Membership Drive

If you're not a CNU member, please consider joining. By joining CNU-National you become an official part of the movement to create more walkable, sustainable cities and towns across the nation. Membership is now more affordable than ever, you can join CNU starting at $40 per year.

By joining CNU-National and living in the Houston area you become a CNU-Houston member. CNU-Houston benefits from every membership we gain, so please consider joining today!

Walkable Business Coalition

As part of our response to the Parking and High Density ordinance proposals with the City of Houston we've been fortunate to meet Bobby Huegel and Kevin Floyd, owners of Anvil and founders of OKRA - the Organized Kooperative on Restaurant Affairs. Bobby has expressed interest in our idea of working with OKRA to create a Walkable Business Coalition to raise awareness of opportunities to get to and from the places we love using any form of alternative transportation. We expect to begin working on this project with OKRA in February. If you're interested in getting involved, please email Andrew Burleson (burlesona[at]cnu-houston.org), and join our CNU-Houston Google Group.

Upcoming Officer and Board of Directors Elections

It's hard to believe, but it's been almost 2 years since we started CNU-Houston, and that means it will soon be time to hold new Officer and Director elections. If you are interested in getting more involved with CNU-Houston and are interested in serving as an officer or director, please email Andrew Burleson (burlesona[at]cnu-houston.org) for more information.

The following letter concerning the High Density Ordinance was drafted by CNU-Houston President Andrew Burleson, and originally posted on his blog.

Recently the Houston City Council adopted the proposed “High Density Ordinance,” which adds a new requirement that high-rises built in residential neighborhoods have at least a 30 foot gap between them and the nearest house.

A thoughtful response to this issue was released last week, and I agree with that response.

Today I want to take a moment just to consider the larger picture of what’s going on in the City politically, and point out a different way of looking at the problem at hand.

The City’s current rulebook is built on the assumption that every property in the city is exactly like every other property. Famously, we do not have zoning that distinguishes what owners can do based on the surrounding context.

The obvious reality, however, is that every property in the City of Houston is not the same. In the past the city was pressured to allow higher-density development inside the loop, which led to the creation of Houston’s two zones: the ‘urban zone’ and ‘suburban zone’. Issues like Ashby High-Rise and Heights Walmart have pushed the city to put token restrictions on towers in residential areas, while also creating a third zoning category, the ‘Major Activity Center’, where said restrictions do not apply. Major Activity Centers are supposed to be an opportunity for places that have a lot of development to get major rule changes that they’ve been clamoring for without changing things around the rest of the city.

So the rulebook now stands on the following premise: “Everything outside the loop is the same, and everything inside the loop is the same, except for the places that are completely different.”*

Any observant person can see where this is going: because every property is, in fact, not the same as every other, the city is under political pressure to create more and more zones on the map that have different rules from each other. If you think that sounds a lot like zoning, you’re right.

There are two political ideas that have historically kept zoning out of Houston:

1. Developers like it better when there are fewer rules to learn, so having a single set of rules for the whole city is good for business.

2. The City does not know what the best use of a piece of land is, the market does, so the City should not be in the business of regulating land use.

These two ideas are basically correct. Simpler and more consistent rules generally are better for business, and land-use based regulation offers very few benefits at a great cost of economic and bureaucratic inefficiency.

However, the assumption that every piece of property in the city is and should be treated exactly the same is both wrong and unpopular. So that’s slowly but surely going away. The problem is, the City’s attempts to adhere to Principle #1 while trying to adapt the ordinances to reality and to political pressure mean we’re headed toward an increasingly balkanized set of “exception” zones that have totally separate and unrelated rules.

The reason the City is taking this approach is that the City believes that the only alternative to the balkanized exceptions approach is land-use zoning, which violates Principle #2. This is the great fallacy of Houston.

A far better and more effective approach to development regulation is form-based code. In a form-based code the scale of a building and the way it relates to its surroundings is regulated, and land-use is not regulated. Incidentally, this is how the City’s rulebook already works: Chapter 42 prescribes that all development in the City of Houston must be built in the conventional suburban form, with large setbacks between buildings and streets, and buildings oriented toward surface parking.

The great opportunity for Houston would be to take a more rational and orderly approach to the political pressure and physical reality that not every property is the same. We could do this while continuing to adhere to Principles 1 and 2.

What if we simply tied development standards and street standards together? If your property fronts on a small street, you need to build a smaller scale building. If your property fronts on a larger-scale street you can build a larger-scale building.

