I promised in an earlier newsletter to update the chapter on the salient points of a study titled Beyond Sprawl. Both I and the chapter office have copies. I think you will find it informative reading.
Houston and its metropolitan region, while unique, has many characteristics similar to California. California's major metropolitan areas have grown precipitously over the last forty plus years, expanded without acknowledging true costs of services, intruded on productive farm lands and sensitive natural habitats, leap frogged areas even perceived as developmentally challenged and all the while mandating the car as the primary transportation devise.
Beyond Sprawl, a joint report of the California Resources Agency, (a government conservation agency), the Bank of America (California's largest bank), the Greenbelt Alliance (the Bay Area's citizen conservation and planning organization) and the Low Income Housing Fund (a non-profit organization) focuses on new ideas on how to maintain growth while fostering economic vitality and creating and maintaining a measurable quality of life - a place where anyone would want to live and work. The report identifies four primary goals:
- To provide more certainty in determining where new development should and should not occur.
- To make more efficient use of land that has already been developed, including a strong focus on job creation and housing in established urban areas.
- To establish a legal and procedural framework that will create the desired certainty and send the right economic signals to investors.
- To build a broad-based constituency to combat urban sprawl that includes environmentalists, community organizations, businesses, farmers, government leaders, and others.
Sprawl, which originally signaled economic and population growth, unchecked has changed into a force that inhibits growth and degrades the quality of our lives. The costs - social, economic and environmental - have been hidden or ignored. Examples of those costs range from automobile expenses in maintenance and commuting time, loss of productivity in the workplace directly affected by travel times and distance, underutilized investments in the older parts of our communities, the inability of cities to provide equal services to all sectors, loss of jobs and access to jobs in the older sections of cities, and the resultant loss of social stability and pressure on land and environmental resources that exist at the fringes of metropolitan areas. When you factor into the equation the rise in the cost of housing, traffic congestion, the decreasing supply of developable land, and increasing costs of providing basic services, the message becomes clear.
We must take stock of ourselves. We must be smarter about how we grow. We need to plan and think. We must create new ways to provide efficient growth patterns that are compact, responsive to people at all income levels, and maintain quality of life and economic competitiveness.
Houston has a very timely opportunity to address these issues. In November, we will elect a new mayor and several new councilmembers. How Houston grows, how Houston plans, and how Houston takes charge of its future and the challenges facing it are of crucial importance in this election. Our economic vitality and quality of life are at issue. November is not very far away and we, the citizens of Houston, need to make our future leaders aware of our concerns about the long term livability of Houston.
Joe Douglas Webb, AIA
