The city of Houston itself has developed programs to try to preserve affordable housing in the Third and Fourth wards and slow down the process of gentrification, but they haven’t accomplished a great deal. One is LARA, the Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority, which acquires tax-delinquent properties and sells them to local buyers at subsidized prices. The difficulty with LARA is that it competes with private developers, and the developers nearly always outbid the city. Some critics have suggested that LARA may even hasten gentrification by encouraging developers to bid on properties before the city can get them. In its first five years, LARA acquired fewer than thirty houses—a drop in the bucket.
More ambitious was Houston HOPE, launched with considerable fanfare by the White administration in 2004. Using a combination of city money and private philanthropy, Houston HOPE was designed to foreclose on delinquent properties rather than bidding for them in the open market, and work with developers to create new affordable projects for local ownership, with public money provided to help the buyers make down payments. The maximum sale price for the Houston HOPE units was $150,000, with up to $45,000 in down payment assistance to the purchasers. Over six years, Houston HOPE acquired 1,110 abandoned lots, with an average tax delinquency of eighteen years. It built 382 new homes and repaired more than 1,000 others. It assisted in the construction of projects in nine neighborhoods, aimed at replacing some of the units eliminated with the destruction of Allen Parkway Village. White called Houston HOPE “redevelopment that’s the opposite of gentrification … It’s good that there are people who want to live in the city limits, but we don’t want to destroy the character of a neighborhood. Unless we do something aggressive, the market will build in concentric circles around the employment center.”
But in the teeth of a national recession, Houston HOPE simply ran out of development opportunities. Early in 2010, faced with a decline in contributions from private sources, Houston HOPE ceased its lending and development programs altogether.
One community that did not participate actively in Houston HOPE was Garnet Coleman’s Third Ward. Coleman does not believe in spending his TIRZ money to stimulate home buying. What he wants is to keep renters in their dwellings. One effort that Coleman has supported is Project Row Houses, a collection of apartment buildings designed to look like modern versions of the old shotgun houses. It’s a small project, several dozen buildings created and developed by Rick Lowe, a local artist who builds the units and then rents them out at subsidized rates to existing neighborhood tenants, many of them senior citizens. One experiment is a collection of duplexes rented entirely to single mothers. There’s no foreclosure problem at Project Row Houses, because there are no mortgages offered.
Lowe is fully on board with the elements of Coleman’s strategy. “Every time one of these little old houses goes down through fire,” he says, “or a landlord decides, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ it means there’s one less opportunity for someone to ever live in those neighborhoods again.” Still, he is under no illusions. “You will see basically in ten years a scattered hodgepodge of townhouses throughout all this area,” he has predicted. “It’s just going to happen. Hopefully the exception will be this little row house village we’re doing.”
HOUSTON DIFFERS from other rapidly changing cities in several important ways. One is sheer geographical size. At 620 square miles, it is big enough to hold all of Portland, Baltimore, and Detroit within its city limits. It is less than half as dense as Los Angeles. When people talk about central Houston, they are usually referring not to downtown or even the close-in wards but to the area inside Interstate Highway 610, which functions as an inner beltway. But Interstate 610 is a giant rectangle stretching nearly seven miles from north to south and eight miles from east to west, holding a quarter of the city’s 2.2 million people. No other large American city would refer to a “center” this vast.
Indeed, the heart of the oversize in-town area is relatively free of residents: Only 4,100 people lived in the downtown business core in 2009. There was one major new high-rise development, One Park Place, thirty-seven stories and 346 units in rose-colored brick masonry alongside the new and expensively outfitted Discovery Green park, which boasts theaters, ice skating, and restaurants; One Park Place was 60 percent occupied as of early 2010. But there was little of comparable scope on the drawing boards.
Where urban development is most obvious in Houston is in the neighborhoods that ring the downtown core, some historic in the way that the Third Ward is, but others, composed of unused industrial land, that do not require significant displacement of existing residents to generate new residential opportunities. Within just a two-mile radius of the city’s historic commercial center, in 2010, there was a population of forty-four thousand. Within a four-mile arc there was a population of three hundred thousand.
What’s striking is how many residents of the area say they want to live some form of urbanized existence. In a survey conducted early in 2010 by the Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 41 percent of the 750 respondents, including those currently well outside the 610 perimeter, said they would like to move to “a smaller home in a more urbanized area, within walking distance of shops and workplaces.” The survey also showed that 57 percent opted for “a single-family home with a big yard, where you would need to drive almost everywhere you wanted to go.” But in a city such as Houston, the percentages aren’t as important as the absolute numbers. Forty-one percent of two million is a little more than eight hundred thousand people. What seems equally important in this survey is the comparison over time, especially among Anglos. In 1999, some 46 percent of Anglo city dwellers expressed a desire to move to the suburbs, while only 28 percent of suburbanites said they would like to move to the city. Today, those figures have evened out. Twenty-five percent of those in the city want to go to the suburbs; 23 percent of the suburbanites expressed a desire for urbanized living. Given the increasing appeal of an urban-centered life, freed from the long commutes and the auto dependency of a home far out on the periphery, it seems possible that those figures will shift further toward the center of the city in the years ahead. The likelihood that central Houston will ever be a pedestrian mecca, like neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Boston, may be slim, given the heat that makes a stroll down the streets an unpleasant experience during so many months of the year. But whether or not there is a revival of all-day street life, there seems as much potential as in many other cities for urbanized existence of some variety.
