Whatever shall we do…

“How can we save the suburbs?” asks Allison Arieff.

In urban areas, there’s rich precedent for the transformation or reuse of abandoned lots or buildings. Vacant lots have been converted into pocket parks, community gardens and pop-up stores (or they remain vacant, anxiously awaiting recovery and subsequent conversion into high-end office space condos). Old homes get divided into apartments, old factories into lofts, old warehouses into retail.

Projects like Manhattan’s High Line show that even derelict train tracks can be turned into something as valuable to citizens as a vibrant public park. A brownfield site in San Francisco has been cleaned up and will house an eco-literacy center for the city’s youth. Hey, even a dump (Fresh Kills, on Staten Island) is undergoing a remarkable metamorphosis into a recreation area.

But similar transformation within the carefully delineated form of a subdivision is not so simple. These insta-neighborhoods were not designed or built for flexibility or change.

So what to do with the abandoned houses, the houses that were never completed or the land that was razed for building and now sits empty?

I couldn’t have phrased this better. This is the problem with suburban design, it’s a one-use and one-use only infrastructure design for all time.

Markets come, markets go, products change with time. In an urban area with an efficient multi-modal infrastructure system, any kind of use can thrive. In some of the most dramatic conversions, old industrial areas in many urban centers have become new high-end residential communities! But the same cannot be said for suburbia, it is unchangeable by design.

Now, in a place like Houston we have the GREAT fortune of not being limited by zoning. Zoning is a futile attempt by government to predict/declare what the market will desire (have no choice) to build. We’ve been spared that boondoggle.

What we do have is a ridiculous set of auto-oriented design standards that we hold projects to, which by nature limit development outside the loop to suburban pod/collector configurations. For reference, everything outside of 610 is defined as “suburban” in the city’s ordinances, and inside the loop is considered “urban,” however, only the area in the CBD allows truly urban built-to-the-street structures to be built without a variance.

We need to embrace our uniqueness as a metro area, and embrace form-based code. That’s what we already have! Now, let’s improve on it by setting logical, mandatory standards for building placement and street network design that create a flexible, adaptable, sustainable market in every part of the city. Where local management districts and neighborhoods wish to voluntarily adopt additional architectural standards, they should be able to.

The basic framework of our city code of ordinances needs to coordinate private development with public infrastructure. Buildings need to be placed on the street in a way that supports multi-modal transportation. Street networks need to be highly connective and efficiently distribute traffic. And in some cases, development may need to be limited to lower densities (or restricted) for a time so that existing infrastructure capacity is not being wasted on empty lots while new water mains and thoroughfares are being built out into the fringe to support the first scattered seeds of ever expanding development. All that would protect our tax base AND our property rights AND our public health and safety.

What can we do with unbuilt suburbs? Not much. I know there are people with some ideas about this, and some of them may even be very good ideas. But there isn’t an easy, obvious solution to the idea of retrofitting old suburbs, except to somehow push enough new growth to them that the product they were designed for can come back into viability. That’s not a good long term approach to city-building, and it’s not what we in Houston should do.

I’d love to hear thoughts on this one, but please don’t email, post in comments so other readers can see what you have to say! Thanks!