Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia.

LEED certification is often a sham. The point system used by the U.S. Green Building Council is too easy to manipulate for the sake of marketing. For example, bike racks and showers earn points even if the building is sited on the edge of a freeway. The proximity of one bus line in the suburbs is equal to a downtown grid crisscrossed by public transportation. I’ve seen aerial pictures of LEED-certified, green-roofed buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt parking. The situation is perverse. Isolated features are used to green wash environmental time bombs—the architectural equivalent of putting a few pieces of organic lettuce on a factory-farmed beef patty.

A new type of LEED certification, LEED for Neighborhood Development or LEED-ND, promises to address some of these deep flaws. I attended a workshop on October 25 at CITYCENTRE, 14 miles west of downtown, to find out about the new point system. Douglas Farr, the original chair of the committee that developed the standard, gave the presentation.

LEED-ND came about as a collaboration between the U.S. Green Building Council and two partners: the National Resource Defense Council and the Congress for New Urbanism. This last group is vilified, especially among academic architects, for requiring nostalgic aesthetics into their codes and for the distance between the ideals they espouse and the resort developments they design. So I went into the workshop skeptical both of the LEED point system and the New Urbanist partners.

Farr started off with examples from Normal, Illinois and BedZed, a suburb of London. Right away, it was clear that LEED-ND does indeed shift the consideration from individual buildings to urban context. He showed a waste treatment water feature at Dockside Green in British Columbia that residents pay a premium to face.

Sustainable urbanism needs to be commodified, legalized, and normalized, Farr argued. His slogans for changing social norms were especially entertaining:

“Sex is better within ¼ mile of mass transit.”
“I thought he was hot until I realized he drives more than 20,000 miles a year!”
“Your SUV Makes You Look Fat.”

Farr’s build up was very convincing, and then came the actual explanation and exploration of the point system. We broke out into groups. Each table attempted to determine whether a local development would qualify for LEED-ND certification. We played the role of inspector, ticking our way through a long and complex checklist, parsing out elaborate definitions in an accompanying binder as thick as a biochemistry textbook.

I sat at the table considering a superfund site in the Fifth Ward that developer Frank Liu is turning into a dense neighborhood of townhouses. Mr. Liu sat right next to me, brimming with energy and determined that his project would cross the silver threshold. LEED-ND is comprised of prerequisites that must be met and optional points added up at the end. The superfund redevelopment easily met the prerequisites for avoiding sensitive lands and it earned innovation points: it is the first and only superfund site to be cleaned up through private financing.

The prerequisites abolish buildings that are inaccessible to the pedestrian and the public street. No blank facades, no high fences lining the street, no security gates between the pedestrian and the front door. For that reason alone, I became a fan of LEED-ND.

The definitions and weighting of points for transit, income diversity, and proximity to jobs were less satisfying, though. METRO wisely does not run many buses by the superfund site now, but it easily could in the future. This type of chicken-egg problem came up again and again leading me to wonder if LEED-ND is compatible with underserved, low-income neighborhoods. Also, Mr. Liu was not rewarded enough for building close to downtown jobs. Perversely, the joblessness of the immediate environs of the Fifth Ward rob the development of points. Furthermore, the points rewarding a diversity of housing types were not strong enough to persuade Mr. Liu to accommodate low-income families.

I had other quibbles. Handicapped accessibility only earns one point. Ten points, awarded on a scale based on the percentage of accessible units, would be appropriate given that access is an instrumental freedom—a means and an end to the kind of society we ought to build. At least accessibility made the list, I was told.

On the whole, I was convinced that widespread legalization and normalization of LEED-ND would move the world closer to sustainability. It turns the technical architecture and urban planning world of sidewalk widths, intersections per mile, façade permeability, density of residential units, and diversity of uses into a branded, comprehensible process that a non-expert can more or less trust.

Duany Plater-Zyberk, the firm synonymous with New Urbanism did do the design for the superfund redevelopment. (See Swamplot’s Fifth Ward: New Urbanists Meet Old Toxic Waste.) However, the LEED-ND point system did not, for the most part, reward nostalgia or faux-Charleston styling. LEED-ND’s relative neutrality to aesthetics is a relief.

The barrier to legalizing LEED-ND would be lower, one might suspect, in Houston than elsewhere given our fame for no-zoning. The presentation and the exercise made clear, however, that our “minimum parking allotments” and “minimum setbacks,” as defined in Chapter 42 of the city ordinances, are major barriers. They turn the whole city outside downtown into a one-size-fits-all suburban zone.

Frank Liu decried plans for increasing parking requirements. “I hate to see new regulations that make doing the right thing harder,” he said, adding that, “SPUDs (Special Purpose Urban Districts) would be a game changer.”

