You're Wrong About Houston and Here's Why

if there's one US city that's most often held up as an example of our nation's failings when it comes to City Planning and sustainable Transportation it's got to be Houston Texas weird zoning inhumanly wide freeways thousands of square miles of sprawl well I went to Houston to see for myself and what I found wasn't what I'd been led to expect instead I saw a microcosm of the struggle we all have in making our cities more people friendly so today a visit to Houston that might surprise you including an audacious local effort to make the city Less Car dependent coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and this was but I'll explain it later and this is part of my city visit Series where I visit a city sometimes a city I've never been to or at least not just for a very long time and try to tell you what's different or great about it from the perspective of someone with the better part of two decades in City Planning and engineering first a bit of a disclaimer Houston is massive and I only had two days I did not have time to explore the 600 plus square miles the city inhabits much less the thousands and thousands of square miles that Greater Houston takes up instead I want to explore the kind of Hidden City within a city that's defined by the in loop I 610 if you consider the inner loop as its own City it has a very different population density and character than what you probably think of when you think of Houston the inner loop at over half a million people in less than 100 square miles is a bit more comparable to cities like Baltimore Minneapolis or Portland when it comes to land area and population so we're going to start south of downtown and kind of go clockwise and that puts us in Midtown which has some of the better Street Scapes I saw in the city this is Bagby Street which was recently redone to incorporate bioses and natural drainage Elements which does end up being pretty important in Houston not all the walking environments are the best like I don't even know how you end up with double exposed curbs that are this tall and I'm not going to sugarcoat this a lot of the streets are pretty wide and busy but and this is kind of a recurring theme in Houston all the interesting viby restaurants tend to be located on just kind of noisy unpleasant streets and they just kind of work around it so Houston has rail if you didn't know now you do it's Street running like portlander Sacramento which seems kind of inade for a metro area of like 7 million we're talking two car trains on the red line that goes to Midtown and one car trains on the green and purple lines H I'll come back to this but and I don't know if this is a running joke but maybe it should be the only quality grade separated rail in Houston is probably this train in Herman Park which I regret to tell you I did not ride let's talk buses because the Metro Bus Network got a major revamp in 2015 focusing frequent service on high demand routes and cutting service on low demand routes makes sense but ridership versus coverage is always a values decision and Jared Walker's book on This is highly recommended and he did work on the Houston redesign I didn't have time to ride every bus on Houston's network but I did ride Route 82 purportedly the highest ridership route in the state of Texas it runs every 8 minutes on weekdays and you can ride it deep into the western suburbs but I wasn't quite that ambitious I really just wanted to get to the neighborhood which when I asked my Houston viewers what I should see while I was visiting was the most mentioned neighborhood nearly the entire route runs on Wester road which gets very stroy as you get out into the western suburbs but even where it passes through Montrose as a sort of neighborhood Main Street it's just not a good crosssection two lanes in each Direction and not nearly as many good pedestrian Crossing locations as you really need Montrose is packed with trendy shops and restaurants but even the hipster coffee shops have dedicated parking lots the walking environment isn't great and there is some density but it's all still fairly car oriented although you can definitely walk to Texas's finest grocery chain and people do walk it's just Houston doesn't always make it easy like does the city not have any authority over where power companies locate the poles that carry transmission lines this is all happening just off Wester and I love that this one has a pedestrian sign as if to say yeah we know people walk here and eh we did this anyway all these neighborhoods have shown you so far are walkable in terms of they being a grid and sidewalks and most importantly things you would actually want to walk to I think it's fair to say Houston is a vastly underrated City for Fine Art I didn't take any pictures inside these places because it's just kind of go but the manil collection has an amazing assortment of mcgrits Pollocks other early mid 20th century stuff and next store is the Rothco Chapel which is really hard to even describe you have to go inside and see it for yourself but if you're into Rothco I don't think it's an overstatement to call it a religious experience for this next part a little full disclosure the fine folks at Bike Houston which does great advocacy work and which I strongly suggest you support if you care about making Houston more bike friendly Link in the description well they found out I was going to be there and they offered to lend me a bike I guess I could have told them no thanks because bking in Houston is terrible and you're kind of wasting your time if you think it's ever going to get better but I don't actually believe any of that so instead I took them up on it and I biked to a couple neighborhoods