David Crossley Interview, Part 2 of 2

DT: When we left off, you were talking about mobility and how a comprehensive plan and an execution of that plan might move Houston towards a more sustainable place and you gave the example of the sidewalks. I was wondering if you could give us some other examples and maybe put it in the context of not just the new paradigm, but the old paradigm.

Houston has got the Grand Parkway and portions of Trans Texas Corridor and, you know, an enormous investment in highways that are clearly not what you probably envisioned. So how, how do you replace that with something new? How do you drop that model and pick up a new model?

DC: Well, you know, it's--I think it's interesting to talk about what we mean by new here, you know. The, if you, if you think about Houston on Day One, it was, it was about shipping. I mean, that's what the Allen Brothers were thinking about, it was it as a port. They, they got up as far as they could in their boat and they said okay, let's buy this land because of now we can go back and forth to the sea.

And then they laid out Main Street as a very urban kind of place. They, towns were built that way and, you know, they put the buildings right next to each other, they had, everything was in line, there were no setbacks, no parking lots and so forth. And then they got this urban plan from Gail Borden, who designed the city, that planners now say is among the best urban plans in the United States.

So the bones, they call it, of of Houston are excellent. Small blocks with easy walk, easy to walk, two hundred fifty foot on a side, so walking around one doesn't take long and so getting places was lots of block faces where you can have retail and all that.

So if you think about cities, Portland is the only one that I've ever heard anybody say is better in terms of its original design. Houston, it was started out as a very serious urban place.

All the early pictures will show you that, that it's a city where people walked around, then we had streetcars. And the first suburb came in the Heights because the developer put a streetcar line out there. The only way people could get there was streetcars. This is way before cars, okay, so you know, 1836 was when we started.

Well, by 1927, we had this incredible, extensive streetcar system, very large, and that's how everybody moved around. We were a transit-oriented city from the beginning and for a hundred years, we were a transit-oriented city. Comes 1945 or so, all of a sudden we say, "Let's build these interstate highways," and we build a Loop and hub and spoke system of highways and now people can drive out to the cheap land and we don't have the streetcars anymore and we've changed the paradigm.

So, but for a hundred years, this was a very urban and all of those bones, you know, which got much larger over time are still in place today inside the Loop and some a little outside, so that the people who live in those areas drive far less than the people who live in the newer areas, even though the transit's not there anymore because everything's so convenient.

So the land use is about convenience as opposed to not. So spreading everything out, which is the what we did with the highways, meant that everybody was required to drive a car. You didn't have a choice, you didn't no way to get anywhere otherwise, whereas here I am in the Montrose, we walk to the grocery store. We walk to the park. We went walked to restaurant with some friends the other day. Heights, all these areas still have all that, you know.

So so that's the story of Houston until about 1945, transit-oriented city. So when people say it was designed around the car, I say no. Not until about 1950 when we started building the freeways. Now that's what we've done for fifty years, but that's not just us. Every city in the United States did what we now call sprawl as as the way to grow

until about today, you know, when we're all deciding that doesn't work anymore. And we're pretty much the last region to still try to make it work, but everybody else has abandoned it as a totally failed paradigm or, or mechanism for human life.

So, so when you start to do a plan, and and we had a plan from the beginning, it was the mobility plan. That's the transportation infrastructure caused everything else to happen. All the lifestyles, the way people live, where they lived, how they moved around, all that was was the plan for the transportation infrastructure. So when we come along and say okay, we're going to plan now to build a loop around this place and build these roads out, they were planning to live outside, to live in other places, to live in the car.

People say we don't plan, we did. Those those were not accidents. It's not like the road just appeared there one day. Everybody who did it knew what they were doing, they knew that they were opening up new land for development by taking the road out to it and they knew that everybody was going to be driving great distances all the time. Everybody knew that. So now we're saying well, maybe not so much anymore, but we're still, it's still a fight in Houston, you know.

DT: Well, it would seem like the arguments for going out to the suburbs where the land is cheaper and housing is cheaper still makes some sense to people, and I would certainly think that it would make sense to developers who are building out there where they can build on a greater scale, and what has changed to make that so unlikely a future?

DC: All the things that are related to driving, you know, beginning with there's a limit. People, the idea of spending two hours in your car just getting to work and back is an idea that an awful lot of people really hate. Now they'll make the trade, you know. They'll say well, I'm getting so much house out here; I'm willing to commute to somewhere to work. But when they first made that trade, traffic wasn't so bad. Here's my suburb out here somewhere near Sugarland.

Next thing you know, suburbs appear around your suburb and pretty soon that road is absolutely jammed. And then the road made it possible for people to go out there and the speed slows down over time that you drive because now there are more and more people on it, until you're parking lots in the afternoon and the morning.

And the stress, we know a lot about what happens to people when they're in cars. I mean, there have been thousands of people with sensors all over them and we and we know that this is the highest stress movement moment for for many people. And we know that some, I've seen one report that says people who drive to work on busy freeway, congested freeways are seventeen percent less productive than people who do not.

Well, this is a town that's supposedly about business, so if we're saying our employees are seventeen percent less productive every day in their jobs, we're kind of suicidal aren't we? I mean, shouldn't we think about that?