No doubt, the new LEED-ND point system can be gamed. Somewhere, LEED-ND developments will replace existing neighborhoods or environments that should have been preserved. They will be enclaves, free of metal gates but marked affordability barriers, that perpetuate income inequality and segregation. That said, sitting next to Frank Liu, watching him respond to the challenges posed by the LEED-ND prerequisites and points, was very convincing. I could see his plans for the former superfund site becoming even more promising.

by Raj Mankad

A two-million-square-foot building designed by WW Architecture. All images courtesy WW unless noted.

To introduce himself to the Glasscock School class for “Spotlight on Rice Architecture School,” Ron Witte said in comparison to his wife, Dean Sarah Whiting, his partner in their practice WW and the first speaker in our series, that she’s the more academically grounded and the more articulate before audiences. His historical knowledge, for example, comes second-hand and is “given to hyperbole.” His presentation on October 4—introduced by a survey of the transformation of Paris in the nineteenth century under Haussmann, and followed by a tour through a few of WW’s recent and ambitious designs—indicated, however, that he was only being modest.

The example of Haussmann’s radical excavation of the Paris cityscape served as a model for what Witte describes as a sort of civic hubris. It is all the more remarkable that today we do not tend to think of the city of Paris as an emblem of hubris, given how few towers it has (besides the Eiffel, obviously), how much walking and sidewalk culture it affords, and how moderate in scale are its residential, industrial, and commercial sectors.

Boulevard Sebastopol, Paris, France. Photo from WikiCommons.

Track Jumping, a proposal by WW.

Proposal for Kaohsiung Maritime Culture and Popular Music Center.

Proposed Kaohsiung Maritime Culture and Popular Music Center bird's-eye view.

Kaohsiung Port Terminal proposed by WW.

Kaohsiung Port Terminal, section.

Kaohsiung Port Terminal, conceptual drawing.

Additions have been made to this 18th-century house in Princeton.

Unfurled box concept for the WW addition.

WW addition to the house.

David Robinson leads a discussion of a plan for Dunlavy Street at the site for the Montrose HEB. Photo by Chris Curry.

David Robinson is an architect who has served in a number of different public positions—chair of the urban design committee for the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, president of the Neartown Super Neighborhood, and president of the Super Neighborhood Alliance among others. He sat down with Raj Mankad, editor of Cite, at Empire Cafe for an interview on September 20.

Raj Mankad: Why not stick to designing buildings? What motivated you to enter politics and, now, run for City Council?

David Robinson: Since studying architecture in college and really even before that, I have always had an interest in the public realm.

RM: But why politics?

DR: It has been in my blood since before leaving my parents home. My father is a professor of political science in government. In my academic training and professional career I have pursued that as part of the fundamental obligation of architects operating in the public realm. And it was at Rice University, especially in the studio of the now deceased Jack Mitchell, where we really learned about exploring the public realm. The assignment was: Do something in the public realm, come back and talk about it, and document it with photography or with illustration or drawing or other means of recording what we have experienced.

RM: Was there an aha moment or a moment of frustration when you worked on a project and you thought, “Okay, this building isn’t enough? I have to go into community activism or politics to make a real difference?”

DR: I am not motivated by frustration, I will tell you. I am really motivated and inspired by opportunity. I truly believe that Houston is a great city. I love being here. This is the year that I will have been in Houston 22 years, which is half my lifetime. I moved here to go to Rice for architecture in 1989. As a 44-year-old man with my own 11-year-old daughter, it’s a wonderful place and she goes to school in the building I am looking at now, across from Empire Café here. She goes to Lanier Middle School half a block away from my home where I practice architecture and have this lovely café. Our neighborhood two years ago was declared one of America’s great places.

I think I have been at the right place in the right time in many regards. I love my neighbors, I love the community. There is so much to work on and we are growing. We are robust. What’s not to like?

RM: I’ll play devil’s advocate. Westheimer, where we are now in Empire Café, is an exception. It’s one of the only streets in Houston where you can walk and feel joy on a stroll. The density—the proximity of restaurants, groceries, homes and businesses—is almost ideal here. But most of Houston is not like this. Houston is defined by huge highways and the buildings have moats of parking around them. City ordinances for minimum setbacks and parking all but require suburban-style buildings. There are vast stretches of concrete everywhere.

DR: I hear you. We have left ourselves plenty of room for improvement. That’s where I believe I have been working on improving the city. I do think that I live in the greatest neighborhood in the city of Houston, but we are working with other neighborhoods. Montrose is by no means the only neighborhood in Houston that is rich in cultur or in wonder and in delight.

RM: For some people, it will be a surprise that Houston even has a planning commission since we don’t have traditional zoning and we also don’t have a general plan.

DR: A typical agenda [of a planning commission meeting] let’s say in 2007 might have had 150 agenda items. A typical one in the last year had 60. So with clear relevance to our economic malaise, you know you sort of go with the flow of what’s going on. The primary role, I would say, of the planning commission is to review applications for plat and reassembly of land with development proposals that may involve a variance where really the rulebook would be Chapter 42. You can feather in there a little bit the landscape ordinances and the parking ordinance that I believe are in Chapter 23 or 26 or 33. We are sworn to adhere to city policy.

