I had the week off from the day job a couple of weeks ago and took the opportunity to attended an April 9, 2008 TexITE luncheon where Councilman Peter Brown was the featured speaker. And it was a speech to remember.
Mr. Brown started off by saying that he has been a member of the ITE since 1995, when he mentioned that some of its members had started getting caught up in New Urbanism. He stated that he has worked in some 25 states with master planned developments and 130,000 units.
He stated emphatically that he represents the City of Houston. He insisted that the Houston metropolitan area needed a "strong central city", but as have so many other speakers who have made this claim, I should note that he failed to explicitly explain why is it necessary to have one. What's so special about a particular municipality when both homeowners and businesses are footloose?
Mr. Brown stated that the efficiency and character of the built environment must go together. He also said that Houston must become a Sustainable City. For those of you that need some help reading between the lines, this means that Houston must have urban consolidation, despite the fact that Houston has been gaining density at a rate of about 500 people per square mile per decade since circa 1990. In this encoded language, this means that we must have more compact development, use less energy, meaning that we have to get away from autos and use public transportation regardless of its decline in use. In other words, it's no longer the City's job to merely provide police protection, fire suppression, or other services. It is now the City's job to compel you to cut down on how much energy you use regardless of your own habits or desires.
There is now a new Council committee called the Committee of Sustainable Growth. Of course, Mr. Brown is the chair of this committee and I would not doubt that some of his "Smart Growth" friends are advising him.
Mr. Brown says that we recycle only 7 percent of our waste, while Seattle recycles much more. He forgot to mention that recycling was one of those fads that started in the 1980's, but municipalities everywhere quickly discovered that recycling was largely a money waster. In fact the City of Houston, which started a recycling plan under former Mayor Kathy Whitmire, has tried on a number of occasions over the past 15-20 years to get out of the recycling business because it was consuming taxpayer dollars. However, recycling is politically popular, ergo the City continues to waste taxpayer dollars doing it because the taxpayers like wasting their taxpayer dollars this way.
Read this post as to why recycling is often a money waster:
Well one of the reasons they want you to take your recyclables to a depository is because curbside recycling is extremely energy inefficient. And seriously money losing in most places unless landfill fees are exorbitant like in NY, CA or Seattle. I think in SanFran you have to sort your recyclables. In Texas, Austin has a weekly curbside program which loses money. In Houston we have a biweekly curbside pickup which loses money, and is only available in the closer in more dense areas, maybe 1/3 of the city area. The trucks squander so much fuel that the money from selling recyclables doesn't pay for fuel costs. This is even worse in lower population density cities like Nashville and 'burbs because of the distance between pickups. Houston was losing intolerable money from this when it was weekly, so they changed to biweekly. Unless you're in an area where land for landfills is extremely tight, and pop. density is high like in major cities on the coasts, curbside recycling is window dressing, a "feel good" solution causing more waste than saving. It's not a matter of Nashville being behind San Jose at all, just reasonable economics for the local situation. The political entities there are saying to you to combine a trip to the store with a trip to the depository and save fuel. I do this with glass since Houston does not take glass at the curbside.
Mr. Brown informed the audience that the City of Houston now has a comprehensive mobility plan and a comprehensive drainage plan in place. A "Green Building Code" will be getting adopted, though he did not go into details of its contents. There are definitive plans for Interconnected Green Belts and flood control plans. At the same time, CM Brown lamented that the City has no source of money for flood control.
Mr. Brown is convinced that new resources for transportation infrastructure funding will be available at the federal level. He reemphasized that Houston needs a plan.
Mr. Brown supports the Texas Triangle Bullet Train connecting DFW, Austin & San Antonio, and Houston. He says that costs will be $21 billion, a figure I'll believe when I see it. He said that Southwest Airlines is probably dropping their opposition to such a plan because there is no money to be made on short haul air traffic. As was to be expected, Mr. Brown emphatically supports dramatically increased light rail and commuter rail expansions. Of course he would because he will be dead before he has to ask taxpayers to bail out Metro when the cost overruns come and bus service goes to pot to continue rail service. All this for a form of transportation that will probably never achieve more than 10-15 percent of work trips no matter how high the price of fuel becomes.
One item I should interject here about a Texas triangle train. One needs to remember that such a scheme will only be built within the boundaries of Texas. As such, people should not expect that a financially strapped federal government, which will be feeling the full brunt of the baby boomer entitlement burden coming within the next decade, to fund such a scheme simply because you are asking that 49 other states fund it without getting anything in return. It will need to be done either privately or be done from the confines of the Texas Legislature.
CM Brown says Dallas is 10-15 years ahead of Houston when it comes to rail, but he failed to mention that rail has done nothing to improve traffic congestion, which is as bad as Houston's. He also didn't talk about the recent massive escalations in rail costs which have sent shockwaves throughout the Dallas political classes and have driven Dallas's rail expansions into the ditch. He said Houstonians will not tolerate eminent domain for new roads. That's good to know because if we are going to have the much ballyhooed 3.5 million new residents show up by 2035, then we will probably have another 2 million or more vehicles on our roads.
Mr. Brown says that Houston must be pro-growth and development, as only 15 percent of new area population and 23 percent of new area jobs are landing in Houston proper, as the people and jobs are going outside city limits. Strangely, moments later he proclaimed that "there is a great migration where people are moving back to the central city". The creative classes want an exciting, vibrant lifestyle and we need to improve the "Quality of Place". I suppose that we are to have no more of those quiet, boring, suburban bedroom communities with good schools and lots of open space which might attract new residents.
Mr. Brown said we have reactive and complaint driven government, where for example a developer says they need a pair of lanes for their new development in order to make it work. This is not efficient, Mr. Brown proclaimed. Instead, "we need to do things like figure out where the high density development is supposed to go". Mr. Brown didn't mention the idea that developers might be the ones whose job it is to figure out where high density development might go, nor did Mr. Brown go into details as to why a developer might need a pair of road lanes to get their new developments to work.
