(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 589: The Bikeable Walkable Forest

This week we’re finally doing it! We’re going to Kingwood Texas and talking about the greenbelt trail system I’ve been telling everyone about for years. This is a storytelling episode, featuring guests John Walsh, Jerry Lunow, and Bill Neuhaus so I hope folks enjoy hearing about NASA, timber companies, bike trails, and Houston’s bayous. But also, stick around to hear how a suburban development in Texas from the 1970’s mirrors and pre-dated Dutch bike planning with special guest, Streetsblog Chicago’s Steve Vance.

Find this episode at Streetsblog USA.

Find all of the episodes in our archive.

Below is a full unedited transcript of this episode:

So let’s talk about where I was born, where I grew up before I went to college, Kingwood, Texas. Oh, Texas you say? I know. Just listen. It gets good

But it’s not just me that’s been impacted by Kingwood, Texas. Other folks you may know remember it fondly as well. This is Steve Vance, now Chicago Transportation and Planning troublemaker and Streetsblog Chicago contributor.

It only came to light when we moved away from Kingwood in ’96 to Batavia, Illinois. And then my perspective and appreciation for the design of Kingwood changed again when I visited Houten in the Netherlands.

Because to understand where we wanna go, we have to look back at where we came from Kingwood is a master plan community on the northeast edge of Houston. Looking at a map of the city, it’s on the top right. It was actually annexed by the city of Houston in 1994 to much derision. I can still remember the fear opponents instilled in the community, complaining about Houston taking over and giving us a single firetruck for every three we already had.

Lots of editorial cartoons, lots of vitriol. Before annexation, where did this place come from? We could probably talk all day about politics and suburban growth, and you could do a whole episode on leapfrog growth in the state of Texas. But Kingwood started out as a series of municipal utility districts, MUDs, entities enabled by the state stitched together to allow developer to fund infrastructure basically anywhere they wanted.

It also started out as a vision from an unusual place, the oil company now known as Exxon.

I never did. But at that point in the Northeast where I was, there were two new towns being developed, Columbia and Reston. And on the West Coast, where Irvine Ranch was being developed as, in quote, new towns. And that got me an interest because my professional report was on the social impact of community development.

I was just fascinated with the whole concept of how land planning and community development could influence the cultural and social aspects of a community and trying to optimize the positive factors associated with human interaction. I heard that Friendswood was getting started and I lived in Houston.

So I guess it was either lazy or a good fit to come back to Houston. Friendswood had actually been initiated by Humble on their own, and they started the development of a heavy industrial park called Bayport on the Houston coastline. They wanted to have a new town next to Bayport, and so they engaged, uh, Del Webb, who was a retirement home developer from Arizona, and he started the development of Clear Lake City.

At the time, oil companies weren’t really into creating residential communities, but with all the excess land, it became a new way to make money on existing assets. Fueled by federal funding of the interstate highways and home mortgage programs, cities spread out. And unlike new towns in Europe, which were publicly financed and constructed, private companies were in control in the United States.

By the time the 1960s came around, critics wondered whether the energy could have been better used to reinvest in cities. In a 1971 design competition, New York-based architect Robert Scofield noted, “The problem of core cities very closely relates to what happens outside of the cities, which implies the whole question of new towns.

Many of the proposals are just more suburbia, suburbia cut a little differently. Maybe the real question is whether suburbia is valid.” But despite the public criticism, suburban-style development continued.

Then John Walsh gets involved.

Turner would ask me to serve in that role, even though I wasn’t a professional planner or landscape architect or land planner. Humble had been a partner with the King Ranch in South Texas on oil and gas exploration. And so we approached, uh, John Turner had hired me, and so we approached the King Ranch, Mr.

Jim Clements, his son, Jamie Clements, about partnering to develop Kingwood. And we were fortunate enough to find out that the Foster Lumber Company was selling their acreage. I don’t know why, but they were selling 50,000 acres in East Texas. So we bought the 50,000 acres in joint venture with the King Ranch.

