working on.

Not to mention that they learned it while they were celebrating Houston’s 200th birthday (in 2036).

We’re working on that, too. Please join us.

THE WORK TO BE DONE Going for superior health, happiness, and prosperity requires a mission matrix that seems almost impossible. Clearly many more partners are needed so we set out to find them and join forces.

treats to hash out a megaplan that tied the whole region together efficiently.

SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT Sustainable prosperity is different from sustainable growth, and the images are more about localism than globalism.

SELLING THE FARM David Crossley leads a packed house to emcee a session about Agricultural Urbanism at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Atlanta.

DIGGING INTO THE DETAILS At the first Sky Farm Transit Retreat, advocates and planners worked to consensus on a vast regional transit plan, based on Metro’s 2025 plan but going much deeper. Left to right, Tom Dornbush, Jay Blazek Crossley, Christof Spieler (by then a Metro board member), and Robin Holzer. Below, the day’s scratch pad with the basis for everything: Cities Towns Neighborhoods.

26

Regional Plan for Sustainable Development Beginning the first-ever Houston Regional Plan for Sustainable Development and more noise about issues When the opportunity arose for the Houston region to get some federal money to do a long-term 13-county regional plan for sustainable development some regional leaders rose to the bait and brought the bacon home. The plan was funded. The three-year process was underway.

We had a lot to do with that and serve on the Coordinating Committee that runs the program through H-GAC.

embrace the plan when it’s finished in 2013.

The vision and goals, we knew, were almost certain to be good ones (and today we see that they are).

H-GAC Two of our biggest projects that year were the launching with AARP and others of the Houston Coalition for Complete Streets to work for the idea that all streets should be safe for all users, and our participation in the Central Japan Rail Railway’s study

group about the feasibility of a Japanese Shinkhasen bullet train taking off from Houston to Dallas every hour or so. High speed rail was pretty certain to be coming to Texas, maybe before any other state.

SUSTAINABLE DIPLOMACY When the federal Sustainable Communities partnership started, we asked the director of the project to meet with the City of Houston’s Planning Director and us. The meeting happened, other people worked hard on it, and Houston wound up with $3.75 million to do a regional plan for sustainable development.

George Mitchell funded half of our participation for these three years and challenged the community to come up with the other half (which it has graciously done for the first two years). The grant established the Cynthia and George Mitchell Sustainability Fellow at Houston Tomorrow. A big circle came back together for a moment.

We were confident that the public planning process would reveal strong support for preservation of greenspace and wetlands, walkable urbanism, and transit but worried whether the 134 towns and cities and the 13 counties will

EXPERT ADVICE Our intimate Ask the Expert breakfasts were mostly sold out and civic leaders had oneon-one dialog with experts like Stephen Klineberg.

2040 FORECASTS We served on the H-GAC forecast committee and continued to ask for - and get much better information about what is happening.

MYTHERY Change magazine featured the Bold Vision of David Crossley and brought a spirit of new age wonder to the whole enterprise (and makeup!)

ISSUES GALORE! From a graphic view of the City of Houston’s budget to a barnburner introduction to the City’s new Sustainability Director to the dynamic Houston Coalition for Complete Streets to the constant barrage of web-based news and commentary to service on an advisory group working with the Central Japan Railway on a high speed train to Dallas, we kept pretty busy.

27

2011 Sustainability

WHAT DO WE NEED? When we asked people to name the basic needs for sustainability, most mentioned jobs and homes but few ever mention the fundamental requirements of life.

Creating a Houston Regional Plan for Sustainable Development

THE KICKOFF Coordinating Committee and H-GAC staff met with federal officials to start the process. The Sustainable Communities project director was Shelley Poticha, at right. Before joining the government, she was CEO of Reconnecting America, a smart growth group, and before that CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism. We’d worked with her in both roles, so this was a good situation. H-GAC had to agree to sustainability principles to get the money, so the region started off with a new set of rules.

the Cynthia and George Mitchell Sustainability The first year of the process to create a RegionFellowship, with David Crossley as the Fellow. al Plan for Sustainable development was a We realized that almost everything we would whirlwind of meetings big and small and the do for three years needed to be about sustaincreation of a lot of committees, which quickly ability. It was our job to teach the meaning of got to work writing bylaws and timelines that sustainability and the had to be approved by a practices that show hope bigger committee.

“How well humankind manages We were committed to earth’s resources, environment, and for achieving a steady state of human life. This about 200 hours a year for population will determine whether was a huge moment for this process, so we asked us, to have all 13 counGeorge Mitchell if he civilization advances or dies in ties begin to plan for rewould support that work; George Mitchell coming years.” gional sustainability. he agreed and we created

THE PLATFORM In an early Committee meeting, we gave a nuts and bolts presentation about sustainability, its meaning and history, and problems it is meant to solve. We have established a position as a top resource for sustainability info and analysis.

