TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: David Crossley (DC)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: February 27, 2008
LOCATION: Houston, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Melanie Smith and Robin Johnson
REELS: 2419, 2420

Please note that the recording includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

(misc.)
DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas and we’re in Houston, Texas and it’s February 27th, 2008 and we have the good fortune to be visiting with David Crossley, who has been in the communications business for many years, both with commercial photography, radio, magazines, multimedia efforts and in public interest and planning efforts. And I just wanted to thank you for taking your time to talk about your life’s work.
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DC: Always fun to talk about yourself.
DT: Well, speaking of yourself, I was wondering if you could remember back to your childhood and see if there is a place that you could say was an origin for your interest in the outdoors, environmental issues, some of the work that you do now?
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DC: You—well, you know, actually I’ve been thinking about that recently because of this book, Last Child in the Woods, and remembering that, in fact, I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts—Wakefield, Massachusetts—and I would come home from school and my buddies and I would immediately take off and go to the woods, a place called Snake Hill that was just a little bit down from our houses, you know. A little suburban kind of town, but there was an edge to it that had—was natural. Every day, we spent time in that woods with all kinds of awful things we did, nefarious plots and, you know, built tree houses and all those things that kids do. And—and I realize now that that’s m—missing for lots of kids and that must’ve been very important to me to be able to do that, to—to just explore that whole thing,
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every day almost. We also had a lake in town, down at the center of town, Lake Quannapowitt, that was a wonderful place and a really beautiful lake and in the winter, it froze over and we went skating on it all winter, you know. So I went to camp in Maine, you know, that was out in the middle of nowhere and we had lots of camping adventures where, you know, spending time, camping on the ground. And I spent a lot of time, my family, in the Lake Winnipesaukee, in the New Hampshire, which is w—wonderful, you know, real natural. So—so there was a lot of nature in my—as I was growing up and, yeah, for sure.

DT: And as you grew older and went to college, was there any sort of experience there that was more structured that might have introduced you to these same kind of concerns?
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DC: No, I can’t—you know, I really can’t think of anything. I was—I—I—I was kind of oblivious in a way for a long period of time until I—I think I—when I got out of college, shortly after I got of college, I lived in New York for a little while and then I went and lived in Greece for two years. And I lived in a small town where we were outdoors all the time and—and people live outdoors. You know, in Greece, you have these court—wonderful courtyards that are full of flowers and grapevines and that sort of stuff. And—and that was the first time I recall thinking about growing things, why we took great care of that grapevine and we learned from the village people there how to do that and—because they—they had their wonderful and amazing ways they dealt with those grapevines. And so—and then we would go wander through the fields, you know, where there were goats and sagebrush and thyme and

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stuff growing and people would tell me what these things were and I became aware that the world was actually out there and that there were things in it that were useful and—and interesting. And of course, you know, when you’re staring down into the Aegean everyday, it was the most gorgeous sea that you can imagine and you’re outdoors all the time, well, yeah. But not really—you know, there’s a whole big gap there from the time we moved to Texas in—in about 1952 until I went to—to Greece. Although, an experience I remember right after we came here, I was just eleven or twelve years old and my uncle had a big rice farm out in Hockley and so we went out to visit him. And I—it was the most amazing experience because I had heard I was going to go see cowboys and so I was pretty excited about that. I
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mean, I was in Texas—wow—and I was going to see cowboys. And we get to the ranch and all—and there’s this truck sitting right in front of the house and it’s absolutely full of big bags and these cowboys are all drinking a lot of beer and it’s like eleven in the morning, you know, and they’re pulling these bags out of the truck and these bags are writhing. And it turns out these bags are all full of water moccasins, it’s the annual go out into the rice paddies and catch all the water moccasins and then bring them to the front of the house and, should I tell you the rest of the story, which is they set them all on fire and they get drunk while they watch. And it was a, you know, for an eleven year old kid, it was a stupefying

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experience and it was, wow, look at this. This is the world of something that I didn’t even know about. So—but then I’ve—I’ve never forgotten that and we spent a lot of time on that farm and—and rode horses and stuff, so that’s my first Texas experience with nature.
DT: You mention Texas and being in rural areas. I understand that in ’73, a number of years later, you spent some time in a place called the Peaceable Kingdom and I was curious if you’d tell us about the Peaceable Kingdom, what it was and what was your experience there?
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DC: Well, the Peaceable Kingdom was a—the place up in Navasota, near Navasota and Washington on the Brazos where a woman named Libbie Winston had bought a couple of hundred acres and had a lot of her friends kind of living there with her and they were—they were doing crafts and they were doing some pretty elaborate organic gardening and she was quite—very skilled in organic gardening. And my wife, Jody, who is a CPA and does tax exempt organizations, was advising her on how she could set it up as a craft school and get some tax advantages out of that so on. And—and at some point, it sounded so interesting, we—we went up to visit and see what it was like and we thought, you know, this would be fun, wouldn’t it, to live up here, do this and so essentially she went up there to run the school—to found
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and run the school and—and I just went along. I mean, I don’t know what I thought I was going do. And I got really interested in woodworking up there because the—we had the possibility of doing a lot of things, and gardening, and we—we built this enormous barn. We just—just this great scam, it was one of the great things of all time. We—we had my friend, Danny Samuels, and—and Ar—Artie Kahn who was architects, design this eighty foot long building and we had a class called Design and Construction of a Large Farm Building. And we charged people to come up and build this thing. And so we—we would have—we had an architecture student who came up and lived with us for a while and learned how to build and then every weekend, ten or fifteen people from Houston would come and just pay a fee for the weekend to help put it together. And then we had a huge barn raising on October 28th, 1973, in
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which we put this whole barn together in a day with two hundred people that came—came up from Houston to do this. And it was just old-fashioned barn raising, you know, with some pretty cool, you know, new techniques for the building. And then at the end of the day, Jody and I got married around a pond and all those people came and—and we had Mance Lipscomb, if you remember, Mance Lipscomb, the great singer, blues singer from Navasota. He sang at our wedding and he sang You Are My Sunshine. And we got married outside, as I said, around this pond and—so it was like—it was an incredible experience to live—live in the country for a year, as we did, and that Peaceable Kingdom, I learned a lot about the world and how—how, you know, how nice it is to be out there and what—that there are more—there’s more than one kind of tree and, you know, that kind of began to get a little
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discernment going on here about what I’m looking at and experiencing. And Lib—Libbie is a teacher, of course, it was fabulous because she knew every plant there was and—and so—and chickens and we had all that. And bees, I had—had—I had actually spent some time in—well, I—after I lived in Greece, I—I went to live in Israel for a little while. I—desperate, come out of Greece with not a penny to my name and caught somehow a s—a ship to Israel because I knew that they would—I could go to the Kibbutz office and they’d send me right to a Kibbutz and I could have lunch. So—so I worked on a Kibbutz for a couple of months and—and—and got involved with the beekeepers, which was a stupefying experience, you know, it was a wonderful experience to—to do something that seems so dangerous and—but was
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actually so productive that—yeah, it was—it was very cool. So—so I—we kept bees up at the Peaceable Kingdom too and then, later in life, I did it again in another place we lived at.
