The Houston Galveston region is expected to see 4 million new residents in the next 30 years. Where will those residents live? How will this change affect quality of life? How will they get around? The Houston Galveston Regional Plan for sustainable development is an important chance to look forward and find ways to keep our communities prosperous, healthy and attractive for generations to come.
CNU will be conducting member-led elections for a three seats on the Board of Directors. Online voting for the 2012 national board election continues until May 11, 2012. CNU members may vote online at http://www.cnu.org/2012boardelections
The Board of CNU Houston endorses Texas’ own Mathew McElroy, AICP, CNU-A. Mathew is the Deputy Director of the Planning and Economic Development Department for the City of El Paso. In just two years, Mathew has grown CNU membership in El Paso from three people to over 150 and trained approximately 150 people for the CNU-A exam. Mathew was instrumental in El Paso’s recent adoption of 500 acres of Smart Code development, a New Urbanist comprehensive plan, extensive code revisions, and the ITE manual.
Find out more about Mathew at http://www.cnu.org/2012boardelections/candidates#matthew
As we announced in January it's time for new officer elections. The new officer elections will officially take place at our Board of Directors Meeting on Tuesday, March 13th (tomorrow).
Of the 2010-2012 Officers, Jennifer Curtis is stepping down from her position as Interim Secretary. The remaining officers are all running for re-election, and Ash Jackson has entered his name for the position of Secretary.
That gives us a final ballot for 2012-2014 of:
President
Andrew Burleson
Vice-President
Matthew Camp
Treasurer
Cathy Halka
Secretary
Ash Jackson
CNU Members are eligible to vote in the new elections either by email to president(at)cnu-houston.org, or in person at the board meeting tomorrow night. With no one running opposed the election will be a formality, but we still encourage the membership to show their support for the slate by sending in a vote.
If you're not a CNU member, please consider joining. By joining CNU-National you become an official part of the movement to create more walkable, sustainable cities and towns across the nation. Membership is now more affordable than ever, you can join CNU starting at $40 per year.
By joining CNU-National and living in the Houston area you become a CNU-Houston member. CNU-Houston benefits from every membership we gain, so please consider joining today!
As part of our response to the Parking and High Density ordinance proposals with the City of Houston we've been fortunate to meet Bobby Huegel and Kevin Floyd, owners of Anvil and founders of OKRA - the Organized Kooperative on Restaurant Affairs. Bobby has expressed interest in our idea of working with OKRA to create a Walkable Business Coalition to raise awareness of opportunities to get to and from the places we love using any form of alternative transportation. We expect to begin working on this project with OKRA in February. If you're interested in getting involved, please email Andrew Burleson (burlesona[at]cnu-houston.org), and join our CNU-Houston Google Group.
It's hard to believe, but it's been almost 2 years since we started CNU-Houston, and that means it will soon be time to hold new Officer and Director elections. If you are interested in getting more involved with CNU-Houston and are interested in serving as an officer or director, please email Andrew Burleson (burlesona[at]cnu-houston.org) for more information.
The following letter concerning the High Density Ordinance was drafted by CNU-Houston President Andrew Burleson, and originally posted on his blog.
Recently the Houston City Council adopted the proposed “High Density Ordinance,” which adds a new requirement that high-rises built in residential neighborhoods have at least a 30 foot gap between them and the nearest house.
A thoughtful response to this issue was released last week, and I agree with that response.
Today I want to take a moment just to consider the larger picture of what’s going on in the City politically, and point out a different way of looking at the problem at hand.
The City’s current rulebook is built on the assumption that every property in the city is exactly like every other property. Famously, we do not have zoning that distinguishes what owners can do based on the surrounding context.
