Boroughs of Houston
Houston has always been a big proponent of annexation. Unlike many other cities – most notably, Dallas – Houston has always worked to assume control of it’s surrounding suburban areas, and therefore to keep the tax-base of the metropolitan area concentrated mostly in a single jurisdiction.
There are some pros and cons to this. On the plus side this has helped Houston maintain a stable and healthy tax base. On the down side, this has caused Houston’s administrative area to become extraordinarily large. When you include it’s ETJ Houston is about the same size as Rhode Island, and it’s population is about 4x as great.
Another debatable side effect is a lack of geographic coherency. Here’s what I mean by this: Houston is so large that people sometimes run into frustration about the ambiguity of “where” they live. If you live off Westhiemer and Dairy Ashford, you’re in Houston. If you live off Navigation and 76th St, you’re in Houston. If you live in Kingwood, you live in Houston… wait, what?
See what I mean? Houston is a city of cities, it’s a community that is composed of many different and diverse neighborhoods, all of which have unique strengths. I personally think this is one of Houston’s great strengths, but we’re not capitalizing on it very well. It would be advantageous to businesses and neighborhoods in different parts of Houston to have a stronger distinction between themselves. Tory Gattis had a post on this same basic topic yesterday, offering reasons why Houston struggles constantly with it’s “brand” and “identity.”
So what could we do about this?
Why not take a page from New York and organize the city as a collection of boroughs? Each borough could have a municipal center fully equipped to handle all the daily goverment services within its jurisdiction, but the big-picture policy and management would still be handled at the City level. The boroughs could serve another useful function as well: the current City Council districts (which are a bit arbitrary and unwieldy) could instead be aligned to geographically logical boroughs.
Perhaps the biggest reason for doing this, is that providing a means for the creation of partially autonomous, locally responsive, and broadly represented districts could significantly reduce resistance to annexation. By continuing to annex, the City can keep its tax base intact, unify and standardize the regulatory environment for the region, and preserve a degree of political and psychological independence between areas that are very different from each other.
To take a stab at what this might look like, I’ve drawn up a map of the Houston region organized into 18 boroughs. These include a few major annexation areas – the Pasadena/LaPorte area (to better unify Houston’s industrial and port activities), the Woodlands and the Sugarland/Ft.Bend County area (to better unify Houston’s emerging employment centers) and the Katy, Cy-Fair, and Tomball areas (to capture high growth areas that are also in the important headwaters of many of the region’s waterways).
Here’s what that looks like visually (with areas in red that I think are the most controversial):
Also, if you have Google Earth, you can download this as a KMZ File and look at it up close.
Now, here’s the thought process I went through in creating this.
- First I tried to divide the area into logical chunks that made sense psychographically as a related chunk of the city.
- Second, I tried to make sure that every borough would have a logical ‘center’, ie. a physical location that would be well suited for both an employment center and a civic/governance center. I looked for either areas that already have this kind of facility in place, or have large redevelopable parcels (vacant lots or big surface parking areas).
- Third, I looked at placing the borough boundaries on logical physical barriers. I prefer waterbodies, but I somtimes used freeways. When the logical location for a boundary was very close to an existing political boundary I used that instead (such as the Ft. Bend County Line between the Southwest, South, and Sugarland Boroughs).
- Lastly, I tried to make each borough similar in size.
This is by no means a perfect map, but I hope it’s a good conversation starter. And on that note, take a look at the map, think about it, and let me know your thoughts and ideas!
I think this kind of organizational system could make the government more efficient and more responsive to citizens by distributing it more logically, and by significantly reducing (hopefully eliminating!) the overlap between the city and county government. I also think this would help with annexation by taking care of some of the major fears that smaller communities have about annexation – especially that their government will now be remote and unresponsive, and that they’ll lose their identity as a distinct community.
What say you?
Categories: choose, featured
Tags: administration, assembly, boroughs, council, divisions, geography, governance, Houston, politics, representation
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7 Comments
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Divide the city into boroughs and we’d have more duplication of government, more government payroll and more incompetence.
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I can’t say that I’d find any worthwhile reason to advocate the idea of subdividing into boroughs, but just to highlight a few quibbles with the map as-is:
1. Gulfton & Fondren SW combined with … the Galleria? I think it’s worth injecting at least a few doses of political reality by making a few concessions to population balance and carving more culturally contiguous regions. If such a concept were to ever happen, I think it would be a given that River Oaks would be combined with the Golden Circle region around the Galleria.
2. The East End combined with West U … even deeper within political reality, there’s going to be a matter of the Voting Rights Act (in whatever form the Roberts Court leaves it in). Other examples of this problem can be seen in the way that the largely Hispanic Northside is almost perfectly dissected by the Hardy Tollroad and the even more impressive tri-section of the emerging Westside Hispanic communities around the Jersey, Memorial, and Northwest clusters.
