Houston's director of planning and development, Marlene Gafrick, will step down from her post Nov. 29 after 33 years with the department and more than eight years as director. The 55-year-old Branson, Mo., native moved to Houston in 1980, fresh out of school at Missouri State University. Gafrick, who is married with two sons, will join Houston-based real estate firm MetroNational. She sat down with City Hall reporter Mike Morris to talk about Houston, zoning and the future. Excerpts are below:

Q: How did you wind up in Houston?

A: Different parts of the country were in a downturn, and my parents gave me $500 and said, "Get a job." I had a professor in college that liked the Houston Oilers, and I'd go to his office and we'd talk about the Oilers. My spring semester my senior year I said, "I'm moving to Houston, sight unseen." The students in my college classes, they really spoke ugly about Houston because we didn't have zoning. I wanted to come see this town that was unregulated and uncontrollable.

Q: After 33 years studying it, do you believe Houston's lack of zoning hurts or helps the city?

A: It's kept Houston's marketplace moving, and I think it puts us at an advantage over other cities. I'm not your typical planner. I have seen a warehouse piece of property become a single-family development in just a matter of a year, year and a half. You go to another, zoned city and that takes years to get through the approval processes. The lack of zoning gives us a lot of flexibility as a city to reinvent ourselves fairly quickly, and it allows us the ability to amend our rules fairly quickly to respond to problems. It's part of the energy, part of that can-do spirit that's in Houston.

Q: Your career has spanned landmark changes to the city's rules governing development, parking, landscaping, transit corridors and historic preservation. Are there items that stand out?

A: The tree and shrub ordinance that I was fortunate to work on. The recent amendments to the parking ordinance. Go look at Rice Military. You can see areas where they didn't have sidewalks, where you had 10-foot setback lines and cars are hanging out into the paved section of the right of way. You can see now where we have the 17-foot garage setbacks and where we're getting sidewalks, and you can see how the rules have evolved for the better.

When you write an ordinance, you think about it from a perspective, and sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong. You drive throughout the city, and you're always doing an analysis of, "Could something have been done better?" or, "Did you get the intended result?" It'll be interesting to go back even three years from now and assess if it happens the way we thought it would happen.

Q: A lot of planning is about predicting the future. What do you see on the horizon for Houston?

A: Houston is going to be even more dense than people are really anticipating, and you're starting to see that now on the multi-family projects. They're doing six-story projects where just a few years ago they weren't doing that type of density. We're going to see this city become much more dense and more pedestrian. The other interesting piece is looking at our mobility studies that we're doing around the city and looking at what our roadway infrastructure needs to look like relative to the number of lanes of traffic, and then trying to think through all the other modes of traffic and how that all fits in. We're trying to look at the job density and the population growth 30-some years out, trying to make sure the city is well positioned for continued growth. That's exciting.

Q: What are some of the key pending issues you're leaving behind?

A: When we got the parking ordinance done and we got the Chapter 42 amendments done (this year), I was cleaning my office, and I found this piece of paper and it had all these things I wanted to work on for Houston. I looked and I went, "Oh, done … oh, done … oh, done." And I sat in my office and I went, now what? Transportation is going to be kicking up big time with the mobility studies, the Complete Streets initiative. That's going to be huge. When you step back and look at what we got done and then these other initiatives are really kicking up, the issue is do you stay and re-energize the department again, or is it the right time to leave? I felt like it was the right time to leave and allow somebody else the opportunity to really take it on and shape the department and grow.