Texas Transit Association

San Antonio news article explores an exploding — and lively — downtown Houston, the result of planned revitalization and METRORail.

Houston’s downtown development, light rail system have revamped city’s image
By Mike Greenberg
Express-News Senior Critic
02/22/2004

Editor’s note: Some significant architectural changes have taken place in the past few years across the state. Express-News Senior Critic Mike Greenberg has been busy noting those changes for an occasional series. First up is a look at downtown Houston; later this year, Greenberg will write about the Rio Grande Valley, Austin and Corpus Christi.

HOUSTON? — No, that can’t be right. We must have made a wrong turn at Schulenburg.

We’re downtown on Main Street on a Saturday night, and the sidewalks are swarming. Live music drifts through nearly every doorway, where abandoned storefronts have become trendy nightclubs and restaurants. Through the upper-story windows of old office buildings and hotels, you glimpse the telltale track lights and art of expensive apartments. Every 12 minutes, a sleek white light rail train glides by.

According to the map, we’re in downtown Houston.

Yeah, right, Mr. Rand. Very funny, Mr. McNally. Ha ha. OK, where are we really?

Uh, we really are in lively, exciting downtown Houston — a combination of words that the most shameless Houston booster would not have dared utter 10 years ago.

For most of the past half-century, Houston was the proud avatar of freebooting suburban sprawl. You could do anything you wanted in Houston, as long as you did it as God intended, behind the wheel of your car.

Downtown sprouted a forest of new office towers in the 1970s, but the old business district along and near Main Street fell into disuse.

From the 1970s through most of the 1990s, downtown’s main draw after dark was its theater district, a compact cluster of facilities that served as homes for the Houston Symphony, Houston Ballet, Houston Grand Opera, Alley Theater and the Performing Arts Association.

The theater district drew thousands of Houstonians and visitors downtown on weekends, but didn’t generate much redevelopment in the area. People drove downtown to see the show and then drove back home. An Italian restaurant called Birraporetti did land-office business with the pre- and post-theater crowd, but competition was slow to follow.

Things began to change in 1997, with the $22 million transformation of a shuttered convention center into Bayou Place, an entertainment complex that included several street-oriented restaurants and clubs and the first outpost of New York’s Angelika Film Center. A joint venture of the city and The Cordish Co., a Baltimore developer, Bayou Place now also includes a 3,000-seat Clear Channel concert venue and is planning a major expansion.

Then, in 1998, the long-vacant Rice Hotel reopened as the Rice Lofts, with its 308 apartments and street-level retail space filling up almost immediately. The conversion, including the restoration of the hotel’s 1913 grandeur, was made possible by Houston’s first use of tax increment financing.

In its years of abandonment, the Rice, 17 stories tall and covering half a block, had cast a pall over much of Houston’s historic downtown and symbolized its neglect. Now, suddenly, it told a very different story.

At about the same time, the Houston Astros’ new downtown ballpark was under construction a few blocks away. (It would open in 2000 as the unfortunately named Enron Field — now Minute Maid Park.)

And plans were under way for an addition to the theater district — the $88 million Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, comprising a 2,650-seat venue, for a touring Broadway series and Houston’s own Theater Under the Stars, plus a 500-seat hall for chamber music and other small-scale events.

(The Hobby Center opened in 2002. Architect Robert A.M. Stern’s design, with its sweeping glass façade under a broad sloping roof, is reminiscent of optimistic 1950s modernism and the “Forward Look” of late ’50s Chrysler Imperials.)

Also pointing to improvement was the state legislature’s creation, in 1995, of the Houston Downtown Management District, which could levy taxes and fees to support a broad range of capital projects, planning and services.

The district’s work is most visible in the new trees, fountains and street furniture of a much-improved pedestrian environment along Main, several of its cross streets and the area around the ballpark and the George R. Brown Convention Center.

“In 1999, things were really beginning to bust open down there,” said David Edwards, a Briton who had moved to the United States 20 years ago to work in the hotel business. “All indicators were that downtown was going to take off.”

A few clubs and restaurants had opened near the Rice and were succeeding. Edwards decided to join the fray. He formed a new company with a partner and, late in 1999, opened an upscale nightclub, the Mercury Room, just off Main Street on Prairie Avenue.

“Five weeks after we opened, there were lines around the block,” Edwards said, “and it stayed that way for a year and a half.”

One year later, he opened a restaurant, Zula, and a year after that another nightclub, the Boka Bar.

He had plenty of company. One by one, vacant storefronts on Main Street and Prairie Avenue became nightclubs with armies of valet parking attendants encamped in front.