And you know, the half of that is you go home and you are so stressed that your fam-, you're getting home at eight o'clock, maybe, and your family, you tell them just leave you alone, I want a drink, you know. It's like so so a lot of family relations stuff is harmed by this stress that comes from driving.

So it's ah, you know, it's a real health issue, it's serious health issue and it's very well known and very well studied and and it's something that it's just not smart to do. So what do we do about that? And and a lot of people realize it and they don't want to, they don't want to live like that and so they're looking, they move in. So there's kind of a movement now to move in closer.

Because Houston has not just one center, but six really large job centers. That doesn't mean you have to move in closer to downtown Houston. It could mean you move in closer to Westchase or you move in closer to Greenspoint or you move in closer to the Uptown Galleria area and that's your focus.

And so we have choices now, we can sort of disperse some of the traffic as we get people relating to many space, many centers instead of one center. And if you think about that, if everybody's trying to get to one thing in the middle, it's just jammed. But if they're kind of out there, the, it's it's it's a metaphor or it's it's a dynamic that you can actually make work. And I think we are showing up as one of the most, what's called, polycentric regions in the United States and and largely as a result of having built those freeways, making it possible to have those places be out there.

And so, you know, I, in fact, I was in a big meeting this morning where I was trying to explain this at the commuter rail study that's going on and saying look, this is not about trains coming into downtown Houston, this is about commuters going to all these other places. We have to find a way to connect them all and have people relate to different places, not just downtown.

Just because the old rail lines go downtown, it's not a reason to say that's where we're going to try to put all our money getting everybody downtown when only seven percent of people work downtown. That means ninety-three percent don't work downtown, they're working somewhere else.

So we, you know, again, it's a paradigm thing, this center and suburban rings was never true in Houston. But still it's in everybody's mind. You see drawings of it all the time and it's not real and so we're trying to say, and we do we do a lot of maps. We do geographic information systems stuff and it's one of our strongest tools because you show people what's actually happening or could happen and then they go oh, yeah, you know, you get it. And so and it's not like I'm creating this stuff. It's like well, we make the maps, we look at them and we see the pattern. Oh, look at that. That's different than what we thought we were doing, let's talk about that.

You know, so so now we're in, you know, with the Houston-Galveston area council, we're we're sort of pushing forward this idea of livable centers of several sizes that are all over the place and they have their own little traffic sheds as opposed to one that's going to the middle and it becomes manageable. You know, if you can do it, if you can actually think that way and then begin to do the transportation projects for those things, world changes, you know.

Eighty percent of the trips that people make every day are not commuting. Sixty percent of the drivers on the Katy freeway at rush hour are not commuting, they're just running errands. Well, that's pretty stupid. We use an interstate highway to run errands? That's because those are the only roads there are in a lot of places so we need to get our communities to be more convenient, we need another layer of smaller roads, which we have here, of course, in the old central city.

You know, you come up to some problem when you're driving around the Montrose, then you you can turn left or turn right, you know. You go on 1960 and you come into a problem, that's it. That's the only road there is, there is no left and right. You're dead, you know, and so it you can get through because we have this intense grid in in in the older parts of the city and then out there, we don't and so we have to fix that over time.

But the idea that people, we could get non-commuters off the freeway, running errands, doing some find out a better way to do that means congestion could vanish just by getting the non-commuters off. So that's a strategy that nobody's ever you know, I mean, we spend a hundred and fifty billion dollars in our transportation plans to 2035 and all of it is aim, is aimed at commuters. Twenty percent of the people.

Well, we're saying why? Let's do the low hanging fruit, the eighty percent that we just, they don't have to be on those freeways. Let's figure out how to make their world easier and get them off the freeways. And so.

DT: You mentioned something about streets and roads and freeways and the infrastructure for getting vehicles around. When you look into the future, do you see these vehicles being mostly single passenger cars or do you see them as being jitneys or buses or perhaps even rail vehicles? What do you see?

DC: Well, I see a lot of rail coming. You know, I mean, by 2012, we're going to have probably the most intense light rail system in the United States. That's only four years away, you know, and we're maybe the largest one and certainly the most, it'll be the, have the highest ridership of of any light rail system.

Who knows that? Who's paying attention to that fact, that Houston's going to transform in one year into a place that's got fifty-five transit stations on one system? And people can come from out in the suburbs and get on the end of it and now they can everywhere in the city on light rail. Well, that's a different Houston than we're used to. So I see that coming and I see a lot more of it as we get how successful it is.

So yeah, I see I see high speed rail going from here to Austin and here to Dallas and so forth. I mean, really high speed rail. We have a contract. We're out, well, I shouldn't say that. We have a sort of bidding process going on with companies all over the world right now to bid on building the T, Texas T-Bone, they call it, the high high speed rail system that would connect us to Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and and to College Station because it would be a T at there.

Remember the, you probably remember the old Texas triangle concept that Southwest Airlines killed back in the day. Well, this is a T-bone. It's much shorter for us to have a line from Houston to College Station and then all everything goes up one line to Dallas and so forth.

