Greener Houston Grapples With Diversity And Sprawl

gifford1967 · Sep 16, 2009

This is the first story in an NPR series on Houston. I thought people might be interested.

Greener Houston Grapples With Diversity And Sprawl
by Steve Inskeep

September 16, 2009

Houston is where you find out what happens when a million people drop by your place.

And stay.

That's roughly what's going on now in Greater Houston. The metro population has increased by roughly a million this decade. People came as immigrants from Mexico and China. They came as job-seekers from California. They came as refugees from New Orleans.

So that's why Morning Edition traveled here: We're following the crowd.

Watching Cities Evolve

Houston is our latest destination on The Urban Frontier, our occasional look at how cities change and grow.

We've seen Karachi, Khartoum, Mumbai and the sprawling suburbs of America's East Coast. We zero in on places that are rapidly growing. There's no shortage: The world's urban population has increased by about 3 billion people in recent decades, much faster than the population as a whole.

If you want to know if we're building a more stable or sustainable world, visit a growing city.

In Houston, oil is the biggest industry, but no longer the only one. Eight of 10 jobs were once linked to the oil industry; now less than half are. People work in biomedical research, aerospace and more.

Greater Houston has around 5.7 million people. They're spread across roughly 10,000 square miles. That's a larger land area than New Jersey.

So many people, so many big air-conditioned homes, so many long commutes — that's the promise and the peril of Houston.

This week, we are learning how developers built a strikingly affordable and livable city. They work in a city with very few rules. Four times Houston voted on a zoning code; four times Houston rejected it.

Houstonians also consume far more energy than people in almost any other city. All that car travel and those cavernous cooled spaces on the Gulf Coast add up. The way you build a city can add to global warming — if you build a city like Houston.

The Challenges Of Urban Growth

Mayor Bill White has struggled to make Houston a more sustainable city. He championed green development and commuter rail lines. That stance hasn't quite satisfied environmentalists. They say Houston needs a more comprehensive plan — just what Houston has always resisted.

And White's city isn't just growing — it's also growing more diverse.

A few decades ago, Houston's demographics were normal for a Southern city: white-dominated, with a black minority. Today, it's just 37 percent white. Hispanics outnumber Anglos. There's a large black population. Thousands of Asian immigrants make Houston their first stop, as you can see at Houston's Hong Kong Mall.

Houston has welcomed diversity, though it leads to some tension.

State Rep. Garnet Coleman represents the Third Ward, a historically black neighborhood full of renters.

Coleman is worried about gentrification — he doesn't want the Third Ward's residents driven out by upscale professionals. So he's arranged to buy millions of dollars worth of land, specifically to keep it away from developers.

A Novelist's View Of Her Hometown

To see how Houston has changed, you could board a boat on Houston's Buffalo Bayou with author Attica Locke. Her new crime novel, Black Water Rising, explores the racially divided Houston of 1981. The main character is a black man who witnessed a murder on the bayou, but can't bring himself to tell authorities because bitter experience has taught him not to trust white cops.

Locke's personal story suggests how the Houston power structure has changed since 1981: Her African-American father is now a mayoral candidate in the very different Houston of 2009.

Sociologist Stephen Klineberg considers Houston "the most interesting city in America." He conducts surveys that show the profound changes in the city's population and its attitudes. He says Houston's diversity shows what the United States will look like in 30 years.

So we may be following the crowd to Houston, but we're also looking at the future of America.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112828563
Click to expand...

gifford1967 · Sep 18, 2009

Another story from the NPR series on Houston-

Houston: Texas-Sized Sprawl, No End In Sight
September 17, 2009 - STEVE INSKEEP, host:

MORNING EDITION is reporting this week from Houston, Texas, a swiftly growing city that's added a million residents in this decade. No doubt, some of those newcomers have taken Interstate 10, which roars in front of this spot, which means they've seen this giant sculpture beside me.

It's Houston's own version of Mount Rushmore. You see giant white busts of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and two founders of modern Texas, Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin. Because it overlooks the freeway, it is known as Mount Rush Hour.

This spot reminds you of a couple of things about Houston: one, that it's a little quirkier than you might realize; the other is that Houston is huge.

These highways radiate out to a giant seaport, to oil companies, skyscrapers, and of course, to miles and miles and miles of suburban neighborhoods.

We took a ride outside the central city with Stephen Klineberg of Rice University who has studied Houston for decades.

Professor STEPHEN KLINEBERG (Rice University): What is striking about Houston is almost wherever you are you think you're at the edge of town. Right? I mean, just - this must be the end here, (unintelligible) suddenly… And then there's that stuff again. You get this leapfrogging of developments and big empty spaces.

INSKEEP: Klineberg drove us through this spread-out city forever under construction, our first stop on the Urban Frontier. That's our occasional look at how city's change and grow.

Prof. KLINEBERG: The city of Houston covers 620 square miles. You could put, inside the city limits of Houston, simultaneously — I kid you not — the cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit.

INSKEEP: Now, I see a highway overpass, it looks like we're going to cross under.

Prof. KLINEBERG: That's the Loop 610. That is the inner loop that defines for us what the, quote, "inner city" of Houston is, which is a gigantic space.

