Beyond the Parking Lots

I grew up along the live oaks in a neighborhood near downtown Houston. We walked nowhere, always driving even the most trivial of distances in massive, American SUVs, minivans, and lifted trucks. Down the street from my home there is a small collection of heavy industry warehouses, and northwards there is a mixture of parking lots, defunct grocery stores, and the white oak bayou which eventually meanders into the small cluster of skyscrapers we call our downtown. The streets here are concrete and the hard curbs are painted with Texas flags, longhorn logos and broad swipes of Aggie maroon. Minus minor stints in small-town Louisiana and rural Pennsylvania, I spent the entirety of my childhood in a one-story brick house in Houston.

I never imagined American cities any differently. Likewise, it didn’t occur to me that Houston could be interesting. Behind NASA (actually located in Webster) and megahighways, what is there in this affront to urban planning?

The Carcinogenic Coast

I have long joked, likely alongside many others, that everyone in Houston is employed by either oil & gas or healthcare. Once, a classmate in California who also happened to have grown up in Houston, disagreed with my statement. “My dad is a lawyer,” she told me.

“Lawyer? Where?”

“ExxonMobil,” said she. And so the theory was proven.

Jokes aside, it is indeed difficult to find a family who is not related to these industries in any way. Houston boasts the largest medical center in the world as well as major headquarters for BP, ExxonMobil, Enbridge, ConocoPhillips, and Shell. My father works on environmental health and safety (EHS) for an energy supplier in town, and across the gulf coast region there are many people who have spent time “on the rig.” Houston is the epicenter of this industry.

It follows that, unlike many other places in the United States, Houstonians are able to change energy suppliers at-will, depending on their active promotions. Television commercials will advertise free or low-rate electricity for off-peak hours in hopes to entice families to swap energy suppliers. It is possible to bounce from supplier-to-supplier like how other Americans might change cellphone carriers or change banks for a better rate.

The darker impact of this reality is the miles upon miles of refineries visible between Beaumont and Houston. On the way to San Jacinto, both sides of the highway are strangled by distillation units and blending chambers. Some of them even have murals painted on them. If you stop at a nearby gas station, the price for unleaded will begin with a 2.

But the name carcinogenic coast has its sick consequences. The upper gulf coast is Texas’ cancer alley, with Harris county boasting cancer rates above the national average. Decades of lax oversight and oil domination have made Houstonians blind to the sheer number and overt dominance of refineries on our horizons, ultimately making them background noise only apparent when something horrific happens. In 2023, a Shell refinery just outside the city experienced a shocking fire that sent dark plumes to the skies above the homes of hundreds of thousands of residents in east Houston. A similar fire in March 2017 darkened the skies above my high school, with subsequent rains causing rashes to appear on the arms of myself and my younger sibling. When refinery accidents occur so often that they only make the news if the plumes are frightening enough, unsuspecting high schoolers like we were at the time will continue to play tennis during an acidic rainstorm.

In reality, refinery accidents occur often though that it is pointless to lay out their many examples in long form here. Suffice it to say that maneuvering around the refineries and their consequences is a way of life along the coast here. What would the country do without us?

Troubled Histories

Along the corridors of refineries one can make the journey from Houston to San Jacinto or Galveston.

San Jacinto, for its part, is a historic site often visited by Houston schoolchildren when they learn about Texas’ war for independence. What is seldom shared outright is that the war was waged in an effort to conserve the institution of slavery in Texas. Indeed, when abolition was on the horizon, Texas, early settlers decided to separate from Mexico for fear that the country would enforce its laws banning the cruel practice. As I have already spent months of my life writing about San Jacinto, the Texan spaces created by this will be elaborated upon in another post. Suffice it to say that the gravitational pull of this monument is incredibly relevant to the attitude of Houston.

Galveston, as a former slave trade hub and confederate stronghold, was the beating heart of Texas before it was eviscerated by a deadly hurricane in 1900. As a child I made semi-frequent visits to the Moody Mansion and Bishop’s Palace, two surviving examples of the beautiful Victorian-era architecture that survived the legendary storm and floods. Aside from the warm, silty waters of the gulf, Galveston is perhaps best known for being the final location where Major General Gordon Granger arrived to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and oversee Reconstruction in Texas. At that time, Galveston had been a prospering trade hub, but 35 years later after the island had been brought to its knees by the hurricane, Houston became the beneficiary of the success of Galveston island.

This truth is evident when wandering the streets of Houston’s older neighborhoods. Houston is filled with homes erected in the early 1900s that were build to survive floodwaters they may have never experienced. One home on 11th street was famously erected by a man who had tragically lost his entire family in the hurricane in Galveston. Even the new houses built amongst the oldest ones are increasingly built substantially above grade, particularly when they are located near the bayous. In light of global warming, it is become increasingly clear that the water level is rising beyond what the city’s infrastructure is currently able to manage.