And the specs on it for for all these bidders are that it will be an average speed of two hundred and forty miles an hour. Well, that's pretty forward thinking. You know, there's only one train actually, the the European trains are now pretty close to that speed, but the the train that now runs in Shanghai, this Maglev train,which delivers people out to the airport in seven minutes, an eighteen mile trip, goes two hundred and forty miles an hour.

So we're specifying, we we folks here in Houston, Texas, that the train we want is going to be very advanced. And now is that going to take five years or is that going to take fifty years? You know, somewhere in between. It's not going to be five, that's for sure. But twenty? Yeah, I think so. So, so the scale of rail stuff is going to really, is going to really change a lot.

But I personally, you know, you know what I mean, my vision is that, and I just found this out today, that if you do a little two mile buffer on each side of all the freeway network, ninety-two percent of all the jobs are in that buffer. That is to say the freeway network gets you to almost all the jobs.

Well, okay, let's just put something in the middle of all the freeways that is high capacity as opposed to single occupant vehicles. Let's have a train of some sort that's elevated and doesn't use up very much space. We already own all the land, you know, we own the right of way and it goes to all the jobs and so let's just put a train in it. Okay?

I mean, you know, that makes sense and I and I think the people I said that to were were engineers who were planning to do, you know, traditional sort of trains on the old freight lines, but were just like, you know, how could we have been staring at this network for so long, a network of freight rail lines and not notice the other network, which is the one we have actually used to get ourselves to work in our cars and that it's in place and why not?

You know, I I don't where that's going, you know, but my vision is we build a a layer on top of this light rail thing that's much faster and goes, you know, all the way from downtown to Galleria within one stop or maybe it goes to Greenway and stops, but not fifteen stops along the way, you know. And it, I think that day comes and, you know, we're in good shape. So now is that going to happen? You know, it's hard to it's hard for me to see it not happening because it's so obvious and sensible, but but who knows, you know.

Elected officials, you know, I was I would say when we when we talk about reducing congestion, I'll say we can't do that because elected officials cause congestion, so how do we convince them not to? You know, it's nothing you can do with transit to try to reduce congestion because elected officials will just keep producing more of it, so you know. Well, can we get elected officials to say oops, stop, wait a minute, this is all wrong. Let's do this a do another way and let's put our fortunes into actually moving people around.

I don't know. Could be, you know, this notion of best transportation system in the world.You know, why not? We already have, no other city has the HOV lane kind of thing we have. We're the only ones that have buses delivering non-stop commuter trips to downtown in the middle of all the freeways. We've got the space, you know. We have some experience.

DT: If you did change the kind of transportation that you have in Houston to something that's shared vehicles with pretty high ridership, does that mean that the development pattern changes too? That you start having much more high density land use?

DC: Sure. It's the, it's the old story, you know, if you get off a train, you're on foot. You're a pedestrian and so everything has to be sort of convenient because you don't have a car. You're just, you're walking around.

And so around transit stops, everything will become gradually and there'll be different scales. You know, downtown is massive, someplace up on the east side, it's going to be a little small neighborhood with a, you know, just a little corner store, maybe, but but more than we have today and more things closer because there'll be some more people, you know, living near these stations.

The Park and Ride approach and we're we're seeing this already, we will start to not just waste those parking lots, we will start to make those parking lots be actual destinations. And the Cypress Station that is now being built out there on 290, which is new Park and Ride and a new mixed use, you know, metaphor, that whole new mixed use project so that when the people get off the train, they can go shopping or go to the cleaners and all that kind of stuff.

And and have been, park their cars in structures as opposed to just over, you know, thousand acres of land. Those become places, you know, so development will move to those because there are huge groups of people all of a sudden, you know, at that spot that provide ready to do some economic activity.

So yeah, I' m I'm I'm sure of, you know, not fifty-five stations, you know, that's a if you try to imagine all of them sort of growing all of a sudden, well, it's an enormous amount of development and so it's not going to happen fast. It won't happen overnight. Not a lot has happened in Midtown already, you know, where we have what is arguably the most successful light rail system in the United States right now and it's only seven miles long, you know. It higher ridership per mile than any other system in America.

Because it's the right approach. It's the connect centers, connect activity centers. So we got Downtown, Medical Center connected, next we connect Medical Center, Downtown to Greenway Plaza to Uptown. Okay, now we got four of our six biggest and, mind you, each of these places has more jobs than downtown San Diego. I mean, they are huge cities in their own right.

And so if we if we think about them that way and we plan our transit that way, when we open in 2012, we will shoot past Dallas almost overnight in terms of ridership and we will have done it with about thirty miles and they did it with forty-seven miles and we will have twice their ridership. So it's the only plan in America that is truly urban in the way it looks at transit and and it is really going to work, you know, if we can get the thing built. I mean, that's you know, you never know, you never know.

DT: You told us some about the infrastructure and the vehicles and about the kind of buildings in Houston it those would support. I was hoping that you could talk about another aspect of living in Houston in addition to driving, shopping and living and that's fording the stream. What does Blueprint Houston foresee for dealing with flooding?