Transportation planning: Area planning will require overlaying TX-DOT's plans, TIRZ maps, and the city's plans. Houston will soon have a classification of city streets, which he says have led to "insipid neighborhood layouts", though Mr. Brown did not go into detail as to what constituted insipid neighborhood layouts. Mr. Brown is not happy with current transportation modeling at H-GAC, claiming it is primitive. Other cities have "much more advanced" modeling.
Mr. Brown then said a major goal of Houston's comprehensive mobility plan is to substantially reduce per capita vehicle miles traveled ! He said Houstonians spend $12,000 per year in auto expenses. He derided that Houston is a cheap city to live, saying that despite cheap housing costs, Houston is very expensive, partly because taxes are high. There is a trade off between housing and transportation costs. "We need to find a balance", presumably through even more planning. Major Thoroughfares are to be rationalized, efficient, and neat. Mr. Brown did not go into any further details as to what the City was going to do to compel its citizens to not travel so many miles, regardless of what their means or travel desires were.
Mr. Brown has traffic calming on his agenda, as well as road dieting. In case you need translations of these terms, these are part and parcel of the Smart Growth agenda, terms which mean that roads need to have lots of money spent putting various barriers in the way for pedestrians, which in turn cut down on vehicle speeds and mobility. Road dieting means cutting down on road lane miles and redeploying them for bikes and walking. In other words, Mr. Brown wants to make Houston more automobile hostile, build up traffic congestion, and make it slower and more difficult to get around so that people will walk more. In other words, this means making Houston look like London.
If you need a clarification of what "road dieting is", imagine this. Westheimer inside 610 Loop is mostly two lanes in both directions with no medians. Now then, imagine taking the outer 5 feet off of the outer two lanes and redeploying them for (seldom used) bike paths. That wipes away one full lane off the street configuration. Then with the remaining three lanes, use the center lane as a turn lane and put an occasional pedestrian island on it. This leaves us with only one full lane for vehicle traffic in either direction.
Don't laugh. I went to a Metro meeting some months ago on the Wheeler / Richmond rail alignment where Metro is looking at allowing only one lane of traffic to operate in either direction during off peak time travel hours. All this in the name of "promoting a pedestrian realm".
Here are just a few of hundreds of photos I took of London when I was there in 2007:
1) This photo shows a 300+ year old neighborhood where there is only on street parking and which only has one lane for cars.
2) This photo is a window ad at a real estate firm where two apartment flats are for sale. The first is for $1,850,000 and the second is for $1,500,000.
3) This apartment was going for $850 per week. The apartment below was going for $800 per week, which is about the average apartment rent in London right now.
The difference between carrying a 30 year $150,000 mortgage at 6 percent in Houston and a $600,000 mortgage in London (the average price of a home in London is about 300,000 pounds) is $32,400 per year, enough to purchase and maintain 5-6 cars per household. My colleague whom I went to London to backfill for is a Scotsman who lives in Aberdeen. He cannot afford to move to London because the UK government takes too much of his salary away in taxes and the City is too expensive for him, his wife, and their 3 kids, even though he is probably making $100,000 per year and would be living in a national capital which has a legendary public transportation system which is heavily subsidized.
Mr. Brown says that Dallas has a comprehensive development plan, but strangely, in order to come up with this new plan, they had to do away with antiquated zoning which was getting in the way of the new plan. Mr. Brown didn't mention stories like this or this when talking about Dallas's latest plans.
Houston does not do fiscal impacts on development says Mr. Brown. People are fed up with taxes and we need to promote development. My take on these remarks is that these studies are often used to justify whether "development pays for itself", presumably meaning that if a developer spots a market for single family homes somewhere and wants to build them, the City could then stop this development on some theoretical grounds that the infrastructure will be too costly to implement and that the development will not contribute enough tax monies to justify planners permitting its construction. In other words, such grounds could be used to deny where people live, where development is located, what type of development it is, and its attendant satisfaction of market participants on the grounds that this development is somehow detrimental to municipal finance of all things. In other words, such a device could be used to hinder development, if that development is presumed to be of the kind that is somehow not to be desired.
The questions started: One engineer who had spent his entire career in traffic engineering, talked abaout the traffic and transportation department, which was dissolved in the 1990's, but is now in PW&E and part of a giant bureaucracy. Gonzalo Camacho was also there. He said that 30 percent of early morning rush hour traffic is school traffic. People move to the suburbs for better schools and cheap housing.
Mr. Brown's response: "We need a Marshall Plan for schools and health care!" Great - yet another plan. That must have been the twentieth time Mr. Brown used the word plan in his talk. He lamented that the City spent lots of money in the Clinton Park area to revive it and make it desirable to live there, but then HISD closed the elementary school so parents won't want to live anywhere near there. Of course the answer to this planning error requires yet more coordination and even more planning so that these mistakes don't get made again.
So there you have it. Mr. Brown fully intends to implement the entire tool set of "Smart Growth" policies to make Houston more congested, full of green belts, with lots of planners doing lots of comprehensive planning which will probably make your life as a Houstonian more expensive and inconvenient. Rising costs will also drive more people out to the urban fringe, regardless of what people's attitudes are towards accomodating new growth. Rising housing costs may stem from an increasingly inelastic and unresponsive housing market, as well as pouring more resources into expensive rail transit projects which are far away from where most people live and work, and do not go where people want to go.
And so it was. This is the City that Peter Brown and his friends want to have. I drove home to put some cotton swabs in my ears to stop the bleeding and started writing. Tomorrow's another day.
Sigh...
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at April 20, 2008 12:40 PM