INSKEEP: When I look at a map, it looks like Houston has a beltway and beyond that is a second beltway and you're working on a third beltway.

Prof. KLINEBERG: Right. There are many of us who feel that's not a good idea. But it's hard to resist.

INSKEEP: Roadside stores and malls seem to go on for as far as Klineberg can drive. One consequence shows up in a study of American cities. It was co-authored by Edward Glaeser of Harvard University. The study shows that Houstonians use far more energy than people in other cities, like New York or Los Angeles. Glaeser has to admit this, even though there's a lot about Houston he likes.

Would you just describe what Houston is in your mind and how it compares to any other generic city you might pick? What distinguishes Houston as a metropolitan area?

Professor EDWARD GLAESER (Harvard University): Well, it's in some sense, you know, the great growing region of the Sunbelt on steroids, right? I mean, it's a place which has remarkably few limitations on what and where to build. It's a place that is whose economy started off being strongly wrapped around natural resources and energy, but at this point in time is much more diversified.

It's a place that succeeds in attracting a million new people since the last census by providing middle-income Americans with a really astonishingly high quality of life. That quality of life is, of course, defined around the automobile. It's a place that is, you know, has a remarkably high level of population decentralization.

People are not living in any sort of an urban core, but it still is, you know, managing to give people an average commute of 27.4 minutes. You've just got enough highways that people are driving fairly quickly from one place to another.

INSKEEP: What other advantages do you see?

Prof. GLAESER: Well, certainly the low housing prices are huge. The census puts the average housing price in Houston at $120,000 right now. The National Association of Realtors pegs it a little bit higher because they're more oriented toward recent home sales. But that's at 150.

For many places, both in the Northeast and in the West, that experienced this vast roller coaster ride, Houston and Dallas sat this thing out. Houston and Dallas have a perfectly well-functioning housing market where housing prices are basically pegged by the price of supplying a new home. And, you know, in a place which has no rules on new construction that would make things really difficult for developers, that ends up being a low number.

INSKEEP: Okay. So, you got a good drive to work, you got a nice house - you didn't pay very much for the house - you got a low mortgage payment. What else?

Prof. GLAESER: That's right. No state income taxes. And not all the schools in the Houston area are terrific, but some of them are, certainly. And on top of that you have all the things that car-based living makes relatively easier. You have an abundance of big-box stores; you have, you know, lots of relatively inexpensive and fun restaurants.

There are lots of attractive things about Houston. Those million people who went there are not, obviously, making a mistake. I mean, it shows the dynamism that can often come from a relatively unregulated market, both in the housing sector and in lots of areas of the economy.

INSKEEP: And yet this is a city that, I think, that some people who think about the environment, think about urban development, think about suburban sprawl would find - is dismaying too strong a word?

Prof. GLAESER: I think horrendous wouldn't be too strong a word, certainly. I got a tremendous amount of heat every time I've said anything positive about Houston. And in some sense, they're right to be worried about the environmental impact of Houston.

Houston is among the five worst American metropolitan areas, in terms of its carbon emissions. All those car miles and even more - the tremendous use of electricity in order to create an artificial environment in a very hot and humid place - all that requires a very large carbon footprint.

INSKEEP: You have worked through what makes Houston attractive to the average guy, and said it competes better against, say, New York. What makes New York not so attractive by comparison?

Prof. GLAESER: Well, the most difficult thing about New York or Boston or coastal California is just the housing prices. In Manhattan, that's always going to be tough. I mean, the cost of building up are going to be high.

INSKEEP: It's an island. You're not going to get any more buildings.

Prof. GLAESER: It's not. It's limited land. And that's not true - certainly not true in the Boston suburbs, which, you know, the county in which I live, Middlesex County, is less dense than Harris County, Texas - that includes Houston, right? I mean, there's more land and…

INSKEEP: And yet the home prices are two or three times…

Prof. GLAESER: They are much, much higher. And that's, you know, I believe the evidence suggests that's overwhelmingly the result of government regulations that actually make it difficult to build.

It's a funny chronicle, where often, you know, well-meaning people in the coastal states of this country, often thinking that they're doing environmental good, have actually, you know, enacted a set of rules that have made it enormously difficult for middle-income people to live in their areas, and as a result, have pushed people toward less environmentally attractive places like Texas.

INSKEEP: Edward Glaeser of Harvard co-authored a study that helps us to understand Houston, a city we're visiting this week.

Tomorrow, we'll meet Bill White, the mayor who says he wants to make Houston greener.

Mayor BILL WHITE (Houston, Texas): And if we did that, then this whole debate about whether we should, you know, have more from coal or more from nuclear or rising utility bills would all be moot.

INSKEEP: And you can join the discussion at NPR.org.

(Soundbite of music)

INSKEEP: From southern California and Houston, Texas, it's NPR.org.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=112896915
Click to expand...

Forums

Greener Houston Grapples With Diversity And Sprawl

gifford1967 Member
Supporting Member

gifford1967 Member
Supporting Member

Share This Page

About ClutchFans

Rockets Content

Support ClutchFans!

Greener Houston Grapples With Diversity And Sprawl

gifford1967 Member Supporting Member

gifford1967 Member Supporting Member

Share This Page

gifford1967 Member
Supporting Member

gifford1967 Member
Supporting Member