In Defense of Townhouses
Everyone I know in Houston hates townhouses. They are seen as the product of greedy developers pushing out longtime residents to put up out-of-place homes in established neighborhoods that have a history worth preserving. No one who read Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities would agree with this sentiment, and it has always seemed wrong to me. I understand the desire for historic preservation, but achieving this can mean turning whole neighborhoods into museums. It’s hard not to have mixed feelings about this—Houston eagerness to forget its past is unseemly. There are other ways to preserve history beyond encasing whole neighborhoods in amber.
Houston has problems. Many of which are a result of its endless sprawl. If you take a single family home with a front and back yard in Montrose and turn it into a pad for six new townhouses, higher housing density is achieved on that block. If you think that increased density is something good for a city, then you should be pro-townhouse.
My pro-townhouse position has felt a little lonely. Almost everyone I know who has an opinion about them believes them to be bad: they are tools of gentrifiers, they increase traffic, they don’t fit in with the neighborhoods they infect, etc. But I recently stumbled across a piece of writing that defends townhouses very well with data.
Between 2005 and 2018, the Inner Loop saw 75,000 new housing units completed, nearly half of which were townhouse units. That’s more housing than San Francisco and Oakland produced, combined, over the same period. The Inner Loop also outperformed the rest of the Houston region in housing production. The area comprises 5% of the total land area of Harris County but accounted for 19% of new housing built between 2005 and 2018.
This is from “Learning from Houston” by Benjamin Schneider in his newsletter Urben [sic] Field Notes. He hasn’t written much there (just two posts as of now), but he writes that his posts will one day be a book called “A Field Guide to American Urbanism”.
Houston is famous for having “no zoning”, but this depends on how zoning is defined. Parking minimums, street setbacks, and minimum lot sizes are effectively zoning, and they are aimed at making Houston more convenient for cars to transport people from their suburbs to their workplaces. But these laws have been loosened in recent years.
For years, the city had a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet in most neighborhoods — the standard in your typical postwar suburb. But in 1998, the city changed that rule to 1,400 square feet, unleashing a transformative wave of townhouse development.
To me what is interesting is that most of the townhouse construction has been inside the Loop. Why is this? My theory is that too many neighborhoods outside the Loop have restrictive covenants to prevent the “undesirable” construction—industrial construction, obviously, but also apartments and townhouses. In any case, inside the Loop is a cornucopia of townhouses. (All the photos here are taken in the museum district and Midtown, where I live.)
Deed restrictions are private, right? Not exactly. In Houston, they are not enforced by HOAs (i.e., your friendly neighborhood fascists), but by the city itself. Nolan Grey, on his blog Market Urbanism, writes, “Houston’s deed restrictions are enforced by government officials at taxpayer expense. . . . [I]n the aftermath of the failed 1962 referendum to adopt zoning, the Texas state legislature gave Houston the right to publicly enforce deed restrictions.” Not that I think this makes a big difference—if it feels like zoning, it doesn’t matter who is enforcing it.
To be certain, townhouses add to traffic in the neighborhoods where they are built. If a house is torn down and replaced by, say, four townhouses, that is at least three more cars added to that street. And Houston does a terrible job providing mass transit for those 75,000 new housing units. The struggles to build any new light rail lines shows how hostile the powers that be are to mass transit here. Freeway-building decisions come from the state government, which is controlled by ultra-right-wing Houston haters. For them, if a new freeway destroys a neighborhood, no problem. If it is a black or Hispanic neighborhood, all the better.
The point is, whatever problems townhouses have, their benefits strike me as undeniable. I am willing to entertain seriously arguments against them, but I am utterly opposed to turning neighborhoods into unchanging museums of past architectural and planning fads, like car-dependent subdivisions or “ranch houses.” Can Houston evolve from a car-centric city to one that values other ways of living? Perhaps not. It would be an extremely difficult transformation. But can the Inner Loop become more dense and less dependent on private cars? Absolutely. If old suburbs like the Heights and Montrose are transformed into truly urban neighborhoods, and the city provides better transportation options , it will happen. For people like me who value city life, it is a much hoped for transformation.
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