The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

by Alan Ehrenhalt

  PERHAPS EVEN MORE dramatic than the infill going on in Houston’s central neighborhoods is the urbanization of its more distant population centers built expressly for the automobile in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. All over metropolitan Houston, far outside the 610 loop as well as within it, car-oriented suburban clusters are seeking ways to capture at least the trappings of urbanization.

  The most prominent of these is The Woodlands, the massive conglomeration of nearly one hundred thousand people thirty miles north of downtown Houston that was conceived in the 1960s and 1970s as a virtual antidote to big-city life. Less than a decade ago, 80 percent of the people who lived in The Woodlands and worked in downtown Houston drove there. Today, by some estimates, that figure is closer to 30 percent. Large numbers drive to park-and-ride shuttle lots inside the Woodlands complex. Even more don’t commute downtown at all—they earn their livings in the six-million-square-foot Woodlands commercial and retail complex. The majority of them seek recreation and entertainment opportunities along the 1.25-mile-long Woodlands Waterway, a linear park and transportation corridor whose promoters advertise it as a “pedestrian-friendly atmosphere” with “urban residences like brownstones and lofts.” The asphalt parking lots that used to line the center of The Woodlands are gradually being converted into a gridded street plan.

  The Woodlands, a booming suburb that used to symbolize escape from Houston’s problems, now seeks to market itself as an urbanized area centered on a waterway and surrounded by pedestrian-friendly places to live and shop. (photo credit 7.2)

  In Sugar Land, another freeway-created suburb of about eighty thousand people southwest of the city, something similar has happened in just the past five years. Sugar Land is now a suburban doughnut with a town center and city hall in the middle, and its advertising stresses that it has become an urbanized place—not the Sugar Land that Houstonians have in their heads. “Urban and Sugar Land were not always compatible words,” one of the town brochures concedes. “Ten years ago Sugar Land was considered a quaint Houston suburb. Now it is working to provide an increasingly urban atmosphere for its increasing population.” Tower Lofts, a ten-story luxury tower, is planned for the core of the town center itself.

  The Woodlands and Sugar Land strike some visitors as ersatz urbanism, instant glitz without history, character, or meaningful community life. A loft apartment in downtown Sugar Land will never be confused with a house in one of Houston’s leafy west-side neighborhoods. But the newly created streets are full of pedestrian traffic, and similar automobile suburbs all over metropolitan Houston are wondering whether they can emulate what Sugar Land and The Woodlands have created in a remarkably short time. “Everybody wants that,” says David Crossley, who heads a group called Houston Tomorrow. “They look at Sugar Land and say, ‘That’s it.’ … This concept is happening everywhere in Houston now. It’s surprising how fast it has happened.”

  Or perhaps it isn’t so surprising. If Stephen Klineberg’s surveys are correct, and more than 40 percent of Houston-area residents really do want “a smaller home in a more urbanized area, within walking distance of shops and workplaces,” then The Woodlands and Sugar Land and their emerging imitators are merely meeting a rapidly growing and inescapable demand. Only a tiny proportion of these people can live in the close-in neighborhoods west of downtown in the Mediterranean townhouses that Frank Liu is inserting on the vacant lots that surround the heart of the city. There simply isn’t enough room for more. The only practical response to the demand is the urbanization of the suburbs.

  From a classical urban standpoint, however, there remains one massive flaw in the suburban town concept: It is virtually impossible, at most hours, to get to any of these places without a car. How the area chooses to solve that problem—or whether it makes a meaningful attempt at all—will be a crucial part of the Houston story in the next few decades. No one is predicting that Houston residents, even those who live in rapidly urbanizing parts of the metropolitan area, will ever give up their dependence on automobiles. But in many places, the car-dependent life will be part of a much more complex mixture of living patterns and transportation uses than has existed for the past half century.

  Like most cities, Houston once had an extensive streetcar system, but as in most of them, this essentially disappeared after World War II. From the 1950s through the 1980s, as Houston was ringing the entire metropolitan area with freeways, public transport was limited to an inadequate and generally unreliable bus network. In the early 2000s, a start was finally made on a light-rail system meant eventually to link the region’s most important commercial and residential centers, then accessible for all practical purposes only by car. The first segment, seven miles of light-rail line running south from downtown to the city’s huge medical center complex, opened in 2004 and has been both a success and a disappointment. Its average daily ridership of about forty-five thousand, mostly recreational or shopping users rather than commuters, has exceeded early projections. But the line has not led to transit-oriented residential development directly along the route, as many of the early planners had hoped. Much of the adjacent land has been bought up by speculators willing to pay as much as $50 a square foot to sit on the property pending future demand. So the first segment has not produced much new residential construction in the immediate vicinity of the new tracks.

  Now, however, Houston is on the verge of constructing something much more ambitious: thirty miles of light-rail transit with sixty-five new stations, scheduled for completion sometime between 2013 and 2015. The vision of the city’s urban planners is that these new transit lines, extending out into the most important satellite centers, will give those centers an urbanized quality that most of them so far lack. “There will be more transit-oriented real estate in Houston opening all at once,” predicts David Crossley, “than anywhere in the country.”

