How Houston Regulates Land Use
marketurbanism.com
marketurbanism.com
As for the sweat, a good wicking t-shirt will let it evaporate quickly, or if you need to wear a button-up shirt, a good cotton undershirt will keep your outer shirt nice and dry (usually).
Even if you get to the point where the heat doesn't bother you, it doesn't stop the heat from making you sweat and smell. I didn't mind going for a walk (or run) on Houston summer afternoons, but there's no way I could walk >.5 miles or bike to work without a shower at the destination.
And, you get used to the heat. I spent many years in Texas; Houston and Austin (about 20 years, in total, across both cities), I really don't mind the heat. I prefer it over cold, anyway. And, there's a certain style of living that is/was pervasive in Austin; do stuff early in the day or late in the day. Hang out inside during the heat of the day. Lots of bars and restaurants have outside patios, which are open nearly year round; many have misters to keep it cool. The only things most people do outside during the heat of the day are swimming or tubing or stuff in the shade (and there's loads of shade along the river and green belts).
Humidity is the big difference, and with Texas as large as it is you can't just assume that somebody from say DFW or El Paso or Brownsville or Austin will experience the same weather as somebody from Houston given the same wall temperature.
Which makes downtown quite walkable any time of the year.
I lived in north-east Houston just outside Beltway 8. Hundreds of new homes were being built along West Lake Houston Parkway, with no apparent plans for upgrading traffic. It was a real mess and will only get worse.
So you lived out near Humble? That's not living in Houston.
That's like living in Newark and saying you live in New York City.
Houston's food tho...
Yes, Houston gets a lot right.
This is a terrible thing that cities badly need to get away from.
Going further cities need to get away from mandating parking period.
There's a 400+ unit condo building that was approved in my town in 2014 and it's still under construction because of course every unit needs parking and they're building a massive underground parking lot. The fact that this building is on a major bus corridor, less than a 10 minute walk from existing rapid transit and it's adjacent to a future site for rapid transit expansion is ignored. There's honestly no reason to build so much parking here and yet the rules mandate that we must add parking everywhere. This increases the costs of housing as well and people must pay for this regardless of whether they use it or not.
Honestly, it's not an issue (in Houston) at all. I like driving and the fact that everywhere has parking is perfect. If I'm going out I just pay for the uber and call it a night. It's cheap enough down here anyways.
Nobody is saying parking should be illegal, just that people shouldn't be forced to build it if they don't want it.
Edit: People more informed than myself have studied how forcing everyone to build parking makes housing less affordable.
Second, the law will Have to change in the next 10 years.
Third, if we do it right, Houston can become the city with the most green space in the country if we require that 1/2 of any replaced parking lot just become semi-public green space.
I'm glad housing is apparently affordable there. My views are probably affected by my experience growing up in California.
http://cityobservatory.org/introducing-the-sprawl-tax/
Anyway, I don't think we even disagree, really. I like green space too. I just hate laws that pretty much force everyone to have a horrible commute because living close enough to your job to walk or cycle, or having enough people in the same space to support transit, is almost illegal.
People who talk about making Houston walkable or changing the setbacks and lot requirements are just fooling themselves. Houston has a character and plenty of people like it. They get offended that you might want to make it any more like Boston, NY, Chicago or DC.
I'm personally glad to be leaving Houston for one of those dense walkable cities, but I'm giving up a nice big house that was very inexpensive, the ability to be lazy and drive anywhere, the discretionary income to own a nice car, and great food. What I gain is personal but having grown up in Texas I do not expect people there to want anything but what Houston is. It didn't get to be like it is because people hated it. Keep in mind, all those neighborhoods, stores, and office parks are there because individuals and businesses voted with their dollars and they continue to do so.
I think it would be nice in some cities to have every second north-south going street reserved for pedestrians and bicycles and every second for cars. Same for west-east going streets. Notice the pattern here? There are some very limited examples of this in Helsinki and Oulu.
http://ospace.fi/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IMG_1387.jpg
http://www.sci.fi/~idean/kuvat/hietahami/rotuar.jpg
Usually pedestrians, restaurants and cyclist just love it. Car people don't mind, as it can curb down traffic in the morning. Less cross sections is often less traffic jams.
But if there is on street parking, this will never happen. You simply need every possible way for traffic as all roads are decimated into part time parking lots.
Do you have a cite that says it's particularly dangerous on an absolute scale (rather than just "more dangerous")? On-street parking is almost always more efficient because the road does double-duty as an access path, whereas parking lots need empty lanes to access cars.
I don't have source. Just a reasoning. Kid might run to the street from behind a parked car. Also cyclist sometimes bump into someone coming out of parked car.
> On-street parking is almost always more efficient because the road does double-duty as an access path, whereas parking lots need empty lanes to access cars.
Car needs about one 1,5 car lenghts behind to back away form a lot. That doubles as 1,5 car lengts for the opposite car and as access path.