and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised mostly because when I scattered out the quote unquote bike routes on Google Street View to plan my itinerary it did look Grim but when I got to a couple of the places that looked the most concerning it turned out well the city has been at work so this is just another case of you don't really know what's happening in a city until you go there now let's go to where Houston really shines when it comes to biking the Bayou Trails this is Buffalo Bayou which stretches from downtown west miles and miles of off Street paths a lot of it made possible because the region just got slightly clever and managed to coordinate the construction of off Street paths with the construction of flood control infrastructure it is Houston so as you ride Buffalo Bayou you not only get views of the Bayou but views of another kind of infrastructure the city is maybe better known for the other one I wrote was the White Oak Bou Trail which connects up to I honestly don't know if you call it the market Trail or the MKT Trail but it's actually really interesting and varied you do pass under freeways sure but you get some raised segments on busy streets that have these really helpful etchings at the cross streets you have sections that feel like you're riding through someone's backyard while you're swalling through dog Walkers and you've got a section that runs right on the north side of a development that's called the market or the MK or whatever they do promise Good Vibes if you drive into the parking lot but well good vibes apparently don't extend to feeling at ease when you have to park your car in an off Street lot but this is a city that historically has basically designed everything as if the only way anyone was going to get anywhere was with a car which is not that dissimilar to a lot of American cities but Houston might even take it to a whole other level it was really hard to find any kind of housing that didn't have on-site parking built into it and the result is even though I found it not really difficult at all to get around different neighborhoods without a car driving is just really ingrained in the culture so my advice walk and ride defensively and be ready for anything like if you're biking on a raised quote unquote protected path definitely be on the lookout for left hooks coming into driveways and if you're you're driving you don't get off that easy either you got to be ready for random traffic jams at fast food drive-through access points let's get back to neighborhoods this is rice military on the West Side north of Buffalo Bayou and this is where we really get into the variety of Houston style town homes that are enabled by the city's liberal subdivision Rigs and weird non zoning so you get these structures that are extremely close together with a wild variation of architectural Styles and some more dense multifam too rice military is a close-in neighborhood it's accessible to lots of other great neighborhoods it has its own charm and the rent is pretty reasonable I came up with a median of $160 a square foot so $1,600 a month for 1,000 square ft in an inner neighborhood that you could probably get by without a car depending on your life situation it's pretty enticing this type of housing isn't just in race military and not every single family lot has been redeveloped and yeah most of the tow houses do have some kind of Tuck under garage but even then there still seems to be a disproportionate number of pickup trucks in front biking through the neighborhoods is fun though this isn't disconnected Suburban Street networks inside the 610 Loop it really is a pretty solid grid and one thing that's great about biking is you really get to see everything as you're passing by and I have to say houstonians go all out when it comes to Halloween decorations this skeleton Rock club scene is basically a masterpiece and they even decorate little free libraries okay let's go into the Heights neighborhood north of rice military it's also a grid and there are some interesting street designs this is Nicholson Street which runs north south and gets you from the market Trail up into the heart of the heights it's got a two-way multi-use path along the west Edge which I don't know how necessary it is because Nicholson Street itself is pretty low traffic but it's a fairly Pleasant way to travel through a pretty attractive neighborhood the heights has its own kind of Main Main Street West 19th just about the closest thing I saw to a main street in the whole city I just wish more of the space was allocated to people not driving a car okay let's hit downtown real quick my Takeaway on downtown is kind of a microcosm of my Takeaway on the whole city better than I was expecting which I know sounds like damning with faint praise but just keep in mind how affordable this city is some of the street Transformations you see happening and all the cool cultural stuff some of which I've already talked about and some of which get to you later downtown has two-way protected bike facilities running both north south and east west and each connects to a different part of the biou path system there are lots of buson lanes all three Light Rail lines converge here and downtown is more active than I'd been led to believe the renovated post office at the North End is a big draw and it does have pretty cool views Up on the Rooftop let's head to East downtown or EO which is the one part of Houston that feels like it's transforming into a more conventional type of dense Urban Redevelopment a lot of it is viby industrial type Hangouts for pre- and post functioning when there are games and matches going on at the nearby sports venues big wide openen patios and yards a kind of unique thing about eido though in the context of Houston