DT: It seems like…
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DC: I got to—my phone is beeping because I’m leaning.
DT: You mentioned two things that interested me to ask more questions. One was living on the Kibbutz in Israel and then living at the Peaceable Kingdom here in Texas and that both would seem to have aspects of living with a community of people and trying to live sustainably and growing your own food, trying to support that community. Do you think that that was kind of informative for you as you’d gone forward, kind of did that on a much larger scale, on the scale of Houston or a state?
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DC: Absolutely. I mean, the—the experience in Israel, I—it—you know, I’ve—I’ve bought that hook, line and sinker. I just absolutely love that concept of, you know, we all—we all ate together in a big common dining room, to see that there was a children’s house. The children all lived together in one place and they would eat—they would eat be—meals with their parents, but they lived in—in a children’s house, you know. And to—to work with these people in the fields and, you know, to realize that there’s no boss here, there’s no—you know, it’s common ownership. It was like—yeah, sure, it was very eye opening to me and I loved it. I mean, I loved it and you would grow the food and you’d bring it to the house and then you’d eat it. You know, like oh, okay, that’s—that feels good. You know, so yeah, and the Peaceable Kingdom was, you know, taking care of each other and this notion of—you—you

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can’t really call it a commune because we—we had—we were blessed with Libbie Winston that—being able to sort of support the whole thing, so it’s not like we were—we had to raise money to do it or, you know—but it—but it was nevertheless around eight or ten people living very closely together and learn how to work together and doing, you know, pretty—pretty ambitious things. So yeah, and I—and I’ve never gotten over it and I want to do it again. I mean, I’m ready, actually getting pretty close to wanting to—we’re—we’re—we’re trying to buy some land, possibly today, as a matter of fact, in—in which I will start doing some of that, try to bring some more people into it. So—but yeah, I want to do it again.
DT: Well, I guess the other facet of this is living in the country rather than a city and trying to see what you can do, I guess, living closer to the earth. I believe that after you lived in Peaceable Kingdom, you later moved to a small town near Whitney, is that correct?
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DC: Whitney, yeah. That’s a—that’s kind of an interesting story. We were—we thought we wanted to go get our own land after the Peaceable Kingdom and so we borrowed the Peaceable Kingdom van, which had a bed in it, and we went out to New Mexico and spent a month looking for land. Thought we would go to New Mexico. And never really found anything, but—but it was a great experience to live outdoors all the time like that, I mean, literally just in this truck, you know, up in the mountains and so forth. And—and thought well, let’s follow the Brazos River all the way back because the Navasota area is all about the Brazos River in many ways, you know, and thought well, let’s just see how that goes. So we went to the Salt Fork, you know, and came all the way down and—and—and one day as we were near
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Waco, actually, we came to this place called Lake Whitney, which is a dam on the Brazos and thought, God, this is beautiful. Just a gorgeous, big, huge lake that on one side had—had cliffs that went up, I don’t even know, hundreds of feet, you know, gigantic. And from—later we learned this is essentially where the West begins. You know, it literally becomes a whole different world sort on one side—that side of the Brazos. You’ve seen bases and stuff and you can see storms coming for a hundred miles and that sort of thing. And so while we were eating lunch, we said wonder, you know, if you could buy something here and we said—we—we just said let’s go ask somebody. And we found a realtor and he showed us eight acres right on the lake and we bought it that day. And I—I’d never gotten over that, we’d never heard of this place that morning and—and then we lived there that afternoon. So we
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lived there for five years, I think, and both of our children were born in Whitney, Texas, which as I said was about twenty miles north of Waco and we had a really wonderful experience there, I think. And couldn’t sustain it because both of us had business in Houston and the drive was pretty far, you know, back and forth from there to Houston. And actually I got a job at Texas Monthly that was a half month job, so I was driving from there to Austin and back twice a month and then Jody was going to Houston and back and it was—it was overwhelming. So we—we finally moved—came to Houston and gave it up, just too far.

