Why is it so hard to say yes to walkability in Houston?...

A few weeks ago, I was walking in Midtown toward Montrose near Spur 527 when I saw a woman on a ladder hanging a sign on a fence.

Her name’s Gwyneth Williams. She lives there on Westheimer. The sign warns that the city wants to close parts of the spur “forever” and advertises a link to a website.

“Tell the city no,” the sign commands.

Have you ever tried to get around here? Even when the beg buttons work, it’s a bad experience, whether you’re in a car or not. Jonathan Brooks, the director of policy and planning for LINK Houston, shared data from the Texas Department of Transportation showing there have been almost 60 crashes here since 2010.

Doreen Stoller, who bikes from Hawthorne to Holman beneath the spur to work as executive director of the Hermann Park Conservancy, told me a few years ago that she sometimes hides behind the signal poles, just in case.

Conducting safety audits at Mayor Sylvester Turner’s request, Brooks’ organization, with BikeHouston, included Spur 527, Hawthorne and Holman on a list of the most dangerous intersections in what is already the deadliest city in the country for “drivers, passengers and people in their path,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

After the audits, in 2018, Mayor Turner made this intersection a priority through his Safer Streets Initiative. He asked a team to look for “corrective measures,” including “infrastructure repairs or improvements.”

It seemed urgent. So, last summer, when Public Works needed to close part of the spur because the infrastructure was literally crumbling, some residents started to hope that those “corrective measures” were coming. As crews cracked away the concrete of the Brazos Street bridge into Midtown, exposing the steel structure, Bill Fulton, the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, just tweeted it out: “What if we never reopened it?”

Here was an opportunity for urbanism, the city started to see. At a public meeting a few months later in February in Montrose, Jeff Weatherford, who oversees transportation and drainage infrastructure as the deputy director of Houston Public Works, presented a preliminary concept for a neighborhood greenway with a shared path and improved intersections.

The city came up with three alternatives. One would knock the rest of the bridge down and close Bagby Street. Another would keep the bridge up as a kind of infrastructural sculpture and “placemaking opportunity.” Another would keep Bagby open to Stuart. Drawn by Ian Hlavacek in Public Works, all would help people on foot and on wheels make connections from all directions between Montrose and Midtown, from Smith to Bagby and Elgin to Holman. Crucially, all include the construction of three raised crosswalks — an urban design feature recommended by the National Association of City Transportation Officials — which slow drivers down and increase visibility and safety.

At the meeting, most residents who spoke up said they supported the greenway. A few were worried, but Weatherford made it clear, at least twice, that Smith Street has “excess capacity” for more than 3,000 cars an hour. The president of a civic association in Montrose said, "It would be a marvelous idea.”

So why did Williams want me to tell the city no? She told me that she had been frustrated by “a lack of transparency” in the process of engagement. She says that she didn’t even know about the meeting I attended and learned about the greenway concept on Nextdoor. Wanting more information, she wrote to the chief of staff of her city council representative, Abbie Kamin, met privately with a representative from Public Works who presented the same slides to her and her neighbors that Weatherford did and talked with business owners. The city, she says, was unable to answer “the in-depth questions that we asked.”

“I’m wildly in favor of density and infill development,” she says. “That is precisely what makes a city a city and makes it a walkable, vibrant, livable place.”

But it’s a no from her. Why? “I won’t use it,” she says. “It’s not big enough for me to use. It’s right there beside me, but I won’t use it.”

Abruptly, last week, Public Works sent an email that it was now, all of a sudden, even though it was their idea, a no from them. On Tuesday at City Council, Mayor Turner said that “there is no consensus,” and “I have decided to move forward with the work.”

It appears the work will cost more than $4 million.

It’s isn’t clear why the city needed the community to reach “consensus” before it could complete a project that came out of the city’s process designed to meet the city’s repeatedly stated goals. Maybe the city will change its mind back again, but the process, here, anyway, has been about as confusing and frustrating as the intersections themselves. It’s a good example — one I hope we learn from going forward — of how the tools of the internet give the voices that tend to be predisposed to opposition even more power, now, to determine how, and even whether, the city changes.

The bridge

Speaking of a lack of transparency: Have you clicked over to Williams’ website, StopBagbyClosure.com? The website is registered with GoDaddy, which obscures the names of registrants. So, the basic accountability of identity is gone.

More concerning, though, is that none of the claims made on either the website or the downloadable petition link, say, to road safety audits or crash data. Here’s one: “Taking away two major arteries into and out of downtown will NOT help the flow of traffic and will make already stressful commutes worse.”

Is that true? The bridge has been closed since last summer. Has it made traffic worse? If it has, how much worse? Weatherford said at least twice at the public meeting in February that Smith has more than enough capacity. Louisiana still exists into and out of downtown, too. The claim that commuters need two ways in and out of Midtown has not been demonstrated to be true. It hasn’t been a problem so far, according to Weatherford, whose job it is to know, but Williams’ website claims that it will be.

When I asked Brown, the city’s planning director, about many of the website’s other claims, including that future development would be stymied by the greenway, she told me, “I don’t know any data sources for [them].”

