[M II A II R II K]

‘Detached Townhomes,’ Gentrifying The Gentrifiers And Housing Regulation That Is Uniquely Houston


Apr 29, 2021

By Kinder Institute Research

Read More: https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/20...-secret-zoning

“Re-Taking Stock: Understanding the Connections between Housing Trends and Gentrification in Harris County.” https://kinder.rice.edu/research/re-...-are-connected

.....

Something is really going right in Houston with its housing growth patterns. Any city has problems when you look at it under the microscope, and Houston is no exception, but that can also cause us to lose sight of things that are positive. Houston is doing things that most other big U.S. cities’ political establishments say they want to achieve, but unlike most other places, in Houston, the talk is actually being matched with results on the ground. But, that doesn’t mean Houston is a Shangri-La for housing. As the report shows so well, the city’s neighborhoods are evolving in different ways that are highly complex and tough to summarize with a single catchphrase.

- That brings me to my second observation: gentrification. Although, in my view, still a useful concept, the term gentrification has come to so thoroughly dominate discourse about growing U.S. cities that it flattens out a lot of the complexity and variety driving the ways in which neighborhoods in cities are changing. The sophisticated analysis in “Re-Taking Stock” makes it possible to tell a more nuanced and ultimately richer story of the city’s evolution in its fullness. — And, finally, even if there is a lot to celebrate regarding Houston’s growth patterns, and even if gentrification is not the only problem the city’s vulnerable residents face — far from it — those residents still face a lot of housing-related challenges. The Houston story shows the limitations of what simply allowing housing, which Houston has done better than just about anywhere else, can do. The silver lining here is that Houston’s unique system of regulating housing may allow for some unusual strategies that could help safeguard its historically disenfranchised populations and vulnerable newcomers alike. But it’s going to take some serious effort and taxpayer dollars, and it won’t happen overnight.

- If you think of Houston’s Inner Loop (the area inside Interstate 610) as equivalent to a decent-sized U.S. city, the “Re-Taking Stock” authors observe that the area is growing faster than many other hot-market U.S. cities of equivalent size, and capturing a pretty healthy share of the overall region’s growth. Appendix 5 shows the construction of a whopping almost 75,000 units inside the Loop in just the 13 years leading up to 2018, almost a fifth of the countywide total on just 5% of the land. That’s really great! Houston’s urban core is flourishing, with new residents, expanding public transportation, abundant and expanding cultural attractions, and all of the other good things that happen when a downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods regain vitality and commerce after decades of nonstop suburbanization. — Urban planning wonk types (I plead guilty to being one of them) sometimes call this aspiration “Smart Growth.” My sense is that Smart Growth isn’t a big part of the discourse in Houston, but I’m struck by how Houston is getting it done — at least the “thickening up of the urban core” part, if maybe not the “restraining suburban sprawl” part in a way that a lot of other cities aren’t.

- What about when you get into what’s happening in individual neighborhoods? “Re-Taking Stock” shows that there is a lot going on, and it’s hard to sum it all up neatly, because it’s highly varied. One of the seven featured neighborhoods, Third Ward, looks like a classic case of gentrification, with a proudly majority-Black, downtown-adjacent neighborhood now being transformed by an influx of mostly affluent, college-educated whites. Even so, as of 2018, Kinder Institute data shows the neighborhood as still being almost two-thirds African American, so the transformation is not (yet?) as complete as it has been in other famously gentrified neighborhoods such as Central East Austin. — This may be in part because of what Kinder Institute researchers call “gentrifiers being gentrified” in Montrose and in other areas west of downtown and Midtown. That doesn’t happen in most cities. In most booming cities, after the residents of neighborhoods comparable to Montrose reach a certain level of affluence and amenity, they agitate via the local political process to slam the door shut on new development. Part of Houston’s secret sauce is that it makes it a lot harder to halt housing growth, and that applies even in some affluent communities.

- Houston’s unique system of regulating housing (less than other places) offers some unique possibilities, maybe not all of which are yet being used to their full potential to solve some of these thorny problems. First of all, the Kinder Institute report makes the diversity of housing types in new construction in Houston abundantly clear. In Austin, by and large, we build huge new apartment buildings, or else we tear down existing single-family houses and replace them with much larger and far more expensive single-family houses, or at best duplexes. — In Houston, what the Kinder Institute calls the “detached townhome” is a real secret weapon for land-efficient, easy-to-build new housing, made with inexpensive wood-framed construction. It is a housing type that’s rare in most cities but close to 34,000 of them were built in Harris County from 2005 to 2018 (Table 1). The detached townhome is versatile — it can be high-end or entry-level, or it can be used for below-market-rate homeownership, or rental for that matter. Maybe some of them could have their ground floors converted to commercial uses someday that maybe sounds crazy, but that was a routine practice in American cities before zoning existed. Unlike large apartment buildings, detached townhomes can be built in small increments, on a single residential lot, if necessary.

.....