Kay Crooker used to talk about things that were so odious, you had to hold your nose and vote. She was huge champion of trees, in the legacy of Eleanor Tinsley. She made sure that when the commission would have discretionary authority over an approval that, by golly, we would be sure to plant some additional trees and require that the developer do some good in the public realm to offset what I think she might argue would be the downside of their impact on the urban environment.

RM: In other cities the people in your position would have a lot more leverage to require things like trees or wider sidewalks or you know they’d be able to leverage stronger restrictions to force developers to invest more in the public realm. But in Houston the restrictions are so light that you are rarely able to do that right, as with the Walmart off Washington Avenue.

DR: Well, don’t make a mistake here. The Walmart didn’t go before the planning commission for the planning commission to talk about how many trees should be there.

RM: Because there were no restrictions on the land that they needed…

DR: The developer did everything they needed to do and the 380 agreement, which is not something that the commission oversees, was a deal that was struck with the mayor and her administration. And that is not to criticize the mayor necessarily but to say that that’s distinct from the planning commission’s business.

RM: That’s my point. In Houston the best that the city could do was to negotiate a deal based on incentives whereas in other cities the planning commission could have negotiated concessions from the developer because of stronger restrictions.

DR: The deal was struck without a planning commission or without real transparency when it comes to what the developer was talking about with the planning department. And don’t think that there is not power in the discretionary authority of the director or the mayor or the chief development officer Andy Icken. Those folks wield a lot of power and negotiate the deals. Like it or not, I would say as a neighborhood guy what I would like to see is more transparency, more involvement with the neighborhoods.

In stark contrast relative to the Walmart debacle — really the Ainbinder debacle, the deal was struck not with the tenant which is Walmart but with the developer which is Ainbinder — is in our neighborhood with HEB. The owner of the land at Dunlavy and West Alabama is a group of individuals that retain the property. HEB showed their colors by engaging the community, conducting a series of public meetings ultimately taking a vote with the community. And like it or not, they offered choices in a relatively democratic process while they worked extremely hard to preserve essential trees that are on the site, respect the neighborhood for their impact both with noise pollution, light pollution, access to existing pedestrian routes, sidewalks, improvements to the road ways. They have paid attention to what the president Scott McClelland refers to as the unique nature of Montrose.

RM: The Walmart and HEB examples show that sometimes we have too few restrictions and sometimes too many. In Midtown or in Montrose, a developer has to get a variance to build a building that is urban and makes sense.

DR: That’s a good point. In [the case of HEB], a variance is not a bad thing. With HEB, Chapter 42 required that they basically connect Sul Ross and Branard streets with a short turnaround driveway that would have cut dramatically into the property nonsensically. A much better solution required a variance…Having been involved in the negotiations between the neighborhood and the developer or in this case, the tenant, it was something that we did as a community and there were times when we were out on the site with bull horn and crowded parade, being sure that the developer knew that we were going to demand the trees remain as much as possible and that they study the context carefully, and provide a solution that is in the interest of the community.

RM: Why aren’t the laws already set up to allow for good of urban buildings in neighborhoods like Midtown and Montrose. By the time the Urban Corridors ordinance got to city council, it…

DR: It was diluted. Right, the carrot and sticks that you were asking about a minute ago, I think were pretty carefully conceived — I was a member of the task force and worked on it a lot. The potential that that had fell far short of where it arrived. Although it remains almost entirely unutilized as and again that has a lot to do with the state of development or our city there is just not that much going on yet. And perhaps if we can get ourselves out of this recession we can embrace some of the goodness that the urban corridors ordinance suggests that we do in terms of providing for broader pedestrian realm, better allocated resources within the sidewalk dimensions, smarter approach to where grass and public space is provided, upgrade pedestrian covered walkways, things like that that exist in the very impenetrable Chapter 42.

RM: If you won the city council seat, what are the number one and number two things you think should happen in the revision of the Chapter 42 and other land-use ordinances?

DR: Well the first thing I want to say is to show me the proposed changes right now. I would cal for transparency and an open process having been involved with considering what should happen to Chapter 42. I must say that it’s a little disturbing how little the public or even ex-public officials have access to the deliberations that are going on in chambers and beyond.

Let’s just go ahead and admit it’s a very complicated business to govern development in what is soon to be the third largest city in the country where business, free enterprise, and a conservative approach to physical affairs and property ownership really is the dominant tone. Layer on the fact that we don’t have zoning and people are entrenched and fiercely against it, you really have to do what you can, which I would argue is where neighborhoods come in. With whatever ordinances we have, we need to protect them whether that’s deed restrictions and property rights at a very basic house by house level or…

RM: Block by block….

DR: …or civic association by civic association. It’s a concept that needs attention and I think the mayor working to consolidate things with this newly created Department of Neighborhoods. She is doing this in a way that is part physical austerity and part practical bureaucratic administration and where I would like to hope and remain optimistic is that it also can fundamentally help neighborhoods help themselves.

