Q&A: Urban density in Houston? Not really

Mary Lou Henry and her late husband, Vernon, built a successful planning and urban consulting business, Vernon G. Henry & Associates, which was founded in 1967. But when Henry reflects on some of her proudest achievements, she talks about the work she did improving neighborhoods and helping to elevate Houston's image.

"One of the things I'm most happy about is having gotten rid of all the inflatable pink gorillas," Henry said in a recent interview in her Uptown office. "One day I was driving to the airport on the North Freeway, and on a 3-mile segment I counted seven inflatable animals on top of buildings, and I thought, 'Enough is enough.' "

Henry, an industry leader who in 2014 received the Texas Planning Legend award from the state chapter of the American Planning Association, has been a longtime board member of Scenic Houston. And aside from her corporate work, she was also involved in the redevelopment plan for Midtown and the city of Houston's development code.

Henry sat down with the Chronicle to discuss Houston's past, present and future.

Q: As someone who's been active in Houston's development and planning industry for decades, what sort of changes have you noticed in the way projects are built?

A: There's a lot more concern about quality, and people seem to be rewarded when they do quality-oriented things. I think probably when I started my career we were just getting things done, and now a lot of effort is spent being sure that what's done is nice. I like how many more places have trees. And there's more concern about every part of town, not just the west side.

Q: When you graduated from Rice University, you went to work for the city. What did you do?

A: I was lucky enough to be the only one who wasn't working on either zoning or subdivision control, so I did park plan, library plan, fire station plan. I did the finger annexations that spread Houston's ETJ out to the enormous area that it is.

Q: You were only at the city for a few years. Why did you leave?

A: I learned a lot, but things just move too slow at the city. It takes forever to get something done. So when the man that became my husband offered me a job in the outside world, which was then Neuhaus & Taylor, which became 3DI, doing comprehensive plans for small communities, I left the city.

Q: Where did your career go from there?

A: I went to work for CRS, and I worked there for probably five years, flitting about the countryside. CRS' jobs were all over the country, so I traveled quite a bit. Although they would not send me to Saudi Arabia, they had a big job for the College of Petroleum and Minerals there, because they said they knew I wouldn't walk 10 paces behind and shut up, which was probably a fair assessment. After CRS, I joined the firm my husband started.

Q: Some Houstonians lament the city's increasing density, developmentwise. What are your thoughts on that topic?

A: We aren't dense. People that think that we're dense haven't been to a dense place.

Q: But won't this change? Will we ever become a city that's as dense as, say, Chicago?

A: I think we'll have spots that will be pretty dense. But as an overall city, I don't think so. We've set a pattern here that is going to be very difficult to change. Post Oak Boulevard between San Felipe and the West Loop is going to end up really dense. It's dense now. But all the prevailing lot size or special minimum lot size stuff that's gone on in the last 10 or 15 years has set vast areas of the city at the density they are now, including some that probably shouldn't have been.

Q: Isn't it a good thing that residents have been able to limit development in some neighborhoods?

A: Yes and no. Some areas that should be redeveloped have those regulations passed and I think probably should have been allowed to be redeveloped.

There seem to be a lot of people that think townhouses are evil. I think that probably when we started the prevailing lot size stuff, which was to help neighborhoods that didn't have restrictions or those restrictions had expired, we maybe should have set an area quota. Like, "OK, we'll do this till 50 percent of the area is restricted or something," but we didn't.

People talk about needing more density to support transit use. Well, we've fixed it so a whole bunch of the city can never be in the next 40 years dense enough to support transit.

Q: What about places like Rice Military, Cottage Grove, these places that have become inundated with townhomes? There are often complaints in these areas about excessive street parking, traffic and concerns over flooding.

A: Did you go through Cottage Grove before this started? It was really crappy. There were pipe yards next to machine repair shops, then there would be a little tiny house or two. There was a lot of not attractive industrial and commercial stuff adjacent to small homes.

One of the previous city engineers had a plan to repave all those streets in Cottage Grove, but the people turned it down.

Rice Military wasn't quite as bad, but it was a mixed area way back in the '60s. I understand from my husband, who worked on the zoning effort, that they didn't know what to do with Rice Military then. Rice Military probably should have had a TIRZ created when the redevelopment first started. But they were so far along that there wasn't enough left to redevelop. That wouldn't have paid for a whole lot.

Since Rice Military was mostly redeveloped, the city has adopted guest parking requirements for lots that under are 3,500 square feet, so now once you get over six new units, you have to have a guest parking place. And it can either be on the street adjacent to your property or within your development. We have the highest parking requirements in any major city in the country. People just aren't adjusted to changing times.

If you listen to people that are looking to the future, it's a short-term problem, because there are a lot of people that think we will be one-car families instead of three-car families and no-car families cause you'll simply whistle up your favorite app.

Q: What about flooding?

A: Clearly, we've got to fix it so that water doesn't get into people's homes, but we do have a changing weather pattern. I can remember when St. Thomas University had a weather department, and they were teaching people to be weather bureau people. They did a study of rainfall patterns. You know the prevailing breezes at the surface are out of the southeast. They found that the area northwest of downtown had an increased rainfall, and it was because the buildings in downtown acted like mountains.

Our flooding problems are complex. Some of them are the result of collapsed sewers, some the sewers are too small. Some they didn't have very good topographic information when the area was designed.

The other thing that people don't understand is that we have these highly expansive clays in most parts of town, and they don't absorb much water, and so if it rains, if you get an inch of rain, the ground has absorbed all it's going to absorb, and the rest is going to run off, and you've got to have a place for it to go.

It's a combination of a whole lot of things.