A few buildings were renovated for law offices. Restaurants began to appear. The success of the Rice Lofts prompted residential conversions of several sizable old office buildings nearby. The downtown residential population grew from about 1,400 in 1990 to more than 3,000 today — about the same number as live in downtown San Antonio.

“There is a nationwide trend to urban revitalization, and Houston is no exception,” said Jody Sinclair, a former journalist who started handling public relations for the downtown district in 1998. “At that time, a lot of people wanted to come downtown. Young people wanted to desert the Richmond Strip” — the line of singles bars along suburban Richmond Avenue — “and empty-nesters wanted out of the suburbs.”

The downtown growth frenzy abated in 2001 with major street rebuilding projects and the start of construction on the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County’s first light rail line, down the middle of Main Street. The torn-up streets kept customers away.

Some of the newly established clubs and restaurants foundered, though most, including Edwards’ three places, hung on.

With the completion of most of the street work and the opening, on Jan. 1, of the light rail line, business boomed again.

Several high-end hotels have opened recently in historic buildings, but the residential market is so strong that one long-established hotel, the Four Seasons, is converting its top four floors to condominiums.

Meanwhile, a new residential and office condominium tower — 28 to 32 floors, depending on advance sales — is planned where a McDonald’s used to stand on Main Street, catercorner from the Rice.

Real estate sources expect a lot more new residential construction to follow — not only downtown, but also in Midtown, a 617-acre territory with Main Street as its spine, just south of downtown.

Houston’s second tax increment reinvestment zone was created for Midtown in 1995 and is managed by the Midtown Redevelopment Authority.

The 1990 census found just 490 people living in Midtown, which was then largely a crime-ridden wilderness, with positive development confined mainly to a pocket of businesses run by Vietnamese immigrants. By 2000, the population had grown to 8,500, according to the redevelopment authority’s executive director, Charles LeBlanc. The population is expected to reach at least 15,000 by 2015.

The 7.5-mile light rail line starts at the University of Houston downtown campus and passes through Midtown on its way to the Museum District, the Texas Medical Center and Reliant Park, home to several sports and entertainment venues, including the new home of the NFL’s Houston Texans.

Despite Midtown’s strategic location on the rail line, little development was planned to take advantage of it.

Urbanist David Crossley, president of the Gulf Coast Institute, describes most of Midtown’s new housing as “car-based dense projects,” taking advantage of the area’s quick access by auto to downtown and the medical center, but located several blocks from a light rail stop.

One four-block area along the line is targeted for a large mixed-use project, which would be a joint venture of the redevelopment authority and a real estate investment trust. That project is still in planning and is not yet a done deal, LeBlanc said.

LeBlanc sees rising interest among developers in transit-oriented projects now that the line is open.

“Everyone wanted to see rail up and running, to see how it looked, tasted, sounded. There were a lot of doubting Thomases,” LeBlanc said.

The line was running before the city, property owners, developers and even the transit authority itself knew what to do with it.

The absence of forethought is especially evident at Reliant Park and Six Flags AstroWorld.

More than 7,000 people rode the rail to the Super Bowl at Reliant Stadium last month, but they had to trek across a huge, inhospitable parking lot to get there.

The end of the line is a park-and-ride facility adjacent to AstroWorld’s back fence. The theme park’s entrance is about a mile away.

Neither Reliant Park nor AstroWorld are planning site development to welcome light rail visitors more effectively, and the transit authority hasn’t asked them to, according to officials on both sides of the farebox.

The rail line has a more effective interface with the Texas Medical Center. Two rail stations serve the densely developed medical center directly along its Fannin Street border, and a third serves a large parking lot to the south. The idea is that people can park at that outlying lot and take frequent shuttle trains to the medical facilities.

The need to coordinate light rail and development grew more pressing last November, when Houston’s voters approved a 72-mile expansion of the rail system.

As the nation’s only large city without a zoning ordinance, Houston has limited tools with which to shape development.

City planning director Robert Litke said his department is working on an ordinance that could create incentives for transit-oriented development along rail corridors.

He said the city also has begun working with neighborhood coalitions to consider how to plan development along the rail corridors.

“All of us will learn from whatever mistakes were made in this first phase, so they won’t be repeated in the second,” Litke said.

Ridership figures for the first month of operation haven’t been compiled yet, but on the Saturday before Super Bowl weekend the trains were generally full.

Some of the riders were headed to or from downtown entertainment or the Museum District station, a short walk from the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum, the Holocaust Museum and several others. A few in hospital scrubs boarded at the Medical Center.

But the bulk of the passengers consisted of families riding the whole length of the line and back, just to see what it was like.

For Houstonians, living in a real city is a new experience. They seem to enjoy it.

mgreenberg@express-news.net