GEORGE MITCHELL AND SUSTAINABILITY In the early 70s, George Mitchell was paying attention to Buckminster Fuller and the growing worry about overuse of resources and excessive pollution of all kinds. In response to the publication of The Limits to Growth, Mitchell convened a world conference on sustainability at The Woodlands.

Some of the conferees are below. More conferences followed and the early ideas about sustainable societies happened here, at the edge of the Houston region. By 2011, Mitchell was disappointed in the world’s failure to come to grips with the danger, which looks like a journey to the collapse of human society and population.

DENNIS MEADOWS Co-author, MIT systems analyst

ALEXANDER KING AND AURELIO PECCEI founded the Club of Rome, funded The Limits to Growth.

PAUL EHRLICH Winner of the first Mitchell Prize.

LESTER BROWN Head of the WorldWatch Institute

DONELLA MEADOWS Principal author of the Limits to Growth, MIT systems analyst, created a set of places to leverage systems to bring change.

28

HERMAN DALY Talked about a time beyond growth

GEORGE MITCHELL “I read the book Limits to Growth and it just impressed the hell out of me.”

It was “a first wakeup call.”

“After about two or three conferences I began to realize what we’re really seeking was the nature of sustainable societies....those that are capable of reaching and then sustaining a decent quality of life for their citizens.”

“To achieve sustainability in the world there must be a balance between things like environmental degradation, deforestation, desertification,and food availability and other resources for the amount of people we have.”

Coming together The need to be stronger and faster There are thousands of nonprofit organizations in the Houston region and there was, and is, considerable buzz about that being too many. A key question from funders is always “How are you different from organization X that seems to do what we think you do? What’s up with that?”

We called together a dozen or so friends to talk about the issue, and our mergers and collaboratives initiative was underway. We continue to work together better and to discuss the possibilities for meaningful mergers.

What would become one of biggest coalitions was born: The Houston Coalition for Complete Streets. Working with AARP and others, we brought a set of 34 nonprofits together around the issue of making streets safe for all users: drivers, people walking or biking, pushing babies or groceries, people using transit, people using wheelchairs, people who can’t see or hear, old people, as well as hospitable to local business, communities, and entertainment.

It felt good from the beginning. It was an idea whose time had come in Houston and we were going to make it happen. The power of cooperation is amazing, and we do it whenever possible.

We have to. We’re a small organization, without a lot of money. We need friends.

PEOPLE POWER On Saturday morning June 4, 2011 the People Powered Parade for Complete Streets

rode from City Hall to the gates of the Free Press Summerfest, where Houston Tomorrow, the official nonprofit of the festival - thanks to Omar Afra - collected hundreds of signatures on the Petition for Complete Streets for the Houston region. This also was billed as Houston’s first ciclovia.

Friends came out of the woodwork in early 2011 when an H-GAC Transportation Policy Council proposal suggested spending all available Transportation Improvement Plan funds - including some that had already been promised to good projects - on roads.

Houston Tomorrow, BikeHouston, the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition, transit, parks, and livable centers advocates all came together to petition the TPC for balanced transportation spending. We developed Option 5 to compliment the four on the table - none of which gave additional funds to alternative transportation.

Over 1900 people in our cities and unincorporated areas signed the petition and many showed up at TPC meetings, more than ever before.

While Option 5 lost, we kept them from taking the already promised funds away and set the stage for the 2013 TIP debate, which included meaningful performance measures across modes and a return to balanced spending with over $47 million for alternative modes, including three $5

million dollar pedestrian projects in Upper Kirby, East End, and Conroe - a $5 million Complete Streets project, something that no one saw coming in 2011.

We also heard this year from RCLCO’s managing director Gregg Lodan that metropolitan cores usually contain 30- 40% of a region’s jobs and always contain most of the high-paying ones.

OPTION 5 A group of transportation advocates and community leaders rapidly came together to propose spending discretionary TIP funds according to the citizen vision based 2035 RTP - balancing spending on all modes of travel across the region.

TRANSIT HANDBOOK A fourth issue of TOMORROW laid out plans and reasons for a rational regional transit plan that serves the largest number of people at the least cost, connecting our centers.

THE BIG COALITION Working with AARP, we helped form one of Houston’s biggest coalitions, this one around the concept of streets safe safe for all users.

WISHFUL THINKING Sitting with a partner at Tacos a Go Go, we created a scheme for a set of urban markets around the Wheeler rail station.

TRANSIT ADVANCE An H-GAC study about a regional transit framework was diminished by its poor public process, but it did put “arterial Bus Rapid Transit” on the table in a big way.

2012 Coalitions and action Local collaboration accelerates along with global business view of sustainability There would be more positive change faster in Houston if some nonprofit organizations could actually merge their operations. A couple of funders encouraged us to pursue our idea for a new collaborative framework that could result in mergers.

