Houston Chronicle  -  June 6, 2007 

 

Houston gets expert advice on what kind of city to be

Urban historian says pro-business stance still works, but professor calls lifestyle new No. 1

By Mike Snyder and Mike Tolson

ust be yourself, Houston.

That was the essence of the message delivered to the Greater Houston Partnership on Tuesday by urban historian Joel Kotkin, who urged the region's leaders not to be seduced by strategies focused on luring the "creative class" of hip young professionals.

Instead, Kotkin argued, Houston should continue its traditions of low taxes and limited regulations to maintain a favorable business environment and a low cost of living. Local governments, he said, should focus on expanding highway capacity and improving street and drainage systems.

"Downtown Houston will never be Midtown Manhattan," said Kotkin, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, and the author of several books on urban issues.

In a report commissioned by the partnership, entitled "Opportunity Urbanism: An Emerging Paradigm for the 21st Century," Kotkin argues that quality-of-life issues such as parks and cultural amenities need not be a top priority of local leaders.

These amenities, he said, develop organically in cities with strong economies that can help lift working-class people into the middle class.

Mayor Bill White said he agrees with Kotkin's description of Houston as an "opportunity city" that's open to new ideas and new residents from diverse backgrounds.

But Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor who has studied Houston for 25 years, said Kotkin's analysis represents a "serious misreading of the new competitive environment facing American cities like Houston in the 21st century."

Kotkin doesn't place enough emphasis on the need to provide a good education to the immigrants and other ethnic minorities who make up most of the Houston area's younger population, said Klineberg, who spoke briefly at the partnership luncheon after Kotkin's speech.

"If Houston is to have anything like the skilled work force we will need in the years ahead," Klineberg said, its leaders must "ensure that all children in Houston, regardless of their parents' incomes, have access to quality health care, to affordable housing and, above all, to truly effective public education from preschool through college."

Kotkin's report highlights the relatively low cost of owning a home in Houston compared to "superstar" cities such as San Francisco and Boston, where most middle-class families can't afford a single-family home.

Access to homeownership was a key motivation for Dave Brown, who moved to Houston from New York City six years ago.

From the lofty perspective of his mid-Manhattan office tower, Brown looked out and saw not the hip and happening center of the universe but a personal and financial dead end. Seven years in a small apartment with a savings account that never seems to grow will do that.

"Something needed to change," said Brown, who worked in human resources and staffing for an information-technology firm. "I didn't think in New York I could obtain the American dream of owning a house and having money in the bank."

A chance trip to see a friend led to a job interview and ultimately a new lifestyle, admittedly far removed from his rural childhood in North Dakota but equally distant from an economic hamster wheel where a stable job seldom translates into upward mobility.

"I also interviewed in Chicago and Minneapolis, but the job and people weren't what I found in Houston," said Brown, 35, who works for an IT consulting firm.

A local recruiter said Houston doesn't deserve its reputation as a hard sell with a bad climate, dull geography, overwhelmed freeways and a vague identity.

"It's a growing city with lots of opportunity," said Marsha Murray, president of Murray Resources, a professional staffing firm. "Houston has a very good reputation to live and raise a family in. A lot of people, believe it or not, prefer the climate. They like it where it's warm. But what we're hearing more and more are good reactions to the school districts and neighborhood environments and the cost of living."

All of that resonated with Toby and Martha Lazor, who just closed on a house in Sienna Plantation, a master-planned community in Fort Bend County, and will be moving in next month. The surroundings may not be quite as pretty as the rolling woodlands around their current home near Stamford, Conn., but the tradeoff seems small in the big picture.

"We'll have 1,000 square feet more in our house, and the price is 45 percent of the cost of our home here," Lazor said. "I don't mind going from a very hefty mortgage to a minimal one. Our children will be able to walk to school. I think the city offers a good range of everything, and I can play golf year round."

The amenities Lazor enjoys so much, however, are not as readily available in many parts of central Houston, where new development is rapidly paving over the remaining open spaces.

This is one reason Klineberg and others said Kotkin should not be so dismissive of quality-of-life issues. Cultural attractions and green spaces are important not only to elites but to "all the levels of talent that we are seeking to attract to this city," Klineberg said.

The discussion of quality-of-life issues in Kotkin's report centers on his criticism of another author, Richard Florida, who has argued that the most successful American cities will be those that attract members of the creative class of well-educated young professionals.

Florida, a public policy professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., said Kotkin is misrepresenting his work and setting up a false choice between creative and opportunity cities. Houston, Florida said, represents both.

``My own interactions with Houston leadership in the early 2000s and visits to neighborhoods like Montrose were inspirational to my creative economic development theory,'' Florida said in a written response to questions from the Houston Chronicle.

Kotkin argues that this is an elitist strategy that can succeed in only a handful of cities that can thrive as enclaves for the wealthy. Houston and most other cities, he said, should focus on keeping homeownership and other economic opportunities available to working- and middle-class families.

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Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

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