DC: Well, the vision in Blueprint and another process that we did regionally called Envision Houston Region three years ago, the Houston-Galveston Area Council did and and asked Blueprint to be a partner in the facilitating it. Wh-what we got from that was this intense citizen desire to preserve the floodplains. Preserve greenspace and, with that, preserving the floodplain. That's complicated because all of the city is essentially floodplain, you know, but or floodway.

But but the, but the sort of desire there is is apparent that we want to somehow not just screw all that up as we did over a long period of time by seeing all of our thousands of miles of waterways, including four big rivers and all and you know, like whatever, thirty or something bayous and springs and creeks, we began to see those as backyard drainage ditches. Fill them up with concrete, put fences you know, and they just weren't they they were just gone; they were out of our minds. You know, we would drive over them sometimes and not even notice them.

Now we're seeing that, as actually people did back in the twenties, nineteen twenties, seeing it as as a riverine system, a riparian system of greenspace that was every in every neighborhood and that if we were to use that properly, we could actually have even transportation in it. You know, and and we and we have that now. We have it to the extent that some of the bayous have been opened up and have trails, actually quite a lot of trails now in in the bayous. So that means people are walking and biking off the street grid and going to places that are, you know, a little different.

So so as we begin to see as as Kevin Shanley did, about how to how to actually just redesign the bayous, put them back to their natural state and maybe help a little bit to provide, instead of a concrete ditch that's deep and and fast, a more laid back space that's actually bigger and holds more water and has grass and stuff and trees and whatever to slow the water down so that it doesn't reach these big systems and just back up all of a sudden because they cant get it out fast enough.

And so the Harris County Flood Control District is now managing, or beginning to manage water in that way and so we would, we are going to see much more of Sims Bayou kinds of things happen, Brays Bayou, White Oak. There are projects for all of them to actually open them up as green ribbons that essentially go out into the countryside.

So that is for us, it's the nature available to us in all of our neighborhoods, as opposed to get in the car and drive forty miles to go see what nature is. It's right there all the time. That's going to be fantastic, you know. We we'll be afraid of it for a long time and we'll put fences so people won't drown and stuff, but I mean, come on, you know. We can learn not to fall into the river, you know.

So I, you know, I would, I'm very hopeful that that that vision is actually underway. I think people are going to be really surprised as they begin to find these places and, you know, Terry Hershey Park and Art Storey Park and all the rest of them are happening and the, you know, they're bayou based and and pretty soon you can walk, you know, or ride your bike a pretty long way and at the edge of some bayou.

The idea, the flooding issue, you know, we've got to find a way to be serious about the, if we do not want flooding, we have to do two things. We have to see each development, each piece of property as a place that can hold water for a little bit. Kevin calls it the sponge theory, you know, it's the I can't remember what the other side of that is, but it's the you know, the the sort of chute theory that we have now about get the stuff gone.

Well, no. If if the house, if my house has gutters around it that collect all the rainwater off my roof, which is like more than half my property, and then that gutter goes down into a hole and down the driveway and out into the street just like that, really fast, and doesn't stay on my property at all, in no time we get the streets street in front of my house fills up three times a year, you know.

We have to retain the water on the property a little bit. Now people will say well, the water's not going to not going to sink in in this clay. Well, that's south of Buffalo Bayou. North of Buffalo, it's not clay, you know, and anything helps.

Water moving off of grass is going slower than water rushing out a chute and so it all helps a little bit. Kevin said if you could, if everybody would put a twelve inch board around their property, little fence around their twelve inches, we would never have flooding again. Well, that's an interesting idea that would keep it, you know. So it's so it's the I I used to say the, you you know, death by a thousand stings or a thousand arrows. Well it's our flooding is that we need thousands of places to slow the water down.

And then the other thing is we need to be able to, when it gets into the bayous, that we need the, there needs to be more space there, this whole concept I just talked about that's a, you know, this idea of of the water moving slowly through the bayous and there's more space and the grass absorbs it and the trees suck the stuff up and all those theories that happen.

So you know, that's the sort of macro, micro how you do it. And of course, what we're really, you know, John Jacob at the at AandM is such a big proponent of making sure we maintain our dra-, our watersheds, all of them for water quality purposes and all that. You know, well say we, you know, don't build in the Katy Prairie. The Katy Prairie helps us not flood and so if we build in there, well have more flooding. Just stop, you know. We don't need to build out there, we don't, you know. We're occupying so much space, it's just ridiculous.

So how do we do that? You know, do we start to pass laws, you know, about not not developing land in the floodways and in the watersheds and so forth? And it, and we already are. You know, we have them in the city now, we're starting to we that painful law just recently passed about not building in the floodway anymore, which is the place that always floods, you know, and but, I mean.

So people who have property in those places are saying well, God, we got cheated. We thought, you know, we we had this place that we could sell for a million dollars and now we can't sell it at all because you can't build anything else in it. Yeah, it shouldn't have been there in the first place, but so there's going to be a lot of pain and that will take a very, very long time to sort of begin to undo some of those things now.

Can we have more laws in the county where it's very hard to control anything because the state doesn't allow the counties to have much authority? Well, you know, we will we will do what we as a group of citizens choose to do over time. And if our elected officials won't do what we want, sooner or later we will find some who do.