Twentyone people from

A NONPROFIT FRAMEWORK Houston Tomorrow offered this chart as a way to think about increasing the efficiency and power of a group of nonprofits. Talks began to test the possibilities, which continue today.

tentorganizations showed up for our first meeting, including Ann Hamilton, the former Houston Endowment grants officer, who was the meeting convener. There was strong interest in expanding collaboration and combining services somehow, but not so much affection for actual mergers. We expressed that that was our top goal, and in the end people from about half the groups agreed to keep talking about mergers.

The most interesting topic was about which groups with which names would be the survivors and what would the common mission be?

We said we had no interest in running the Mother Ship part but thought we had both an all-encompassing name and an all-encompassing mission: Improve the quality of life of all the people in the Houston region. Some agreed.

Events put a pause to the discussions but they will certainly be continued.

Our great event for the year was our conference “Sustainable Cities: The Business View,” co-hosted with the Kinder Insitute for Urban Research at Rice.

30

Speakers from IBM, McKinsey, Siemens, and NRG led the discussion, explaining the intricate mix of their business plans and their sustainability advocacy. Speakers from the Center for Houston’s Future, the Kinder Institute, the Shell Center for Sustainability, and Better Houston responded, and there was a sense that this conversation was important and timely.

We took the lead on another conference called “Fairness in Transportation Spending in Houston.” It was focused on the new federal transportation bill and for the first time that topic filled the large room at H-GAC. A new Houston Region Equity Network was born that day, one that has the potential to change a lot of the Houston spending stories.

We began to see scenarios emerging for the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (RPSD). The promise was that they would deal with real issues - cars and land preservation and education and jobs and more.

One aspect of the RPSD was the creation of a group of case studies by partners including the City of Houston. It’s proposal, which was accepted and is underway, was how to look at activity centers in the City, to define them, to work on policies to encourage them.

EQUITY IN TRANSPORTATION Our local team joined with national organizations PolicyLink and Transportation for America to examine the equity effects of the new federal transportation bill, spurring the formation of a new Regional Equity Network.

BUSINESS LEADS With IBM and many other global corporations not only practicing sustainability within their operations but also promoting the idea of sustainable cities, we invited four corporate leaders to talk about that with some local nonprofit leaders.

BLUEPRINT HOUSTON a revitalized effort to convince the Mayor to pursue a General Plan for The City of Houston’s Future got underway in the face of signs the City was headed for some difficult times.

DEVELOPMENT IMPACTS We worked with TSU and Baylor to produce the region’s first Health Impact Assessment, an emerging method of measuring how public policies can affect people’s health.

Photo: David Brown

Transit at a crossroads A chance to increase funding for transit goes south in a referendum

THE CUSTOMERS SPEAK Young people hung out at rail stations to tell riders about the Metro referendum and the looming rail financial disaster.

TO WN DO WN

GR EE NW TR AY

A CONFUSING VOTE We led a coalition working to end the long practice of diverting Metro funds to area cities and Harris County. Voters told us they thought voting Yes would mean more transit and rail, but wound up voting to stop light rail progress for years.

ME DIC AL C

The underlying problem in all of this was the the threats by suburban politicians and developers to go to the Legislature to cripple Metro and turn its leadership over to Harris County. Some of the threats were truly draconian, including taking 50% of the agency’s sales tax funds to give to the area cities.

Metro transit is not popular with politicians working on sprawl.

The voters were enormously WHATEVER IT TAKES Our man confused and they wound up in the banana suit tried to help voters realize what the stakes were voting against if they voted Yes on the Metro refwhat years of sur- erendum. Apparently, more bunches of bananas were needed. veys said they wanted: more transit. So the cities continue to take the money, ostensibly to fix streets, although the buses are slowly being deconstructed by those deteriorating roads. And the rail connection to Main Street is unfunded.

UP TO WN

Early in the year we began organizing with our partners at Better Houston and the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition to persuade Metro to give citizens a straight up or down vote on whether to continuing taking money away from transit to fund 16 cities’ and Harris County’s budgets in the Metro service area.

Nearly $3 billion had been taken over the years and several of the cities lowered their tax rates because of it.

HUMAN TRANSIT Transit We got a wizard Jarrett Walker headstraight up or lined our transit symposium in the spring, where Metro’s down vote on the CEO explained the dire con- matter, but up sequences of continuing to that is yes, - would allow cities to tap into continue to divert Metro’s funds. Walker bethe funds. came a consultant for the It was a compliMetro Re-Imagining project now underway. cated ballot issue, and Metro noted that any growth in sales tax revenues above the mark set in it would be split 50/50 with member jurisdictions through 2025, potentially providing more money for transit, but also stated : “None of the additional funding may be used for rail.”

Metro said a Yes vote would allow it to pay down debt, provide more park and ride service, build more bus shelters, and work on building ridership. We argued that a No vote would do all that and provide funding for light rail.