THE FUTURE URBANIZED HOUSTON would not look much like big Northern cities. The downtown residential population is unlikely to increase very much; nor will the number of downtown jobs. Downtown currently holds about 23 percent of the office space in the Houston region, largely because major oil companies have made a downtown commitment, and because a new downtown energy complex has sprung up around the wind-power industry. But the percentage of Houston-area workers employed downtown is much smaller than that, and few expect that the overall downtown employment percentage will change very much in the coming years. Instead, Houston will have to urbanize around its satellite employment, retail, and residential centers, of which there are a large number, most of them inside the 610 loop but some at a considerable distance outside. According to Stephen Klineberg of Rice University, who conducts the annual survey of resident choices and opinions, Houston can actually be said to have five to eight downtowns, and eighteen centers of activity. Houston is, in the language of urban sociology, a “multicentered metropolitan region.” And many of those quasi-urbanized centers remain comparatively cheap compared to similar urbanizing patches in other cities. As Klineberg says, “If the rich are going into downtown now, there are other centers that are still affordable.”
For many students of Houston, the reason for the city’s comparative affordability is a simple one: the absence of zoning laws. In fact, the commonly held image of Houston as a wide-open build-what-you-want-anywhere-you-want city is somewhat
exaggerated: Chapter 42 of the city’s municipal code provides for sewer controls, and for a developer of substantial properties, these can be used to serve the same limiting purpose as a formal zoning law. There are also deed restrictions, of the sort that Garnet Coleman has employed successfully in the Third Ward; these can be written by the developer himself, and can, for example, impose legally enforceable rules about the number of low- or moderate-income tenants or buyers a project must contain.
Even so, Houston’s political leaders have traditionally believed that the absence of formal zoning makes it much easier for developers to operate. Mayor White once commented that “one reason Houston is affordable is that they don’t have to pay lawyers several extra thousand per lot to go through a zoning.”
Despite the existence of informal zoning by other municipal codes, several scholarly studies have pointed to the absence of zoning in its official sense as the main reason the city remained (relatively) affordable even in its most desirable districts during the height of the national real estate boom of the early 2000s.
In 2008, the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser published an essay in City Journal that attributed lower housing costs in Houston directly to the absence of official zoning laws and the relative simplicity of the permitting process. “The unavoidable fact,” Glaeser wrote, “is that New York makes it a lot harder to build housing than Houston does. The permitting process in Manhattan is an arduous, unpredictable multiyear odyssey involving a dizzying array of regulations, environmental and otherwise, and a host of agencies. Then developers must deal with neighborhood activists and historical preservationists. Any effort to build in one of New York’s more attractive, older communities would almost certainly face strong opposition from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.… Houston’s builders have managed—better than in any other American city—to make the case to the public that restrictions on development will make the city less affordable to the less successful.”
Not everyone agrees that the absence of zoning laws is a good thing for Houston. It is not hard to find planners who argue that, even though some controls do exist, it is an incongruous hodgepodge of a city, with townhouses and warehouses stacked next to one another because there is nothing in the statute books to prevent them from locating there. Planners in nearly all cities complain that the really important decisions are made by developers, not by planning professionals, but the case is far easier to make in Houston than almost anywhere else. In the words of architect and former mayoral candidate Peter Brown, “There are no tools to guide the growth of the city.… Not having zoning is a detriment when you’re trying to determine what kind of city you will be.” The reality in Houston is that if you want to build a small property or make substantial changes to an existing one, the process is easier than almost anywhere else in America. If you want to implement a master plan for the city or even a significant portion of it, there are enormous political and procedural obstacles. This is very nearly the opposite of what prevails in many American cities with a complex zoning code.
A cheaper, much messier city than nearly all its national counterparts: That is what the consensus seems to be, among those who watch it from the inside and those who observe from a distance. But one other point seems inescapable: A city without formal zoning is a city that changes faster than other cities do. It is much quicker to respond to even modest evolution of market demand. Developers in particular can react faster. “As long as they can put forth the required cash,” says architecture professor Tom Diehl, “there are few prohibitions from getting dirt turned and foundations poured.”
