A Houstonian’s Plea to Save the City

You don’t have to be an Urbanist. You can, like me, love your car. But Houston’s car culture has hamstrung the city, and if left to continue unchecked will eat the city alive from the inside out. It’s why I’m writing this from Seattle, not Houston.

In Houston if you don’t have a car you’re either broke or you don’t live in Houston. That’s just how it works. If Houston wants to survive as a city in the coming decades, that’s got to change, and fast. So here’s what I’m saying so those of you who don’t want to read don’t have to go too far. You can’t do a thing in Houston without a car, because we’ve embraced sprawl and we’ve embraced freeways. That’s wrong. Houston needs to make the city easier to walk, bike, bus, or take the light rail around. Houston needs to stop subsidizing developers by building and servicing roads in new subdivisions. Houston needs to stop subsidizing car companies that benefit from $9000 of public money for every $1 we spend on car transportation. Do that, and maybe one day Houston will actually be a place where Beyoncé doesn’t just grow up and leave for New York and Los Angeles.

Houston I love you, but you’re letting me down. So sings my heart as I sit in my apartment in Seattle two years after leaving the city I love, and fight for viciously. Seriously, viciously. You know how you can complain all day about your family, but the minute someone else badmouths your family, they’re done? When folks here in Seattle come to me with a “well I don’t know about Houston but I visited Austin once for South by Southwest and kinda liked it”, I shut that ridiculousness down. Austin??? Really??? You mean fake cool Austin? That place that has become so sterile they’re printing shirts saying they’re weird cause they don’t believe it themselves? Overpriced and underwhelming Austin? The city without Chris Shepard or Justin Yu or Bobby Heugel or David Buehrer? That Austin? Let’s be clear that I’ll fight for my city. But now, to Houstonians, I need to be real.

Houston is a city of concrete and asphalt, with air so thick with humidity and laced with benzene that just existing on a summer’s day turns time into a sweet sludge of molasses and puts you at risk of heat stroke, cancer, or both. In high school my friends and I used to sit outside in the middle of summer listening to the the blaring of Cicadas bzzZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzing their absolute guts out. We’d chug gallons of water under the blessed shade of those old Oak trees and occasionally venture out into the grass to throw the frisbee, gingerly avoiding the fire ant piles. When time came to head to college I wanted to leave, and God said try again, so I moved further into the city, to Rice.

At Rice I began to appreciate the life happening beyond the suburban bubble my parents created and cars cemented. Unencumbered by the ire of my AP English Teacher and the No Facial Hair policy strictly enforced by my Spanish Teacher (that lead to multiple trips to detention?), really unencumbered by the asphyxiation of the U.S. Public School System in general, I entered into a Houston as vivid and wild as those peacocks I’d sometimes see strutting around neighborhoods off-leash. Outside the suburban Houston and inside the loop was a Houston baked with authenticity, exuding reality, more than New York or Los Angeles ever could. I got to know of the city of people existing together without much pretense because there’s little room for pretenses when we’re all sweating through our clothes on the walk from the front door to the car. A Houston blanketed in mosquitos and consistently misquoted whenever anyone has a problem. It took me a while to figure out why we earned the name “Space City”, since Johnson Space Center and all that science stuff is so far from downtown it might as well be in another state. It’s said Houston stretches across a piece of land so large that to drive from one end of the city to the other takes two hours, and I think that’s without traffic. Sometimes folks can’t understand the scale, so I just say look, in Houston I’ve got to drive 15 minutes to get from my bedroom to the bathroom, and another 20 to get to the kitchen.

And that might be funny, but that’s an actual problem. Houston is built around one thing and one thing only, and that is the car.

