Houston is one of the most strange and fascinating places I've ever reported on. (That's its Art Deco city hall, above.) In Next City, I wrote about all the surprises I found there -- namely, about how practical progressivism plays out in this old-school climate, a city that basically exists through sheer force of will.
Here's a collection of a few passages from the piece:
Annise Parker, mayor of Houston, is hurt. She’s limping when we meet in her third-floor office at City Hall, wearing one black shoe and one tan leather slipper fitted around a bandage on her sprained left ankle. Another bandage circles her sprained wrist. “I tangled with a City of Houston trash can,” she says from behind her polished wood desk. “One of those big black boxes.” A staffer in the room suggests that Parker needn’t mention that it was specifically a City of Houston trashcan. But Parker does anyway. Several times.
After all, it’s not as if Parker is easily beaten. We’re speaking on a Tuesday morning at the beginning of her third term as leader of the nation’s fourth-largest city. She has tackled the most provoking and most mundane of urban challenges and now, because of term limits, she has only two more years serving Houston as an elected official. She’s already hearing from people who want her to run for state office.
Parker made headlines in 2010 by becoming the first openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city. Shortly after her third inauguration, she flew to California to marry her longtime partner. Parker’s ascent spurred what she described as “lots and lots of frankly unearned media attention” that had the attitude of, “How could this have happened in Houston first, and not all these other places?”
Her reply: “It’s because you don’t know Houston.”
Houston is strangely under-chronicled for a city that could fit the entirety of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore inside its 600-square-mile footprint. While the city’s sprawling reach makes Los Angeles look dense, its population of 2.1 million makes it the fourth most populous city in the nation, following New York, L.A. and Chicago.
Julia Ideason Building: Houston Public Library
Elsewhere:
Houston is a profoundly international city. Twenty percent of its residents are foreign-born, with nearly as many Asians and Africans as Latinos. It’s the fifth most popular city for American immigrants. As a result, Houston developed a reasonable immigration policy that those squabbling elsewhere might learn from. ...
The city’s dependency on oil and gas has dimmed in the last three decades, and it is investing seriously in sustainability: Transit, green space, renewable energy and a dense urban core. Parker created the position of sustainability director for the city and recruited Laura Spanjian, from San Francisco, to run the new office. Her marching orders? “Shake things up,” Parker says. In addition to investing in rail, bus and bike infrastructure, the city launched the massive Bayou Greenway Initiative, a $480 million public-private project that will transform the relationship between city residents and the bayous.
Houston is also making progress on inequality. Parker restructured the city’s Office of Affirmative Action and Contract Compliance into the newly christened Office of Business Opportunity to help minority- and women-owned small businesses compete for municipal contracts. She instituted one of the most expansive anti-discrimination ordinances in the country. And Houston was first in the nation to solve its rape kit backlog, a horrific problem plaguing most major cities. Standing next to Parker to mark the achievement was another up-and-coming Lone Star Democrat: Sen. Wendy Davis. The senator — a fellow female politician with a media-friendly personal story — helped secure $11 million in state funding for Texas’ 20,000 untested rape kits. Houston combined the state dollars with federal and city money to not only eliminate its backlog, but also improve evidence management in the long term.
Finally, there’s Parker’s stance on economic inequality. While homelessness in cities is ubiquitous to the point where it is almost accepted as a natural part of the urban fabric, Houston is working eliminate chronic homelessness. The mayor, whose son was homeless when she adopted him, dedicated her last two terms to the issue. Her inaugural reception, after all, was held at the Houston Food Bank.
None of these accomplishments were done by template, as there’s no mold fit for the city’s brass-tacks culture. In Houston, reform must happen on decidedly local terms. If visionary policies catch on, it’s because they are useful — not because they are visionary. Here, you have to make the business case for what you do.
“We’re not going to purchase renewable energy because it’s great for the planet — although it is great for the planet — but because it’s good for business,” Parker said. “Obviously, we want to save taxpayers money when we can.” Against all odds, Houston is the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the country.
Houston has become a case study for the practicality of progressivism. The city’s radical transformation over the last three decades, and its finely tuned evolution under Annise Parker, speaks to the nuts and bolts of intelligent urban policy. Ideals are not the fuel here; utilitarianism is. The main mode of reform incentivizes change rather than regulates it. (This is still small-government Texas, after all.) Yet the new Houston looks far more idyllic than the old.
Downtown Houston, with rail line
And finally:
Parker calls herself a “thoroughly conventional mayor.” By epitomizing the practicality prized by Houstonians, she is credible when she ventures into more classically progressive territory.
Comparing Parker with Wendy Davis, the mayor’s occasional partner in the statehouse, is a study of contrasts. Davis’ 11-hour filibuster in the Texas legislature won her the national spotlight, inspired a groundswell of progressive activism and propelled her gubernatorial campaign — but did not ultimately stop the abortion ban she was protesting from becoming law. Parker’s managerial brand of progressivism doesn’t incline her to take show-stopping risks, and her rhetoric often sounds decidedly straight-laced, even conservative. But, as she tells me, she has a list of things to accomplish, and one by one, she’s checking them off.
The trick, though, will be for Parker to not let the brass tacks keep her from dreaming big and taking risks — with or without a coalition. After all, the energy for progressivism that Davis catalyzed marked a turning point for state politics in Texas. And Parker is in her final term as an elected official in Houston. As her former professor, Steve Klineberg puts it, “This is her chance to be a visionary.”
Gordon Quan, who I interviewed for the story, with Irma of the famed Irma's Restaruant
You can see an excerpt of the story here. The piece happens to be the 100th Forefront feature, which is pretty great.
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