You know, we have to be aggressive about the of being a citizen in a democracy, you know, means you you can't just watch television and blame the elected official. You have to go stand in front of the elected official and blame the elected official. But I think we're sort of I think we're getting there, you know, i think.

We in we we've expanded our horizons. When I watch advocacy groups now who have been totally focused on city council for as long as I've been around are now saying wait a minute, we need to be talking to Harris County Commissioners Court. Oh, well that's good. Now you've just expanded your horizon out to, you know, a place the size of Rhode Island or something and and there's a lot of money out, you know, being spent of actually make things worse. So okay, now let's start talking to those five elected officials.

So I, you know, I'm hopeful that the kind of thing that Blueprint Houston started, which is citizen engagement in in very important things at the most fundamental levels is spreading out everywhere and and we're seeing it at the at the whole regional level through this Envision Houston region thing which is going on, that it will keep going and growing.

And you know, up up the passage of a plan that is citizen values, is citizen goals would be enormous, you know, because it allows the citizen then to say, when they hear about some law that's about to be passed or something, they and they know that that's in opposition to the values of the vision, they can stand before council and say no. You passed this law.

I mean, you passed this policy statement that says you wont do that thing and so now we've got something to argue about that transcends one elected official or one mayor. You know, they they come in and they start a whole new regime of what the plan is. And citizens want to say no, we want a plan that's our plan, that doesn't care who the mayor is or who the city council members are. The plan continues and it can't change until we change it.

That is to say, you can call us together in another one of these processes and you should every five or ten years, you know and we'll do it again. You know, say do we still believe those things? Are those still what we want? But we won't have a mayor coming in, saying and I'm going to go now the completely opposite direction of the last mayor. You know.

DT: Well, what if you do agree on a shared direction and you have shared values and goals but you're in a city that's, I guess, known as the largest American city without zoning, what would be the tools for controlling, particularly, land use? I can see with transit and flood investments where you've got public right of way and you've got public capital funds to use. But what happens when you're dealing with private land use in a city that doesn't have that tradition of zoning and development controls? Would you use market tools? Would you use just traditional ordinances?

DC: You know, the the sort of shift in thinking throughout the country is is away from zoning in any event. Zoning has produced not desirable situations and it's mostly been used to exclude types and classes of people from communities. So if you say oh, we're not going to allow apartments, well, that means you're probably not going to allow low income people either, that sort of thing, you know.

So that's really been a kind of disgraceful use of zoning, and a lot of people--it also has present prevented the notion of the mixed use area, which is to say an area where there's a store and there might be offices over it and there might even be homes over it, you know, that kind of thing. In zoning, you never allow that. You separate all the uses. Well, that means that the kinds of cities that were built in America and Europe and everywhere else in the world for thousands of years can't be built now because of this zoning idea.

So the the whole concept of new urbanism is to kind of push that aside and go to a new kind of tool called form-based code, form-based development code. That means rather than worrying about the use of the land and saying you can use it for this but not for this, we'll say what we care about is the form that takes place in any particular place.

So on my street here, where these are all single family dwellings on their own lot, you would say it's not appropriate to put up a six story building on one of these lots because the form is excessively different. Behind me, the next street over here, the Hawthorne Street is it if you drive down the street, it looks like this street, like a bunch of houses, you know. They're a little bit bigger and the reason they're a little bit bigger is because they're all duplexes or quadriplexes. So the density right behind me is twice as high as it is right here.

The next street up is Montro, I mean, is Westheimer. Westheimer, go for it. Five story buildings all along Westsure, fine, why not? Because it's appropriate. But, so you have this sort of cascading thing that you that you do where you where you say you protect the small, you don't allow the big in the middle of the small and and the big, you allow a different set of rules to to come forward. Most importantly, these houses are set back twenty-five feet from the street, all of them.

On Westheimer, we want those houses, or whatever buildings there are there, not to be set back at all. We want them to come right up to the sidewalk and use all the land and create this environment on the sidewalk that's a pedestrian area that's got cafes that you know, what cities feel like.

And so form-based code is just telling you things like that. How far the buildings are set back or not. How high they are or not. Have curb cuts, whether you can have drive-thrus or, you know, that sort of thing. Parking lot. If you say if you say on a street you can't have curb cuts, that means you cant have any kind of drive-through anything, you can't have loading docks, you can't have parking lot, I mean, you know, all of a sudden, you transform the place by just saying no curb cuts. That's a piece of form.

As it happens, we already have form-based code, it's just really lousy form-based code. We have a chapter forty-two of our development ordinances; we have a lot of regulations here. But it sort of foolishly divides the city up into an urban area and a suburban area and rather than describe urban as a kind of as a kind of form and suburban as a kind of form, it describes urban as everything inside the Loop and suburban as everything outside the Loop.

So if you're familiar with the city, the little truly suburban or you know, early suburban neighborhood of Afton Oaks, which is just inside the Loop is actually urban in the code's view and Uptown Galleria, which you know, has as many jobs as downtown San Diego and thirty thousand residents and is clearly a big city is suburban. Well, now, doesn't make any sense.

