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Houston Goes Global With New World-Class Parks And Bayous

This article is more than 8 years old.

Houston, TX

The growth of Houston has far surpassed the perception about it from outsiders. Thanks to a warm climate, pro-business policies, and a lack of zoning, it is now America’s 4th-largest city, and is creeping up on perpetually-mismanaged Chicago. In the process, it has nurtured a host of amenities that signify its newly-global status, from the world's largest medical center to one of America's best restaurant scenes. Add to these several new parks, with more to come, that could tweak the city's sprawling and auto-centric reputation.

Beginning in 2008, up until 2020, the city is adding various new and revived parkland and bayous that will benefit city residents. Principle among them are the just-completed Buffalo Bayou Park, a 160-acre stretch of revitalized bayou just west of downtown. It opened this fall, and serves as urban America's latest grand-scale downtown waterfront reclamation project, with the potential to become Houston's de facto central park. The city has numerous other bayous and will reclaim those also, through the Bayou Greenways 2020 initiative. This will include improving ones that were poorly-maintained or concreted over, aspiring towards a century-old plan to have tasteful waterways running through Houston. The other big park project is Discovery Green, a 12-acre downtown area that was turned several years ago from parking lots into a multi-purpose park.

Total combined costs for these parks will be over $400 million, although they are being financed and maintained in a classically Houstonian way. About half of this funding has been private donations, including $90 million from the Kinder Foundation, a philanthropy run by local energy billionaire Rich Kinder and his wife Nancy. Rather than managed by the public parks department, the parks are run by non-profit conservancies--which has become a time-tested way to ensure that they are run well. And perhaps most importantly for this business-minded city, the parks are going up fast--with little time passed between money donated and project completion.

Since arriving to Houston in early November, I've visited these parks, and talked with civic leaders about their ramifications for Houston's future. Here's a breakdown:

Buffalo Bayou Park

(photo credits to Buffalo Bayou Partnership)

When the city of Houston, working with the non-profit Buffalo Bayou Partnership, wrote a master plan for this area in 2002, it was coming off a rough period. The year before, Hurricane Allison had caused flooding along the bayou and throughout much of Houston, producing billions in damages citywide and erosion inside the park.

That isn't to say that the park had been terribly notable before. Collectively, Buffalo Bayou starts from some dams out west of the city, stretches past downtown, the industrial east side, and the Port of Houston, and into the Gulf of Mexico. Its prime parkland portion, with banks that slope upwards from the water towards the street on both sides, sits just north of downtown, and had long been a nondescript stretch of grassland. The bayou itself, which is a river-like body, runs along the cavernous bottom of the park, as if in a canyon. It had become overrun with erosion and invasive species, to the point that sometimes there was barely any water flow.

So in 2002, the plan was drawn to improve nearly 2.3 miles of parkland heading west from downtown. The plan called for more intensive landscaping, better lighting, bank refurbishment, and better flood control. Most importantly, it called for added amenities, so that there would be actual reasons for someone to visit.

A singular philanthropic act pushed the plan forward in 2010. That year, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership received $30 million from the Kinder Foundation. After discussions with city officials and community leaders, the partnership began contracting out construction and repair work in 2012. In following years, the partnership would raise another $23.5 million in private philanthropy, including from key donors like the Wortham Foundation, and $5 million from the Harris County Flood Control District. Within five years of the Kinder's initial donation, the park had opened.

How does it look? I wanted to find out, so recently was given a golf cart tour by representatives from Buffalo Bayou Partnership, and SWA Group, the park's landscape architects. We began by entering the Water Works, which is an information center and park entrance just off downtown. Included here are a pavilion, children's area, and art park. We continued west, through the portion of parkland that divides the trendy Montrose neighborhood just south with nightlife-oriented Washington Avenue to the north. This includes a sports field that doubles as a large concert space during special events.

Further west were several new pedestrian bridges that improve downtown views, and enhance access to a park that once just had a few crossing highways. The concluding highlight was yet another performance and visitor's space: Lost Lake. It includes a food take-out, event space, outdoor seating area, and kayak rental, and abuts a dam that recycles bayou water. The SWA architects did a particularly good job on this portion, by surrounding the retention lake with tasteful local plants, as to nearly conceal the concrete infrastructure.

But aside from the amenities, there are pronounced changes in the natural landscape. During the tour, we wove between the park’s dual trail system--with one trail following street level, looking down over the park's banks and bayou; and the other, further down, roughly following the shoreline, letting people engage with turtles and ducks. The space between, rather than plain grass, has been transformed into a dense arrangement of forest and shrubbery that conceals within it public art, play spaces, dog parks, seating, and a complex lighting system that turns blue at night.

The park renovation has also included pragmatic flood control measures. Sediment was removed, the shoreline was altered to accentuate its previous natural curves, and shrubbery was planted along the banks to prevent erosion.

But the most remarkable thing about the park, in an age when government projects constantly exceed cost estimates and drag on for decades, is how much bang this public-private partnership got for its buck. For $58 million, Buffalo Bayou Park now has two new major visitor centers, several pedestrian bridges, added flood control, and acres of amenity-filled parkland. Anne Olson, president of the partnership, credited the project's privately-funded model for the strong turnaround.

