Retro-silient?: America’s First Eco-Burb, “The Woodlands” Turns 50

George Mitchell was an unlikely disciple of enlightened urban planning. Born in the scrappy port city of Galveston, Texas in 1919, he made his fortune as an oil and gas wildcatter during Houston’s freewheeling boom years of the 1960s and 1970’s. It was reportedly his reaction to all the shapeless sprawl that he saw engulfing his adopted hometown, along with nostalgia for the traditional neighborhoods of his youth, to cause him in the early 1970s to enter the development business. His signature project, The Woodlands, near Houston, was conceived as an antidote to the typical post-war suburb. The project became one of Mitchell’s biggest obsessions but not his most lasting legacy. Now at 50 years old, The Woodlands remains one of the most ambitious and contradictory “new town” experiments in U.S. history. So how has it fared over time and how true has it held to its original principles? What lasting influence and lessons has it left? How does it stand up to today’s standards of sustainability, resilience and placeness? ?

Dubbed one of America’s first “eco-burbs”, The Woodlands debuted in late 1974 in what was perhaps was one of the least likely locations for planning innovation in the entire country; conservative Montgomery County, Texas. Located 30 miles north of the famously unzoned City of Houston, the 45.5 square-mile site (approximately the size of San Franciso proper) was originally owned by a lumber company before it was acquired by Mitchell to serve basically as a firewall from that city’s encroaching urban sprawl. His goal was to create a verdant, self-contained, live-work-pray oasis that would stand in vivid contrast to the inexorable expanse of asphalt that Houston was at risk of becoming.

Design With Nature

To help develop the vision for The Woodlands, Michell hired or consulted with a who’s who of mid-century planning and development luminaries. They included; James Rouse of the Rouse Company, William Periera (planner of Irvine, CA) and most notably the renowned University of Pennsylvania landscape architect and lead planner Ian McHarg. McHarg’s seminal 1971 book Design With Nature provided the theoretical foundation for the project and was a treatise for a stronger alignment between urban planning and the then nascent field of environmentalism.

Not unlike other “new towns” of the era, the original master plan was conceived by McHarg as a series of individual villages organized around large connected green spaces and tied together by a loose mesh of tree-lined parkways and boulevards. Each village was equipped with its own parks and shopping center. A central town center with restaurants, corporate offices, hotels and retail was added in the 1990s along with an engineered riverwalk conjured from a drainage swale in a nod to the Paseo Del Rio in San Antonio.

The Woodlands major innovations of the time involved eschewing conventional “cut and fill” site engineering practices on the heavily wooded and flood-prone site and preserving as much existing tree cover as possible. In what is now fairly common practice, the site’s natural features provided an organizing framework for the development plan as well as passive stormwater management and flood control. Building sites were surgically carved out of the woods and screened from view from adjacent boulevards and parkways by stands of mature trees. Commercial signs were strictly limited. A system of dedicated walking trails, in-lieu of traditional sidewalks, was threaded throughout the site to connect individual neighborhoods. Paved surfaces were `kept to a minimum. A few cluster-housing sites were nestled into the woods to provide options for economical housing types. If not quite the picture of a turn of the 20th Century Garden City, it at least strove to be a latter-day forested suburb for a hopelessly car addicted region. The highly site sensitive design helped save the project untold millions in site engineering costs and earned plaudits from architects and planners around the country.

HUD’s New Communities Program (Title VII)

In launching The Woodlands, Mitchell may have been motivated as much by a more utopian vision of suburbia (as embodied in forerunner master planned communities such as Reston, VA and Columbia, MD) as by the newly introduced incentives for innovative planning projects courtesy of HUD’s “New Communities” (Title VII) program rolled-out in 1970. Title VII was conceived as programmatic response to both the failures of urban renewal and the yearnings of the early environmental movement of the 1970s. The program’s lofty goals included the development of innovative urban planning models to help reduce the environmental impacts of urban sprawl and its associated racial and socioeconomic segregation. The development of sociable, live-work environments with recreational amenities, affordable housing, and workers freed from long commutes, were some of the program’s professed aims.