RM: It is one thing not to have zoning and it’s another thing not to have a comprehensive plan.

DR: Well there is a five page general plan that was written by a very small group of folks that some, I have heard, argue constitutes a comprehensive plan. But those of us who know what that really is would say we certainly aren’t there yet. There is language in the code that requires the city to adopt a comprehensive plan and it’s not at some future time, it is now.

RM: Would you push for a general plan as a city council person?

DR: I think so. I wouldn’t rush headlong to my chains you know. I think that a comprehensive plan sounds potentially as scary as it sounds beneficial. For me Houston is a beautiful city that I love and there is much about it that I wouldn’t change one bit.

RM: We could have a general plan without zoning. The plan could be an idea that was debated.

DR: That’s right. Zoning does not have to be a component of a comprehensive plan. I’m glad you said that because in some ways a comprehensive plan has become a taboo in the same way as the Z word.

RM: The plan could be rather freewheeling and complex.

DR: I really like the model of neighborhoods. You may say that’s because I am the president of the Super Neighborhood Alliance. That last hat that I wear currently is one that I was nominated for last Fall and was supported by the mayor in that nomination. So like in Montrose [Neartown], where we have 21 civic clubs and two institution members — I’m now the president of all the [super] neighborhoods across the city. Each one of the neighborhoods is different, unique in challenges, context, character, ethnic breakup, and on and on. So that’s where I think that the current problem with Chapter 42 as a one size fits all document needs to have some application that is specific to context, which is really what I’m hearing discussed downtown. It’s not that one size should fit all, it is that we need to encourage the development of the character that is specific to the context.

RM: My concern about what you are saying is that the whole category of “neighborhood” is so unstable and not clear politically. We have civic clubs, some of them are active some of them aren’t, then we have block level mini zoning where you can set minimum lot sizes. Then there is this super neighborhood structure that is encouraged to develop plans, but then those plans don’t have any political clout…

DR: I disagree.

RM: They are just like an emerging…

DR: No no, I think you are wrong. Our plan that we have for Neartown is one that reflects the neighbors’ interests. Its not officially recognized or adopted by the city of Houston but it is something that we continue to work on in public meetings. And for instance, when development is considered, we try to make sure that they know what neighbors want. That’s truly grassroots, working up toward the city and the city in some ways enabling it to inform how they would like development to occur. We see this at the planning commission where they do actively care. We do care, I will say as a past public official. We listen when neighbors come to the podium and they speak about what should or should not be. We’ve got authority to consider variances and we take those concerns of the neighborhoods extremely seriously…Running a city is a complex notion. I hope to have a seat at the table for city council—this would be someone who as a volunteer has engaged in these activities in addition to my profession to learn about how things work and what opportunities there are to make the city better.

RM: Okay.

DR: I don’t believe that Houston is broke and we need to fix it. I think we need to tweak it like, you know, get hybrid engine instead of a gas-guzzler.

RM: Switching gears to a different but related topic, would you oppose the expansion of the Grand Parkway and Segment E in particular? Sue Lovell, who is leaving the seat you are running for because of term limits, voted in favor of it. Segment E, as you know, would connect I-10 and 290. It would run through what are now hunting grounds, farms, and open prairie.

DR: Sue Lovell is a friend and I respect her very much in a number of ways…The fact that you point to I don’t know what her reasons for voting for that segment of the Grand Parkway…

RM: She said when she was asked by the Houston Chronicle and Houston Tomorrow that the development is going to happen there anyways and that we needed to get out in front of it. The infrastructure should be there in advance. In my mind, there is so much vacant land inside the city already served by roads, adding another ring road would be a travesty.

DR: You probably don’t know any concrete company do you?

RM: If you are elected to city council, would you use oppose the Grand Parkway and Segment E?

DR: I would use the opportunity of being a city council member to weigh in strongly on issues that I think impact our built environment. I know that segment is particularly heated issues for a lot of reasons. Let me not get into those details because I think while what I have read suggests to me that it probably shouldn’t happen, I want to say that I haven’t studied the details in it. I think that that’s something I’m very proud of my track record on planning commission, is that I didn’t come to that seat with a presumption that I knew better than anybody else how to be a commissioner or how to lead this city. I think there is a real obligation in that job as a public official that you listen first, understand the facts as best as you can, understand the limitations of your perspective and your seat at the table and then really trust your judgment.

RM: Would you in principle vote for precious tax dollars to go first to places where people already live, to improve transit where the people already are?

DR: I think the census has really presented us with some hard evidence that our region continuous to grow … I believe we can say unequivocally it’s going to happen. And so we want to be smart about how we prepare for that and that’s where I believe the urban corridors [ordinance] has virtue. Its anticipating growth where it should be around the infrastructure that we have laid out with our major thoroughfare plan and freeway plan. They are existing network for getting around the city. Yes they could be done better.