  Architecture professor Tom Diehl adopts an even more visionary tone. “The people who want to live close in are finally getting something now. The people who want to live on the freeway already have what they want. It’s not like you’ll step off the light rail and feel you’re in Boston. I don’t think people will call it a victory soon. But it will happen. You will ultimately have little urban pockets where you can get your urban fix.”

  It remains to be seen, of course, whether the much larger transit system now being built will generate the development that the first segment failed to generate, or will simply bid up the price of nearby land for speculators willing to do nothing with it for years. But it’s fair to say that the belief in an extensive transit system, and the willingness to pay for it, is now an article of faith among the city’s business establishment. None of the mayoral candidates in the 2009 election expressed any desire for a reconsideration of the plan to get the system built. “If I had to take one thing that would measure the success of Houston,” said candidate Peter Brown, “it’s transit linking mixed-use centers.” Brown didn’t win the election; he narrowly missed making the runoff against eventual winner Annise Parker. But none of the major candidates took issue with his essential vision. It may be difficult for Houston to make major additional investments in transit in the near future. Money is tight; the overwhelming sentiment seems to be to wait to see what effect transit has in the coming decade and make plans for the future based on that. But what Houston has already promised to do in creating a metropolis with a significant transit component, and what it is already in the process of accomplishing, seems remarkable in a city whose identification with the automobile has been all but total.

  BEYOND THE TRANSIT QUESTION, Houston’s civic leaders seem to share a conviction that, more than most, theirs is a city and a region that embodies the American urban future. It has an urban middle class expanding for several miles around the downtown; a diversity of population that includes roughly equal numbers of African Americans, Latinos, and Anglos; a relative racial harmony based on the desire for growth rather than a contention over social differences; a rapidly expanding eagerne
ss for the more distant satellite centers to offer significant elements of urbanized life; and a transit system that will eventually link new centers and relax the auto dependency for which Houston has become famous all over the country. It may be an urban planner’s pipe dream, or it may be the reality of the next few decades. Houston, says sociologist Stephen Klineberg, “is the most interesting city in America. Its diversity shows what the United States will look like in thirty years. Chicago was the city of the twentieth century. Houston is the city of the twenty-first.”

  Whether there will be a stable place in it for Garnet Coleman’s people of the Third Ward remains very much in doubt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CREATING A DOWNTOWN

  IN THE FIRST DECADE of the new century, in cities all over the American South and Southwest, something puzzling happened. Separately, but more or less at the same time, leaders of these sprawl-based conurbations that had grown enormously in the past generation began to express deep longing for a downtown. Not a mishmash of office buildings, hotels, and stadiums—most of them already had that—but a city center comparable to ones that members of this political and business elite had seen on visits to older cities: New York, Boston, and Chicago, but especially older places closer to home—San Francisco, Seattle, Portland.

  So it was that in a remarkably few years, Phoenix and Dallas and Charlotte did things they would have considered unthinkable a decade or two before. They spent billions of public dollars on light-rail transit systems; they drafted long-term “vision” documents that projected a future in which downtowns were friendly to pedestrians rather than just convenient for automobiles; they won voter support for striking new public buildings and placed them as close to the center of the city as they could.

  Just what was it they were looking for? Two things, really. One was the downtown residential population that they were convinced older cities had and great cities needed. Intimately related to that was a desire for street life, a round-the-clock presence of locals and visitors that would project a sense of vibrancy to anyone who saw it.

  Why did they want those things? That turns out to be a more complex question. For some, the reasons were relatively specific. They were tied closely to the desire to recruit and retain big corporations, and the sense that these companies were uneasy locating in a metropolis without a center. Motorola, crucial to the economic development of Phoenix in the postwar years, had all but pulled out in the early 2000s and relocated to Austin, Texas, where the center of the city bustled with life at all hours of the day and night. The perception in Phoenix business circles, whether entirely accurate or not, was that Motorola left because it wanted a place with a downtown. More specifically, it wanted a place with a sophisticated urban scene that would appeal to the bright young college graduates it hoped to employ.

  This was a common refrain across the big Sun Belt cities. In the words of Michael Smith, Charlotte’s director of downtown development, the bankers who dominated the town’s economic strategy felt that they had to have downtown amenities “to attract hip young professionals.” Virtually all of these Sun Belt cities agreed with the geographer Richard Florida’s argument that future prosperity depended on the ability to lure the “creative class,” and that this could be done only with a thriving urban culture.

  More broadly, though, there was a perception that the twenty-first-century world was dividing rapidly into global cities and cities that were second-tier, no matter what their metropolitan size, and that rebuilding (or creating) a downtown was the only way to move into the first rank. “The common element of great cities,” proclaimed Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon, “has always been a belief in the central core as the heart.”

  I listened to those leaders and I found myself thinking, oddly enough, of Pinocchio. After a long series of struggles, he wasn’t doing all that badly as a wooden puppet. He had learned to tell the truth about himself. But he wanted desperately to be something more than he was: a “real” boy, made of flesh and blood and possessed of a heart just like the other boys he saw around him. There is a sense, at least, in which the great modern cities of America’s South and West are in the grip of Pinocchio fever.

