And Will Help With Houston’s Flooding and Traffic Problems
By Kyle Hagerty, Bisnow Houston, January 9, 2020
For decades, Houston has been the poster child of urban sprawl, growing to nearly 670 square miles. That story is changing. Years of work from the city and redevelopment authorities are finally paying off, as high-density, mixed-use projects break ground all across the Houston urban core.
“We’re early in the urbanization cycle,” Ziegler Cooper Senior Principal Scott Ziegler said.
Even more importantly, Ziegler sees Houston’s return to our inner core as part of the solution to Houston’s chronic flooding issues. “Quite honestly, I think if we hadn’t expanded out to the suburbs so quickly, we wouldn’t have near the problem. Those developments are the ones flooding the bayous,” Ziegler said. “If Houston had girdled its growth, we would have preserved prairie, pasture and forest lands for drainage. Suburban development has really taken away our drainage capacity.”
Ziegler knows it is a controversial opinion that could get him in trouble, but he said he stands by it. “When we build in the city, we have to have retention. We’ll put in underground tanks and detention infrastructure. In addition to that, we’re going even more vertical, two feet above the 500-year flood plain. Before it was two feet above the 100-year flood plain.” Houston’s lack of zoning may make headlines, but high-rise and mixed-use development in Houston’s inner city is more stringent than single-family home development on the city’s unincorporated, vulnerable edges. As millions flocked to Houston suburbs, local officials ignored stricter building regulations, allowing developers to pave over crucial acres of prairie land that once absorbed huge amounts of rainwater, according to investigative reporting from the Texas Tribune. At the crossroads of gentrification, traffic and flooding, Houston’s densification is one of the most important trends in the city. With the city continuing to grow at a rapid pace, building a resilient and attractive city will be the responsibility of the city’s developers and architects — and they are just getting started.
Read the rest of this article in Bisnow Houston.