Leveraging Title VII’s loan guarantee provisions, Mitchell and others tapped the program to get private lenders to do what they were never otherwise inclined to: provide financing for new, highly speculative, master-planned development at scales rarely previously attempted. In all, 13 communities from throughout the US were selected to participate in the program.

From Eco-Burb to Elite Enclave

After a shaky start due, in part, to a national recession during the 1970s, the project began to hit its stride by the early 1980s. “I remember The Woodlands being looked upon mostly as a distant bedroom suburb for the aspiring upper middle class during the late 70s and 80s”, says lifetime Houston resident and area real estate market consultant Steve Spillette, Director of Research for Houston-based Community Development Strategies. “It was viewed, somewhat stolidly, as a place with good schools where you could buy a starter home or something nicer and commute into the city. Except for its dense trees and the lore that had been built up around it, it really wasn’t considered that much different from any other exurb of the era. In fact, it was perceived as a little stiff and boring”, he says.

Things began to change dramatically in the 1990’s. That’s when the town center and riverwalk were added along with a 16,500-seat outdoor amphitheater which became the premier outdoor concert venue in the entire region. Major corporations also started to decamp to The Woodlands from other parts of the metro. A regional mall was built. Upscale restaurants and hotels followed. “It kind of went from being just a pleasant ‘white bread’ suburb to a real center of gravity within about ten years from about the mid-1990s to the early 2000s”, according to Spillette.

By his account, The Woodlands today is unquestionably considered Houston’s most elite suburban community with some of the highest home prices and commercial rents in the entire metro area. Although home prices in The Woodlands can vary widely from village to village, the current community-wide median home value is $675,000 according to Redfin. This is more than 98 percent more than the metro-wide median home value of $340,000. ?The median home value in the exclusive Carlton Woods section of The Woodlands currently stands at $3.5 million.

More “Sub” Than Urban

Despite its later urban-themed additions, The Woodlands today remains unmistakenly suburban and car-centric. Its sheer scale and spread-out nature - along with its “tree maze” street system - makes it hard to comprehend as a single, distinct place. Only the immediate Town Center/Waterway section could be considered remotely walkable but even it doesn’t unfold itself in a particularly explorable way to encourage such activity (there isn’t enough development intensity or mixed-use to keep the area active and animated). The Town Center’s copious public art and swanky hotels and restaurants -- many of whose exteriors are trimmed out with tropical patterned landscaping -- seem to betray the project’s more modest original aims and aesthetics.

Disappointingly, given its peekaboo aspect of buildings hidden in the woods, there are also few great reveals in The Woodlands. The stands of trees conceal mostly generic glass office buildings and strip shopping centers of pre 2000 vintage. As a piece of highly self-conscious landscape design, the riverwalk lacks the quirky charm and liveliness of San Antonio’s. Architecturally, The Woodlands still oozes 1980s suburbia. Low slung office buildings and McMansions dominate.

And despite its initial goal of being a socioeconomically diverse community, The Woodlands today is one of the most exclusive and least diverse suburbs in the entire Houston Metro area. The project’s early affordable housing goals along with those of several of the other Title VII projects (dubiously measured then by the number of planned apartment units and smaller lots as proxy measures of affordability) ended up being one of HUD’s first concessions when the entire Title VII cohort of projects started to encounter early financial difficulties. Moreover, the subsidies that did go into building affordable housing were never tied to caps on home resale prices or buyer incomes. The result is that their prices have been allowed to float upward at fair market value making them “affordable” only when compared to the Woodlands’ bigger and more luxurious homes which often range in the millions of dollars.