And then we followed the trend at the time, which was to develop villages. And we chose to make villages be composed of an anchor, which was an elementary school, two church sites, and a small multifamily retail development, single-family residential around that. And each village was to be connected to the major facilities that ultimately got developed in Town Center and the high school and the middle school and then to connect to the other villages.

So you could walk on greenbelts to other villages or to the Town Center or whatever.

A key to how those greenbelts were ultimately designed was architect Charles Tapley.

This was most apparent when he and his colleagues started rethinking Buffalo Bayou, the waterway that cuts through downtown Houston.

You remember how many of the bayous had been concrete channeled. Now, like Buffalo Bayou is now a linear park, which is what Charles envisioned. In fact, it was envisioned originally in that ’27 plan.

And we also set up just before Sabine Street, there was a little open space there that had a few picnic tables and a parking place that you’d get to off of Allen Parkway. So we planned to have a stop off there for a lunch picnic. And so the day started, we assembled in Memorial Park, and we got canoes going and down, and it was just a little bit, it started raining.

By the time we got to Shepherd, it was just a super downpour rain. Some of the outfall three-foot diameter pipes that were higher up, they were shooting water out into the bayou and across and just getting heavy-duty rain falling right on you, these big outflows throwing water in, a bit of confusion and chaos in the process.

Several boats turned over. Everybody’s in a heavy drenching deal. And we got down finally to where we were gonna have the picnic and got out there, and there was little shelters over the picnic table. The people were all standing and huddled underneath and telling all these incredible whitewater experiences right here in Houston.

This great harrowing but incredible experience that had happened in this process. But anyway, just it was a different deal just talking about this experience that had just happened here. That gave a lot of attention to whatever outdoor adventures or outdoor space that existed here in Houston, and that sort of set that process.

And first example

Now

One thing we were doing at that point in time, which I think may have been the catalyst, we were doing what we call Blue Bayou. It was taking Buffalo Bayou as it ran through Houston and doing a study of a very critical nine-mile section, and we were having to fight off the people who wanted to concrete it and everything else.

We had a very different vision than they did. It was the precursor to what is going on now. There’ve been a number of people who have taken the bayou concept that was developed and continued to develop it And I think that brought Charles to the attention of Kingwood Development, which was an arm of Humble Oil and Gas at that

The planning coordinator for Kingwood with Friendswood Development, John Walsh.

And you had to start with the East Texas Piney Woods were, you know, famous among people that cared about those kinds of things. And they were particularly famous because you have the pine tree overstory, and the understory plants are many, many, many of them are flowering. You know, the dogwood trees and the Grancy Greybeard trees and the snowdrop trees, they all have magnificent, mostly white flowers in the springtime.

And the dogwood trees were very large and just spectacular when they bloomed. So, you know, you didn’t have to be a real landscape fan to appreciate how beautiful they were. And so the thought of doing anything that would interfere with that was really off base for us. And just it came naturally for us.

The other thing was that we wanted the trails to be water permeable so we weren’t depriving any of the vegetation from moisture. And we wanted to preserve as much as possible the wildlife.

The primary power can be put underground, but it’s extremely expensive. So we work with CenterPoint, it was HL&P in those days, but it’s called CenterPoint now. And we have overhead power lines for the primary power, and we have underground for all the distribution. That was all done in a way that minimized the impact, adverse impact on the vegetation.

But he took inspiration from the neutral ground in the center of streets in New Orleans where he grew up.

Ian McHarg stuff was just coming out. This was the early environmental movement. It wasn’t even urban planning at that point in time. It was more an environmental base and how do we do this? And oh, by the way, are we cutting down trees? We’re not gonna cut down trees anymore. We didn’t realize that trees would become one of the keys to how we are gonna deal with sustainable issues over time.

