Livable places: Creating neighborhoods in Houston where you can work, live, and play

HOUSTON – The City of Houston’s Planning Department wants to make Houston a more walkable and bike-friendly city. In the summer, new rules were approved by city council to do just that under the “Walkable Places” ordinance.

Now, Houston’s planning department wants to take it a step further by creating “Livable Places,” a concept that would create neighborhoods inside Houston city limits where you could work, live and play--eliminating the need to drive.

Dipti Mathur, City of Houston Planning Department Division Manager, leads the livable places action team, overseeing the strategic planning of this concept. She said there’s a growing demand among people who are looking to buy a home in walk-able pockets.

“In the entire city, we are missing affordable spaces, like Montrose,” Mathur said.

According to AARP, 56% of millennials and 46% of baby boomers want to live in a more walkable environment.

In fact, the livable places team has already found data indicating that on the east side of Houston, car ownership has dropped.

Mathur also says younger families aren’t gravitating towards a suburban lifestyle as much. U.S. Census data says 30% of households in the United States are single-family households and by 2025, 75-85% of those households will not have children.

So, this idea of having large communities with single-family homes is not sustainable.

The livable places team will first focus on the development codes that we have in place right now. Mathur’s hoping to rework those rules so that “livable places” or neighborhoods can be built in walkable neighborhoods.

Livable places are not a full solution to making housing in Houston sustainable, but it at least will help by providing options to how housing is built and more importantly how we choose to live.

This concept is just in its beginning stages and there’s still a lot of work to be done, but Mathur says her team hopes to make great strides in the development code in the next two years.