3. Greenspoint and Spring … Will. Not. Happen.
4. Katy … should probably be even more red than The Woodlands or Sugar Land.
5. You go beyond county lines for several areas, but not to capture Pearland or Friendswood. Why not go whole hog?
Obviously, redrawing the lines will create new winners and new losers within new political jurisdictions. It probably goes without saying that it’s easier to accept the current situation than it would be to craft new ones that multiply the problem.
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Greg,
I’m not a politician, so frankly I was looking strictly at the functional, infrastructural, physical relationships between places. I’d rather leave the politicking to the politicians — ie, if anyone at city hall actually gave five minutes thought to this I’m sure they’d manipulate the boundaries for political gain. However, I’d rather give them a starting point that was based strictly on infrastructure and topography than one that had major political concerns rammed in at the beginning.
As for not grabbing Pearland…
You know, I thought about that. The reason I decided not to was 1: to stay out of Brazoria County, and 2: because I couldn’t see how one could create any boroughs down there that were comparable to the ones in the rest of the city in size or population. You’d either have a disproportionately huge borough or a disproportionately underpopulated one.
Of course, the South Borough is underpopulated as well, but it’s adjacent to the Medical Center, and I personally think that area should be recipient of a deliberate effort to promote development.
Anyway, that was my reasoning, and of course it’s not perfect. If you’re interested, I’d love to see you make a map with your ideas!
-Andrew
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The reality is that over the past decade the City of Houston has systematically eliminated the prospect of annexing its suburbs through a series of Limited Purpose Annexations and Strategic Partnerships Agreements. And if that weren’t enough of an impediment, the legislature and voting rights act make annexing even more difficult.
Anyway, and sadly, regional annexations are simply no longer an option for the City of Houston. There will be no more Clear Lake land grabs. There will be no more Kingwoods. And there will be no taking of The Woodlands.
But setting that issue aside for a moment, the notion of creating 18 mini-governments seems unnecessarily expensive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, unnecessarily confusing, but a very good way to would undermine efforts to generate regional solutions to regional problems.
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This is like just about the worst idea possible. Political corruption and cronyism magnifies exponentially the more layers of government you have. Compare/contrast Houston to New Orleans if you want to see what happens there.
Or look at what happens when you try to put a new development in NYC. Read up on the Atlantic Yards / Forest City Ratner saga and the Ashby High-Rise protests start to look like so many letters to the editor.
The gigantic, flat, monolithic character of Houston’s political organization makes this a smooth, streamlined city and is a benefit to everyone. “Boroughs” would balkanize the metropolis, turning Houstonian against Houstonian, and taking the city away from its prosperous dynamism towards the cloistered localism that characterizes regions like the Los Angeles basin, where every little suburb is incorporated as its own entity.
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Ok, clearly at this point no commenter is getting what I’m saying.
I have no interest in balkanizing Houston. I don’t see any greater administrative authority given to a borough than is currently given to a city council district. There would be no difference in the ordinances or procedures or anything else between these boroughs, they would all remain standardized.
What I would be interested in seeing is the city break down its customer services into logical districts that people could intuitively relate to.
So, for example: there would only be one parks department. However, the parks department would have one office in each borough that served as the main workplace for work related to that borough. That office would be able to handle local customer service issues, so people in the area wouldn’t have to drive so far to deal with such things.
There already is this kind of ‘branch office’ structure for most of the city’s services, but they aren’t distributed according to any kind of logic, nor are they clustered together in any kind of easily recognizable destination except in Downtown.
What I’m basically proposing is the organization of the current government into points of contact that are more local, and leveraging that organization to help promote identity and awareness of Houston’s many diverse ‘cities within the city’.
The goal would be to put the people who are working in a community IN THAT COMMUNITY, so that they would be more in-tune to the needs of that community.
The only point is to make this vast city more local for the majority of people who live in it by organizing points of contact with the government geographically. Anything that would result in dividing the city against itself would run counter to the goal I’m discussing.
Lastly and most importantly, I think that if such a strategy were taken Houston might find it was able to annex some of the areas that are currently politically unfeasible to annex. This would spread the “standardized” environment farther than it currently extends and REDUCE balkanization, in my opinion an important priority for any healthy metropolitan region.
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Interesting clarification.
Still, if annexation is part of your plan, the plan needs to be redrawn. The City has entered into agreements with hundreds of MUDs that specifically preclude the option of annexation. Additionally, any annexation discussion must include an analysis of the economic impact of the taking… if the City annexes an area it assumes all of the debt of the area, in addition to all of the service demand of that area. And there is a lot of debt, and there is a lot of service demand in the ETJ.
Anyway, annexation is a non-starter. But aside from that, there are a score of other issues peppering the proposal that, in my judgment, make this very inventive idea poor public policy.
For the record, I share many of your concerns. But given the ungainly nature of Houston and its GMSA and the economic, demographic, political and pragmatic realities that define it, if your initiatives are to be addressed they must be tackled regionally.