Will values shape Houston’s future?
The City of Houston Charter calls for the City to prepare a general plan for future development and infrastructure. In summer 2006, City Council voted a budget amendment authorizing the Planning Commission to create a workplan to move the City towards producing a general plan. Since then, there has been heated public debate about what Houston’s general plan ought to address and how.
In their book, In Search of Excellence, authors Tom Peters and Robert Waterman observe that,
“In a world where the rate of change seems to be escalating rapidly, core values provide a source of guidance.”
The City of Houston is assuredly changing ever-more-rapidly; are there core values to guide us and shape Houston’s future?
On March 31st, about 100 Houstonians braved an early morning downpour to answer that question. In a workshop convened by Blueprint Houston at the Tejano Center for Community Concerns, Houstonians from across the city wrestled with words and attempted to articulate our shared values.
But we didn’t start from scratch.
We built on the Guiding Values from the Citizens’ Agenda for Houston’s Future developed by more than a thousand Houstonians who participated in Blueprint’s first Citizens’ Congress and public survey in 2003.
Previous participants drafted guiding values statements across 8 categories: environment, community, economy, transportation choices, neighborhoods, government, education, and culture. Our job on Saturday was to review the draft statements and validate that these are in fact values held by most Houstonians. We broke up into small groups and reviewed the values, statement by statement.
Transportation Choices
We value and will work for
- The best transportation system in America
- A high level of access for all
- An integrated, efficient, multi-modal network
- Coordinated land use and transportation planning
- Choices and safety
The idea is to determine what we can agree on. For example, the ten people in my breakout group all agreed that Houstonians value transportation “choices and safety”, and we all want a “high level of access for all”. But some of us felt weird about wanting “the best transportation system in America.” Why in America? Is that even realistic? We felt better about striving for “the best transportation system possible.”
Our discussion about “coordinated land use and transportation planning” was more heated. It’s the right goal but the city mostly doesn’t regulate land use. Does transportation follow from land use? Doesn’t new transportation induce new land uses? What if we push for “Transportation planning that facilitates quality growth”? We felt more comfortable with that statement.
We had similar group discussions in each category over the next two hours. And as we wrestled with values, so did eleven other groups.
Throughout the morning, Blueprint Houston facilitators captured the consensus from participants in each of the breakout groups. At the end of the day, the facilitators have to pull it all together and get us to final statements. Expect a final draft of Houston’s vision and values from Blueprint Houston soon. In the meantime, we can all make sure the City is on board with the simple notion that Houston’s future will be better for all of us if we all know what we’re striving for.