DT: While you’re talking about your city connection and your career, we might want to go back a little bit and talk about some of the commercial interests you had in being a photographer and working with magazines and perhaps you could start with your role at KPFT as a radio manager there and if that might’ve influenced you both in learning about communication, mass communication, and about environmental issues since that’s a very public oriented…
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DC: Sure. Well, I came back from Europe in ’71 and pretty quickly got—maybe we came back in ’70 and then ’71, I got this job at KPFT, a very long story about how that happened. I’ll just go past that, but—but I went in to be a volunteer and, I mean, within weeks I was the manager of the station. You know, KPFT is so tumultuous and so I was the third manager, actually. The second one didn’t—wasn’t there very long. There was some brouhaha about that and then there was a big strike and then I was the candidate from the strike and became installed there. So during that strike, I learned a lot about public speaking because I had to go out and talk to the press and so on and—and I got—and I began to learn about what that meant to have—what communication was all about, you know, and how to sort of get these things done quickly, you know. And then because I was on the—just was a crazed, you know, microphone hound, I was on the air a lot, and—and KPFT is such a

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great experience. It’s probably not as loose now, but back in the day, we were sort of programming live all the time. We were making things up and we’d go in and say let’s do—go do this right now and we’d just go on the air and do it and, you know, bring somebody in. And—or live music or you know, and it was—not like there was much of a plan. It was—I mean, there were certain things that were scheduled, but oth—really, a lot of things happened. So I—I would—I said oh, I’m—I’m going to—I want to do a show called Lunch and so two hours in the middle of the day, we would interview people. It was live and—and—and I just learned how to talk, you know, basically, do news and that sort of thing and—on the air. And—and so I loved it, it was a great experience and, of course, we were always involved. At that time, KPFT had a very good news department and—and we covered local stuff and we ran all the
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city council meetings live and so I learned how the city council works and, oh, you know, learned not to be afraid of those guys and to, you know, you—they’re just humans. And—and so I think that’s—that I—I have a—obviously is where I got involved with public policy and how I began to understand how things work a little bit, you know. Not—I mean, as I look back, I was just seeing a little glimmer of light coming through or darkness coming through something, you know. But sure, that was how that all started.
DT: You also worked with a number of magazines and it was interesting to me that some of the magazines were pretty technical. You know, there was Science Today in the early 60s, MD Magazine, Universal Science News and then there were others, like Texas Monthly, where you were from ’77 to ’78, that were more general readership and I was wondering if you could talk about the different audiences and different kinds of topics and whether there was some sort of environmental discussion among any of those journals?
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DC: You know, my magazine experience started at the University of Texas with the Texas Ranger that used to be the c—campus humor magazine. It was a big deal back in that day, so it was much—it was very popular magazine and it was a—a humor magazine, you know, like the Harvard Lampoon, only at that time, it was bigger than the Harvard Lampoon. And—and I just loved that world and I loved being a magazine editor more than anything and so I did that for a while. And then I went to New York to try to get a job at a big magazine and—and wound up not getting a job at a big magazine, but at a new magazine called Science Today and I was the managing editor of that. And then that magazine failed pretty quickly and that—I went with the editor to a—to MD magazine, where he was the—he be—he
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was the news editor and I was his assistant. And that’s where I learned about science writing and which I just found to be fascinating and I’m still, you know, I spend a lot of time reading science journals and so forth. So I wouldn’t say that was where I got involved in environmentalism, but that’s where I began to understand science and systems, which became a big, you know, piece of what I do now. And—and I did that for, I don’t know, a little while. There’s a—kind of a good story about how—if you want me to jump into Europe—wh—how I—I—I had this funny job for a while at a magazine called Toys and Novelties. It was the mag—it was the magazine of the toy industry and of the Christmas ornaments industry. The novelties were the Christmas ornaments and I was the managing editor. It came out

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twice a month, big, thick magazine so it was huge job. And the last page of it was all the stock prices for the companies that we—that we would—dealt with. And I would call this guy and he would give me all the prices to put in there for—you know, and at one point I said what is stock? How does—how does this work? I mean, what—what are we talking about here? And he said can you get a hundred dollars together? I said I can—I can work on that and then well, you do that and you send it to me and I’ll—and I’ll show you how this works. Well, six months later, I had five thousand dollars, you know, and it was amazing. And—and it—and it was a, actually, bad experience because since then, I’ve thought, oh, this is easy, stock market and of course it’s not. But at that time it was so I—five thousand dollars. So I said I quit, I’m going to Europe and so I lived in Europe for a couple of years on
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that money. But yeah, so—so that was a—the break in the—in the magazine business. But the science—and I—I came back to Houston and did science writing as a freelancer for a while—couple of years, actually. But I don’t know, I loved—I love—science is very interesting and so that’s a—I—I’m—science, environmentalism. It’s all, you know, the same thing.
DT: I think with each of these experiences, radio and magazines, you’ve sort of shown that you’ve got an interest in communication. I think you also worked in the multimedia industry somewhat later. Could you talk about that and if it might’ve had a connection with environmental aspects to your life as well?
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DC: Yeah. You know, if you—it was my big epiphany, you know, that came—that led me into that work. I was a—I had—I was a commercial photographer. I had a studio and that’s what I was doing and I took one of my sons and one of his friends who, at the time were about ten or eleven, down to Mustang Island where we were staying at somebody’s condominium. And I remember it was April 14th because Jody would come the next day when the tax season ended on April 15th. And—and that—they had CSPAN, they had cable and I’d never seen cable TV and this was 1992, right. So I’d—I’d watch CSPAN. It was fascinating. There were these scientists and they were having a press conference and it was live and it was about a book they
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had written called Beyond the Limits. And I had—I’d heard of The Limits to Growth back in the Whole Earth days. You know, the Whole Earth Catalog was s—such a window to everything, you know, and we were at the Peaceable Kingdom, we had all of them. You know, we went through that stuff and lived it. Well, so I was aware of their earlier book and here they were saying, you know, twenty-five years later that we passed the limits. We’ve gone beyond the limits and we have all this horrible black future coming at us because we’ve gone too far on the Earth in terms of its sustainability and so forth unless these things happen. And I was—it was weird because I could see the CSPAN and, out the window, I could see the kids running on top of the dunes. I’ll never forget this, these little kids are just having

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fun and I’m thinking oh, this isn’t going to work as a future for them, for my kids. If it’s as bad as these people say it is, I’ve got to get to work. I’ve got to do something. And I wound up walking up and down the beach all night, just out there, just thinking, you know. And holy cow, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? And at one point, I wrote sense in the sand and I’m not sure what I thought or what I meant at the time I wrote that, but it was obviously I was thinking we’ve got to make sense here. And so when Jody came, we spent the whole day talking about, okay, I’m going to stop what I’m doing; I’m going to get out of the photography business. I’m going to do something that’s about environmental issues. And we
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realized at that time that multimedia was just coming, that Apple was now having CD players in their computers and that you could do multimedia that you could put on a CD. And so you could learn, you could teach and it was—we were—we were seeing some multimedia in use, but the CD meant we could now sell this stuff. So perhaps made the mistake of not going nonprofit and deciding to go for profit, Sense Interactive was born as a company to—to do CD-ROM multimedia programs about environmental issues for—for kids at the grade school level, elementary school level, thinking that if they could grow up with good principles about the environment and about the world, they would build things that worked as opposed to didn’t work. So I did that for four or five years and lost a tremendous amount of money, trying to
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compete with Microsoft and—and ultimately it went away. But it was a—it was a period in which I learned about systems and learned from those authors, including Donella Meadows, who was the—in a way my mentor even though sh—we—we had actually met and talked some, but—but—and you know, she didn’t know me, but I—I—but I—I read everything she wrote and I—and I thought she’s got—she’s got the approach. She had—she—she did this brilliant thing once where she produced on a white board something called Nine Points to Leverage a System. And apparently did this live, in front of a group of people up at MIT where she said now here’s how it all works. And she said—listed all these things in hierarchical order with number one
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being change the paradigm, change the story. And I just related to that so strongly because I was a communicator. I was a journalist and I thought that’s what—that’s what I can do. I can—I can work from that level, I can think about what the—what the story is and change it as opposed to changing legislation or all these more difficult things that aren’t as productive. So, you know, maybe that is jumping the gun a little bit and—but my—my Gulf Coast Institute experience today runs totally on the principle of changing the story, which we can talk about a little later, if you like.