THE URBAN CORE The four big activity centers are close together, begging to be connected by transit.

METRO SOLUTION The promised light rail system made those connections, with 3 lines in construction.

HOLD IT Voters ended light rail progress, potentially for a decade or more. A new Uptown BRT line will be isolated as will Greenway Plaza.

BAYOU GREENWAYS Voters overwhelmingly approved bonds to build the Bayou Greenway project of parks and hike and bike trails along hundreds of miles of bayous in the City of Houston.

WORRY ABOUT WATER We produced a white paper on water issues in the Texas Triangle. We found the groundwater and river issues to be significant problems but concluded Houston is in better shape than other regions in the Triangle.

31

2013 High-speed change A powerful coalition begins to move the City toward safety

NEIGHBORHOOD GREENWAYS LAUNCHED To complement Houston’s Bayou Greenways, Houston Tomorrow’s Jay Blazek Crossley began advocating for a Houston Neighborhood Greenways program to provide complete streets across Houston giving children in every neighborhood meaningful safe access to walking and biking. If modeled after similar programs in Portland and Seattle, half of the people in the City of Houston could be connected in 5 years for only $100 million.

You can feel a win coming and sometimes when one comes more follow.

It’s pretty clear, for example, that the bikes in Houston program is firmly launched and growing fast. We worked with Bike Houston and Bike Texas to establish that relationship and get things done in Houston and at the Legislature. And it feels like the bike initiative is spurring work on the Complete Streets issue, with the Mayor having promised a new program.

Of course the Bayou Greenways project is largely funded and on the way. We helped procure a federal TIGER grant for that. It won’t be long before Houston has the largest bike network in the nation. Now what’s missing is connections between the bayou trails, so Houston Tomorrow launched a Neighborhood Greenways project to link it all together.

A draft of the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development has been approved by the Coordinating Committee. It is about to be released to the public. It will change the story in Houston. It already has.

There’s much more that we - who often wince at the turns of events

32

each month - are optimistic about in the future; we feel that some huge tipping point has been reached, and we’re moving in a good direction.

We have more than 7,000 Twitter followers with more signing up every day. Since our last birthday, 5 years ago, 287,368 unique people visited our website, for 860,684 HELP IS ON THE WAY Some of the worst sidepageviews. We have hundreds walks on the planet make walking difficult or of speakers under our belts, dangerous for thousands of people, some with hundreds of conferences and babies, some in wheelchairs, some with impaired vision or balance. The City says it will other events, hundreds of step up to the plate about this. wonderful donors and volunteers, and dozens of partners working with us to make it all possible.

Exciting things are about to happen. Projects we and many others have been working on for years, sometimes a lot of years, are crawling toward fruition. Some of them are huge (the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development) some are just big (the Urban Houston Framework report), and some are neighborhood size (the development that’s about to explode at the EnSAFE PASSING IS THE LAW The Houston Coalition for Complete Streets began calling for the City of Houston to pass such a law several years ago as part of our 15 point plan to begin making Houston’s streets safer for all users.

semble/HCC rail station). Some are just about people shifting and preparing to make a lot of changes. Always, the possibility of the City of Houston beginning a good process to create a plan for the future is right around the corner, and it may finally be an idea whose time has come. We’re still working on mergers & collaboratives, we might wind up being swallowed and renamed in the process, but we’ll keep the body of work moving forward, at least until 2036, Houston’s 200th birthday (we‘re already planning that party.)

A WORLD OF POTENTIAL HURT Scientists agree that global temperature increase more than 3-4 degrees Fahrenheit could lead to a situation in which the climate system starts to feed on itself far beyond our ability to control things. Houston Tomorrow’s design solutions are crafted to prevent that, while improving quality of life.

ALL DONORS, 1998-2013 (continued from inside front cover)

Honoring people who have improved our quality of life The Houston Tomorrow Catalyst Awards recognize those belonging to the longstanding tradition of citizens dedicating themselves to the betterment of the Houston region. We think of them as catalysts.

Sometimes the catalyst tweaks a minor direction change that alters the course over the long term and sometimes the catalyst causes an explosion. The Allen Brothers who founded Houston were great catalysts. Gail Borden, who drew up the first City of Houston plan that has endured and is often hailed as one of the best in North America, was another great catalyst.

The first awards ceremony is September 26, 2013, at the BioScience Research Collaborative.

The Emeritus award for a person who was or has long been a recognized force for change goes to the late Howard W. Horne, Sr., the first chairman of Metro, who was a long-time passionate advocate of public transit service, and dynamic figure in Houston’s real estate evolution.

Finalists and winners are: Excellence: A long-term champion of quality of life who is a recognized provocateur.

Jim Blackburn, Jeff Taebel.

Honoree: Jeff Taebel Engaged: A thought leader who has a clear change agenda.

Keiji Asakura, Laura Murillo, Rick Lowe, Michael Skelly.