It makes sense Houston of all cities would be this way. As the energy capital of the world Houston allowed those behemoths of industry to do whatever the heck they wanted. Build a chemical plant next to some houses? Go for it! Make shady financial decisions and hide them through fudged audits? Fine, just don’t get caught! When things were booming and demand for oil was hot Houston practically became the fifth mint of the United States of America. And back in the heyday of Houston if you were an oil titan from Houston you ran the world from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo. Even now Exxon Mobile, in a shadow of it’s former glory, practically has it’s own State Department. Pretty much anything that made money was given the full right-of-way. As Houston goes, anything goes, and for road and highway construction, that meant if the folks making money downtown needed to get to and from work faster, the city would move mountains to make it happen. In the absence of mountains though, the city went for demolishing entire communities, primarily low-income communities of color. Hundreds of homes and around fifty churches in Independence Heights, the first municipality established by Black Texans. Those white-collar businessmen and engineers said I don’t want to live next to Black people so they moved out of the city, then they said I need to get to work quickly, so they built freeways through the city. Now we see those freeways as our God-Given right, and when they get crowded we say ok tear down some more of those poor people buildings. That’s what was going to happen in the most recent I-45 Expansion that until very recently TxDoT was going full-steam-ahead on. Only after significant opposition did the city finally revise their stance on the project and request TxDoT make changes to their $7 Billion proposal.

It makes sense that a city geared toward individual profit would try to build itself in a way to enshrine and support that profit. Houston was built on oil money and built to demonstrate the best way to spend money on oil by making everyone drive everywhere to do anything. In 1955, the first time Fortune ranked the largest companies in the world, these were the top ten:

• General Motors (cars)
• Exxon Mobil (oil)
• U.S. Steel (…steel)
• General Electric (energy)
• Esmark (meat packing)
• Chrysler (cars)
• Armour (meat packing)
• Gulf Oil (oil and gas)
• Mobil (oil and gas)
• DuPont (chemicals)

Economically, the United States revolved around beef and cars. And it showed in the ways our government prioritized investments. Forbes released that list in 1955, and on June 29th, 1956 President Eisenhower’s “National Interstate and Defense Highways Act” went into effect. It was the biggest public works project in the history of the country, authorizing $25 Billion a year from 1957 to 1969 and the expansion of the interstate system to 41,000 miles. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act accelerated the already fast pace of freeway construction across America. And for $25 Billion a year we got what we paid for, freeways all over the country and all through every major city.

Near where I grew up on the west side of Houston sits a big hunk of steel and concrete called the Katy Freeway in all its concrete brutality. At its widest it extends twenty six lanes across, and for 10 miles has a right of way between 200 and 300 feet across. I don’t know what else to say about it except it is phenomenally huge. And despite having a right of way that is literally the length of a football field across, it is still clogged with traffic most of the day. When it is not clogged with traffic, for instance for a brief moment during the COVID19 crisis (according to my boots-on-the-ground reporter my mother), it sits high above the surrounding neighborhoods as a hot, untouchable, unwelcoming no-mans-land. China had the Great Wall to keep out the Mongols, we have the Great Freeways to separate our communities.

If you live in Houston you probably have opinions about the traffic in Houston. It’s congested, it’s terrible. You think to yourself, I’m stuck in it on the way to work and on the way home. I can relate. One summer I got an internship at Hewlett-Packard out near Spring. I spent every morning driving at least 45 minutes to the office, and every evening driving at least 45 minutes home. By the end of every day I wanted to die I was so exhausted. My dad said welcome to the real world. The real world sucks. Now I live in Seattle and I either spend 15 minutes on the bus each way to work or 45 minutes biking, doubling my commute as a workout. If I am exhausted some days it is because I worked a long day. I don’t worry every day about getting a speeding ticket or getting in an accident. Folks sometimes resign and say the world sucks get used to it but it doesn’t suck, and there are ways to make it better. These days I stumble out of bed and fall asleep on the bus and am jarred awake miraculously at the right bus stop 15 minutes later and I never worry that I’m too sleep deprived and might crash or that I’m spending a ridiculous amount of money on gas and toll roads every day. Or I wake up early and instead of driving to 24 Hour Fitness to run on a treadmill or go to Soul Cycle to spin my legs in place I get out and ride my bike on protected bike lanes all the way into work never worrying that someone in an F-150 that is distracted or tired or both will veer ever so slightly and wipe me off the face of the earth.