So we were very young. It was a do no harm kind of philosophy. How do we do these things without disturbing as we work through it?

But the trail system was a casual movement through the greenway, through the forest, not to be hurried and to just take advantage of the natural aesthetic of plant material that were there.

The trails are concrete, but they’ve lasted a lot longer than if they were crushed granite or wood chips.

What I remember was all the palmettos back in the woods and, and sort of going through all of that, and how do you maintain that? Do you leave it natural? What happens when you build up on either side of it? Does it remain natural? What I saw when I went back out and looked at it a few years later, the darn thing was pretty much like we had anticipated it would be.

If I remember correctly, there were little pocket parks along the trail system where there would be a swing set or something like that, which is what we had anticipated.

But what won it for them wasn’t the building, but the design of the trail. As one of the judges noted, “I feel the trail is the important thing. I would’ve been against any citation for the pavilion itself.” Another judge noted the pleasantness of the greenbelt and meandering trail. The team also won environmental awards for the Greenbelt Trails from the Chamber of Commerce and the American Institute of Architects.

The initial trail design was exported to the whole development. Currently, there are over 75 miles of these trails serving over 70,000 people in the suburbs of Houston. Charles designed bridges over water inlets, and there are tunnels under the arterial roads so runners and cyclists don’t have to cross any busy streets.

We’ll come back to the genius of this network in a bit with Steve Vance, but I wanted to pull another interesting historical environmental thread.

In fact, when we first went to interview with him, and I think I mentioned this to you there, he, he had hired a Greek architect early on who didn’t have any landscape experience And he showed us a rendering, and, and the rendering was basically a dirt road with a turkey running across it. And we didn’t have any idea what in the world he was thinking about.

And we had this very nice interview, nice guy. I, I knew the guy who brought us to the table, and we left, and we looked at each other and said, “What, what just happened? Has this guy really got that much land? And who is George Mitchell?” was more or less what we said. And we weren’t smart enough to dig into it.

But The Woodlands first phase, funded in part by one of the few successful grants for new towns under HUD’s Title 7, would become known for something else impressive: being the most complete example of Ian McHarg’s ecological planning method as he laid out in his seminal work and book, Design with Nature.

We were active w- with them and helping a lot of the beginning development of that first phase. And we liked the idea of what McHarg’s direction was, that first land and property be developed around prevailing winds, prevailing rains, prevailing breezes, prevailing animal life, prevailing and all of that.

Those kind of patterns laid down to determine some of how the development moved.

To try to work more with the environment, with part of it being a base of the development. And through a number of projects we had, I would say that it’s how to keep part of the environment as there. Just recognize the environment much more than the way of scrape it all away and bring back whatever new is to either replace environment and/or get as much of the concrete down on the ground as you can.

Charles was a great speaker. Charles had wanted to major in journalism first and what he had planned to go in college, but then he switched to architecture and graduated from Rice in architecture, but was very interested in the landscape side of everything also, which was one of the key things, as well as him being an architect that I went to work with him first, that he was interested in landscape as well.

Both of us became registered landscape architects as well. And that architecture needed to relate to the earth and to the site more than just an architectural building set on the surface somewhere and the beauty of all this architectural box put there. It needed to relate to the earth, the environment of other forms of life that are needed to go on around the building, birds, bugs, all the other parts of our environment that we don’t recognize as so part of the energy of the earth.

That’s a positive infrastructure effect. But that infrastructure of the Greenbelt trails reminded Steve Vance of something else, the Netherlands.

And then my perspective and appreciation for the design of Kingwood changed again when I visited Houten in the Netherlands in 2011, where I recognized some of the design principles in Houten were actually present in Kingwood. And I was shocked that somebody in the 70s had this idea That has been replicated 4,000 miles away at around the same time, but also I think in Davis, California, there are some parallels between Kingwood and their bike path system and Davis’ bike path system.