DT: Yeah, I’d like to. Maybe before we get there, we could talk a little bit about another chapter in your communications history and that’s with the Citizen’s Environmental Coalition, where I think you got involved in ’95, just a few years after you started Sense Interactive.
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DC: That’s right. When I was being frustrated because I was having to transform Sense just to stay alive into a—a corporate multimedia and—and at that point, web producer, so we did a lot of, you know, a couple of hundred—maybe a hundred—a hundred websites for—for corporations. And then that—and that’s what I did for a living and I’m—where was this, you know, this environmental thing that I wanted—where is this phone?
DT: When we left off just a moment ago, you were talking about Sense Interactive and some of your website work as a prologue to talking about CEC.
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DC: It was just a frustration that I realized I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. I had gotten back into doing—delivering products for corporations, which is what I did as a photographer. And then this environmental thing was still there, I had to do something. And so I got involved with the Citizen’s Environmental Coalition. And I—I want to say it was a couple of months or something like that, next thing I knew, I was the president of the Citizen’s Environmental Coalition. And—and that was a pretty great experience because it meant that I got involved with all the issues. You know, at that time, it had about ninety member groups and so as I met those people and worked with those people, I’d—I—I realized how enormous this sort of effort was
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and how many people that were involved in it and how difficult it all was. And then I—I was a very active president in the sense that I served on committees and commissions and so forth and got deeply involved in the air quality back then on several levels. Mayor had set up a blue ribbon commission and I was a member of that, representing the environmental world with business people and so forth. And so I learned a lot about how things work, not just the actual environment, but I mean about how the systems of government and business and so forth work. And—and so that was a real eye opening experience to me. While I was—while I was at CEC, we got an opportunity—CEC had always wanted a home and we got an
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opportunity to found the Houston Environmental Center in this building on—on Richmond Road—Richmond Avenue where it is today. And we had thirteen or fourteen environmental groups come to all office in the same space where, for the first time, we all were face-to-face everyday and worked together on lots and lots of issues. It was very powerful and still is very powerful place. And we got a meeting room that—that hundreds of organizations ultimately used and I—and I think the last I heard was something around like seven hundred meetings a—a m—a year were happening in that, sometimes four or five a day. But—so this would mean sometimes you’d walk down the hall and you’d see the county judge in there. You’d see, you know, people pretty t—famous people, all hammering out something about
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water or air or parks or something. And—and I gradually began to realize that wow, you know, everything that’s happening about the environment is happening in this room or in this floor or this building and it was very strong. And so—so—so I—so at that point, I was, you know, I was a volunteer president, but I was working thirty, forty hours a week on CEC. So I—I was into the environmental world by that time, totally in the—in—in—in—into everything and beginning to get it and the…
DT: You mentioned that this space, the Houston Environmental Center, and all the cotenants there, these environmental groups often met with one another and with governmental leaders to try to hammer out some sort of environmental consensus in different matters and said that clean air was something that particularly interested you. Could you use that as a little model for how CEC in this particular place, this center, functioned to help bring together some sort of common ground?
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DC: Well, I mean, to the extent that you could—I’ll—I’ll never forget Linda Shead, who at the time was the executive director of the Galveston Bay Foundation and I was involved with air. And I was talking to Linda and I said I—I want to figure out is there a connection, you know, between air quality and Galveston Bay. And she just looked at me and she said a third of the toxins in Galveston Bay come—are airborne. And that’s—you know, that old saying about everything’s connected, you know, it just went off in my brain, like you know, boy, everything is really, literally connected. And if we could work together, you know, more, who knows? And so this idea of having a—a—a—a wilderness group sit in on a discussion about roads, you know, made perfect sense to me, still does because a road’s going to go through some wilderness. And so if you’re saying we want to save wilderness, we want to
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save prairie, whatever it is, and a road is coming, that road is not just the width of that road. All the development that will come with it is going to take your wilderness away. So you can’t—it—you—so—so I don’t see how you can be a—a wilderness or a preservation group and not be concerned about roads and development. And of course, privately, they all are, but publicly, they—they can’t say that. They can’t, you know, they can’t say we’re opposed to the Grand Parkway, but you know, privately, you—you get it but it’s a one-for-one trade, that a road’s going to take away whatever greenspace there was there. And the—the—and so—so all—so these groups, you know, clearly needed to be face-to-face on a daily basis and just—people just talking and I think that’s been very powerful over the, you know, the
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years. I—I th—I really think that we all know more about everything now and so, you know, I do essentially smart growth, but now everybody is involved in some degree of smart growth, wanting—because they get it that that’s the compact development forum that will save land and clean air and all those energy—and you know, all the issues are—ultimately it all comes down to land use. Everything’s about land use, all the issues that there are about how you use land and so I’ve been doing my best to try to learn that and teach it as a reporter and then communicator, that’s—that’s what I do.