Among the changes that can occur faster in Houston is demographic inversion. The demand of the affluent to move closer to the center can be met quickly, through the construction of individual townhouses or condominiums without regard to any overall master plan for the site or the surrounding area. Small developers can do fill-ins without having to worry about the legality of a nonconforming use. As a report by the real estate analysis firm Metrostudy put it in 2006, “The type of development being done in riskier areas generally speaking tends to be small and somewhat opportunist. Find a site on a good corner, reasonable access, and they do a dozen townhouses.”
While other cities hold seminars on the likely future of gentrification, Houston is in a position to gentrify virtually overnight. This is the main reason Garnet Coleman is buying up vacant land piece by piece in the Third Ward. Small-scale developers do not need to acquire large parcels or jump through bureaucratic hoops to start erecting homes for the affluent wherever there is an available piece of property. They can, to all intents and purposes, just show up and start digging.
The ease of building on small lots next to properties with radically different uses is what led to the accelerated population changes in the Fourth Ward in the 1990s. The Third Ward would have seen essentially the same process except for the amount of land banking that has taken place. Indeed, the southern parts of the Third Ward, closest to Houston’s Museum District and to Texas Southern University, have seen a substantial transformation in the years since 2000. And over the course of a decade, without much attention being paid to it, central Houston in general has lost most of its white working class. The center of town has become an enclave of arriving Anglo professionals, a declining center for African Americans, and the home for a rapidly rising number of Hispanics taking over properties that African Americans have left. All of this has occurred, in large part, because it is so easy to create change one house at a time, instead of waiting for construction to be approved on large parcels.
Not all the changes are easy to document statistically, but they can be traced through changes in political behavior. The Anglos in the central-city townhouses have quickly become a dominant force in city elections. When Houston chose a new mayor, in November 2009, it is estimated that Anglos—mostly liberal Anglos—cast about 65 percent of the vote, even though the 2000 census had shown them to be only about 30 percent of the overall city population. Some of this was the result of a low turnout in which Anglos tended to vote more heavily, but a good deal of it also resulted from the rapid demographic changes of a build-to-market city. The winner of that mayoral election, Annise Parker, was the openly gay city auditor, and her sexual preference was a negligible factor in the campaign. Parker’s election came as something of a shock to political observers from around the country who would not have expected Houston to make such a choice; it came as no surprise to those who had been watching the demographic changes in the city over the previous ten years.
TO SEE THE PECULIAR WAY in which central Houston is redeveloping itself, one need only walk around behind the immense George R. Brown Convention Center that borders Discovery Green. There one finds railroad tracks, warehouses, loading docks, huge amounts of vacant land, and, nestled in between, pockets of high-end townhouses built by Frank Liu, a Taiwanese-born real estate developer. He has made a specialty of squeezing homes for the professional class into blocks that look like wasteland on the outskirts of downtown and in the poorer neighborhoods immediately to the north.
Most of Liu’s projects do not involve much displacement, if any, because rarely are there more than a handful of residents to displace. One of his largest parcels of unbuilt property is a Superfund pollution site. On Nagle Street, in the dingy backyard of the convention center, he is marketing a Mediterranean-style townhouse development with three-story condominiums, each more than two thousand square feet, complete with high ceilings, luxurious bathrooms, and huge picture windows.
To tell the truth, there isn’t much to see out of the picture windows. The buyers are essentially purchasing property in a railroad yard. Liu makes a joke about this. “You’ve always loved trains,” he tells some of the empty-nest suburbanites who make up a majority of the visitors on open-house days. “Congratulations! You get to be near the train.” They are not near much of anything else. There is no grocery store within walking distance; for that matter, there is still no grocery store downtown, eve
n on the more presentable west side of the convention center. It doesn’t seem to make much difference. The demand persists anyway.
The area around Nagle Street never used to have a formal name; it was just the wasteland on the other side of the tracks from the convention center and the rest of downtown. Now it is called EaDo—East Downtown—and thanks to developers such as Frank Liu who are willing to build high-amenity homes on small and seemingly unpromising pockets of land, the population of EaDo is now roughly equal to the population of downtown itself. Even in the recessionary years that slowed the market in Houston and especially in its suburbs, new houses sold on Nagle Street. In the words of Bob Eury, of the Central Houston Civic Improvement organization, “You see people buying housing in Houston that you never would have imagined anyone buying.”
The current population of the Nagle Street development, Liu estimates, is about 70 percent empty nesters and 30 percent young professional singles and couples. Almost no children live here. “The higher the price,” Liu says, “the more empty nesters,” who tend to ask about high-quality appliances, the amount of light streaming into the living room, elevator capability for future years, and sometimes smoking balconies for baby boom contemporaries who have not shed their tobacco habit. The young professional contingent places a higher priority on green features and energy savings.
There are twenty-seven units to one acre of land in this particular development—the empty nesters who buy there are often cutting the amount of their living space in half. But they don’t seem to mind. “They’ve already fallen in love with intown,” Liu says, citing an infatuation that even the most committed urbanites in most other American cities might find difficult to understand.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 18