Theoretically on-steet parking only needs 0,5 car lenght in front and 0,5 car lenght in back. But this rarely happens as there are no marked lots. In practice the empty space between cars ranges from 0,3 to 1,4 and tends towards bigger. Because people want to park loose when there are not much cars and when the street fills it doesn't even out.
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7403217,-95.4587679,3a,75y,2...
I also think Houston is well-placed to become one of the truly great American cities with only minor shifts in policy.
Those huge roads? Shrink the lanes and paint on bike lanes (which is effectively free, since the lines are repainted every few years anyway), and you've got green urban transit options everywhere. It's already relatively safe to bike most places in Houston, certainly in all the neighborhoods, because the roads are big enough to accommodate bikes even without lanes specifically marked. I used to bike to class when I was in college...about 10 miles each way. None of it was particularly hairy or scary, even compared to "bike-friendly" towns like Austin.
There's also a surprisingly large amount of green and park space in Houston. The bayous that are concrete-filled could be ripped up (some parts of the Houston bayou system were concreted over in the 70s and 80s, as a failed attempt at flood management), and turned into hike/bike trails (they already get used that way...there's dirt foot paths along the top of every Houston bayou I can remember).
The train and bus system needs massive improvement (or, it did when I last lived there or visited), and the car culture needs to be killed, as this author notes. But, there are some very good, very walkable neighborhoods in Houston. I couldn't afford to live in them, but I enjoyed the street festivals and such that happened in them. Again, some minor tweaks to policy could allow more of those neighborhoods to thrive. The lack of zoning means that retail and restaurants often exist right along side neighborhoods; which is the ideal for a walkable neighborhood.
Traffic is obviously a huge problem for Houston, but that's true of every major American city. It was particularly pronounced while I was living there, as two of the biggest highways were under construction for several years (also common in growing cities).
In short: I'd love to see Houston get more of these things right. It was a good city that treated me well. My first attempt to get a real job turned out great, the cost of living is on the low side given the scale of opportunities available and the benefits of living in such a big city (great art scene, great music scene, great food, etc.). I moved to Austin after a few years in Houston, and while Austin also has a lot going for it (I would even say it's the first and only city I've ever really loved), it has felt like it's been going the wrong direction the whole time I lived there and the years when I didn't. Every once in a while, it'll get something right (like going to a 10-1 district-based city council instead of at-large, or being pretty good about bike lanes and bike safety), but on the whole the things that make Austin great are in decline. Artists and musicians are leaving because they can't afford it, black and brown folks have been pushed out to Round Rock or Georgetown or other surrounding cities again because they can't afford it, and music venues are shutting down left and right because they can't afford it and the new (very wealthy) downtown and surrounding area residents don't like the noise. My desire to live in or visit Austin has dropped to almost nil in recent years.
I know it's not fair because it's technically not Houston, but the city will always be synonymous with sprawling, McMansion-filled suburbs with a Walmart (and a Target in front of it), and a mall every few miles.
At some point, we're all going to have to agree that cars are trying to kill us and take the necessary steps to resolve that problem. The cities that figure it out first will be the next great American cities, I would guess.
NYC's biggest current problem isn't affordable housing, it is that transit capital projects are grotesquely expensive because of a combination of: diffusion of political responsibility, a broken bidding process, and very strong construction unions. What we have is great, but without the ability to undertake new projects, including rehabilitation, without spending much more time and money than any other city in the world, it will eventually be a big problem.
So...yeah. I agree it's unlikely to happen any time soon. But, that's true of every city I've lived in: The things that most need to change have the most political pressure not to change, and so they won't, and that aspect of the city will continue to suck. SF won't change the things it needs to change to resolve its housing crisis; Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, won't do anything to change their car addiction; etc.
So, I probably agree with you. I wish for a better Houston, because there's a lot of like about it, but I don't have high hopes of it actually becoming a better Houston.
What are "space-consuming regulations"?
You see a lot of mixed-income neighborhoods in Houston - places where people are building $700,000 homes where 80% of the same street are 1000 square foot shacks with people living in them making $20k a year. Luckily for them, their lots are worth half a million dollars. I don't know if this is the result of the lack of zoning, but I don't see this happening in other cities in Texas, so I have to think it's somehow related.
You might say "So don't buy a home there" or "So buy a home in an HOA". The point is that there isn't housing available in those areas nearly as much as there is most everywhere else, meaning people start to gentrify crappier blocks because they house the want at the location they want just doesn't exist.
This is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of thing. If neighborhoods are income-segregated, there is no end to opinion pieces about this awful late-capitalist crypto-apartheid. If neighborhoods are mixed-income, then the hand-wringing is about rich people living behind walls next to a shanty town.
Not so luckily. Texas has no state income tax and gets most of it's money from property taxes. Those land-wealthy people making $20k a year likely have a $12k tax bill (there are things like homestead exemptions which can help .. but still)
It's definitely happening in East Austin.