At the moment I’m looking for an intern who could work with me in my office on Washington Ave. for about 5-10 hours a week. The ideal candidate would probably be an architecture / urban design / graphic design student, but anyone who is passionate about place-making might be a fit.

If you’re interested, or you know anyone else who might be interested, check out the job post online. I’d also be grateful to anyone who shares the job post, the more I can get the word out about this, the better.

Thanks!

Read more from the .

If you haven’t been paying attention to this issue, it’s time to tune in.

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:

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.

This isn’t shocking speed, Portland built their entire streetcar network a block at a time and did each block with this kind of speed. My recollection is that the portland streetcar was built at a pace of something like 1 mile every 2 weeks… but I could be wrong. I wasn’t able to quickly find a report on that, so if anyone has a link to how fast that was built please share.

Still, a job well-done by Metro. A common complaint against light-rail (or any other infrastructure project for that matter), is that the construction will destroy the surrounding communities. There’s no reason that should be the case, and it’s good of Metro to be showing the effort they’re making to avoid undue impact on surrounding homes and businesses.

So, I’ve been building an image database that makes it easy to find and share images of places. The result of that effort is a new web site, called Placeology, which is now launched and open to the public. I encourage you to check it out, and to share any great photos of Houston if you have some.

Thanks

At a recent city commission meeting, what began as a simple invitation to the city manager and commission to join Mari Chael and local residents on a “joyous bike ride” around scenic South Miami has escalated into a $1 million insurance binder permit demand and other red tape requirements before the ride can proceed.

“Let me make this perfectly clear,” said City Manager Hector Mirabile to Ms. Chael. “Under no circumstances will you do this unless this commission authorizes you to do it. And two, if it does happen and you violate a law, the police will take action and code enforcement will take action.”

Read the rest at the Miami Herald.

One of the most ridiculous examples of this can be found on the side of the main building of the MFAH. If you haven’t been to the Museum of Fine Art, you should, it’s fantastic. One nice thing is that it’s located directly at the Musuem District Station on the light rail, so if the train is an option for you then you can get there without dealing with parking.

However, if you do arrive using the southbound train you’ll find this blank wall across the street.

Obviously the Museum needs to have carefully regulated light and air, and they need high security, so I understand why they don’t have secondary entries on every side of the building. That said, this giant void space is just begging for some life to come fill it it. It wouldn’t take much. For maybe 10 grand you could frame-in some simple, small art display spaces against the liner wall, and then you could turn around and rent these as “mini-galleries” for local artists and craftsmen to showcase and sell their work.

In five-minute scribble form it might look something like this:

There are opportunities for large businesses to incorporate these kinds of incubator spaces all over the city. Whether they’re art incubators (appropriate for the museum district and the MFAH) or start-up business spaces, there are blank-wall-voids all over our urban core, and it’s foolish not to use them for something.

Turning these voids into dirt cheap incubator spaces would not only represent a dramatic improvement in walkability, it would also be an economic boon. Any time you lower the barrier to entry you help spark entrepreneurial activity. Being able to get a “major street” address for your company is a big move, even if you’re only renting 150 sqft or so.

Obviously we can’t even start an experiment like this without the City getting out of the way… just one more reason to push for the removal of setbacks and parking regs in our urban core.