We need to think about complete streets, we need to think about a bigger tool of parts downtown in the what’s called the design manual for public works and engineering so that some new tools are introduced. Some things that we are trying, we see being attempted in other places around the country, other places around the world, just plain good ideas. We don’t want to import those because we are stupid or because we didn’t know any better. We need to do it because they are good ideas and we just need to adopt those things not to be more like anybody else but to make Houston better.

RM: Right.

DR: I think that’s the real opportunity as we have got a lot of smart people right now in good places in the city government and I think to allow wisdom to prevail. I think the opportunity is incredible and I would like to be there at the table.

RM: Thank you for talking with me.

DR: My pleasure.

Cite 86 cover photograph by Paul Hester.

The Summer 2011 issue of Cite (86) was mailed and is at the Brazos Bookstore, CAMH, MFAH, Issues, Domy, River Oaks Bookstore, and other stores. Below is a letter from guest editors Katherine Howe and Rafael Longoria about this issue, followed by the Table of Contents.

Houston is not only the largest American city without zoning, it is also the only sizable American city without a comprehensive plan. This does not mean that there are no planning efforts going on in Houston. There are plenty of well-intentioned master plans for different parts of town, but these tend to be limited to relatively small areas, or focused on specific functions, such as traffic or public art. For years, local governments have been eager to delegate planning functions to any private group willing to pick up the bill – a practice that puts less affluent neighborhoods at a clear disadvantage.

Articles in this issue of Cite explore different aspects of Houston-style planning. Starting with an architectural review of the venerable Rice University campus written, upon the occasion of the university’s centennial, by Mark Cottle and Sabir Khan, two Rice architecture alumni who now live in Atlanta. They trace the history of the campus from the coastal plains, which defined Rice’s site a hundred years ago, to the remarkable master plan by Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, and its evolution in the hands of a roster of architects who have shaped its spaces and buildings to this day. Cottle and Khan attempt to explain how the most successful buildings on campus are those that understand the conceptual and spatial lessons of the original plan, rather than rely on superficial stylistic mimicry.

In a counterpoint to Rice’s grand scheme, Susan Rogers evaluates the plans to “update” Airline Drive, a deteriorating two-lane commercial street at the heart of the city’s bustling wholesale produce district. She challenges the City of Houston to reconsider its traffic-centric approach to planning and replace aging thoroughfares throughout the city with more community-appropriate plans to make Houston a better place to work and live.

Raj Mankad evaluates the nearly completed widening of Sims Bayou and considers the role a coalition of residents played in improving the design.

Houston’s Civic Art program—fusing public art, architecture, and urbanism—runs counter to the city’s tendency to avoid centralized coordination. Matt Johnson evaluates the program’s success after fifteen years of existence.

We thank you for supporting Cite with your attention and welcome your comments to the editor at mankad at rice dot edu.

Cite 86 Table of Contents

Citings

News: RDA Visits Dallas, Long Dawns in Helsinki, High Schoolers Float Past Professionals, China is Big
Letters
Calendar
Architecture: WORKac’s New Angles on the Blaffer
Food: The Agile Food Truck
Musings: Why It Never Gets Dark in Houston
Community: Workshop Houston’s Beat Shop
Economy: Haus Coop Fosters Alternative
Sustainability: An Interview with Bina Agarwal

Features

One Hundred Years of Rice: Contemporary Responses to Tradition
By Mark Cottle and Sabir Khan

Buried Concrete: Is the Re-sculpting of Sims Bayou a Cause for Celebration?
By Raf Mankad

Street of Dreams: Is a Bigger Airline a Better Airline?
By Susan Rogers

Public Art in Four Acts: Houston Arts Alliance Negotiates a Babel of Critics and Patrons
By Matt Johnson

Readings

Review: Architecture as Revolution: Episodes in the History of Modern Mexico by Luis E. Carranza
By Monica Savino

MFAH Selects

New Books on Architecture and Design

Hindcite

Houston Aleph
By Harbeer Sandhu

Early this year,\ I graphed median household income and place of birth for all of the census tracts along Bellaire/Holcombe from Main Street in the Medical Center, west to Highway 6. Recently, updated 2009 small area data has become available from the American Community Survey. The graph below shows Median Household Income along the Bellaire corridor in both 2000 and 2009.

Click on the image to open it at full size.

The duo is Robert Thomas and Richard Murray. They are well-credentialed: the former was then director of the program in Public Administration at UH, and the later is now director of the Institute of Public Policy at UH. The book is part of a series by the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley, designed to promote “better understanding of the nature and working of the American system of democratic government, particularly in its political, economic, and social aspects.” We’re in the company of New York, London, Toronto, Stockholm, Montreal, Winnipeg, Indianapolis, and Leningrad, and have a place among them because we were a “unique case study” in a city where “it no longer seems appropriate to focus government intervention primarily on economic development alone, while ignoring societal ills and social objectives.”