Honoree: Rick Lowe.

Evolving: New on the scene and shaking things up.

Bobby Heugel, Carra Moroni, Ian Rosenberg, Laura Spanjian.

Honoree: Laura Spanjian.

Emerging: Students who have sharp ideas and the ability to express them.

Michael McCreight, Houston Christian High School Hannah Bevers, University of Texas Houston Tomorrow intends to search out, encourage, and work with such catalysts to create change that will help us achieve our vision of Houston being home to the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous people in America by the region’s 200th birthday, August 30, 2036.

$100-$249 Aaron Chang, Adam Socki, Adra B Hooks, Allen Tiller, Alma M Howie, AM Johnson, Anne and Robert Davis, Anne and Thomas Olson, Annmarie Johnson, Arturo Lopez, Audrey Trotti, BA New, Barbara and Thomas Blocher, Barbara and Thomas L McKittrick, BB Toth, Bee Ventures, Betty Baer and Frederick Krasny, Bill Neuhaus, BJ Snyder, Blaine & Judith Hollinger, Brazos County, Brian Crabtree, Carol Adatto and Eric Nelson, Carol Shattuck, Castlen Kennedy, Charles Bullock, Cherie Gorman, Christopher Walker, Christy Hitchens, City of Friendswood, City of Pearland, Claire Caudill, Claudia Williamson, Clayton & Catherine Hurst, Clayton Erikson, Coats & Manderson, Colin Hendricks, Courtenay Siegfried, Courtney Robins, Curry Architects LLP, Dan Searight, David & Anne Morris, David & Susanne Theis, David Hitchcock, David L Fox, David Webb, Davis Maxey, Deborah Wandel Francis, Debra Danburg, Dexter Handy, Diane Schenke, Donna Kacmar, Doreen Stoller, Doug & Claire Kilgore, Doug Childers, Doug Kilgor, Dr. Mavis Kelsey, Dunn Judson, Edith Lane Crossley, Edith T Personnette, Elizabeth T Brooks, Emily Braswell, Eric Nelson, Eubanks Group Architects, Evan Conroy, Evelyn L Merz, Frances Farenthold, Freeman E Self, Galveston Houston Association for Smog Prevention, Garden Club of Houston, Gayle and Charles Carlberg, Geoff Carleton, Gerald & Bobbi McIntosh, Gordon Echols, Greater Horizons, Green Bank, Harrient C Latimer, Hayley Pallister, Henley Foundation, Holly Hutchins, Ian Rosenberg, Informed Ideas DBA, Jacqueline Leatz, Jacqueline S Clark, James A Elkins, III, James D Hill, Jane Bavineau, Jason Ginsberg, Jean D Krchnak, Jeffrey & Rebecca Tapik, Jemaine Gibbs, Jennifer Cate, Jeremy & Helen Davis, Jermaine A Gibbs, Jerome Peters, Jerry Lowry, Jessica Pugil, Jewett & McCulley LLP, Jim & Donna Bennett, Jim Box - Consultant, Inc, Jim Granato, Joan Crull, Joel Salazar, John & Judye Hartman, John Breeding, John Corbell, John E Walsh, John K Spear, John Ohmart, John Thompson, John W Corbell, Jonathan & Naomi Smulian, Karen C Derr, Kate Hood, Kate Kirkland, Kathryn Hite, Kay Sheffield, Kenneth & Rogene Calvert, Kerri DaSilva, Kim and Reid Wilson, Kinsinger & Co, L Gaertner, Laura D Jackson, Lauri Debrie Thanheiser, Laverne Williams, Lawrence Lander, Legacy Land Trust, Lisa & Douglas Shead, Lorie Westrick, Madeleine and Michael Appel, Marc Grossberg, Marcia & Conrad Perry, Margaret Menger, Marie G Ristroph, Marina Rossow, Marion Fay Monsen, Mark & Linda Ruane, Mark J Mohr, Martha Murphree, Marvin Rich, Mary Almendarez, Mary Lawler, Mary Margaret Hamilton, Matthew Camp, Matthew Huston, McIntosdh Revocable Trust, Merz & Berlinghoff, Michael & Nancy Hochschild, Michael & Susan Bono, Michael M Fowler, Michael Tracy, Mike O'Brien, Mitchell Shields, Mitigation Strategies LLC, Morris & Lewis, Mothers for Clean Air, Nancy Hentschek, Nancy Pittman, New Jersey Future, Newton Ellison, Nyla K Woods, Olga Barlow, Palmer Schooley, Pat Mione, Patrice and Gary Easterly, Peter Price, Phoebe and Robert Tudor, Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast, Pliny Fisk, Power Plumbing, Rachel and James Dunlap, Raymond & Terri Thomas, Rebecca & John Luman, Rey de la Reza, Richard R Farias, Richard V Viebig, Jr, Rick Potthoff, Roanne N Stern, Robert A Mahlstedt, Robert Harriss, Robert L Howier Jr, Robert McAshan, Roberta Burroughs, Robin A Holzer, Robin Blut, Robin Cavanaugh, Russell Schexnayder, Ruth Milburn, Sakina & Mir Nadir Ali, Samantha and Bryan Carlile, Samra and William Jones-Bufkins, Sanchez, Ramon, B Ross, Sara Paschall Dodd, Sarah Cooke, Scott Weaver, Shanna and Troy Fuhriman, Sharon Roark, Shead Conservaation Solutions, Sheila Mitchell, Shelley Smith, Silvia McCollom, Sims McCutchan, South East Texas Regional Planning Committee, Spillette Consulting, Stan Bilski, Stan Winter, Stephan Blasill, Stephen Amos, Steven & Deborah Hecht, Stuart & Angela Kensinger, Stuart Smith, Susan Alleman, Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill, Suzie Edrington, Sylia and Gordon Quan, Tadd Tellepsen, Talley Landscape Architects, Texas Tech University, The TOD Group, Toni and Jeff Beauchamp, Virginia Stogner, Walter H Walne, Webb Architecture Corporation, William E King, William Findley, Williams Companies, Zane Segal Projects, Inc $1-$100