Although Houston was nothing but a speck on the map during the antebellum south’s heyday, it bears the scars of a segregated southern city even now. Despite being one of the most racially diverse cities in the United States, Houston’s stark divide between east and west (see: seas of refineries located in the east) in tandem with its system of wards that outline historically Black neighborhoods ensure that structural failures inevitably impact areas that are predominantly Black or Hispanic. The city is working to rectify this inequality, now more than ever. And change seems inevitable: the 21st century has seen Houston’s most rapid demographic change as the city has been majority minority since 2000—the year I was born.

End Game of Capitalism

As I described Houston’s flooding effects of climate change and environmental damage caused by the same oil companies advertising good deals on television, some will focus on the flooding and others on finding lower prices. I have long wondered, is this the final beast of western civilization?

The funny thing is, Houston isn’t really one of the cities that seems to most benefit from all it produces. The sludge pulled out of the gulf is refined here, the pollutants remain and the energy travels across the grid to light homes and businesses elsewhere. The energy companies are based here out of necessity, but many of them are selling product worldwide to benefit cities far, far from the Bayou City. Meanwhile, we are left with acid rain and sprawling highways cured only by the sickness of “just one more lane.” This is made allowable by the low gas prices, kept palatable and normalized by car culture and the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Wiess Energy Hall (duly funded by several of the aforementioned major oil and gas companies).

For all its product, Houston is a B-class world city at best. With gas, my family has jokes that our hometown is best known for NASA, Beyoncé, and the cough syrup-and-sprite concoction known as Lean. Our city is the fourth most populous in the nation yet oft forgotten, mentioned frequently only in urban planning YouTube videos posted by creators lambasting the city for its horrendous urban planning or alleged lack of foresight.

In spatial form, a Houston is a libertarian’s wet dream, close to a restrictionless sandbox where it is legal to build close to anything. Unlike in other American cities, you can build a gas station next to a residence—-as described above, my neighborhood was located next to heavy industry and nobody batted an eye. The lack of formal zoning in Houston has prevented the skyrocketing rent prices seen in cities with more restrictive planning practices, sure, but it seems to guarantee that Houstonians live in shockingly close proximity to pollutants and other threats.

Not unlike refineries, the lack of zoning is either a cool quirk or an unnoticed fact of life for Houstonians. This led to a small embarrassment in a college law class during my undergrad where I raised my hand to ask what the professor even meant by “zoning.” His short reply: “where are you from? Houston?”

It may go without saying but the dangers of bad urbanism almost never make themselves known in the wealthiest parts of the city. “Rugged individualism for the poor, socialism for the rich” rears its ugly face in the Wild West of urban planning all too often.

The Importance of Houston

For all its faults, I love this city. I grew up here. And especially as of late I have come to believe that the city has an important place in the discussion that this project, the native city, is trying to start.

I’ve spent much time detailing some of the reasons why Houston might be a complex and troubled place to live. And of course, there are many accompanying reasons why I appreciated growing up in the city: the amazing food, the welcoming culture, the seemingly endless opportunities. But my growing realization that bad urbanism and unaddressed histories have complicated the quality of life here has pushed me to consider what we need to learn from this story.

I have concluded that most of America looks something like Houston. Rapid population growth in the automobile age has encouraged us, from an industry standpoint, to look at individual transportation as the primary mode. Vast swaths of middle America have little in the way of reliable public transport, making Houston not an outlier but representative of that region. Similarly, suburbs of Houston are similar to the low-density middle class developments we have put everywhere in the country; there is seemingly nothing unique about the cookie-cutter, squiggly-line, cul-de-sac beasts popping up in the periphery of the sprawling mass we call Houston.

May I suggest that these places matter too, however unattractive they may be?

Yes… we must consider them in our arguments for a better urbanism and a brighter future. While Houston haters and tornado-alley critics may be proponents of the “just move” strategy, I am more interested in approaches that take into account that people don’t want to leave, weighing the importance of people-place relationships against efficiency based arguments. Relatedly, I believe sustainability arguments centered on efficiency in direct opposition to people and culturally sensitive realities are headed in the absolute wrong—and a rather pointless—direction. Houston’s continued existence must be a piece of our puzzle, and accounting for this rather than advocating for us to leave the whole mess to rot and decay makes for a more interesting and productive solution.

So Houston stays. And we improve it, somehow. Despite 2024 seeing some setbacks, the city is on track to continue to install miles upon miles of bike lanes along streets and bayou greenways. In the housing market, building and development has managed to keep Houston one of the more affordable big cities in the United States. And if Texas sees a political shift in the state legislature and transit approach, the forthcoming highway expansions could be the last to ever take place. Surely coming decades could see population growth force developers to consider building upward instead of outward, especially as the cost of road upkeep threatens to bankrupt the city.

I am also hopeful that Houston can fix some of the inequality I’ve examined in this post, ranging from pollution to flooding and infrastructure upkeep. Omissions and assumptions make frequent appearances in my writing, a shortcoming I am hoping to address. As such I have always taken it for granted, leaving unsaid that our imagined Native City is a healthy and safe place to live for every resident. Houston is far from this, so I believe it is even more important that we articulate the consequences of ill planned industry in the context of cities and incorporate the resulting lessons into our definition of what future cities should strive towards.