When reading the following I want you to keep something in mind: Luxury Apartments and Condominiums.
Houston, it seems, is no longer an affordable place to live. OK sure, housing prices are still relatively low but, in order to raise Houston's cost of living, there is a coordinated effort to fiddle with transportation costs to lower Houston's rating and continue the assault against the single-family vehicle. In fact, it could be argued that you, driving your car to and from work, the grocery store, to your children's recitals, classes, school, etc. have become public enemy number one in Houston's fight against affordability creep.
The car, either within the city or without, has never been sexy when viewed through the spectrum of new urbanist thinking. This is, in large part, because you, in your car, present an obstacle to those who want to be in theirs with less traffic on the roads. It's been known for a long time that the idea of public transportation has strong support but ridership percentages (compared to the whole of the commuting population) are relatively low. The reason for this? People like the idea of buses and trains when other people are riding them and they're driving by (or, in some cases, being driven by) in their cars on wide open roads.
We also know that everyone wants there to be affordable housing, provided it's located far away from their own neighborhood. The convenient answer to this, provided to us by think-tanks and the unproductive class, is "affordable housing located next to transit centers". This is, presumably, the best of both worlds. You give the poor and gormless ready access to trains and buses which prevents them from mingling with their more enlightened brethren who like to ride their bikes at parks, visit sidewalk cafes and generally live life as they imagine the Europeans do. (except that, the Europeans really don't). This ensures that the older, more expensive, inner-city neighborhoods with their McMansions and refurbished bungalows maintain their 'character and charm' without being subjected to the blight that is brought on by an influx of those less sophisticated and fortunate. It also ensures that the roadways are only populated by two types of people. Either those with luxury sedans who have 500 plus horsepower to travel at 30 MPH or those who drive more modest vehicles from the sticks to work the service jobs that the luxury set requires.
Of course, there's a flaw in all of this thinking and it lies in the italicized words at the top of this post.
Because, you see, what's being built around the transit centers is not affordable housing. Increasingly, in Houston, it's luxury apartments that are being built. The reason for this is due to the relatively high valuation of land requiring high-rents to be sustainable. You're not going to receive a ROI high enough to please your investors if you're building affordable housing inside Loop 610.
It's no accident then that Houston's public transportation network was not designed to bring people from the outlying areas to job centers, as most good public transportation systems do. Instead, the entire purpose of the system is to move relatively affluent residents from their residences and businesses to their places of recreation. During the rare times that the Metrorail builds out to low-income areas (the Near East side for example) the long-term hope is gentrification and an increase in collectible rents will "bring up" blighted, aging neighborhoods. Historic preservation is the sole provenance of the well-to-do. The poor don't have that luxury and, in many cases, would prefer a nice grocery store over a 40-year-old school house that's falling in on itself.
Put it this way: Parks, curbside coffee-ships, wine & tapas bars and five-star restaurants catering to the foodborg and their fellow travelers are not designed for the poor. They're catering specifically to a more elevated class (in their minds) and would recoil in horror if a family of five came in to celebrate a 20 year anniversary. You don't see parents feeding a baby Cheerios from a Ziploc baggie at Pass & Provisions.
Houston's elite and ruling class have long looked to cities such as New York, Chicago, Portland and San Francisco with envious eyes. Cities that are given more run in the national and global media as centers of culture and urbanism. At heart, what we're currently witnessing are successes at attempting to copy those cities. In many cases, the very people who are grousing that Houston needs to copy those cities are the same who came to Houston because it had jobs where the others did not. Trying to explain that to a New Urbanist can cause a paradigm to shift without a clutch, so tread carefully.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong, or faulty, in what the New Urbanists would like to see. It is a different vision of Houston than many people had when they arrived, and a different Houston than what attracted them in the first place, but it's a valid point of view on what the city should be. While I, and others, disagree with the goal that doesn't mean that it's adherents are fundamentally wrong. It would be nice if they argued about it honestly however. Missing from any of these arguments is the fact that Houston's relatively cheap housing has allowed people to spend more on other priorities (including nicer cars) or to move outside of the city center to outlying areas where drives are longer, but lot sizes and square footage bigger, schools better and the infrastructure actually works. These are choices that people make, not something that they are, in many cases "forced" to do. In fact, for all of the talk about 'Houston' growing, it's really the Houston extended metro area that's growing, while the city itself sees population numbers that are flat, or slightly declining.
The problem then is both that people have a choice and they're increasingly not making the ones that the unproductive class would prefer. There are trade-offs inherent in any choice, something that the utterly worthless Houston Area Study constantly fails to include in it's questions. The New Urbanists among us don't want to mention those, because they water down their arguments. Houston being a lot more nuanced than Houtopia.
I've stated before that the "battle" for the future of Houston is over and those who believe as I do, that the public transportation system should be focused on moving people into the city and then to various job centers, have lost badly. From Metrorail to bus reimagining, Houston's public transit system is now fully positioned to actuate the New Urbanist vision. Whether or not the argument has been an honest debate is irrelevant to our current position. We're running full-on, full speed to Houtopia and every out-of-context data point only serves to feed the popular narrative.
What we're seeing now is the second stage, a chance for further diminishing the role of the single-family automobile, and further separating 21st century Houston from the past that led to it's rise as the global city for energy. So-called "complete streets" seek to choke traffic flow to the point of impassability while benign sounding "traffic calming" measures are anything but. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing we might not ever know because the rise of the Houston Lock Step Political Media is going to ensure that only one view is given a voice. That the 'one chosen view' is biased, occasionally dishonest and, in most cases, dictatorial are just the eggs that inevitably get broken in the New Urbanist omelet.
If there was a mission statement it would read as follows: "In Houston, you are free to choose any mode of transportation you want, as long as it is not a car."