Consider the following food-for-thought example. What if the High Density Ordinance looked like this:

*Note that “Directional Lane” means either one-way or each way. Ie: most of downtown has 4-5 lane one-way streets, which would qualify for unlimited height.

If you apply the logic above you’ll find that it already fits 98% of the development in Houston. Only a handful of high-rises around town fall outside of these parameters, and arguably those are the very high-rises the surrounding community believes are detrimental.

The best part of this formula is that it leaves the developer totally in control of density for any new greenfield project, but requires that they build streets that will offer appropriate capacity to the scale of proposed construction.

These rules are simple, they don’t require any special exception zones, they don’t allow high-rises in single-family neighborhoods, and they could be applied city-wide without an issue.

In fact, with a few minor additions (like sidewalk, utility, and platting standards) a simple set of rules like this could easily replace the City’s existing Chapter 42 and result in better development outcomes. That would be a win-win for everyone, and that is the kind of outcome we should be looking for. Instead we continue to see token efforts that slowly but surely make our development rules more complex and unpredictable without actually achieving the outcomes that the neighborhoods mobilized about in the first place.

*As an aside, they’re also about to change the definition of “urban” from “inside the loop” to “inside the Beltway”.

The Congress for the New Urbanism is the nation’s leading advocate for walkability and urban revitalization. Concerning the proposed changes to the parking ordinance, the CNU-Houston offers the following observations:

Overall we find the subcommittee recommendations are sound, with two specific exceptions.

1. Bicycle Parking

The rationale and intent expressed in the subcommittee recommendations on bicycle parking are laudable, however the recommended provision is inadequate. First, the recommended exemption for properties under 5000 square feet is counter-productive. Properties under 5000 square feet represent the vast majority of our urban neighborhoods, which are the places with the highest amount of bicycle use. These are the small scale neighborhood businesses that are the safest and most appealing to bike to, and are frequently places where the majority of car parking is on-street. Providing bicycle parking in neighborhood-oriented businesses has the greatest potential to reduce on-street car parking generated by these businesses.

Second, the proposed requirement seems arbitrary and too low. Rather than a one-size fits all requirement, it would be more logical to base the bicycle parking requirement on a percentage of the car parking requirement. Above a small minimum, it would be even better to allow additional bike parking to be used as an offset for a percentage of the car parking requirement.

Providing bike parking is affordable and space efficient. For example, a single standard 9×18 car parking space can hold approximately 12 bicycles. For this reason, and because of the opportunity for improved public health and decreased reliance on on-street car parking for neighborhood businesses, the city should look to adopt stronger standards for bicycles as part of it’s new parking ordinance.

2. Restaurant / Bar Parking

The proposed changes to the bar and restaurant parking requirements are a reaction to the perceived abuse of free on-street parking by restaurants and bars in urban neighborhoods. These businesses often struggle to meet current parking regulations due to the small parcel size, very expensive land, and highly fragmented ownership pattern that is the norm in urban areas.

The proposed response does not fix the existing problem, but primarily will act to eliminate the continued development of much loved urban places like Lower Westheimer or Washington Ave, and to ensure that no new places like them can be built.

Instead of this small business inhibiting new requirement, we believe the city should look to emulate a new program developed in San Francisco, called SF Park. In this approach parking meters are added to any street where over-consumption of on-street parking is creating adverse impacts, and prices are adjusted monthly to ensure that supply and demand of on-street parking are in balance. This approach eliminates the worst abuses of on-street parking: patrons parking several blocks into a residential area and walking to the bar to avoid paying for parking, and valet services providing parking for an establishment by parking cars on residential streets for free. Further, establishing the expectation that free parking is not available in very high demand areas makes it feasible for property owners to create structured parking that would not be feasible without charging users a fair rate for the parking. In high-demand, high-value, fine-grained urban places the city’s lot by lot approach to regulating parking creates a major encumbrance on redevelopment without adequately providing for parking needs. In extremely complex and dynamic places it makes more sense for the city to step out of the off-street parking equation altogether, and to focus instead on using pricing to keep on-street parking in check. We happen to have a great precedent for this pattern: Houston’s thriving downtown district operates exactly this way.

A final benefit: as many other cities have done, Houston could use revenue generated by parking meters for local infrastructure improvements. Among other examples, Portland paid for its streetcar system in this way.

We encourage the City of Houston to reconsider these two aspects of the proposed parking ordinance changes. More generally, we encourage the city to step back and think about the role and ramification of parking requirements throughout our city. We should use the parking regulation revision process as an opportunity to decrease barriers to walkable urban development in our city, not to increase them.