Some countries, such as the Netherlands, made deliberate choices, moving towards less energy-intensive modes as the United States shifted further towards auto dependence. In 1979, with more oil embargoes and the election of Ronald Reagan, auto dependence and urban sprawl were set in stone for another generation.

Steve and I enjoyed a rare Texas bubble, a place where you could bike everywhere if you wished.

And then when I moved to Batavia, like, I was put on lockdown. Like, I was not allowed to bike to certain parts of Batavia or Geneva. There’s a, a road in that part of Illinois called Randall Road. It probably has a state highway number. But I was not allowed to cross that road. And the thing is, the grocery store was on the other side of that road, and thus I was severely restricted.

Things that were normal for me to do in Kingwood, I was not allowed to do in Batavia because Batavia had very little bike infrastructure, had almost n- I think no on-street bike lanes, although Kingwood didn’t have any because it had such a robust trail network. And then the middle school that I attended in Batavia was built on a greenfield site at the edge of town, and so I either had to take a bus or one of my parents had to drive me

But as kids, we didn’t know why we couldn’t or what was really different aside from the fact that one place had accessible transportation and the other really didn’t.

And it was some events were open to the public, and so I attended one, and one of the Dutch planners explained this layered network system. So there’s a, a network of roads for cars and vehicles, and there’s a separate network for biking, and they will intersect at certain points and you make certain treatments so that those intersections are safe.

But between points, you have completely separate networks. They don’t have to be the same network with the bike path and the road in the same alignment. You can separate them. And so it was neat to learn in like 2010, 2011 that there was a name and a concept and a process for doing what I had experienced as a child in Kingwood for five years.

For these Dutch planners, the way they were describing it, they would say, “Get a map out. Mark the points of interest that you’re trying to promote cycling to, and draw straight lines between them.” So you can see the beginning of a network. Obviously, you can’t build bike trails in a straight line because there are buildings and natural resources in the way, and so then you try to draw the straightest line possible between the two points.

And so if you look at a map of Kingwood and you mark all the playing fields and the schools and the pools, it’s, it’s basically the whole bike path or multi-use path, the Greenbelt Trail, was designed to just connect all of those things. It hit every point that someone like me or my sister needed to go to frequently on our bikes.

The network was there for that

While the Dutch and the Danes were moving forward with their layered networks, our best had big ideas that did work. It was just drowned out by policies that favored car-oriented development. It didn’t have to go that way, but we do have a suburban blueprint to start with and make better. As Steve noted, Kingwood is not perfect and could be improved.

The place is still car-oriented, but the Greenbelt trails are a safe, reasonable alternative for getting around the area. We know others created a different path and have seen it work. We could get there too if we choose.

A few thank you notes before we finish up here. Uh, The Houston Review, “The West Ranch” by Amy Bacon. I reviewed that. Uh, it was a really great piece. You can find it on Google. Rice University’s library and the Charles Tapley Archive, they were super helpful in sending me archived articles and, uh, reports and other things from Charles’ archive that talked about the Greenbelt trails as well as some of those competitions that they were a part of.

Fritz Steiner at the University of Pennsylvania, who has brought back the idea of thinking about Ian McHarg and many of the folks at the University of Pennsylvania at the time who wrote a number of books rethinking design with nature. Gary Nelson and his Substack were really helpful in this, as well as all of the interviews that we did with our friends, Jerry Lunow, Bill Neuhaus, Steve Vance, and John Walsh

To learn more about our work, visit theoverheadwire.com. To listen to more Talking Headways podcasts, visit our podcast page at usa.streetsblog.org. We’ll leave a link to the page in the show notes. Also, thanks to our generous Patreon supporters. Thank you for making this episode and all of our episodes possible.

And finally, a special thanks to Coach Simpson, Coach Barr, and all my Kingwood teammates, men and women. And if you get a chance, take a bike up to Kingwood and just ride around on the Greenbelt trails for a day. It’ll change your mind