  OF ALL THE PINOCCHIO CITIES in the United States, Phoenix is perhaps the strangest and most interesting case. Unlike most of its counterparts, it hadn’t really abandoned its center in a rush to the suburbs; more accurately, it never possessed a center in the first place. One can find pictures of downtown Phoenix before World War II, pictures of relatively busy streets with coffee shops and men wearing bolo ties and department stores sitting comfortably on the main thoroughfares (including the store that made the Goldwater family rich and famous), but it is the downtown of a modest-size Western county seat. No one would confuse it with the core of a major urban center.

  And a modest little town is just what Phoenix was in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1940, it had only sixty-five thousand people. Then, almost without warning, it began to grow inexorably, first with the coming of the aircraft industry during World War II, later with electronics companies such as Motorola in the 1950s. Especially important, the development of artificial air cooling made the place livable in the summer months and turned it into a magnet for newcomers from the North who were eager for a fresh start in a sunny climate. As early as the end of the 1940s, Phoenix had more window air conditioners per capita than any city in the United States.

  All American cities sprawled outward in the decades after 1950, but Phoenix had more room to sprawl than nearly any of them, into flat, empty desert land where growth encountered no serious geographical obstacles. The only real impediment was water, and although not everyone realized it, Phoenix actually had plenty of that, thanks to the Roosevelt Dam that had emptied the nearby Salt River early in the century, and then later to the Central Arizona Project that brought in water from the Colorado River and allowed home owners in the middle of a desert to have lawns as green and lush as if they were in Atlanta or Miami.

  By the time of the 1960 census, due to both migration and annexation, the city had surpassed four hundred thousand people; by 1980 it was approaching eight hundred thousand; early in the 1990s it crossed the million mark. And the older prewar suburbs were growing exponentially as well: Metropolitan Phoenix was home to three million people in 2000, and it is home to well over four and a half million today.

  The newcomers of the 1950s bought into subdivisions lined with virtually identical one-story ranch houses, made of concrete block, topped by low-sloping roofs, and flanked by open-air carports that offered modest protection from 110-degree summers. The new arrivals of the 1970s bought a different product, typically a beige house with a stucco exterior and a wooden frame underneath, more likely two stories than one, with a red tile roof that emulated the Mediterranean look that developers and buyers both seemed to like. From the air, Phoenix looks like a vast carpet of red tile.

  The subdivisions were bigger in the 1970s and 1980s than in the early postwar years: 180 homes on average, compared to just 30 in the 1950s. And the houses were larger as well: By 1980, the average single-family home in Phoenix was twenty-two hundred square feet. But the lots were getting smaller, so that more units could be built on a given parcel of land. In some of the less affluent new subdivisions, the distance between houses was so small that they looked crammed together. The carports were obsolete, replaced by huge attached garages that often took up more land frontage than the house itself. There was actually a word for the long, curving residential streets that sprang up in Phoenix in the 1970s and 1980s. They were called garagescapes.

  And the proliferation of these stucco neighborhoods reflected more than living choice. They constituted, by the mid-1980s, the most important industry in metropolitan Phoenix. In the words of Susan Clark-Johnson of the Morrison Institute, an urban policy think tank at Arizona State University, “Real estate is to us what gambling is to Nevada. We’re basically a one-industry place.”

  BUT EVEN AS PHOENIX built a successful
economy around low-density growth and seemed to embody the very idea of it, the community’s longtime residents and even some newcomers came to fear it as well. They liked the Valley of the Sun, but they had a feeling that something about it was out of control: Metropolitan Phoenix wasn’t just growing; it was exploding, and no one in local leadership was placing any limits on the explosion. They saw the valley as a messy blob that reached farther into the desert every year. Where would it stop? Could it be stopped? Home owners who lived ten miles beyond the center developed a queasy feeling when subdivisions similar to theirs began popping up ten miles beyond them. And those who lived twenty miles out felt just the same way when the blob stretched ten miles farther, to Goodyear and Buckeye in the scruffy desert west of Phoenix, or to Apache Junction in the east, on the edge of the Goldfield Mountains.

  It wasn’t mainly a fear of congestion or traffic jams. Phoenicians did complain about those things, but in fact Phoenix has never had a really serious traffic problem. It didn’t complete its freeway system until the mid-1980s, later than almost any other city, but it hardly mattered, because the main arterial streets were so wide and capacious that commuting around the city was relatively easy whatever route you chose. Basically it still is.

  In part, fear of sprawl in Phoenix was related to pollution, reflected in the number of smog alerts that seemed to grow more frequent each summer. Beyond that, though, it was a much less tangible sense people had that the valley just wasn’t the same oasis in the desert it had been when they arrived a decade or two before. To families who had bought stucco homes with red-tiled roofs in close-in Glendale in the 1960s, the prospect of thousands of new ones almost identical to theirs going up in the 1980s in Surprise, fifteen miles away, generated a vague but powerful unease about the future of the entire area.