is that for the most part these places do not have on-site parking okay let's quickly hit the venues that I think generate a lot of the activity in Ido there's the Toyota Center where the NBA Rockets play in which has a ginormous parking garage aptly named the tundra I actually had to Google whatever entertainment act it was that was drawing huge crowds to the Toyota Center that night Wikipedia says this Ensemble was laboratory created in The Cauldron of a survival reality TV show seems cool and normal shell Energy stadium where the MLS Dynamo play is in Edo itself and I was satisfied that I'd raided it properly in my MLS stadiums video they even incorporate the train into the stadium murals minute made where the Houston baseball team plays also has a train station it's just a defunct passenger rail station that now functions as a team shop Sports motos and nicknames are funny this team is ready the number two rain we'll see how it plays out ALCS deciding game yet to be played at time of taping I do kind of like Space City as a moniker but Houston is more often than not adopted clutch City which I don't know it's pretty easy to be clutch when you know exactly what pitch is coming next okay in a minute I'm going to get into the meat of all this which is the very visible battle between houstonians and the forces outside Houston that want to keep widening freeways and making other terrible quote unquote improvements right in the heart of the city but first brief reminder to click all the usual stuff if you're enjoying this glass half full urbanism tour of America's fourth largest city connect on the apps and consider supporting directly via patreon if you're enjoying these on the ground City visits travel isn't all that cheap not even to Houston okay let's head back to East downtown there are more people moving downtown and close in and a lot of new residential units coming online there's just not as much of it in EO as I've been hoping I mean it is kind of cool that they have these ballpark Lofts across Interstate 69 from minute made Park oh wait never mind tex. eminent domains the ballpark Lofts because they decid decided they needed to widen an I69 by like a city block or two I mean to be fair on the day I filmed the freeway was congested so maybe eminent domaining a bunch of East downtown and making whatever's left of it even less Pleasant to be in because the freeway is even closer and noisier and more polluting than it is today well maybe that's all justified in the name of congestion mitigation oh hang on it's only congested because there's a disabled vehicle blocking the right lane so maybe maybe the reality is we need to eminent domain East downtown just to make sure there's room for people to drive unroad worthy vehicles and drive them poorly and this is just a small part of a mega project that's been dubbed the north Houston Highway Improvement project and I know you didn't just see me air quote the word Improvement but anytime your state do uses that word you can be pretty sure it means the opposite I mean for me and I'm just one voice out here and I don't live in Houston but it just seems like it might be more in the city's interest to improve the cohesion between downtown and East downtown and the neighborhoods to the north instead of making it even more hostile than it already is competing priorities I guess okay for this next part we really have to understand Metropolitan planning organizations or mpos every Metropolitan region over 50,000 people in the US has one and the way they function and the amount of power they have really varies from Metro area to metro area but generally they do project selection and make decisions on how to allocate federal transportation funding across a region so if you're wondering why so much terrible stuff gets built right in the middle of Houston take a look at the composition of the board of directors of the Houston Galveston area Council or H gak there are a whopping 37 directors representing all kinds of jurisdictions around Greater Houston but guess how many of those 37 represent Houston or unincorporated Harris County which together do comprise over half the metro area population it's just four 4 out of 37 over 50% of the population but about 10% of the representation and this is a theme all over the US cities contribute more and receive less that's Evergreen but hgac takes this Insanity to a whole new level I mean Houston population over 2 million is getting big dogged by suburbs that are like less than 1% its size and this isn't even just about free will ways or other bad Transportation ideas for example in 2022 the board of directors voted to give Houston just 2% of $488 million that was granted to the region for flood mitigation following hurricane Harvey despite the city having taken most of the damage I mean that's not only insane it's completely immoral enter proposition B which is on the ballot on Tuesday November 5th prop B AKA fair for Houston which I think is genius branding would amend to the city of Houston Charter to require that any mo the city is going to be part of has to have a population proportional voting system the whole approach is really fascinating and I really do think we should all get educated on it I honestly didn't know anything about prop B until I started hearing about it from multiple viewers and the idea was so compelling I just had to get to Houston before election day so I could make a video so if you're eligible to vote in the city of Houston well I don't want to tell you how you should vote but but if prop B passes it's going to be extremely entertaining and instructive for the rest of us I do want to reiterate that I did focus on the inter Loop neighborhoods for this video but that is only 25% or so of Houston's