DT: So what you were dealing with in the mid-nineties at CEC and the Houston Environmental Center had to do with trying to see what current problems were, but also to try and get ahead of—of future problems. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about the Houston Advanced Research Center, which I guess was then the Houston Area Research Center.
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DC: No, it’s still—it was the Houston Advanced Research Center. That was just a…
DT: And their Foresight Project, which I guess you got involved in ’95, and I was hoping you could explain what sort of problems they foresaw and what sort of solutions they were trying to put together.
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DC: Well, this was with HARC, The Houston Advanced Research Center, which is up in the Woodlands and was funded by George Mitchell. It’s an amazing organization dedicated to sustainability. And I actually—I learned that term from them and began to figure out what—how that works, you know, but in—in ’98, they launched the second part of the Foresight Project. The Foresight Project, the first part of it had been to bring together a couple hundred citizens, scientists, business leaders, gov—government leaders to identify the top environmental issues in our region and then to prioritize them and air quality was number one issue. So Foresight Two, as we called it, was to determine solutions to those issues. And by that time, I was involved—I had not been involved in the first part, but as the CEC president, I was
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involved on the committee and—and was—became the chair of the long range air planning group. And in that, I began to realize—well, I’m jumping ahead. There was a—no, maybe I should do that. Well, let’s—le—le—le—let me do it in chronological. So at the launch of the Phase Two, which is in August of ’98, at the University of Houston, there was a luncheon and a lot of presenters and so forth and at the lunch itself, David Crockett, who is a, oh, I want to say great-great-grandson of Davy Crockett and who is a councilmember in Chattanooga, Tennessee and ran something called the Chattanooga Institute for Sustainability. Well, I thought oh, well, here come all those words, institutes and sustainability, and—and he told the story of Chattanooga, which when he started working was—was known as the dirtiest city in America. And he was—he showed this picture of daytime, people driving with their
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lights on because the smog was so thick, you really couldn’t see otherwise, you know. And—and then a few years later, it’s the, you know, model, Disney World, perfect city, you know, and all through the work of the Chattanooga Institute, bringing the people of Chattanooga together to clean up their own act, you know, and to become a great city that—that the—be—begins to grow and has economic success and all that. And I—boy, this is really—this is really good and I was sitting next to Ann Hamilton at the Houston Endowment and I leaned over and I said you know, we need a Houston Institute for Sustainability. She said yeah, that’s true. So, you know, I—I—as I—as I began to get it, that all the issues were about urban growth, how we use the land and how we grow, there was no organization in Houston that was looking at urban growth. There had been the Rice Center and then
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been some things in the past, but they were gone. So you know, I naïvely said okay, well, I’ll found the Houston Institute, which became the Gulf Coast Institute to be—be more regional and we’ll—we’ll study urban growth, you know. And I know nothing about it, but I’m a reporter, you know, so I’ll go out and find out what the story is and go find the cities where they’re doing this great sustainable development and talk to people there and then come back to Houston and tell that story and tell about the best practices we’re seeing everywhere else and then let’s start going down that path. So the Gulf Coast Institute was essentially founded at lunch that day. We got our—got our tax exempt early in the next year and got a little money from EPA, from Doug Lipka at EPA, was a great guy and I went on a trip. I had
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studied all the cities and found out which ones were the ones that were doing sustainable development and they were all, as it happened, as a mir—it’s still probably true, they were all up in the Northwest part of the country, so it was Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Victoria, B.C. and Vancouver, British Columbia. So I went on this incredible trip to all those places, fourteen days or something like that to visit some of the coolest cities on the planet, you know. Starting with Vancouver, which is a—just a dream, you know, it’s just a fabulous place and—and they’ve just—they’ve done a great job. They have—they have this law that every—every decision in Vancouver has to consider whether it’s good for children. Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? You know, if you care about the children enough to—every law, you look at it and think about whether it’s going to be good for children, is a—an
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approach I’d never heard of, you know. And they have a—they have a law that every house will be an eighth of a mile, no more than an eighth of a mile from a park. And that’s going to take a long time to get to that, but that means that’s only a couple of blocks, you know. That means everybody has basically a little park and so this whole notion of pocket parks and neighborhood parks, they’re everywhere in Vancouver. So it’s this fantastic environment that’s actually wonderful for children. And you don’t see much smog and they don’t have any freeways and it’s commercially very successful, economic powerhouse, you know. In fact, it was real interesting. I went to their economic development council to visit the—the director there and up on the board, on a—on a blackboard was this list of cities who are their
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competitors in the world, five or six or something. It’s Sydney and I don’t remember, but Houston was in that list. Oh, that’s really odd. Well, it turned out to be because of the port because they’re a great port, you know, and so the port aspect of Houston was something they noticed and paid attention to in a way I hadn’t. I didn’t even—port? Oh, yeah, that’s right, we have a port, you know. So that was a learning trip that was sort of beyond belief, you know. I met some great people and I learned a lot and—and came back and started doing slide shows and presentations and writing and saying we are going to found a smart growth movement here in Houston. So smart growth I had learned about serendipitously, you know, it’s amazing how things happen when you start to look. When you start to think about one thing, all of a sudden, everything’s about that. You know, it’s—
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there’s a saying about it, having to do with windows. I’ve forgotten it, but—but yeah, I—as soon as I started to think about urban growth, I get a postcard on my desk that’s about a conference in Austin, which is just down the road, and it’s about smart growth. It’s called New Partners for Smart Growth and it turned out to be the second such conference. Now there have been, I don’t know, I’ve—I’ve—I just went to one a couple of weeks ago in Washington, I think we’re up to fifteen or so and I’ve gone to all of them. But smart growth, that sounded good. If we’re going to grow, let’s be smart. That sounds good, I like that. So I went to this conference and that’s where I learned who to—who to talk to and who to meet and who—and what cities were, you know, how—what to focus on. And so that has actually been the thread