But the website went and made them anyway. J. Allen Douglas chairs the Midtown Management District’s Urban Planning Committee and lives in Midtown. He says, “We should have conducted traffic studies on the major thoroughfares. Does closing Brazos have any effect? Could it have any effect? We should have asked businesses to substantiate their logic that they are suffering as a direct result of the flow of traffic. But the assumptions were made, and they were never challenged.”

One member of the Midtown business community, Douglas says, simply told him, “You have to trust us.”

One business that has claimed it was “suffering” is Spec’s on Smith Street, about half a mile away. John Rydman, the president and owner of Spec’s, wrote in an email, “Sales changed a lot during the last year. Our customer count declined soon after the spur was torn down.”

No one wants that. But how much have sales changed? Can Rydman show that the loss of a bridge half a mile away has caused any of this? Can he show that it had nothing to do, say, with the opening of other liquor or grocery stores in other neighborhoods?

Douglas says, “The most appropriate rule of engagement is to gather data.” But that hasn’t happened here. Now, he says, “there’s a kind of mobilization. That doesn’t stand in for data. That’s simply preference.”

He means that there’s a website and a petition and a Nextdoor thread and hushed private correspondence and at least eight other signs that I have counted, one of which is located on the property of one of Morgan Group’s apartment buildings, the Pearl Midtown, which advertises online that it has a WalkScore of 87!

Apparently, walkability is good, even marketable, right up to the moment the city wants to build some.

Lack of evidence

All this, this process of mobilization and the emphatic expression of preference without evidence, sounds very familiar to Katherine Levine Einstein, an assistant professor of political science at Boston University.

She wrote a book, “Neighborhood Defenders,” about which voices are heard during the process of community engagement.

First, she says, there’s a fundamental psychological issue cities need to reckon with. “We are averse to rapid changes. We are incredibly reactive.” So, out of this reactivity, she and her colleagues have found, is that the people who tend to speak up — who, maybe, tend to develop websites and hang up signs — are “not representative of the broader community.”

Not only do they tend to be homeowners nearby, who are older, white and male, her research shows, they tend to be “overwhelmingly opposed.” They don’t come with an open mind, that is. They come to say no.

She has also found that they tend to position themselves as “pseudoexperts,” a tendency that is exacerbated by the proliferation of free digital tools — websites, Nextdoor, Facebook and Change.org.

The petition on Williams’ website claims that “eliminating the Brazos Street and/or Bagby Street connections ... will likely cause real estate properties to lose significant value, will damage area merchants and will negatively impact future development.” So, it’s worth asking: Does the introduction of greenspace where people can walk or bike safely in densifying urban neighborhoods actually cause property values to decrease and turn away other developers? Because the exact opposite has been shown to be true.

Community engagement

The problem, here, as I am trying to express, goes way beyond this project in Midtown and this process in Houston.

It’s not that all residents’ voices shouldn’t be heard. It’s that all residents’ voices should be heard.

As Brown, the city’s planning director, says, “Changes that [people have] not participated in are scary.” So, you want people to participate in the changes. “We seek out [their] comments,” Brown says. “That’s one of the things planners do well.”

So, acknowledging, at the start, how we are reactive and averse to changes, as Einstein has found, might make the process through which changes happen less combative, more collaborative. As well as acknowledging that our privileges, or our fears, or our biases, might lead us to make claims and fall back on conclusions that aren’t productive of the changes that would lead to a city that starts to work better for everyone.

What’s clear, with this project, Douglas says, is that “the process has failed.” He says that he and others in Midtown had signed a letter asking Public Works to stop to gather data. “Let’s find out what the issue is,” he says.

The city had identified a problem and came up with three solutions that could have solved it. Is it that none of those solutions is a good idea? If so, let’s demonstrate that. Otherwise, I’m starting to think that the issue might be something else. After all, this process started when the city reacted to the death of a man and a woman who were trying to cross the street were struck and killed by a driver in Houston Heights in April 2019. At the time, Mayor Turner said, at a press conference near the crash, “Everyone must invest in safer, more accessible and more complete streets for all.”

I am not an expert. Living next door to where the city wants to build a greenway, epistemologically speaking, philosophically speaking, does not make you one, either, and it does not make you more or less knowledgeable about any of these issues. Your claims are not supported by the virtue of your mortgage.

So why does the process of community engagement seem impossibly, almost inevitably biased toward that, toward not here, not now, not in my backyard, toward no? Einstein says that planners, for a start, could be more “careful about when it is reasonable to solicit input. Let’s empower them, and then hold them accountable.”

Governments at all levels should have to present and defend their projects, explain how and why they are spending taxpayers’ money, demonstrate good arguments with evidence, share data, strive for transparency and remain open to reasonable objections, suggestions for improvement — and even being told no sometimes. But Einstein says that the process of community engagement we have now isn’t conducive of that. She has found, over and over and over, a few people have “total veto power.”

So, it’s a question. Williams says she won’t use it. I say I will. A business owner says he lost customers, and I say I am afraid of crossing the street with my 4 ½-year-old daughter. Who’s the city going to listen to?

West is a writer, editor and teacher in Houston. You can find him on Twitter @allynwest.