So so the two sets of rules need to be brought down to the neighborhood level. My house is on a suburban street and Westheimer is an urban street, but it's only two blocks away. And so you have different forms for those things that are very close together.

Maybe you've heard about this Ashby High-rise project that's causing so much trouble? Well, it's a twenty-three story building that's right in the middle of a single family dwelling neighborhood. You know, it's totally inappropriate. There's nothing like it anywhere near. Beautiful project, but wrong place. Really wrong place. I wish we could get it in Midtown where it would be very helpful and useful to get some things happening there and then help to build a proprietorship.

So so this form-based code is now in use in I think something like twenty-five cities in the United States. None of them very big, Miami's the first big city to adopt it and they have just adopted it. I have no doubt that we will that we will in five years, we will be using form-based code extensively in the city, probably basically in the transit corridors where it we have to do that.

We have to allow urban development. It's illegal to do anything urban in the whole City of Houston right now except in the central business district. So whenever you see some of these big projects happening that that look pretty urban, you wonder well, how can he be saying that? Well, they they had to go to planning commission and get variances for everything to bring the building up to the sidewalk. Oh, excuse me. (Coughs)

DT: Maybe we could talk about one other aspect about code besides form and use and that's the energy that buildings use and my understanding is that forty, fifty percent of the energy that we use in our economy is dedicated to keeping our buildings lit and cool and heated and is that another element of what you foresee for Blueprint Houston and how the buildings could reflect a shared set of values?

DC: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That the the energy the there's some pretty good pretty interesting charts and graphs about that. The energy used by a suburban home, per capita energy, is is many times greater than the amount of energy in being used in an apart-, by the people who live in an apartment or that's, you know, in a big building.

I mean, basically when you're when when you're heating your apartment, you're also heating the apartment above you, you know, and that kind of goes up. So it gets to be, you know, I remember when I lived in Manhattan, we would never turn on our heater because we didn't need to because the floor was warm, you know, so.

So these buildings are very energy efficient, these these larger buildings. They share walls and and of course, the embodied energy that goes into building them is significantly different because you are sharing a lot of the structure and the and so forth. They're easier to insulate and and ultimately you can have a building that is on a city lot that's the same size as a single family dwelling might be on that's several well, let's just say it's a hundred stories tall or something and you think it's only got that one roof, you know, for hundreds of people.

So the energy issues that have to do with compact development are are huge and and we want to see the thirty to forty percent of people who really want to live in urban circumstances, we want to see them allowed to do that, because they are they are low hanging fruit. They are people who don't use as much energy or as many resources as people who live in suburban environment. That's just the truth. So we shouldn't be trying to forbid, you know, or demand only suburban development as we essentially do now with our policies.

Because if you want to live in the suburbs and you want to be do all of that, well, fine. Nobody's trying to say you can't do that. But for you to say and I don't want somebody else living in some urban circumstances, crazy, from your own selfish point of view. Everybody who lives in the suburbs ought to totally support transit and high buildings and all that stuff for the people who are willing to live in it because those people aren't using much in the way of resources. And they're out of your hair, they're not on your freeways, that you know, so.

I don't understand whywhy suburban folks are so adamant about not allowing urban folks to live their way in in in Houston. And really in some other places, too, but because it's it's self defeating, you know. But they are. So you know, If we care about energy, at some point we will care about energy and we will care about climate change, all of us will, and the path is so clear.

You know, that to get to a better place, the that's impossible not to get it as time passes. So, you know, and the market will do it. I don't have any questions that ultimately then and the market is, you know, pretty much I think the dominant model for development in the United States today is mixed use dense everywhere.

You know, it's been slow coming to Houston, but you know, the the last eight big projects that have happened in Houston or that are happening right now are all very dense, very urban, very mixed use places because, you know, land costs make the market say well, we need to really highest, best use of the land. And that of course is how much can we cram into it, I mean, you know. And so I think the economics are now starting to push that happening everywhere.

And then there's a there's a cache that's been attached to this new idea of livable centers and town centers. People all of a sudden were surprised by the Woodlands, which had been this spread out, seemingly sprawling, suburban, you know, very nicely done, environmentally sensitive kind of place, but nevertheless, sprawl, suddenly have a city pop up in the middle of it.

You know, well, that had always been on the napkin from day one, you know, the drawing the original drawing, I've seen it thirty years ago. So that thing, that thing was always planned, but it just needed to have all those other rooftops built before, now we can put up a true, pretty true, city in the middle. And we're seeing brownstones, lines of brownstone apar-apartments and condos being built there in the Woodlands.

Well, Sugarland says okay, we want to do a town center. Sugarland, you know, we think the quintessential kind of suburban place. Well, no, now it's got this very urban town center and people live in it. They were sold out of all the living, the residential units immediately. And so it's walk-able, it has a hotel in it, it's kind of, it's a funny place because it's surrounded by freeways, but now that's all they think about in Sugarland is how do we extend this metaphor here of the town center, the walk-able town center? And now everybody in the region wants to have a town center.

