Anti-Town Planning #5: The Woodlands Is the Way It Ought to Be

If I had to live in a major urban area, I would like to live in a place like the Woodlands, a master-planned community north of Houston. The difference between the Woodlands and the town plans I’ve critiqued earlier this week is that the Woodlands was planned by a developer, while the other town plans were written by government planners.

Flickr photo by HJPotter.

The Woodlands is a 28,000-acre development that began in 1974. Like other “master-planned communities,” it differs from smaller subdivisions in that it was designed as a complete community, with offices, stores, hotels, schools, parks, and residential areas. Although it includes a mix of uses, it is not, for the most part, “mixed use.” That is, the nine “villages” that make up the residential areas are separate from the retail and commercial areas. But the employment areas provide more jobs than the number of workers living in its residential areas.

Flickr photo by ljmacphee.

“You name a place for what is no longer there as a result of your actions,” a developer once told Joel Garreau. But the Woodlands is an exception, as it has retained 1,500 acres of woodlands and 4,200 acres of other open spaces, not to mention 1,700 acres of golf courses. In other words, more than one out of four acres are public open spaces.

Flickr photo by ljmacphee.

The community also has 145 miles of bike trails, plus swimming pools, skateboard parks, lakes, waterways, and numerous other recreation facilities. Of course, the large yards accompanying most homes in the Woodlands are also a source of recreation and open space.

The Woodlands is also affordable, with many new and existing homes selling for well under $250,000. Current listings of new homes show, for example, a 4-bedroom, 2-bath home with 2,264 square feet offered for $205,000. Smaller homes are selling for under $170,000.

The Woodlands is growing rapidly, with census counts increasing from under 56,000 in 2000 to more than 80,000 in 2005. It should be completely built out in 2011, after which residents hope to incorporate or at least resist annexation by Houston.

Under Texas law, most of the Woodlands is within Houston’s “extraterritorial jurisdiction,” which gives Houston the right to annex land without the permission of the landowners and to veto local incorporation. The Woodlands residents’ persuaded the legislature to put a moratorium on Houston annexation, and hope to persuade Houston to let them incorporate after the moratorium expires.

If I recall my history correctly, Congress passed a law in the 1960s providing grants to developers who wanted to build master-planned communities. The Woodlands was one of several communities started with these grants, and perhaps the most successful. Only the initial village in the Woodlands was planned with federal grant money.

The main obstacle to master-planned communities is not a lack of planning funds but a lack of land: few developers have access to the large number of acres needed to build enough homes to provide a market for shops and offices. Joel Garreau comments that the Woodlands succeeded only because it was backed by an oil company “with deep enough pockets to wait ten or twenty years for a payout.” Of course, cities that draw urban-growth boundaries or put up other barriers to development only make it more difficult for developers to acquire the lands needed for such communities.

Flickr photo by HJPotter.

One developer told Garreau that master-planned community “doesn’t mean anything more than a marketing term.” It is true that some developments that call themselves master-planned communities are really little more than golf courses surrounded by housing.

But Google master-planned community and you will find lots of examples of true planned communities. They are mostly in states like Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada, where there are few state land-use laws and lots of large landholdings.

Typically, a developer buys a 5,000 to 30,000 acre ranch and draws up the master plan. The developer then sells portions of it to various builders who concentrate on commercial, housing, or other parts of the development. Irvine and Valencia, California, and Reston, Virginia, all of which began in the 1960s, certainly fit the definition. But unless California planners ease up on their regulation, the Golden State is not likely to see any more true master-planned communities.

A place doesn’t have to have master planning to be livable. When no one developer can acquire enough land to build a master-planned community, then individual developers will build residential, commercial, retail, and other developments on smaller parcels. Some local government will probably need to provide schools and parks. The community should be perfectly livable, though it may not be quite a pretty as the Woodlands.

But if planners want to get a job that truly promotes livability, they ought to go work for developers instead of the government. If government planners would get out of the way, more developers would have an opportunity to build communities like the Woodlands.