The obvious reality, however, is that every property in the City of Houston is not the same. In the past the city was pressured to allow higher-density development inside the loop, which led to the creation of Houston’s two zones: the ‘urban zone’ and ‘suburban zone’. Issues like Ashby High-Rise and Heights Walmart have pushed the city to put token restrictions on towers in residential areas, while also creating a third zoning category, the ‘Major Activity Center’, where said restrictions do not apply. Major Activity Centers are supposed to be an opportunity for places that have a lot of development to get major rule changes that they’ve been clamoring for without changing things around the rest of the city.
So the rulebook now stands on the following premise: “Everything outside the loop is the same, and everything inside the loop is the same, except for the places that are completely different.”*
Any observant person can see where this is going: because every property is, in fact, not the same as every other, the city is under political pressure to create more and more zones on the map that have different rules from each other. If you think that sounds a lot like zoning, you’re right.
There are two political ideas that have historically kept zoning out of Houston:
Developers like it better when there are fewer rules to learn, so having a single set of rules for the whole city is good for business.
The City does not know what the best use of a piece of land is, the market does, so the City should not be in the business of regulating land use.
These two ideas are basically correct. Simpler and more consistent rules generally are better for business, and land-use based regulation offers very few benefits at a great cost of economic and bureaucratic inefficiency.
However, the assumption that every piece of property in the city is and should be treated exactly the same is both wrong and unpopular. So that’s slowly but surely going away. The problem is, the City’s attempts to adhere to Principle #1 while trying to adapt the ordinances to reality and to political pressure mean we’re headed toward an increasingly balkanized set of “exception” zones that have totally separate and unrelated rules.
The reason the City is taking this approach is that the City believes that the only alternative to the balkanized exceptions approach is land-use zoning, which violates Principle #2. This is the great fallacy of Houston.
A far better and more effective approach to development regulation is form-based code. In a form-based code the scale of a building and the way it relates to its surroundings is regulated, and land-use is not regulated. Incidentally, this is how the City’s rulebook already works: Chapter 42 prescribes that all development in the City of Houston must be built in the conventional suburban form, with large setbacks between buildings and streets, and buildings oriented toward surface parking.
The great opportunity for Houston would be to take a more rational and orderly approach to the political pressure and physical reality that not every property is the same. We could do this while continuing to adhere to Principles 1 and 2.
What if we simply tied development standards and street standards together? If your property fronts on a small street, you need to build a smaller scale building. If your property fronts on a larger-scale street you can build a larger-scale building.
Consider the following food-for-thought example. What if the High Density Ordinance looked like this:
| If your property fronts on this kind of street… | You can build this high: |
|---|---|
| 1 directional lane | 3 stories |
| 1 directional lane + turn lane | 4 stories |
| 2 directional lanes | 4 stories |
| 2 directional lanes + turn lane | 6 stories |
| 3 directional lanes | 8 stories |
| 3 directional lanes + turn lane | 10 stories |
| 4 or more directional lanes | Unlimited |
*Note that “Directional Lane” means either one-way or each way. Ie: most of downtown has 4-5 lane one-way streets, which would qualify for unlimited height.
If you apply the logic above you’ll find that it already fits 98% of the development in Houston. Only a handful of high-rises around town fall outside of these parameters, and arguably those are the very high-rises the surrounding community believes are detrimental.
The best part of this formula is that it leaves the developer totally in control of density for any new greenfield project, but requires that they build streets that will offer appropriate capacity to the scale of proposed construction.
These rules are simple, they don’t require any special exception zones, they don’t allow high-rises in single-family neighborhoods, and they could be applied city-wide without an issue.
In fact, with a few minor additions (like sidewalk, utility, and platting standards) a simple set of rules like this could easily replace the City’s existing Chapter 42 and result in better development outcomes. That would be a win-win for everyone, and that is the kind of outcome we should be looking for. Instead we continue to see token efforts that slowly but surely make our development rules more complex and unpredictable without actually achieving the outcomes that the neighborhoods mobilized about in the first place.
*As an aside, they’re also about to change the definition of “urban” from “inside the loop” to “inside the Beltway”.