Progrowth Politics’ clear explanations of local land use and redevelopment issues, MUD districts, and the push and pull between the city council and mayor are the book’s greatest strengths. They clearly show how things get done in the city, and by doing so provide both a fantastic reference for understanding political processes in the city and also develop their primary point about how these processes have consistently enabled economic growth to be at the center of the civic agenda. They show the nuts and bolts that allowed what Jan Morris called the “mighty resolve” of Houston to take the primary role in influencing the city’s form.

That’s not the book’s only civic service, though. Hidden amid wonkish chapter titles like “Growth Patterns” and “People and Politics,” this book provides a top-of-the-line, clearheaded historical narrative. While Stephen Fox’s Houston Architectural Guide recovers the history of the city neighborhood-by-neighborhood and building-by-building, Thomas and Murray connect all the dots, presenting a cohesive story from Allen to Whitmire. And though you wouldn’t know from its cover (never has book design so perfectly channeled the architectural spirit of the City Hall Annex), they actually make it quite entertaining.

Take, for example, the chapter on Houston’s annexation policies. The book gives exhaustive and energetic treatment to the drama underlying the annexation of southeast Harris County by the City of Houston under Mayor Lewis Cutrer. It’s one of many episodes in which the old-guard city council comes across like a kind of Houstonian id.

Cutrer made his proposal [for annexing SE Harris County] one week after the secret annexations. Since Houston’s legal position appeared to be solid, the suburban mayors were in a better position to gain territory through a compromise than through a lengthy court fight. Hence, they readily agreed to take Cutrer’s offer to their respective councils and resume negotiations later.

Cutrer’s strategy received a cold reception from council members and prominent civic leaders. Some segments of Houston’s leadership advocated a ‘Holcombe’ response. Their solution was to annex the entire county! The council rejected Cutrer’s argument that Houston could afford to negotiate because it enjoyed a superior legal position. ‘If we have such a strong legal position, they reasoned, ‘why should we give up anything?’

Of course, the City Council won that battle with the mayor, and ended up taking huge tracts of the county for the city. That incident isn’t an atypical example of our political past, and reading through so many of them will certainly make sure you never forget how much growth and expansion meant to city leaders. That road-map border outline will never seem quite the same.

Unsurprisingly, purchasing this book is either difficult or expensive. I found my copy in the Texana section at Half Price Books in Montrose, so perhaps some digging in similar sections may prove fruitful. A few are available for upwards of $30 used on Amazon. If buying isn’t an option, various libraries around town have it in their stacks. But it is certainly worth the time to track down Progrowth Politics somehow: It’ll help any Houstonian make some sense of it all.

Check out Aaron Carpenter’s other reviews of books on Houston:
The Last American City
Cinema Houston

Spectators watch as the rotation of a house in Sharpstown is completed.

It is 11 a.m. on a Thursday in Sharpstown, Houston. Roughly forty spectators sit obediently on metal benches provided by Cherry House Moving Company — a mix of Rice University students, architects, “just in for the day” New York art scenesters and garden-variety devotees of conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll. Today, Carroll will rotate the ranch home at 6513 Sharpview as the climactic moment in her decade-in-the-making work, “Prototype 180.”

Arguably the most pivotal moment in the artist’s career, “Prototype 180” proposes a myriad of questions on art, architecture, and urbanism. Most obvious is that Carroll is intervening in the makeup of this neighborhood, thereby underscoring the historic significance of Sharpstown as the nation’s largest community of single-family homes when it was conceived in 1954, and its transformation after the 1982 economic downturn from white suburb to immigrant-rich density. The rotational rupture also questions issues of land art and real estate, policy and public space, urban sprawl and first-ring suburbs.

The multilayered aspect of this conceptual work has drawn today’s audience, which is just as much a part of the artwork as the moving truck and clay soil that will buttress the new cement foundation. Yet an air of mystery of precisely what “Prototype 180” implies, and what its result will be, permeates the humid air. It is intrigue rather than answers that lures the spectators; despite years of dialogue, everyone remains poised at the edge of understanding.

Bewilderment with Carroll’s work has overcome even art world insiders, notably MoMA’s Barry Bergdoll, and most recently Joyce Wadler of the New York Times (a publication for which Carroll herself has written). In an interview with the artist, published on Oct. 17, Carroll consistently corrects Wadler for not asking the “right” questions, as the journalist focuses on the project’s budget, its funding, and the impact on neighborhood property values. Instead, the artist emphasizes that “Prototype 180” comments on the culture of Houston by imbuing the home with its own autonomy, becoming a free enterprise in itself. Ultimately, Wadler’s most cutting question is what qualifies “Prototype 180” as a work of art. (The simple answer being that Carroll is making readymade architecture “performative.”)

As a conceptual artist, Carroll has no obligation to explain her work. She states in her 2008 monograph, “ … why can’t people take a responsibility to make their own decisions about what they are looking at, the pleasure they derive from it, and what they are seeing instead of being told the supposedly correct interpretation?”