Waller, you know, which is way out there, way out there is working on a on a town center. Well, they they and trying to get money from the Houston-Galveston Area Council, I think they got some, actually, to to do a plan for a town center. Every town, every town in the region is going to want to do that. Already does. So I mean, it's it's that's what coming. That's we're changing our mind about sprawl, all of us are.

DT: Maybe you can look into your crystal ball about another aspect of the form of cities and how they're used, how they accommodate people. You talked about buildings and mobility and of energy use and flooding, do you think you could talk about one last aspect that might bring us full circle to your experience at Peaceable Kingdom and the Kibbutz. I understand that Harris County used to be the leading agricultural county in the state, produced more farm products than any other part of Texas. Do you envision Harris County being able to produce some sort of produce or meats. Is that a possibility?

DC: Oh, absolutely a possibility and a, probably a necessity if we're thinking about sustainability. We we just led did a a we have a magazine called Tomorrow and we did an issue of it on food, food security, we called it, in the fall. And we explored all of that.

It's it's really interesting, you know, when you when you look at the, you ask somebody who lives in Pearland why it's called Pearland and and they don't know. And you say well, because it used to be just miles of pear orchard. Pears? Yeah, pears, you know. And there's there's a few names around, I can't remember any of the more of them right now that are like named after some fruit or vegetable or something and the and nobody reremembers that that was the case, that this place, of course, was agricultural heaven.

Cattle, of course, everybody knows about that. But League City and those areas down there were all strawberries, you know, and and of course, we can grow anything here now, you know. I mean, we've got this great resource named Bob Randall who's, Doctor Bob Randall, who's just retired from the Urban Harvest, you know, who is teaching that this is a really rich place to grow food.

And like I say, almost anything. Well, you've seen my front yard, you know, I mean, we've got a, we've got a pear tree, we've got a peach tree, we've got got a grapefruit, lemon, lime, orange. We're going to plant a fig in the back. We're also growing tomatoes and potatoes and beets and corn you know. I mean, and we've grown corn in our front yard, right here in the middle of the Montrose, which is actually really fun. So sure, I mean we can grow anything almost anything here and then, unfortunately, as we get to a little bit of global warming, there's more that we can grow.

So I think we have to be saying to ourselves, look, this idea of flying lettuce in to Houston from Australia is really not a sustainable idea. You know, as fuel prices go through the roof, the first effect will be on airplanes. And well, you know, we're going to have a lot of issues about that as we go along here, but one of them is flying food in, you know, like that kind of food is insane. Now it's one thing to fly in caviar from Russia or something because that's where it is, but we can grow lettuce here.

And I don't know if you even know this, but after 9/11, you remember they immediately cancelled all flights over the United States for for several several days, a week or more, and Bob Randall told me that by the third day after 9/11, you couldn't buy seafood in the restaurants here. And the reason is because seventy-five percent of the seafood that comes to us here on the Gulf of Mexico is flown in from other places. Well, you know, how how necessary is that?

And so this whole idea of local economies, where where a farmer's growing, you know, a thousand acres of rice that nobody eats because it's for cattle and, therefore, he's just getting paid, you know, a pittance above what it costs him to do it, so rice farmers go out of business, doesn't make any sense. And partly, it's because the long path to to market of that stuff to the end user has everybody taking a little money out of it.

Whereas a farmer, some of my friends who have farms over in Wharton County or, you know, up at Cat Spring, bring their stuff in to the Urban Harvest Markets on Saturday and they sell it for the price that you might pay at Whole Foods, but they get all of that income. And then they have those dollars that they spend on something local and that dollar might circulate around our community for a while, whereas if you go to WalMart and buy something, that dollar goes to Bentonville, Arkansas. Immediately, it's gone. It's left the community.

So this whole notion of local businesses and industries and so forth that that that's the opposite of globalization, I think it's going to get to be very, very strong because the the what what's fueled globalization is cheap energy. And if cheap energy's gone, does it still work? You know, can you can you still bring all this stuff from China, you know, particularly food? Isn't that sort of crazy? These enormous ships. So you know, it's healthier, I think, you know.

Well, so so that means we have to have the land to do these things. It's a growing movement of sort of back-to-the-landers that's been going on for thirty years or more. But it, but this notion of growing, I can't tell you how many friends who are sort of my age or near my age are saying, you know, we got a little piece of land over here in, you know, Cat Spring or someplace, maybe we'll go do that instead of being here all the time.

So we have a friend, lives on this street, they have a, they have a farm that's near, I think it's near Eagle Lake or something, and he works here and he collects bags, garbage bags, full of people's leaves and grass all so that their front yard is totally full of these bags and then he piles them in his truck on Friday and goes out to the farm where his wife lives full-time now and she comes in and sells at the farmers market. Well, these are sophisticated city folk who did that, you know.

And I I keep hearing, you know, you know, I've got another friend who's buying a place in Waller this week and we're buying a place, I think, tonight to do some of those things. You know, I want to do, there was some things I'd been thinking about. So olives, we can grow olives in Texas. Well, gee, you know, if if you should use olive oil and drink it because it's healthy, well, let's grow some.

