Paying for green space

Who has responsibility for ensuring that there's enough park space for Houston residents? According to City Council, some of that responsibility needs to be on developers.

The ordinance, which city officials hope to have in place by Oct. 1, would be one of the most significant new regulatory requirements in years for Houston's politically powerful development industry. Leaders of single-family home and apartment development organizations said they supported the measure in principle but were concerned about some details.

"We feel parks are both a public and a private responsibility. The majority of that burden is being shifted to the private sector" under the proposed ordinance, said Brian P. Austin, a board member of the Houston Apartment Association. The city uses tax dollars mostly for operations and maintenance rather than land for parks.

Edward E. Taravella, chairman of the Greater Houston Builders Association's development council, said the city should consider counting yards attached to single-family homes toward the parks and open space requirements. Otherwise, he said, the measure would discourage development of single-family houses with yards.

I suppose that might make sense if the goal were to ensure a certain amount of unpaved, grass-capable land be preserved, but it isn't. The goal is to ensure that there's a minimal amount of community space per capita. Yards serve a purpose, but not the same one as park space.

Let's do the math here. The formula the city devised is this:

10 acres times number of housing units times 2.6 average household size, divided by 1,000. That means a developer building a project with 100 units would have to set aside 2.6 acres of space.

Putting it another way, for each housing unit built, you need to set aside 0.026 acres of space. That's 1132 square feet per unit. How big is the average lot for new housing developments in Houston these days? Six thousand square feet? Seventy-five hundred? I'm guessing, I really don't know - in the Heights, most lots are five thousand square feet, and that seems small compared to what I see elsewhere. You could build on smaller lots, or you could essentially leave one empty for every five or six you do build on; the bigger the lots you build on, the fewer you have to leave empty. In a way, this could incentivize bigger yards.

Or you could avoid that and pay a fee instead, which appears to be the better deal anyway.

Andy Icken, a deputy public works director assigned by Mayor Bill White to help develop the measure, said its formula for determining land or fees required is consistent with those in other Houston-area cities that have park set-aside laws.

Its intent, Icken said, is to ensure that as Houston's population grows, it provides 10 acres of parks for each 1,000 additional residents, which is far short of the 25.5 acres per 1,000 residents recommended by the National Parks and Recreation Association.

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Icken provided examples of comparable requirements imposed in Austin, Fort Worth and several Houston suburbs. Fees in those cities, he said, range from $500 to $1,000 per unit, while land dedication requirements support goals ranging from 2.5 acres to 10 acres per 1,000 residents.

The money raised by the fee in Houston would go into a fund that would pay for acquiring parkland or adding new facilities, such as sports fields or playground equipment, to existing parks.

The money could not be used for routine maintenance. Joe Turner, Houston's parks and recreation director, acknowledged that maintaining the new parks the city acquired through the ordinance would require increased maintenance staffing funded by taxpayers.

Two members of the council's Regulation, Development and Neighborhood Protection Committee, which plans to vote on the ordinance Aug. 29, expressed concern that the option to pay a fee in lieu of providing land was too generous.

Since land prices tend to be higher in rapidly developing parts of the city, they said, paying the fee would cost developers less than buying the required acreage in the same part of town and giving it to the city.

"Because of the way the ordinance is drafted, I suspect that most everybody will buy their way out of the dedication requirement, and that could open us up to charges of creating a hidden tax," said Councilman Peter Brown.

Councilwoman Pam Holm agreed, saying this outcome could defeat the ordinance's intent since money from fees would not be sufficient to buy comparable amounts of land in areas where prices are high.

Given that the fee works out to less than a dollar per square foot, I'd have to say that Council Members Brown and Holm are correct, though if this is a "hidden tax", it's not a very steep one. And as Stace noted, even if this modest fee gives the city enough money to buy more park space, there's no extra money being generated to maintain it. That would be a real problem, and it deserves some more examination. After all, while parks may improve quality of life around here - something that even the developers agree with - poorly maintained parks are a drag. We surely don't want that to happen.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 15, 2007 to Local politics