Gail Delaughter/Houston Public Media
Over an eight-month period after Houston Mayor John Whitmire instructed the city’s planning department to “use discretion and waive sidewalk construction” for certain single-family projects, only 6% of about 3,700 approved projects received waivers from sidewalk construction requirements.
The waiver initiative came after debate over the city’s sidewalk ordinance, which requires single-family construction projects to build a piece of sidewalk on the property or pay a fee if a sidewalk isn’t already in place. Because the fee is generally more expensive than the cost of building a sidewalk, the rule resulted in cases of individual slabs of concrete in front of homes that connected to nothing else — so-called “sidewalks to nowhere.”
“In government, unintended consequences is the worst thing that you have to be concerned with,” Whitmire said in September, when he issued a memo instructing the planning department to waive the requirement if it resulted in a sidewalk to nowhere. “There are unintended consequences to the original ordinance.”
Kevin Strickland, co-founder of mobility-focused advocacy group Walk and Roll Houston, argued the phrase “sidewalk to nowhere” is “propaganda.”
“These aren’t sidewalks to nowhere. They’re sidewalks to somewhere,” Strickland said. “You don’t add by subtracting, meaning we don’t get more sidewalks by issuing waivers for people not to have sidewalks just because it might be the only sidewalk on their block.”
The planning department issued about 3,700 permits for single-family construction projects from late September through May. Among those, 2,247 projects “were approved to build sidewalks,” according to the planning department.
About 1,500 were not required to build a sidewalk because they front a private street or shared driveway. About 100 projects paid a fee instead of constructing a sidewalk. An additional 234 received waivers “due to infeasibility or lack of nearby connectivity.”
In response to public records requests from Houston Public Media, the planning department initially said it was incapable of determining the number of waivers issued that would allow projects to avoid sidewalks and fees.
“They don’t know because they don’t care,” Strickland said in June. “If they cared about this data, it would have been tracked. So to me, it sounds like a deliberate effort — don’t bother tracking it because we have no interest in sharing it with the public.”
Asked for comment on Strickland’s perspective, the planning department in July then said it received “additional help from our IT Division” and produced the records.
Gail Delaughter/Houston Public Media
In September, the Houston City Council debated removing the sidewalk requirement altogether. After public pushback, Whitmire began the waiver program and the matter was referred to the planning department for further consideration.
The planning department proposed an ordinance that would exempt projects from the requirement under a variety of circumstances, including if there are deed restrictions in place prohibiting sidewalk construction, the lot is 1 acre or larger, construction of a sidewalk is deemed infeasible, or if there aren’t sidewalks on the same block and the site isn’t within 1,400 feet of a school, library or church.
The department hosted a series of community meetings in October and planned to present a proposal to the city council in December — but that never happened.
“We have so many balls in the air, and so I am hoping that I can get this back up moving, and we’re looking at maybe by summer, the first week of August,” department director Vonn Tran said in June. “We just got through budget and all of the reorganization — just lots of moving pieces. A part of it was we wanted to give it time. And so we’re about to circle back to it.”
Michael Pollack, professor of law and associate dean at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City, is the author of an upcoming book about sidewalks. “Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource” features a section set in Houston. He argued that “sidewalks should not be the responsibility of the adjacent property owner, but rather a really concerted effort at the city level, at the governmental level.”
“That said, a system of ad hoc waivers from that law … that’s really problematic, too,” Pollack said. “If the whole point of this, of what I’m saying, is we need more efficient and coherent and thoughtful planning, that is the exact opposite of all of that.”
In September, at-large council member Sallie Alcorn raised the prospect of a voter-approved bond for more intentional sidewalk construction.
“Let’s do it,” Alcorn said at the time. “Other cities do it. That’s how they get great sidewalks.”
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