It is not as if I’m a exception to the rule. I’m a fairly typical kid from Houston. Oil and gas dad, marching band in high school, a minor Boba Tea addiction. Like a fair amount of kids who grew up in Houston but stuck around for a little bit I really hated it in high school, and then stayed in the city long enough to learn to love it. I loved going to the Museum of Fine Arts, or the Menil, or studying at one of Houston’s coffee shops that support local non-profits like A Second Cup or Paper Co. Cafe. And then when I graduated from college, I, like so many typical kids from Houston, left.

I left because the good jobs aren’t in Houston any more. Because most people don’t choose to live in Houston. My family didn’t even choose to live in Houston. The company my dad worked for said you’re moving to Houston and that was it. Now given the choice, and without the Fortune 500 heft forcing talented folks into the city, folks are leaving. I left.

Balk, squirm, spit in disgust at what you think to be a farce. Believe that Houston is growing rapidly and has booming industries. I left. My friends left. The stream of golden capitalism created by the ooze black of oil from the ground has, like a well, dried up. I’ve seen this in my own family. When I entered my second year of college my dad lost his job. He shrugged, said it was the markets, all boom and bust, that it’ll be back roaring soon. He got a job a few months later but this time in Dallas, and spent every weekend driving back and forth between the cities. He couldn’t find anything for him in Houston. When I visited home and would see him get in on Friday night or Saturday morning after driving the four hours from Dallas I would say, hey Dad imagine if that high speed rail line between Houston and Dallas was finally built! Then you wouldn’t have to drive any more, you could just hop on the train and be here in a jiffy. He always pushed it off, said he’ll be dead before they ever get the thing built. Now in 2020 my little sister is about to enter her second year of college, and my dad lost his job again. You can try to say it’s COVID, it’s the incompetent young female judge, say that if the country was still open he would keep his job. You can believe that, but you’re wrong. (And you’re wrong about Lina Hidalgo. She’s one of the best things to happen to Houston in a while, and you should check your facts and the work she has done.) The fact of the matter is that oil fell because of OPEC, because of Russia, because the West Texas producers have been flooding the market for some time now, because demand has dipped globally, and a million other reasons. Oil might come back, it might not, but the star is dimming. Where meat packing and oil stood proud back in 1955, now there’s Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet. Back even ten years ago folks who were smart and wanted to make a lot of money straight out of college studied petroleum engineering. Now all those smart money hungry kids funnel into computer science curriculums across the country. Why? Because that’s where the money is. Even if you don’t have an ounce of care toward global warming (though you should), even if you don’t care about the way oil has sent innocent American soldiers to die fighting proxy wars to secure supply chains deemed essential to national security, even if you don’t care how to this day companies like Exxon Mobil do business with warlords and corrupt governments, it doesn’t change a thing. Simply put, the money’s getting harder to find, and the folks trying to make a good living are leaving for other cities.

The rail line between Houston and Dallas still hasn’t been built, but it doesn’t matter as much for my family any more, since my dad is once again back home, unemployed. We joke a bit how the tables have turned. My little sister’s now in college, my older sister’s now a consultant, my mom tutors most nights of the week, and I’m a software engineer, but my dad, the breadwinner though all our childhoods, is now the only one sitting by. He’s spent a lot of his new time perfecting his cocktail making skills to impress my mom, and I’m not a sage but I think it’s working.