13 Celcius, Aaron Tuley, AL Serody, Alan R Cooper, Alberto Magh, Alexandra Nolen, Alexandra Paddon-Jones, Allen Watson, Alyssa Dole, Amanda Benavidas, Amanda Benavides, Amanda Goad, Amanda Zeller, Amar Mohite, Amy Boyers, Amy Lee, Amy Sullivan , Andrea and ricky Edrington, Andrew Burleson, Andrew Cobb, Andrew Hung, Andrew Mangan, Angela Martinez, Anita Sparksbohn, Ann Taylor, Anne and Kevin Taylor, Anthony Reidy, Antoine Bryant , Artie Lee Hinds, Aston Hinds, Axum T. Teferra, Barbara Koslov, Becky Edmundson, Becky Smith, Belinda Hill, Bill Blome, Billy Cook, Blue Heron Farm Inc, Bob & Dianne Josephs, Bob Ethington, Brad Beers, Bradshaw Hovey, Brent & Kelli Batchelor, Brent Moon, Brian Herod, Bridget Jensen, Brittany Fox, Caitlin Benzon, Cameron Javidpour, Candyce Rylander, Carole Allen, Carolyn Mata, Carra Moroni, Carroll Blue, Carroll Shaddock, Catherine R Pernot, Cathy Halka, Chancellor King, Charles Peters, Charles Savino, Charlotte Wells, Cheryl and Dan Sorak, Chris Conner, Christian Seger, Christina & James Huston, Christinia Hudson, Christof Spieler, Christy Smidt, Christyna Lewis, Chuck Wemple, Claudia Escobar, Colleen Brady, Colleen O'Donnell, Connie Chao, Constellation Energy Group Foundation Inc, D'shaun Guillory, Damon Williams, Dan Sharber, Daniel Lynch, Darlene Collins, Dave Martin, David Barry, David J Armistead, David Jarvis, David Manuel, David Morris & Anne Lewis, David Robinson, David Spaw, Dayle Blake, Deanna Schmidt, Debbie Antoon, Deborah M Ortiz , Denny Patterson, Dhelfor Balbin, Diane Alexander, Diann M. Woods, Doris Sing, Doug House , Douglas Elliott, Dr Philip Scheps, Dr. Pamela Berger, EB Brooks, Ed Eubanks, Edward Goldsberry, Edwin Lloyd, Egu Ramanathan, Eileen Egan, Elizabeth Lindheim, Elizabeth Love, Elizabeth Proctor, Eric Dick, Eric Leshinsky, Eric Slagle, Eric V Perez, Erica Billings, Ernesto Maldonado, Escoto Kamisha, Esther de Ipolyi, Filo Castore, Flo Hannah, Frances Burford & Alexander P Remen, Francisco Alvarez, Frederick Lazare, Gabrielle Novello, Garin & Marie Brockman, Gary Newton, Gary Packwood, Gene Francis Creely, II, Geri Wells, Glassman Shoemake Maldonado Architects, Glen Miracle, Greenexus, H. Irvin Smith, Haley Jackson, Hana Pinard, Hank Coleman, Hank Kastner, Hannah Jans, HC Clark, Helen Dreyfus, Hill Swift, Holly Eaton, Houston Arboretum & Nature Center, Houston Center for Photography, Hovey Bradshaw, Huan Le, Informed Futures, Irma Sanchez, Ivan Sue, J Douglas Killgore, J. Kent Marsh, Jack Holderness, Jacob Cuevas, Jacquisine LLC, Jaewoong Won, James & Barbara McCornick, James & Rosie Carrillo, James Gustafson, James Larimore, James McCallum, James Niederle, Jan K Kindel, Jana Mullins, Jane and Robert Dunphy, Jane Block, Jane's Due Process Inc, Janice M Krocker, Janis Scott, Jasmine Opusunju, Jay Mays, JC Gottfried & AF Vazquez, Jeanie Kincannon Ward, Jeff Bowden, Jeff Harmon, Jeffrey Solak, Jeffrey Wood, Jessica L Brand, JG & JK Bomba, Jim Bundscho, Jim Casey, Jimmie Brannon, Jing J Chen, JJ Paul, Joe Nelson, Joel Barna, John Cryer, III, John Hormell, John Kirksey, John Taylor, Jordan Shane, Joyce Almaguer-Reisdorf, Judy and James Dougherty, Judy Landress, Julia Gee, Julie