population and there are lots of interesting diverse and even dense neighborhoods outside the loop that I didn't cover neighborhoods like gulon that have pretty hostile pedestrian environments and ethnic enclaves like the Mahatma Gandhi District in Chinatown but there are really too many di mention because and this may be news to some of you but depending on how you define diversity Houston is the most diverse city in the US probably one of the most diverse in the world honestly now I'm not a huge fan of broad racial categories but if you categorize houstonians as black white asian and Latin American it comes out very close to like 25% each across the board now there are different mixes in different neighborhoods but if you went back and reviewed this whole video video which I don't encourage you would probably see about 25 25 25 25 or honestly if you just stood in line for barbecue speaking of which I'm not going to make a long- winded argument for the benefits of diversity but I will say Houston is world class when it comes to amazingly delicious Fusion Cuisines it is pound-for-pound definitely a strong candidate for best food city in the US I'm not saying it has as many like Michelin star places as New York but I had incredible food in very unassuming looking places for extremely reasonable prices so I'm not saying Houston has solved racism but my observation as a mildly oblivious white dude is half the battle is just getting different people to be around each other doing normal everyday things in a normal way and this seems to happen in Houston proper more naturally than it does in just about any other US city so if you're someone who really believes there just has to be Dutch bike infrastructure everywhere before you'll get on a bike you're going to be unhappy here and you should probably just move somewhere else but if you're like me and bike infrastructure is important but just one of many many things you weigh when you're considering a place and you also care about a growing culture of livable streets activism or like rodeos or I don't know housing you can actually afford close into a city that has worldclass art and amazing diversity and culture and Cuisine well Houston is going to check a lot of boxes that most cities can't even and come close to checking remember if Houston home of some of the most wretched freeways on the continent can get organized around people friendly land use and transportation priorities any City can do it and don't let anyone tell you biking in Houston sucks because it's actually very fun eh especially if the Ed of Bike Houston delivers a cool bike to your hotel yeah this is as good a time as any to acknowledge that I am visiting a lot of North American cities and staying in a lot of hotels and hooking up to a lot of dodgy seeming Wi-Fi networks but that's where today's sponsor nordvpn comes in I mean I'm making a video every week and I really do have to work every day to be able to do that so just disconnecting for a few days while I'm traveling isn't really a choice but I don't love sending information over public Wi-Fi and I don't like having my IP address out there it may not seem like a big deal but there are any number of things that bad intention people can do if they get a hold of your IP address like can do a distributed denial of service or DDOS Attack Just for funsies I guess or as part of some sort of ransomware or other nefarious purpose well if you're logged into nordvpn which is just one click that person isn't going to see your actual IP address they're going to see something in like Phoenix or whatever and this is just one thing that makes nordvpn kind of indispensable for me these days it does also have NextGen encryption it blocks malware and trackers it gives me piece of of mind when I'm traveling which is usually when I'm the most harried so this is why I recommend nordvpn so strongly I just have other things to worry about when I'm staying in a hotel in a strange city and I don't need my internet connection to be one of those things anyway if you sign up for any of nordvpn's 2-year plans during their Black Friday promotion which is active right now you're going to get four bonus months on top if you use my code also if you're booking a winter vacation outside the US maybe to somewhere tropical maybe South of the Border it's been known to happen there's a little hack you should know about like if you're booking hotels or car rentals there are a lot of websites that will quote you a higher price if you're originating from a US IP address but nordvpn lets you choose an IP address from a wide variety of countries just saying anyway nordvpn does come with a 30-day money back guarantee so it's really hard to go wrong here again make sure you use my custom code down the description it does does get you 4 months for free and it does help support the channel and thanks again and that's all I've got thanks for joining today and thanks is always to the patrons I did pay my own way on this trip just because thought it was really important so the direct support really does help thanks again to B Houston and the folks behind prop B for being super generous with background information and a bike it's not always that easy showing up in a city you don't know all that well and trying to get up to speed on issues and neighborhoods I did really enjoy being in Houston though and I will say that Texas barbecue SL Thai Fusion it's kind of life-changing keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new installment next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 550,217

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, cities, cities skylines, houston, houston astros

Id: 0fMTaNYYvwE

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023