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for—since 1998 that I’ve gone to these smart growth conferences. Now I speak at them, but—but it—it keeps the, you know, it just keeps it going. I mean, the network gets bigger and bigger and those people who are doing this work are phenomenal people all over the country and all over the world. So it’s a—it’s a real source for me for—for both inspiration and knowledge, how to—well, what should we be trying to do, you know, because cities are, you know, they are so complicated and they’re obviously big. I know that Houston’s one of the biggest, in terms of the geographic area, you know, and so when you—when you start to look at scale and you say well, gee, that’s interesting that all of New York with its eight million people and all of its suburbs and farms and everything will fit inside the Beltway, it’s an interesting, you know, thing to sort of contemplate when, you know, when we—by
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the time we get to eight million people, which is actually coming pretty quickly in Houston, we’ll be occupying a space about the size of New Jersey. All—the state of New Jersey. So the scale there as we are using land as if there’s no end and it’s cheap and th—th—disposable and in New York, they’re very, very parsimonious about land use. As a result, New York, people will say, is the greenest city in America, or Manhattan is the greenest place in America because there’s so little energy use, emissions per capita, all those things are, you know, they’re miniscule compared to the way we have developed. So—so, you know, looking at cities has proved to be the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in my life, you know, because
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it’s, what, human habitat, you know, and—and if you can begin to actually see us, you know, if you studied termites and how they build something and what they do and the energy stuff that goes on in a big termite mound in Africa and all that and you realize well, that’s what we do. We’re just these little termites, these human termites who do all that stuff, too. It’s just that we can really do big stuff, you know. Enormous things you can see from space.
DT: Maybe you can talk about how you could make that human termite mound in a planned, coherent way. I think that in 2001, the Gulf Coast Institute launched something called Blueprint Houston and I was curious why you felt that was necessary and how that came about and what’s sort of come of it?
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DC: Well, a lot of things, you know, that come from drinking. I had a little group of people that would come to my office maybe once a week and—and we’d have a bottle of wine and we’d talk—after work and we’d talk about, okay, what is it? You know, what’s the one big thing that could happen in Houston that we could all get behind and make happen that would sort of change everything? And when you realize that you listen to a lot of people in the region and you—you sort of get it that, for everybody, it’s a problem that the City of Houston doesn’t have a plan. I remember hearing the planning director of—of Dickenson, I think, say it doesn’t matter how carefully we plan our community because we have this eight hundred pound gorilla in the middle of us that’s just thrashing around, has no idea where it’s
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going or what it wants to do or what its dreams for the future are and we’re totally at its, you know, sort of whim of, you know. And—and so I began to study this idea of comprehensive plans and (inaudible) well, yes, Houston’s the only big city that doesn’t have one, a comprehensive plan for the future. Why wouldn’t you do that, you know, where you bring everybody together and—and you sort of agree on directions and values, you know, fundamental stuff. And then you make sure that everything you’re doing is going in that direction. And you consider everything—health ca—education, air quality, everything, you know, at once. And so we all agreed, that was what was the missing thing, that it could change the whole region if the—Houston would have a general plan for the future. So we thought we would launch that as an idea in August of that year, which was the beginning of political
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season, the—look—that we were going to have a city election that year. And at that time, Lee Brown was the mayor running for reelection. And we thought well, let’s get this into the election process somehow. Let’s make this an issue in the campaign—planning. And the way we’d do it was use a—a vehicle we have called the Thousand Friends of Houston, which is something that’s modeled after—originally after the Thousand Friends of Oregon and there’s a dozen or so state organizations like that that get lots of citizens involved, financially usually, to talk about how to protect some aspect of—of what they’re doing in their—in that state. Wh—so we
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made it the first city, metropolitan one, so Thousand Friends of Houston was launched and we used it to buy an ad in—in a—in a up—at that time, the Upper Kirby District had a—had a newspaper called The Progressive and we bought two full page ads in that. And the first page of it was—had this sort of blank piece of paper with a shadow under it and it said this is Houston’s plan for the future. And then the second page said we the people need a plan. And we said let’s start now and, you know, we outlined some stuff, it looked kind of Constitution like and—or Declaration of Independence like. And it—it worked. I mean, it got people talking about it and they got into the mayoral debates and it got support from—from Lee Brown in a sort of general way. But along the way, in—in—in—in our conversations as we were having some wine, we thought, you know, what would be really cool is if we could
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get a whole slate of candidates to run for city council and mayor on this platform of a general plan, so that everybody was for the same thing. So that if you were going to elect one, you’d elect them all, you know. We’d sweep the government just the way the Citizens for Good Schools did back in the day and—and—and Peter Brown, at that time, architect and planner and one of—one of the people that was talking with us. Steve Kleinberg, another one. Peter said okay, I’ll run. I think he said he’d run for mayor, but—but maybe Steve Kleinberg would run for mayor and we—we all talked about that stuff, you know. So we all know now that Peter Brown ac—actually did run for council at large and—and is now in his second term as a council member and is considering a run for mayor. So it’s interesting to note those conversations
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back then. Oh, and the—and he still carries the—the ball of the general plan at—at city council, you know. And we’re making some progress. We—we actually are making some progress. I think the city is embarked on a type of general plan that will, I hope, evolve into the real full-blown thing. But I think we’re off the dime. An—anyway, to go back, we—we—with the mayor’s blessing, we went to Houston Endowment and asked for money to—to launch this big process to bring citizens together to talk about their values and their goals in a way that would produce a consensus document that w—was to be called a Citizen’s Vision for Houston’s Future, that with—with any luck, you’d put it together in appropriate way that actually no one would disagree with it. And then that’s what we think we’ve produced now. So we got the money from Houston Endowment and we called the initiative Blueprint
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Houston. So that actually was named in September of 2002. Blueprint Houston, it was a Gulf Coast Institute project for a couple of years and then—and then we spun it off as its own 501(c)3, which it is today and I’m still the co-chair of it and so it’s still—we share offices and it’s still very much, oh, you know, very close to—to what we do.