Herman, June Giddings, Justin Myers, Kara Niles, Karen Marshall, Katherine Tsanoff and Fletcher Brown, Kathleen Garland, Kay and Dennis Duncan, Kay Harnden, Kelly Buchanan, Kelly Jeanine & Justin Lee Moss, Kelly Porter, Kelvin Edwards, Kenneth Schneider, Keveney Avila, Kim Beam, Kim Denney, Kim Ogg, Kimberly Hester, Kimberly Nelson, Kimberly Nicholson, Kirk Ferris, Kristin Scheel, L & G Miranda, Lana & Craig Kress, Laura Jardine, Lawrence Chapman, Les Cave, Leslie and Peter Wang, Lesly Vandame, Lilibeth Andre, Linda and Eric Hatleberg, Lisa Lin, Lisa Robertson, Liz Batile, Lois and Stephen Zamora, Lucille Martin, Lynn Edmundson, M & M J C Lunsford, M & R Caudill, Mabel and Raymond Chong Family Trust, MaDiana Diaz, Mangalji Shamsa, Marcita Galindez, Margaret Hinson, Margaret Kidd, Maria Jose Pesantez, Marilyn Okabayashi, Marina Badoian-Kriticos, Mark Mabry, Mary Carol Edwards, Mary Cinotto, Mary Lou Henry, Mary Marth Steed, Matthew R. Dietrichson, Matthew Tejada, Matthias Jung, Megan Parks, Melanie Rigdon, Michael Kramer, Michael L Fjetland, Michael Mazoch, Michael Monks, Michael Nichols, Michaelle Wormly, Mickey Hummel, Migigation Strategies LLC, Mike A. Lytle, Milton Mendez, Mimi Detering, Mindy Cooper, Miranda Maldonado, Mitchelle Gleisner, Nadia Lauterbach, Nancy Brown, Nancy Christophers, Nancy Christopherson, Nancy Sparrow, Nanette van Gend, Neil Bremner, Pam and Rob Reeder, Pamela Minich, Pat Baranski, Pat Walsh, Patricia & William Cunningham, Patricia Wallace, Patrick Gibbs, Patrick Horton, Paul Liffman, Paul Schechter, Paul Suckow, Paula Lenz, Peter Brown, Peter Forinash, Peter Guglielmo, Polly and Joe Ledvina, Priya Zachariah, Rachel Dvoretzky, Raphael Alicia, Raphael Wakefield, Ray Gutierrez, Raymond Dee, Rebecca Perring, Rebecca Reyna, Reginald Young, Richard Andrews, Richard Braastad, Richard H Cron, Richard Johnson, Richea Jones, Rick Cagney, Robert Appiah, Robert Carlen, Robert Muhammad, Robert Taylor, Roger Anderson, Roksan Okan-Vick, Ronald Cherry, Rosalind Bello, Ross Culbertson, Sameer Soleja, Sandra Glass, Sang Lee, Sarah Hughes, Sarah Phelps, Saundra Dahlke, Scenic Texas Inc, Scott Barker, Scott Chamberlain, Sereniah Breland, Sharon Greiff, Sharon Lahey, Sharon Siehl, Shaun Smith, Sheila Blake, Sheila Condon, Signal Creek Architects, Sina Raouf, Stephanie Ellis, Stephanie Stout, Stephen Crawford, Stephen Floyd Peacock, Stephen Linder, Steve & Jennifer Ostlind, Steve Clarke , Steve Nordlander, Steve Stelzer, Steven & Bianca Clark, Steven Altus, Steven Granson, Steven Mikulencak, Stuart Abramson, Susan Yound, Tabitha Holt, Tamara Nicholl-Smith, Tara Kelly, Teresa J Allen, Teresa O'Doonnell, The Brass Maiden, Theodora Batchvarona, Theola Petteway, Theresa Rodriguez, Theresa Strong, Thomas Chompson, Thomas Gail, Thomas Gray, Thomas Jones, Thomas P Jacomini, Thomas Winebarger, Thuy M Tran, Tim Schauer, Tina Fleck, Tobin B. Maples, Tom Dornbusch, Tom Ferguson, Tom Northrup, Tom Smith, Tony Frankino, Toral Sindha, Trevor Hightower, Trudy Stetzler and William Wilson, Urban Harvest, Vicky Bettis, Victoria Lea Herrin, Vinod Pathrose, Virginia Baxt, William Speer, William Wilson, Winfred Frazier, Zac Trahan, Zakcq Lockrem