"The Kinders are really good in that they set a timeline for his project," she said. "They wanted it completed in a certain period of time. And so I think that's a great motivator, and really helps with efficiency as well. There's not any extra time to spend any extra money."

Moving forward, the park will receive $2 million annually from the city. It will also generate revenue from the restaurant, event spaces, and boat rentals, and be managed by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership.

Depending on available future donations, the partnership will pursue a second park phase stretching east of downtown. This would be more incremental, since more of that land is privately-owned, and would extend through poorer neighborhoods like EaDo and the Fifth Ward. But this means the phase would have even more potential to generate property tax revenue, and broader urban revitalization.

Bayou Greenways 2020

Buffalo Bayou is not Houston's only bayou—nor the only one slated for improvement. Despite its reputation as a semi-arid southwestern city, Houston's climate is actually more like New Orleans', with heavy rainstorms and swampy marshland. It is thus defined by water, primarily bayous, with about 2,500 miles of natural and man-made channels traversing through Harris County, which encompasses Houston. The problem is that many of them, despite passing prime real estate, haven't really been opened to the neighborhoods.

For example, in the neighborhood where I'm staying--a hipster area just north of downtown called The Heights—there is a bayou passing through White Oak Park, a large recreational center. But like so many other bayous in Houston, it feels remote and unapproachable, and the waterbed has been concreted over. This concreting was done decades ago to other bayous, to help speed west-to-east water flow during a bad flooding period. This left many, like the one outside my door, looking more like the Los Angeles River than natural waterways; they are big concrete basins, usually with a small stream trickling through. Also like my local one, many bayous are in rough shape--they are poorly kept, aesthetically indistinct,  and inaccessible.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1912, the city drew up a plan to turn Houston's bayous into a prominent citywide feature. But amid neglect and flooding concerns, this plan was ignored for a century, before a civic appetite grew to revive them. Along with talks about Buffalo Bayou Park, this began in 2012, when Houston voters overwhelmingly approved a bond referendum that would dedicate $100 million to the Bayou Greenways 2020 initiative. This was soon matched by $90 million in private philanthropy—including $50 million from the Kinder Foundation. At a total anticipated price of $220 million, the initiative will include renovation of 9 strategic bayous--or 150 miles worth--inside the city. The money will go towards construction of the Bayou Greenways, which include connected off-street hike-and-bike trails and publicly accessible greenspace. It will even connect some bayous, and thus much of the additional city parkland abutting them. Construction and repair has already begun, and by completion in 2020, 60% of residents will live within 1.5 miles of a renovated bayou. Anticipated economic benefits are estimated by the city at $30 million annually. The philanthropic presence behind Bayou Greenways 202o has turned it, too, into a non-profit function. Private fundraising, land acquisition, design, construction and maintenance will be managed by the Houston Parks Board, the non-profit organization leading the project.

Discovery Green

For a preview of how these bayous might effect the city’s economy and quality of life, I toured Discovery Green. This is a 12-acre park just outside of the downtown convention center and basketball arena that features a skating rink, two restaurants, and parkland that is far more art- and amenity-intensive. For decades, the land where Discovery Green sits contained a few parking lots and dilapidated buildings. Eventually the land was donated to the city by a real estate investment company for the purpose of creating an iconic park. The project was announced in 2005, and thanks to $54 million in private donations, including $10 million from—you guessed it—the Kinder Foundation, the park opened in April of 2008

This park is also overseen by a non-profit—the Discovery Green Conservancy—and has private revenue sources, including a 5-star restaurant called The Grove. The park has become part of a broader effort—along with light rail, sports stadiums and a $15,000 per-unit rebate for condo developers—to increase the downtown population. Unlike those other measures, though, Discovery Green requires little taxpayer money, and actually seems to be working. The park is crowded throughout the day, and will become more so, as it is bordered by multiple new high-rise construction projects.

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There is a common thread behind all these projects—the Kinder Foundation. For years, the foundation, bolstered by money from Kinder Morgan, Rich Kinder's downtown-headquartered, Fortune 500 energy infrastructure company, has funded numerous area initiatives, including social services for the poor, medical research, and an urban affairs department at Rice University. Parks have been another target of his generosity, with funding going towards the Hermann Park Conservancy and Emancipation Park, along with the three projects mentioned above.

If these current and future park and bayou improvements become world-class amenities--as they appear destined to become--the ramifications will be enormous for Houston. It is one of America's largest and fastest-growing cities, adding about 20,000 residents on average every year since 2000. But regarding lifestyle amenities, its national reputation doesn't approach similarly-sized U.S. cities. It is instead viewed as a hot, congested, sprawling mess of concrete--known for offering good jobs but little else. Rebranding Houston as a city that offers urban quality of life is viewed by local leaders as essential for further attracting talent, and these parks are a key piece in the equation.

“Great cities are really investing in this type of infrastructure,” said Tom Bacon, a local investor and member of the Parks Board. “You got to have a quality of life, you got to attract and hold on to the right kind of people.”

When it comes to the factors for attracting this talent, Houston's parks likely will not surpass its strong business climate. But they should slowly make Houston's image greener, and assuming everything is completed on time, will become a testament to the city's pragmatic spirit. In 13 years, the city will have added numerous world class parks, at a cost likely far less than the economic benefits reaped. While other cities have become monuments to bureaucratic inertia, Houston will show what happens when a business-oriented city gets into the business of parks.

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