So I think the question about food is is is a really huge question. If you talk about quality of life, you know, I've actually had some people who are supporters of what we do, our mission is improve the quality of life in the Houston region, say "why would you do a food issue?" And I would say our mission is quality of life. You don't make the connection between quality of life and food? Well, it's kind of tenuous. Don't we do land use? And don't we grow food on land, you know?

So if we have this unbelievably rich land, as we do, sort of going to the Northwest, putting a highway in the middle of it doesn't make any sense, you know, if we think we might need to feed ourselves at some point in the future.

So yeah, we spend a lot of time on on food and health, you know. People, people don't understand why we talk about health and say, well, quality of life. You know, if you're not healthy, there's no quality of life, you know. So so we're having some fun, no, you know, kind of getting down to basics about what quality of life means, that it's not about, necessarily about transit, it's it's it's about health and safety and welfare, you know, and prosperity and all those things. So it's huge.

DT: You spent some time talking to us about your work in communications and communicating a vision of what Houston could be and a much more sustainable place that supported a better quality of life. And I was wondering if you could explain why this is important to you and why it should matter for the next generation? And maybe use as an example conversations you may have had or will have with your son, Jay, who works with you at the Gulf Coast Institute.

DC: Well, of course, we've had a lot of conversations. We have them everyday as we talk about how, you know, we're going to proceed and what our strategic things are and he's a very smart kid and he's not a kid, he's thirty years old now and totally gets this stuff pretty quickly. It was amazing to me how quickly he understood the the concepts.

And and, you know, the city aspect, the notion of bustling cities and that sort of thing, that's what young people want. They don't get out of college dying to go live in some suburb. You know, they want to go to New York or San Francisco or Paris or Boston or whatever.

And so the fact that we have in Houston, our young people want to go off to the city is kind of stupefying, right, it's or it's kind of amazing. I mean, that this is a city, what's wrong with it?

And so to listen to him, for for me to hear from him validation of all the theories we have about young people and what they want and, you know, the action. Not having to have a car when you're young and it's a huge expense and all that, makes me say, oh well, if we want our children to stay here and to live with us and to live in our community and to help it thrive and use all their intelligence and training to make this place better for all of us, we better give them what they want, you know. We need a better playpen here.

So so we have that conversation a lot, you know. And then the notion of the country and the nature, he he he he also has been talking about this Last Child in the Woods and saying he really thought he got a great upbringing, you know. He was he was sort of before the children who are now forbidden to go into nature because, you know, it's dangerous.

I mean, the it's a, it's a fact that children now are less healthier because they don't eat dirt whereas when I grew up, we ate a lot of dirt, you know. That well, that that does wonders for your immune your immune system. You're swallowing bacteria and there you know. Well, parents now would be appalled by that concept and everybody has something sterile that they use to wipe everything, you know.

And and Jay, both both Jay and and his brother, Austin, were sort of raised in a garden. You know, they crawled around and ate stuff and some of it was good to eat and some of it wasn't, but and then he they walked to school and we took them to we spent a lot of time on the bay and so they had that experience very young. So he had that and he knows it and he told me that well not just recently that he he gets it.

That that that's gone now and for for most kids and and so I think that's a, you know, we're seeing that there's lots of issues: crime, stress, ADD, all these things are related to nature deficit disorder, the idea of not having access to nature. Not having the tree house that I did, you know, and that kind of stuff.

And so he's grateful that he did have that and that that he and his brother could, you know, go naked and dress up as Indians and go whooping around through the bushes and stuff when they were that only two feet tall. And so he knows that that means that's what our mission has to, you know, unfold.

We have to find ways to get that to happen for future generations because not knowing about nature and not having an intimate relationship with it is is very dangerous to the human race. I mean, we are, after all, critters in this world, you know, and to not to think that we are somehow apart and that we are much more mechanical and that the world exists inside little tubes and little, you know, displays and so forth is to so limit the amount of information and process and and the creative creative possibilities that makes us possibly get to a point where we can't actually do anything.

You know, we can't we can't live, whatever that means anymore. And and so I think it's very dangerous. So I'm I'm thrilled that so we I do spend time talking to lots of classes and and about all these things of young people and and we've tried to get our magazine out to schools where science teachers can use them to teach kids about urban life.

And then, like I say, my own son, both of them actually, I mean, they love being out in nature and part of the impetus for us buying a place now is to replace something they lost about six, seven years ago, this old childhood place my wife had had was sold by a whole group of brothers and sisters and they're really angry about losing that place where they used to go up there.

It was up above Huntsville and it was a, you know, wild place and they're angry about losing it. So they want something back. So you know, that's a good sign, isn't it? I mean, it they think they'll be they'll be okay for another generation and I expect they will have their kids, should we be so lucky as to have some, do that.

DT: Well, it sounds like you may be able to bring something back from the past and also something new from the future? A good plan.

DC: A good plan, yes, well. Plans are all about direction, that's what they're about. Make sure you, as long as you're going in the right direction. It could take a long time or a little time, but at least you're, you know, you're not headed off to oblivion somewhere because you're going the wrong way.

DT: Well, thanks for giving us the map. I appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

DC: Well thank you very much. What a treat.