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The Rice Thresher
6100 Main Street (MS-524)
Houston, TX 77005-1892

I like the noise, the bustle, the clamor, the bright lights, the honking horns, the smell of the subway and the sound of car alarms. I like the humanity that oozes from the dirty concrete pores. It permeates everything: Fifth Avenue, Hyde Park, Dupont Circle, South Station, even Central Park. Humanity is hard to avoid on the East Coast.

What I enjoy most is the feeling of community one feels within the urban jungle. Certainly not the same community that small-town America offers, and not nearly as friendly, but there is a sense of being part of something larger.

It is a feeling found while walking around Chicago's State and Wabash the day after Christmas, strolling through Piedmont Park in Atlanta when the rollerbladers are out in force, and the soccer fanatics hit the field, or sweating it out on Metro during rush hour. It's sometimes grimy, sometimes hectic, but you never feel alone.

I miss that feeling here in Houston. Even my native Atlanta, another product of the Sunbelt boom, has some semblance of that lovely urban atmosphere. It is a place where you can talk about the Braves game with the man next to you on the train coming home from the stadium or smile and nod when the drunk college student who has accosted you in Buckhead rambles incessantly.

Houston, however, is devoid of this mercurial, seething urban grind. You could live out your professional life in the fourth largest city in the nation and see no one other than your close friends and co-workers.

Spend four years inside the hedges at Rice and move into a walled-in community in Clear Lake, drive to work by yourself Monday through Friday and shop at the closest suburban mall when you need to. Even trips from nightclub to nightclub or bar to bar require the automobile.

There is no sense of being a part of something else here, no sense of responsibility for a common area, no sense of being in a city save for the overabundance of car dealerships. Houston has the material aspect of the city, but none of a city's unique feeling of community.

I miss the conversation with the stranger on the train and the surprise encounter on the streets. I think this has to do with the fact that we don't have the chance to walk through the streets; we don't have the chance to engage the attention of that stranger on the train.

The post-war, haphazard suburban boom is culpable in many ways. The suburbs went up while the inner-city community withered and the tax dollars fled. Along with the money fled urbiculture's historic and communal heritage. My own beloved Atlanta is a casualty of the air conditioner and the automobile.

Suburbanites work in the city, use its resources and facilities, come for its sports, but leave every day at 5 p.m., leaving the city's heart to deal with its own problems of overuse and underfunding.

The argument is in some sense analogous to Nike's affairs overseas. To paraphrase noted economist (and Rice alumnus) Hermann Daly, capitalism has been said to internalize profit and externalize costs. Suburbia has done an admirable job of that. Vast sums of money pass through downtown but hardly help the plight of the area.This money and any feelings of responsibility are packed away to Sugarland every afternoon. The mentality is: If I don't live there, why should I care?

All in all, this is a plea for some real urban planning. Not just zoning laws, but real efforts to encourage folks to move back to the city. For example, we can implement incentives for developers to renovate the downtown area and for regional and metropolitan-area planning that facilitates communities built around people, not streets.

Cities can plan highways to promote high-density living instead of sprawl and perhaps even allow for rail travel sometime in the distant future. People are interested in more than just housing costs, and I think that there is a desire for that fading feeling of fellowship and a willingness to pay for less traffic, businesses and neighbors within walking distance, less stress and strolls through the park. The newfound interest in building communities as they were 70 years ago is a step in the right direction, and I can only hope that the initiative will spread.

If you build it, they will come. As for those of you who will graduate and stay in the big city, try living in town. You just might find that you like the feeling you get where the streets radiate humanity.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the April 11, 1997 issue.