But it obviously isn’t fair to judge The Woodlands on today’s standards of “placeness”, diversity and affordability. As noted by other observers including former McHarg student Fredrick Steiner who currently serves as Dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, its founder’s intent was not to change peoples’ patterns of living (except maybe to reduce commuting) than to simply build a more self-contained and environmentally conscious suburb for the peak automobile age. In a 2005 retrospective on The Woodlands in which he contextualizes McHarg’s work in relation to the later New Urbanists, Steiner defends the former’s terrain-centric design philosophy as a prioritization of ecology over stylized urban form. In designing The Woodlands, McHarg, it seems, was clearly foreshadowing what later became known as Landscape Urbanism, and later, resilient design.

As for sustainability though, The Woodlands really only just scratches the surface. With its reported 8000 acres of open space, the entire development can really be likened to a big “conservation neighborhood” albeit on a very large scale. Although Mitchell and McHarg, with their emphasis on community wholeness and what is now referred to as green infrastructure, were tracking in the right direction, there was never any deemphasis of large-lots or the use of cars in their conception for The Woodlands. Neither was there any thought of energy efficiency. Today, there are charging stations and a free trolly service, but the community, like most of the country, is driven (literally) by copious amounts of oil and air conditioning. The project does earn somewhat higher marks for resiliency however. In a region notoriously prone to flooding and extreme heat, The Woodlands has experienced far less damage from the region’s not infrequent hurricanes than higher and drier areas within the region. Its heavy tree cover and relatively restrained use of hardscape also makes it feel noticeably cooler. The Waterway meanwhile, has become a much referenced local exemplar of amenitized flood control infrastructure.

What the “Frack”!

Somewhat ionically, George Mitchell became best known not as a pioneer real estate developer but as the putative “father of fracking”. He introduced the revolutionary natural gas extraction process in the 1970s. He and his family foundation went on to fund many civic projects around Texas including for historic preservation, university endowments and land conservation causes. He sold off the remaining holdings of The Woodlands’ Corporation in 1997. It was subsequently acquired by the Howard Hughes Corporation in 2011.? It remains to this day one of the largest single private real estate ventures ever undertaken in the U.S.

Despite its ambitious intent, the Title VII program was ignominiously shut down in 1981. The Woodlands was both the largest of the program’s 13 projects and the only one that didn’t default on its loans. A post program evaluation analysis prepared by HUD in the 1980s cited many factors that led to the program’s failure including HUD’s too hands-off approach and inexperience on the part of both the selected developers and the program’s administrators. Also cited were the deep recession of the 1970s and a lack of extended loan repayment terms to help amortize many of the projects’ high up-front costs (the result of relying exclusively on private loans guarantees versus more flexible direct loans from the federal government). ???

No Knockoffs

Despite its now vaunted reputation within Metro Houston, it is telling that The Woodlands never inspired any real imitators in the region. In fact, apart from several faux main street developments (a.k.a., “town centers”), and a handful of newer urban amenities in Houston’s core, the metro area has proven itself largely inimical to most urban planning trends over the years. Even the now several decades old New Urbanist movement seems to have largely passed it by. The region’s physicality, like most sunbelt cities remains overwhelmingly defined by super-sized freeways, mall-centered satellite cities, and myriad other forms of nondescript sprawl.?

“Only Kingswood in northeast Houston and maybe First Colony in Sugar Land could be said to have taken a page out of The Woodlands’ but they don’t come close to it in terms of scale, quality and execution” says Spillette. “The Woodlands is a brand onto itself”, he says. “I think the difference is that you had a patient, legacy investor who held unfailingly to the original vision. He was interested in creating lasting value and wasn’t willing to sell-out for a quick buck when things got difficult. I think that’s a real rarity these days”.?

Besides its physical uniqueness, The Woodlands is also something of an anomaly from a governance standpoint. Having rejected, over the years, both the path of municipal incorporation as well as annexation into Houston, the now 120,000 population community it is essentially governed via a special management district structure akin to a property-owner association. In many senses therefore, The Woodlands remains a singular outlier project. However, it should probably be seen less as a monumental achievement of 20th Century urban design and more as an emerald-in-the-rough and curious administrative experiment. Also, an early (if accidental) progenitor of climate adaptation planning. In developing model communities, as with so many other things, timing and context are everything. A little divine prophecy equally so.

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