Chapter 42 is back

This is going to be fun.

Sprawling, boomtown Houston may be in for another battle over land use and development, this time driven by the most significant changes proposed to the city’s building rules in 13 years.

The rewrite would further a push for density in single-family development, begun inside Loop 610 when the rules were last changed in 1999, by extending those guidelines citywide. The proposed changes also would address problems that have cropped up with the townhomes that proliferated after the 1999 revision, which designated the Inner Loop “urban” and areas outside “suburban.”

City planners and developers say greater single-family density – allowing more homes to be built on a single acre – will spur redevelopment of blighted areas and provide more affordable housing in the city because builders will be able to fit more buyers on each piece of land, lowering the price they have to charge for each house or townhome. They stress the changes would not encourage more apartment towers.

Many residents are wary. Some say the push for greater density inside the Loop has sacrificed neighborhood aesthetics and created infrastructure problems, compounded by a lack of city enforcement. Others fear how the proposal will affect their neighborhoods.

Change can be scary for residents, Planning Department Director Marlene Gafrick acknowledged, but said redevelopment is better than decline.

“We have an aging city. We need to think about how we go in and allow for our city to be updated,” she said. “To some extent, these rules will encourage the redevelopment of property. We’re trying to encourage more single-family residential development outside the 610 Loop.”

On the one hand, this update should allow more dense development throughout the city of Houston, which in turn should make new development in Houston more affordable, and thus make living within the city more competitive with living out in the burbs. This is a good and necessary goal, and though I have expressed concerns about this in the past, I support it, as I have come to the view that the city needs to do what it can to encourage people to live inside its boundaries. Making housing more affordable is a good step in that direction. But the concerns I had before still remain, in that the city’s infrastructure will be greatly taxed by an influx of denser development. Rebuild Houston will deal with some of this, Parks By You will deal with some of this, and the rail lines that are currently under construction and whatever expansion of the bus system we get will deal with some more of it, but it’s not enough. We’ll need a lot more transit – all the rail we voted for in 2003 and then some, and a much bigger emphasis on sidewalks, walkability, and bicycle access. I feel like we’re moving in the right direction, but I worry about how long it will take us to get where we need to be.

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5 Responses to Chapter 42 is back

  1. Randy says:

    Do you know when Council is expected to vote on this?

  2. C says:

    There’s so much land on the Northeast part of the city that being more dense for that side isn’t necessary. I’d just like for the approved areas where the rail plan is already going to be outside the loop for more density. If anything changes outside the loop for more density, more, let it be the areas that are already the most dense which is more everything from west loop going all west to beltway.

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