33

SPACE

World

2036Humongous birthday party

race, nation

We had a vision. We worked together. We got there. Happy birthday. business, city, neighborhood

family next week next few years

lifetime TIME

children’s lifetime

THE FEW, THE BRAVE This illustration from The Limits to Grow depicts relative numbers of people who stay focused on short-term family and personal issues vs those who can embrace global issues and vast time.

Were are you in this graph?

BECAUSE WE DID IT. We became the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous metropolitan community in the United States. In 23 years, from 2013 to 2036, we will transform our regional world to achieve the highest quality of life.

Houston is selected as the US metro region with the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous people in the nation. And on its 200th birthday! Amazing!

We can do this. We can become the region with the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous people in the United States. We just have to decide we want that.

We’re already the second happiest region in the Harris’ poll’s Happiness Index (Dallas/Ft Worth is first!), we just have a little to do there.

Both health and prosperity respond to smart growth public policies. That is, walkable urbanism in centers that are connected to each other by transit service has very positive health and economic benefits. (And by the way, good public transit was found to be a major contributor to happiness in a recent study of 10 cities.)

To move toward walkable urbanism in the 25 job centers in the map at right we need to focus walkable policies on those places and we need to act to create that transit system you see there.

In 2005 numbers, those green areas contain 59% of all the people in the region, and the pinkish and green together contain 79% of all the people, not to mention 86% of all the jobs.

(We’re working on newer numbers.)

People who want to live in walkable urbanism - which is 62% of City residents - ought to be able to work in those same areas.

34

This is really so easy.

First, almost all of those places are in Harris County, so the voting jurisdiction for that level of government is pretty all-encompassing. Second, it’s almost all in the Metro transit service area, so we only need one agency to pull this off. And third, almost oll of the centers are in the City of Houston, which is already moving strongly in the direction of walkable urbanism..

Regional policies are mostly based on the areas outside a couple of these circle areas. Harris County is always the gorilla in the regional room, but getting Harris County officials to get in step with citizen preferences ought to be possible. And Metro has a much smaller but not dissimilar plan already; it would probably be happy to go there. The problem will be TxDOT, which “owns” all that right of way. It will have a tough time relinquishing control to lesser forces like the City and Metro and the Public. But you never know.

As Rice’s Dr. Stephen Klineberg, in his unmatched enthusiasion and persuasiveness at a recent presentation, cried out “Suddenly quality of life is central to Houston’s future!” we all

clapped, and as I did, I thought, well, but suddenly? It took 15 years to get you to say that!

Even so, thanks for the cover line and your refocus of attention, and all the rest.

Thanks to everyone in the region for all you do to make Houston a better place to live, and don’t forget to put the birthday on your calendar: August 30, 2036. We’re making reservations.

- David Crossley

THE MOST IMPORTANT MAP We believe we should spend a lot of public time studying this map, which shows that the green areas around the top 25 job centers contained 59% of all the people in the 8-county region and 75% of all the jobs. A relatively small, mostly bus-based transit system running in the existing highways that connect all the centers would be the most efficient, least expensive way to connect the majority of people in the region.

TOMORROW SPONSORS

Jody Blazek & David Crossley Susan & Barry Goodman William L. Peel, Jr. Gayle & Mike DeGeurin Janet Redeker

TOMORROW SPONSORS

Arup Beverly B. & Dan Arnold Penny & John Butler CDS Market Research Susan Christian & Laura Spanjian Barbara & Jonathan Day EnerVest Trey Fleming Ann & Kenny Friedman Gunda Corporation Hutchinson, Shockey, Erley & Co. Jordan & Skala Engineers Stephen Klineberg Harry Reasoner Perkins + Will Ziegler Cooper Architects Asakura Robinson

Miki Milovanovic

Bracewell & Giuliani

Ambassador Arthur Schecter

Denton A. Cooley

Zane Segal

John Crabb

Tejano Center for Community Concerns

Jack Drake Scott Howard HNTB Polly Ledvina

Traffic Engineers, Inc. FabenĂŠ Welch LaVerne A. Williams

Nancy Edwards & Bob Randall

The Woodlands Development Company

Lisa and Clark Martinson

Claude Wynn Interests

TOMORROW SPONSORS

Anne and Charles W. Duncan, Jr. Brenda and John H. Duncan, Sr. Ellen and Edward Randall, III Fairfax and Risher Randall

TOMORROW SPONSORS