Press tackles "evil Republican" developer
This week, the Houston Press passed up an opportunity to do some balanced, interesting journalism on the massive redevelopment going on inside the loop.
Instead, Josh Harkinson took the easy, predictable, boring approach:
Few businessmen provoke sharper differences of opinion among Houstonians than Bob Perry. The founder of Perry Homes is the largest private political donor to Republican causes in the nation. Writing checks from his modest home in Nassau Bay, he gives voice to conservative suburbia and inspires nightmares among the left-of-center politicos in the city's urban core.
And he's no less controversial within the camps of his own industry. University of Houston architecture professor Tom Diehl speaks for many in his profession when he describes the 72-year-old former schoolteacher as, simply, "the enemy."
Standing with Diehl in the lounge of the Gerald D. Hines School of Architecture, Celeste Williams giggles. A native of Manhattan who teaches courses on the history of design, she grapples for her own words to describe Perry's town houses. "I can't even call them plain vanilla," she says, "because I love vanilla so much."
Williams climbs into her blue Audi and drives through the Third Ward. The architect has agreed to tour several Perry developments and apply an informal "good neighbor test" -- a measure of how the town houses interact with their surroundings. She comes to a stop at Baldwin Park, where old oaks are hemmed in by a young wall of identical brick facades.
Walking out of the park and into the street, Williams catches simultaneous views of two sides of a new Perry town house. "It looks like two different buildings," she says. The bricks on the front of the house peter out halfway along the side, in favor of siding. Windows are scarce, and their sills don't line up with those fronting the park. It's a classic example of squandering a valuable corner lot: "If you're facing the corner, you have an incredible opportunity to gather both streets to you," she says as a car whizzes by, "and as you can see, that's pretty much lost."
The explanation for the disjointed corner house is simple: Perry has surrounded the park with tract homes. "They're just stamping and then they're just building," Williams says. "It has no site-sensitivity."
Part of what we like to do with this blog is offer some balance to the formulaic approach of this town's tired legacy media (yes, the days when the Press should be considered substantively alternative journalistically have long passed).
So, here's a slightly different perspective:
1) For years, liberal urbanites complained as the inner city grew more deserted, lamenting the fact that people wouldn't give the inner-city lifestyle a chance, and heaping scorn on the choice of many people to live in suburbs. Now that those folks are moving in to the city, liberal urbanites are complaining that they're moving in?
2) Or, as some liberal urbanites admit in this article, the real complaint seems that the suburbanites are bringing their suburban values with them: they'd like safe, affordable housing with nice amenities, and may not want to take on remodeling quaint 100-year homes that are literally falling down. In other words, "they" can move here, but "they" better think like us or we don't want 'em! Very tolerant of diversity.
3) Perry and other builders -- love 'em or hate 'em -- are sinking massive amounts of capital into redeveloping this city's inner loop. Yes, they expect to make money. So what? It's redevelopment that benefits the inner city's tax base, and improves the city's population density, which liberal urbanites have long criticized in this "city of sprawl" (as they say). Redevelopment does have its costs. Capital isn't free. And the injection of capital made by Perry and others in redeveloping the inner loop is staggering.
4) Not everyone can afford the $500k townhomes that some of the liberal urbanists might prefer to the Perry "worse-than-vanilla" models, or maybe even the Audi driven by the architecture professor who grew up in Manhattan. Those Perry homes are giving some people a chance at inner-loop ownership that they wouldn't otherwise have. Ownership is not insignificant. Liberal urbanists might consider that ownership could well be an important driver in building/maintaining the quality of neighborhoods, so they don't decline into the "ghettos" those liberal urbanists suggest some of the Perry developments will soon become.
5) It shouldn't be a requirement of inner-loop living that one think like a liberal urbanite architecture professor who grew up in Manhattan. Really! Diversity is good.
6) Granite countertops aren't an evil in themselves, and it's not evil to desire them as an amenity. Really!
Look, I came of age intellectually with a copy of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead by my side. I have no doubt that Howard Roark would find common cause with some of the architectural critics of some of the cookie-cutter inner loop development. I'm not a huge fan of all of the construction. But, people have choices. If you prefer to remodel an existing inner-loop home, that choice is available. If you prefer an affordable inner-loop townhouse, that choice is available. If you prefer an expensive inner-loop townhouse, there's that option.
Please, though -- don't complain that the inner loop isn't Manhattan, or that we don't all think alike. Those are virtues, not problems.
Feel free to discuss, while keeping in mind that you have that option here, and we aren't telling you what you should be thinking.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/26/05 03:39 PM | Houston Life | Print | Comments (6)
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