In her presentation to her audience on Thursday immediately before the rotation, Carroll reveals herself as not the cocky outsider artist critiquing the Houston model, but instead somewhat modest, thanking the 2,438 people directly engaged with “Prototype 180,” especially the moving company and the attorney who ironed out any issue with the city. Carroll reveals the degree of thought that went into her project: she’s been researching Sharpstown for over 20 years, wrestling with the implications of the first-ring suburb.

It is no secret that a mountain of complications have arisen in realizing “Prototype 180” — the project was routinely delayed because of the contractual and structural issues that accompany an architectural intervention. Thursday’s event is interrupted by bouts of rain, and the moving truck’s wheels temporarily become entrenched in muddy clay. But Carroll eschews ego and embraces the faults that come with performance — she even entitles a chapter “Mistakes” in her monograph, where she recounts unwittingly performing a work in Puerto Rican-dialect Spanish in Argentina.

By 2:30 p.m., with the aid of a lime powder and wooden planks, Carroll has triumphed. The house has been rotated.

The narrative of “Prototype 180” is not even half complete. The house, although successfully rotated, still stands elevated on the Cherry House Moving truck. A new slab will be paved, and once the home finds its new resting place, Carroll will rehabilitate the building, which was left uninhabited for 13 years. This process includes installing “PIGRO,” plumbing art designed by Carroll while in residency at the Kohler Company in 2007, as well as vertical farming and solar paneling. Architect Charles Renfro, a close friend and collaborator of Carroll’s, said:

The house will be repurposed as a new kind of community center, one founded on ideas and debate. It will become a laboratory for new ways of thinking about making sustainable architecture, not simply by reducing its carbon footprint, but also by rethinking our first-ring suburbs and creating a model of how to keep these neighborhoods vital and sustainable. It will become a site of conversation about architecture and the objects that occupy it. It will also be a local hero, sharing with its neighbors technology that will help lower costs and raise the standard of living to all of the neighborhood.

Renfro’s statement suggests that “Prototype 180” may bring to Sharpstown an approach similar to that of Project Row Houses’ in the Third Ward. If so, Carroll’s elusive language of history and theory will be grounded in the push for sustainability. Renfro’s description of community service, however, remains distant from today’s performance.

Charles Renfro and Mary Ellen Carroll

The site for the proposed Walmart is off Yale Street between I-10 and Washington Avenue, and could be an urban transitional node between Montrose and the Heights. Photo by Sharon Steinmann.

Houston city council passed a $6 million incentive for the new Washington Heights shopping center to include “landscaping, a bike trail, and widening, repaving and improving drainage.” The center, which is anchored by a Walmart, has stirred up an unusual degree of controversy and reveals the forces shaping (or intentionally not shaping) the city’s evolution without zoning. OffCite will examine Washington Heights in a series of posts. This first one will look at the development critically from the standpoint of opponents.

Opposition to the new Washington Heights development argues that it is a troubling and regressive chapter in the development of Houston’s urban core. Instead of high-density, mixed-use, neighborhood-scaled planning that would strengthen the character of the city, Washington Heights represents the low-density, box-and-strip retail that dominates and defines suburbia.

The site itself is somewhat enigmatic. Historically industrial, it is a transitional node between several neighborhoods. While technically in the West End, it has a strong relationship to the Heights and serves as a primary thoroughfare connecting that neighborhood with Washington Avenue and Montrose. Relatively quiet residences and light industry lie to the west and I-10 is directly north.

Undoubtedly, the backlash to the development has been exacerbated by the fact that the retail center is anchored by the perennially unpopular Walmart. The stakes are raised by the fact that the City of Houston has now awarded the Ainbinder Heights LLC, the developer of the project, up to $6 million in reimbursements for infrastructural improvements in and around the 23-acre site.

Broadly speaking, the opposition to Washington Heights breaks down into two camps: 1) those who dislike the tenant and will antagonize, in whatever way possible, the progress of the development and 2) a more moderate group, who are resigned to the fact that the project is happening, but oppose what they view as poor, status quo development.

Protest signs within site of the proposed Walmart location.

The Washington Heights shopping center rendering shows a prairie rather than a city.

Increased protections? When developers catch wind that the ordinance may bulk up, it is easy to imagine the rush to demolish before the ordinance gains strength.

Under the current ordinance, applicants denied permits by the Houston Archaeological and Historic Commission (HAHC) face a 90-day waiver, after which they are free to move forward with demolition plans, regardless of the Commission’s initial denial three months prior. In order to avoid an onslaught of swinging wrecking balls, the task force has suggested placing temporary holds on denied permits until permanent changes to the ordinance are explored and approved by the end of the year. The temporary holds would apply to denied permits for demolitions, alterations, or relocations on properties contributing to designated districts. This marks a noteworthy effort to improve protection for Houston’s historic districts, and limit the threats of inconsiderate alterations and demolition on the city’s historic building fabric.

