Learning from Houston

It’s clear that the city’s permissive housing development policies help with affordability. But how are the vibes?

For anyone interested in housing and urban development in America, Houston is a required pilgrimage. Houston is the only big city where, in most neighborhoods, some semblance of organic, historical patterns of urban growth are allowed to take place; where increased demand for housing leads to an increasingly dense housing stock. It ain’t always pretty, but it is fascinating. As the policy tide turns to the end of single-family zoning and looser housing development regulations, Houston is a vision of the future. Other cities have a lot to learn from its successes and failures.

Houston famously has no zoning. Developers have quite a bit of latitude to build what they want, where they want. But Houston still has certain restrictions on housing construction, like parking minimums and setback requirements. For years, the city had a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet in most neighborhoods — the standard in your typical postwar suburb. But in 1998, the city changed that rule to 1,400 square feet, unleashing a transformative wave of townhouse development.

Today, these townhouses are ubiquitous inside the 610 Loop that marks the central part of the city. A detailed study from the Kinder Institute at Rice University explored the impacts of this development pattern. Between 2005 and 2018, the Inner Loop saw 75,000 new housing units completed, nearly half of which were townhouse units. That’s more housing than San Francisco and Oakland produced, combined, over the same period. The Inner Loop also outperformed the rest of the Houston region in housing production. The area comprises 5% of the total land area of Harris County but accounted for 19% of new housing built between 2005 and 2018.

Not only did Houston’s permissive development environment yield a lot of housing, it also affected where that housing was built. Townhouse developments were most likely to go up in expensive majority-white neighborhoods on the west side of town. Housing construction in these areas appears had the effect of “steering higher-income housing growth away from gentrifying neighborhoods,” according to the report.

This is a “remarkable” pattern, the report notes, making Houston a major outlier among American cities. Just about everywhere else, established upper-middle class and wealthy neighborhoods in the heart of the city are off-limits to housing construction. The neighborhoods where new development is allowed are more often than not low-income Black and brown communities, or post-industrial, freeway-adjacent netherworlds. By allowing new housing in every neighborhood, Houston concentrated development in the areas best-equipped to handle it.

The Kinder Institute report shows that Houston’s permissive housing development regime helps limit gentrification as well as urban sprawl. Though, of course, it doesn’t prevent either phenomenon. Townhouse developments are becoming increasingly common in historically low-income neighborhoods, a harbinger of rejuvenation or displacement, depending on whom you ask. Texas’ concrete cowboys are still doing their dirty work, building sprawl developments and highways into the flood plains as fast as the state can hand out subsidies.

Another under-discussed facet of Houston’s lack of zoning, Luis Guajardo, a Kinder Institute policy analyst, told me, is the way it enables noxious industrial development in inappropriate places. On the east side of town near the port, truck depots and factories are springing up in residential neighborhoods, producing dangerous and unhealthy conditions.

Houston’s zoning policy is no panacea, and it’s not worth copying whole hog. But at least on the housing front, Houston’s lack of zoning appears to be a significant factor behind its relative affordability. Abundant housing and low market-rate rents make it much easier to combat homelessness, turning Houston into a national model on this issue. Homelessness dollars go a lot farther in Houston, where the fair market rent for a one-bedroom is $1,100, than in San Francisco, where the same unit can be had for over $2,600. Houston is also one of the few big cities where the Black population is increasing — another indicator of the city’s affordability.

It’s pretty clear from a cold, analytical perspective, that Houston’s permissive housing production environment is better for affordability than what most other American cities are doing. But housing and development policy questions are also, notoriously, about vibes. How does all of the new housing in the urban core of Houston color the feel of its neighborhoods?

Houston Townhouses

The street-level experience of Houston’s townhouse neighborhoods isn’t all that different from your typical single-family home neighborhood in another American city. Townhouse developments mask their true density by using up the entirety of their lots. What looks like three townhouses from the street might actually be six or nine, since they’re tightly packed in rows within lots previously occupied by one or two single-family homes. The townhouses themselves are skinny, sometimes less than 20 feet wide, and up to four stories tall. In the wealthier neighborhoods where these buildings are concentrated, their height and density are muted by a generous tree canopy.

Houston’s townhomes come in a striking diversity of architectural styles. A fair number can be described as contemporary, with exposed concrete, acrylic panels, asymmetrical facades and other trappings of “fast casual architecture.” But an equal number are being built in traditional, historicist styles — faux chateaux, Spanish villas, Brooklyn brownstones, even a few San Francisco-style Victorians. Walking by some of the best-designed historicist townhouses in Houston, you can squint and imagine yourself in London or Philadelphia. Needless to say, few neighborhoods in America are trending toward the density or street-level experience of 19^th century rowhouse neighborhoods.

These olde style buildings are not particularly common in coastal cities, where more academically-oriented architects are embarrassed by historicist and traditional architecture. Take a tour of Los Angeles’ “small lot houses,” — townhouse developments somewhat similar to, albeit not nearly as widespread as those in Houston — and you won’t see many shingles, gables, bricks or stones.

Individually, some of Houston’s historicist townhomes are indeed cringeworthy. But at the neighborhood scale, these developments seem to blend in to the existing urban fabric more easily than aggressively contemporary new buildings. Compare that to older neighborhoods in San Francisco or LA, where boxy gray McMansions — which do nothing to increase density or affordability, in contrast to Houston’s townhouses — stand out like a sore thumb amidst the centenarian houses.

Houston does still have pockets of de-facto single-family zoning. These areas have protected their single-family status by covenant, a mutually agreed upon, time-limited rule within a given neighborhood. Covenants were a necessary compromise for Houston to retain its broad prohibition on zoning, Nolan Gray argues in the book Arbitrary Lines. I would add that they have a powerful symbolic effect, vividly demonstrating that single-family zoning is, in fact, an exclusionary policy. Compared to the majority of Houston’s urban core neighborhoods, the single-family hold-outs have a gated community feel. Their homogenous housing stock implies a homogenous socio-economic makeup. By contrast, neighborhoods open to new development are a riot of styles and housing typologies; diverse homes for a diverse city.  

There’s a lot to dislike about the design of Houston’s townhomes. Their car-centrism requires soulless driveways, often gated, and leaves some developments oriented away from the street. While I’ll take parks over backyards any day, the lot coverage of Houston’s townhouses can feel a bit ruthless, and the reduction in permeable landscaping is concerning in a flood-prone city. Their use of space can only be considered efficient within the intellectual confines of the cult of the single-family home. You could fit a lot more units, using a smaller proportion of the lot, in a regular multi-family apartment building.

My takeaway is not that Houston’s townhouses are some brilliant innovation that every city should emulate. It’s the principle behind them that’s worth emulating. When housing construction is permitted in almost every neighborhood, then development occurs in a more balanced, equitable way. It becomes easier for cities to produce enough housing to keep up with demand and to grow up rather than out. New housing typologies and urban design concepts suddenly become possible, opening up new experiential horizons in the city.

Cities with stronger commitments to non-car transportation, vibrant streets and deeply affordable housing can take those principles and run with them. Maybe they can create more neighborhoods that actually resemble the pre-zoning, pre-car districts — Brownstone Brooklyn, Victorian San Francisco — that are among the most desirable in the country. At the very least, they can allow their built environment to catch up with the needs of the contemporary populace.

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