DT: Is there a way for you to connect the plan that Blueprint Houston was trying to assemble with some of the solutions that Parks Foresight (inaudible) was envisioning? Is there a connection between those two?
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DC: Oh, yes. Absolutely. In fact, that might have been where I heard the term, comprehensive plan, because in that process of a lot of people meeting to talk about clean air, we—we sort of got—went beyond refineries and began to realize that if you had this huge chunk, which at that time was around forty percent of the air quality issues coming from transportation as they are today, the carbon issues, wh—that was only going to get worse because we’re going to drive more and more people, all that. So what’s the solution to that? How do—how do we get people to drive less? Well, the only way to get them to drive less is for things to be closer together. Transit, smart growth, all that, you know, and so more compact development, more convenient communities where you don’t even have to drive for some things and so
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on. So that project was very much full of smart growth principles and recommendations that had to do with smart growth, which had to do with having a general plan for the future. So I’m—I’m—I’m almost certain that comprehensive plan was mentioned in that forecast report as a—as a—a solution to—to air quality problems anyway.
DT: And you’d mentioned earlier this idea of changing the paradigm, changing the story, changing the frame. How is Blueprint Houston’s frame or paradigm different from the status quo here in Houston?
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DC: Well, maybe there’s two paradigms that are changing. One of them was—the first one was what is Houston’s story? I was at a conference in New York w—way back, an organization called the Congress for New Urbanism, which is an enormous effort of planners and architects all over the world who have put together a, you know, a charter for new urbanism that talks about how to build the kinds of communities we’re talking about here. And on the first day, the opening slide, the PowerPoint slide of this Congress for the New Urbanism was a picture of the West Loop with cars and smog and a big sign on the top of, you know, text on the tops that said Global Houston. And the guy said the purpose of New Urbanism is to defeat or prevent Global Houston. And I went boy, that’s a bad rap. I mean, it’s probably true, but you know, that’s what everybody thinks. We want to make sure
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that our cities don’t do what Houston did. So Houston’s story, both internally and externally, was that we drive a lot, it’s all concrete, the air is terrible, signs everywhere. Nothing—you know, it was a really bad, negative story and it was one that a lot of people here believed because it was largely true, you know. It wasn’t the whole story, obviously, but it was all—that stuff all existed and we all know that. And I thought the story, if you—if—if we keep having that story in front of us all the time as that’s what we are and if that’s the story we keep telling inadvertently, we’re not going anywhere. We need a new story and the new story was now we will use the term green city as that we can be—we don’t have to be that. We can have a different future, we can think about being something else. And so that’s all we’ve
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done is like for ten years is try—keep trying to say there’s another story. There’s something else Houston can be, we can be better. Our first bumper sticker said Houston should be a better place to live. You know, it was a wa—you know, a lot of people were offended by that, which—because it implied it wasn’t perfect, you know, but—but that was the—that was the approach and—and so a couple of years ago, we launched a—our green city—maybe it’s almost three now—movement that—and all my slide shows now begin with this text that says Green City, Garden City. You know, that plays on the fact that Houston is an incredibly lush place. I mean, we are in the richest ecosystem in North America, according to Jim Blackburn, and we have—I should say eco-region and we have eight to ten arguably totally different ecosystems that come together right here, starting up from the Gulf and the woods
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and the prairies, you know, all that stuff. Very rich, very green. You—you fly into Houston, it just doesn’t look like this concrete city, it looks like it’s just ocean of trees, you know. And so play on the fact that people love to garden and maybe we can bring out food as an issue here, you know, and that—that people are—are—people in Houston just love trees and gardens and all that. So it—can we be proud of all that and can we say we could do more and can we begin to use the term green to talk about not just the trees, but about the air quality and the water quality and the way we live and do we drive and the stress and healthy and our children. All, you know, the whole thing. Green. All of it. And that’s been huge, you know, I think, that people now—well, that’s what everybody talks about now in Houston. Nobody was talking about being a leading green city ten years ago and now we are.
DT: Well, so part of what you’re trying to do is change the topic, change the discourse and use that as a way to get to a plan that’s—that’s actually a written document that has some teeth.
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DC: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, totally, at the end of every year when we do our fundraising letter, you know, I have to sit down and reflect and type some things and I always get around to we have totally changed the discussion. Our claim at the Gulf Coast Institute or accomplishment is that we have absolutely changed the civic discussion from something ten years ago to what it is now, very positive and hopeful, I think. And that the plan, which now has a Citizen’s Vision for Houston’s Future waiting for the city to adopt is—is a beautiful vision, you know, that’s a—that’s about Houston being sustainable and Houston being—having sustainable prosperity, is a term we’re using, and having green neighborhoods and the l—you know, all these wonderful, walk-able transits, best—it—it contains the—the goal of
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having the best transportation system in the world. Well, you know, why not? I mean, somebody’s going to have that, I mean, and we’re young and we’re just getting started with that, so why not? So—so that’s where the plan is trying to go and—and—and that all came from the citizens. So the citizens here have that kind of ambition, but they’re scared. Sorry.
(misc.)
DT: When we broke off just a moment ago, we were talking about the ambitions, the goals that I think you found a consensus among a number of people in Houston for a more sustainable city and I guess that begs the question of how do you achieve that goal? And I was hoping that you might be able to give us an example of how that might happen.