Houston is not the only city in Texas to include a waiting period after permit denials. Dallas requires a waiting period of 180 days, doubling the time that property owners must wait before moving forward with the denied plans. It all boils down to the fact that time equals money. It costs money to sit on a site and wait to move forward. Dallas also boasts far more protection, primarily through its status as a Certified Local Government (CLG), which allows the state of Texas to grant police power to the city, in order to actually enforce the preservation of historic buildings. Houston’s lack of zoning laws prevents the city from qualifying as a CLG, and with police power at the state level, it becomes difficult for the city to enforce maintenance and use of historic buildings. This results in buildings falling victim to demolition by neglect.

Houston’s current approach works in such a way that the 90-day waiver begins when the application is submitted to the city. However, HAHC only meets once a month. As Courtney Key Tardy of the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance explained, if the HAHC meets on the 15th of May, and a developer submits a plan on the 16th, that plan may not even be reviewed for another month. Thus, the already brief 90-day window may be cut even shorter, possibly to only 60 days.

The pending changes to the preservation ordinance seek to discourage developers from sitting on projects, waiting out their 90-day waiver, and moving forward with the wrecking ball. The current process only works when preservation organizations like GHPA and preservation-minded communities come together, even within the short window of time, to establish alternatives to demolition and work to save the threatened resource.

In Dallas, 180 days of wait might be enough to deter developers. And in Houston, the newly appointed Task Force will have the chance to explore the possibility of extending the existing waiting period, or eliminating it entirely. Such a change would increase protection for historic properties and give a huge boost to preservation in Houston.

City Council’s vote on the temporary suspension of the 90 day waiver has been postponed a week, but if passed, the change would apply to all new applications for demolitions, relocations, and new construction within Houston’s 15 historic districts. The Council will also vote on a 7-month ban on the creation of new districts, exempting neighborhoods already in the process of applying for historic district status. These temporary changes pave the way for permanent amendments to the ordinance before the end of the year.

Kate Dellas is a graduate of Middlebury College and currently enrolled in the Masters in Historic Preservation program at the University of Vermont.

Los Angeles Farmers Market at 3rd and Fairfax [Photos David Bucek]

For the past two years, the Ashby Highrise has dominated debates over Houston’s lack of zoning and land-use planning. The well-to-do residents of Southhamptom and Boulevard Oaks sought to delay and ultimately stop the 23-story building proposed by Buckhead Investments.

There is a new group of sign wielding residents, in Montrose. The Chronicle has reported over the past month on the sale of a 7.68-acre site, until recently the home of Wilshire Village, to the H-E-B grocery store chain. The blog Swamplot covered a Saturday March 13 protest led by the Montrose Land Use Coalition. The graphics stood in contrast to the comic terror of the “Tower of Traffic” signs at the Ashby Highrise protests. At least one sign showed a rainbow. One poster detailed a plan for a farmer’s market.

That plan came from a group that includes David Bucek, Daniel Hall, and Chisun Rees of Stern & Bucek Architects. They worked with several Montrose residents and Dana Harper, with whom Stern & Bucek has teamed up on the rehabilitation of the Frame/Harper House and the Schulenberg Dance Hall.

Bucek shared a copy of the plan with OffCite — Montrose Farmer’s Market Plan. Below is a jpg version.

In an email, Bucek provided some of the background and motivations for the plan:

We have been meeting at Brazil coffee house, owned by Dan Ferguson, with the goal of creating a Montrose Farmers Market that goes beyond the typical parking lot variety. Our conceptual plan promotes open space and was influenced by other well-known farmers markets such as the Los Angeles Farmers Market at 3rd & Fairfax and the Ferry Building Farmers Market in San Francisco. In addition to selling locally grown produce, these markets offer retail shops, coffee houses, restaurants, and much needed civic space. I have included some pictures I took this fall for reference, which you are free to use.

Our goal for the 4th largest city is to have an urban market that rivals those of the West coast. Montrose would be an ideal site for such a market given the diversity and existing urban street scape/new rail line. We chose the Wilshire Village site because it is the largest undeveloped tract of land in the immediate area and was for sale until recently. Our group is not part of the Montrose Land Defense Coalition, we just met. However, we allowed them to use our conceptual plan. Our plan was to create a series of park like gathering spaces with one main building with shops and a series of covered pavilions with restaurants and cafes. Local produce would be sold up front under tents, within the main building and under two long covered areas where trucks can back up. A long board walk extends from north to south. If realized, such a project should be designed with sustainability in mind. For our scheme, we proposed to locate the new structures within the areas of the former apartments to maintain the existing trees.

We developed the plan for the Wilshire Village site to spark community interest and development funding. I am not sure how HEB will develop this tract? However, some type of urban farmers market is greatly needed to compliment the existing decentralized markets and can be realize on a different/smaller site.

David C. Bucek, AIA
LEED AP BD+C

San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers' Market

Wilshire Village was the last of the three original FHA-insured garden apartment complexes built in Houston, according to Steven Fox.

Current state of Wilshire Village Site, photo from Swamplot.