I can see Houston is unable to hold not just the successful kids raised in the city, but even the talent it at one point reeled in with the booming oil industry. I just got an email from an older friend, pushing middle age, who worked high up in an oil and gas technology company. The downturn hit him too and he’s done, trying to take this opportunity to get out of the oil industry while he can. He’s thinking of moving to Seattle, where the good jobs are. One by one person by person I see the people, smart and hardworking people, being drawn away from Houston. The money’s running out, and a city built as an engine of capitalism will slowly be left to rust.

I’m here making a plea with the city, saying look things are bad but it’s not too late if you just wake up and see there’s a problem. For too long the city did the wrong thing and it didn’t matter because everyone was making money. Now the city continues to do the wrong thing as the money dries up. There needs to be an awakening and a shift. Stop granting loyalty to a culture of cars and to industries that you owe nothing to. Based on recent calculations, Americans are sending $612,500 overseas every minute to support the automotive lifestyle. Do you think The Emirates or Saudi Arabia got rich by letting us keep all that oil money? Of course not. We’re expatriating dollar bills as if the entire U.S. Treasury just had its visa expire. Investing in the local economy, in creating a city where people want to live and companies that attract top talent want to locate, means creating a city that is walkable, bikeable, and breathable. Houston owes nothing to cars and nothing to the oil industry that made us dependent on them. Personally I owe nothing to the companies that paid for my childhood, my soccer practices, my food, and my education. They paid my dad and when the going got tough they did good for Capitalism and fired him. And make no mistake I have no sentimentality or anger toward these companies. Simply, if they made their bed let them lay in it.

Houston’s reluctance to change will relegate it into the future as a second rate city of decaying concrete monoliths. Freeway interchanges as tall as Mount Everest and wide as the ocean choked by cars spewing fumes into a toxic fog over the city. Derelict neighborhoods left to rot without the money to rebuild their roads, and the people to live in their houses. Better infrastructure decisions needed to have happened in the 60s, when Japan was putting in their first high speed rail lines. The decision by the country to widen roads, and make the freedom to drive an essential reality of life has hamstrung a generation and wasted billions of public tax dollars. We have subsidized the car, and if you are someone that believes in individual freedoms and still takes issue with my arguments against Houston’s car culture, know that the freeways have infringed on the rights of those who can’t afford to fight for them, and driven apart communities without the political power to stop them. What started as a symbol of freedom has morphed into one of the ultimate infringements on individual freedoms. For Houston’s children there no longer is the freedom to walk or bike, since suburbs like Sugarland, The Woodlands, Katy, and Spring Branch among others have been built expressly for the car. For Houston’s caretakers, men and women who stay at home to take care of their kids, there is no longer the freedom to say “take yourself to soccer practice”. If there is a practice they have to drive to the field, and if there is a play date they have to drive to the house. There are less and less ways for children be independent and walk on their own to the field, or ride their bike to a friend’s house. Entrenched in every movement of life in Houston is the act of driving, without room for choice.

That is why I say while the best time for Houston to change was yesterday the second best time is today, and the worst time is tomorrow. Through the burden of constant community meetings and the lack of centralized support, the message for change in Houston has been clear. Delay and de-fang. By delay I mean that the ability to make significant changes to the fabric of Houston’s transportation network away from car dependency has been halting and slow. By de-fang I mean that like a viper without its fangs even if there are flashy initiatives and committees and meetings, the money simply is still not there. When we subsidize roads, it is the way America has always and will always be. When we subsidize buses, wider sidewalks, protected bike lanes, and light-rail, it is socialism and an affront on our individual freedoms. This thinking is a lie, culture exists only as long as people support it. When an artificial culture built around making money for the companies at the top of the heap exists as the American Car Culture exists, then it can simply be walked away from. Just stop the subsidized continuation of road building. Instead of $9000 invested by public entities for every $1 you spend on your car, put all that money in other forms of transportation. By radically re-aligning Houston around walkability, livability, and breathability, there is a chance for Houston to redefine itself away from the well that’s growing empty. And I’m saying all of this because no matter what I will fight for the city I love and the future I know it can have.