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DC: Well, practically speaking, the sort of work plan, if you will, which we have shown around a lot, is for city council to adopt the Citizen’s Vision for Houston’s Future, which has, oh, I don’t know, twenty or so items that are sort of value statements and then twenty-one goals, specific goals. To adopt that is the basis for public policy, period, then—and—and then to say as a next step, now let’s launch a general planning process with that as its basis. In a normal comprehensive plan or general plan process, the city will say okay, we’re going to start now. We’re going to hire a consultant and we’re going to go through this enormous public process that might cost a million and a half dollars to find out what people want. We did that. That’s a gift that wh—actually it was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, sort
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of went into Blueprint to—to actually do the first part of a comprehensive plan. It’s finished, we got it and—and I think it’s bulletproof. So if council would just adopt that and we have done Step One. Step Two is okay, well, what are the strategies that would take us toward—in the direction of having the best transportation system in the world or of having self sufficient neighborhoods that are green and, you know, what are the—walk-able. What are—what are—what—what do we have to do specifically in terms of policy to start going that way? An example is the city doesn’t do sidewalks. The city requires property owners to do sidewalks. Well, you walk around anywhere and you’ll see oh, gosh, there’s no sidewalk here because that property owner just didn’t do it or the sidewalk’s broken apart because they’re not taking care of it. And as result, the whole pedestrian realm is totally discontinued.
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It’s very dangerous and inadequate everywhere and we’re about to have fifty-five transit stations and everybody getting off those trains is going to be on foot, will be a pedestrian. So a policy has to be—well, there’s no other way for us as a community, which is what a city is, to have walk-able areas around those stations unless the community does it and the city get into the business of doing sidewalks in the same way it does streets or water or whatever, pipes, you know. So—so that’s getting to be a specific. Okay, policy. City will do sidewalks. You know, where will we get the money? Well, particularly around transit stations, how about if we say Metro, or transit agency, is required to give twenty-five percent of every penny it makes from the sales tax back to cities for what’s called general mobility funds. So they use them for whatever they want, but the City of Houston, we’re saying, should devote a piece of that to supporting the pedestrians at the trains and so that’s where the money would come from. That means that money wouldn’t be going into some road
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project, but that’s okay, right? Isn’t it fair to—now we got this transit system, we got to figure out how we get people around the neighborhoods. So—so there’s a—from general to specific because the policy or the value was we value walk-ability and we want our neighborhoods to be walk-able and we want the best transporta—you know, so all those things sort of work together. So to those—getting to be very specific kinds of things. But within a general plan, you identify some areas, mobility is usually one, health is sometimes one, healthcare, education, you know, so there’s a whole bunch of topics. In our case, drainage is certainly going to be one, flooding and drainage. And you begin to do a mobility plan, a drainage plan, you know, contained in the general plan and under the auspices of this vision and these policies. And in fact, we are doing that. We’re—the mayor has already launched a mobility plan and the c—and—and—and the scope of work that’s given to the consultant says we’re going to do the Vision for Houston’s Future as the basis.
(misc.)
[End of Reel 2419]
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 sidewalk. 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, you know, an enormous investment in highways that are clearly not what you currently envisioned. So how—how do you replace that with something new? How do you drop that model and pick up a new model?
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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 a—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,
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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 s—very serious urban place. All the early pictures will show you that, that it’s a—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
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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 s—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
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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 s—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
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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
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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?
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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 your—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
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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 s—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 j—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’s comes from driving. So it’s a—you know, it’s a real health issue, it’s serious health issue and it’s very well known and very well studied
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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—m—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 a—it’s a—it’s a metaphor or it’s a—it’s a s—dynamic that you can actually make work. And I think we are showing up as one of
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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 pe—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 work
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in 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
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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. I mean, 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? Well, 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
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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 w—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 (?) or buses or perhaps even rail vehicles? What do you see?
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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
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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 the—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,
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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—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
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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
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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 adon—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
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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 nonstop 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?
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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
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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 a—I’m sure of, you know, not fifty-five stations, you know, that’s a hu—if you try to imagine all of them sort of growing all of a sudden, well, it’s a—an enormous amount of development and so it’s not going to happen fast. It won’t happen overnight. Not a
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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
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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 (inaudible) 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 of—what does Blueprint Houston foresee for dealing with flooding?
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DC: Well, the vision in Blueprint and a—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 m—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
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backyard drainage ditches. Fill them up with concrete, put fences a—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 a—as a s—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
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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 can’t 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
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more of Sim’s Bayou kinds of things happen, Bray’s 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
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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 ch—you know, the—the sort of chute theory that we have now about get the stuff gone. Well, no. If m—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
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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 wha—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 pro—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
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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 s—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 A&M 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, we’ll say we, you know, don’t build in the Katy Prairie. The Katy Prairie helps us not flood and so if we build
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in there, we’ll 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
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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
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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 Commissioner’s 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’s—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
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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 won’t 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
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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?
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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—al—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 hou—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
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America and Europe and everywhere else in the world for thousands of years c—can’t be built now because of this zoning idea. So the—the whole c—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
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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 in Montro—I mean, is Westheimer. Westheimer, go for it. Five story buildings all along West—sure, 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
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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-throughs 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 can’t 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
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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
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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
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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.
(misc.)
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?
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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
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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, you know, 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,
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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 why—why suburban folks are so adamant about not allowing urban folks to live their
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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, I—I—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, 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—I—I don’t have any questions that ultimately then—and the market is, you know, pretty much I—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
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because, you know, land costs m—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
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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. We’re—Waller, you know, which is way out there, way out there is working on a—on
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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 (inaudible). 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—is that a possibility?
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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 re—remembers that that was the case, that this place, of course, was agricultural heaven. Cattle, of course, everybody
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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
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anything—almost anything here and then, unfortunately, as we get to a little bit of global warming, wh—th—there’s more that we can grow. So I think we have to be thay—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
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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 p—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
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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—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. We’ll—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
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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 fulltime now and she comes in and sells at the farmer’s 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
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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, wh—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
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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 a—it’s about health and safety and welfare, you know, and prosperity and all those things. So it’s huge.
(misc.)
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.
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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
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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 imoon—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—
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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
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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 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
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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 (?) their kids, should we be so lucky as to have some.
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.
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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.
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DC: Well thank you very much. What a treat.
[End of Reel 2420]
[End of Interview with David Crossley]