<\/p>\n
A 1995 drawing by Evan Mintz, then 9-years-old, predicting Houston’s future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Yvonne Cormier<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, letters editor Cindy Rivas Alfaro published several predictions<\/a> written by Houston children back in 1995 that had been part of a time capsule at Hermann Park. Among the optimistic visions of flying cars or youthful doomer forecasts of nuclear war, one message grabbed my attention: My own.<\/p>\n “I believe Houston will be a giant city in 2020. With a giant transportation system,\u201d I wrote as a precocious 9-year-old. \u201cHuge monorails, really big subway systems. And instead of houses we\u2019ll live in humongous buildings and flying cars.”<\/p>\n I even drew the then-Transco Tower for scale.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Clearly my predictions didn\u2019t come true, but nevertheless there are a few lessons to be learned from the letter.\u00a0<\/p>\n RELATED: I asked Houston children to predict the future over 30 years ago. Here’s what they said.<\/a><\/p>\n READ THE LETTERS:\u00a0Flying cars, robots, hope: What Houston children predicted over 30 years ago<\/a><\/p>\n The first lesson: I\u2019ve always been like this. My obsession with Houston\u2019s urban design and overall passion for living in a growing city is not some newfound trait or airs I put on for the job. I was biased for Houston from the very beginning. Admittedly this is more thanks to\u00a0video game designers Will Wright<\/a> and Sid Meier<\/a> than urbanists Donald Shoup<\/a> and Jane Jacobs<\/a>. Long Saturday nights spent playing SimCity 2000 and Civilization II provided an elementary-school-aged foundation for thinking critically about the places where we live and an ambition for building great cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The second lesson is that even though that 20th century sci-fi vision of the future didn\u2019t exactly come to fruition, we shouldn\u2019t dismiss youthful ambition. Yes, Houston never built a massive monorail, despite Kathy Whitmire\u2019s best efforts<\/a>. Nor did we construct super-massive arcologies<\/a>. In fact, Houston doesn\u2019t even have the tallest tower in Texas anymore, as Noah M. Horwitz lamented last week<\/a>. But cities aren\u2019t just the sum of their buildings \u2014 they\u2019re the spaces between the buildings. They\u2019re the people in those buildings. And the ambitious wonders we have built meet the needs of those people \u2014 sometimes bluntly, cheaply or unimaginatively, but better than so many other metropolises. Rings of loop roads that transformed the prairie into housing are themselves megastructures, ones that bring the American dream within reach for millions.<\/p>\n In ways I didn\u2019t imagine as a kid, Houston has done big things. The bayous have been transformed into linear greenways. We built a landbridge over Memorial Drive. We\u2019re starting to put freeways below grade to reconnect downtown with Midtown, the Museum District and EaDo. Those are Houston\u2019s ambitions fulfilled. (And we should all happily thank Rich and Nancy Kinder for their contributions.)<\/p>\n Another sort of ambition my kid self didn\u2019t fully grasp was that of being a city with a dynamic and growing population. Back in the 1990s, Houston\u2019s watchword was \u201cworld class\u201d \u2014 we simply had to build mass transit, attract the Olympics and show that we weren\u2019t some backwater port town that got lucky on oil. Turns out that Houston didn\u2019t need monorail or spectacle to become a global city. We just needed the people. A city\u2019s diversity and vitality doesn\u2019t come from the buildings, it comes from the women and men who live there, their own personal aspirations and efforts to build a better future. Immigration has been our city\u2019s most successful megaproject of the past 30 years.<\/p>\n “I believe Houston will be a giant city in 2020. With a giant transportation system,\u201d Evan Mintz wrote as a precocious 9-year-old. \u201cHuge monorails, really big subway systems. And instead of houses we\u2019ll live in humongous buildings and flying cars.”<\/p>\n Courtesy of Yvonne Cormier<\/p>\n Finally, there\u2019s the lesson about how I can at least partially blame regulatory barriers and a stultifying status quo for snuffing out my imagined future for Houston. After all, it isn\u2019t the lack of child-like imagination that makes it hard for Houston to urbanize. It\u2019s the way that America can\u2019t build mass transit as affordably or quickly as our peer nations. It\u2019s because Texas has a constitutionally dedicated fund for freeways<\/a>, but not for rail or buses. It\u2019s the local setback requirements, drainage rules, parking minimums, unnecessarily wide streets and a hundred other bureaucratic cuts that help kill the vision drawn by 9-year-old Evan. SimCity never had to deal with those issues, and that was by design.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n<\/p>\n