Street View is really a wonderful thing. It provides the means to waste hours of your life by virtually cruising around major world cities. I was looking for architectural inspiration in the low-rise areas of Tokyo when a thought occured to me: where had I seen this urban form before? Oh, right:
The “superblocks” around Araiyakushimae Station range in size from 250×350 to 500×600. Within the blocks, numerous privately-maintained driveways and accesses connect interior lots to the outside world. The rapidly-developing Washington Avenue corridor is being built out at the exact same scale – in lot size, building coverage, and building height. In fact, if you flip the Tokyo image around (so the cars drive on the right side of the road), the transition is nearly seamless.
So why does an aerial photo of Rice Military look just like Tokyo?
A few things set Houston apart from most other American cities here. For one, American cities have long had a prejudice towards public streets. Development regulations stipulating that “every lot must have X amount of frontage on a public street” date to the 1800s in most American cities, well before the age of zoning. Interior lots reached through shared access easements are a common feature of rural and exurban development, but Houston is relatively uncommon in allowing such arrangements in a high-density setting. This results in narrow alleyways more characteristic of cities in Japan and, on a larger scale, Great Britain.
We also lack the setback regulations typical of American metropolii. Minimum front/side/rear yard requirements, typically based on a single-family home on a 5000 square foot lot, entered almost every city’s zoning codes in the 1920s and 1930s. They still exist today. Houston, however, never had such regs – side and rear yard are limited only by fire safety issues, which in practice means a 4-5′ gap between wood-frame buildings, or zero-lot-line with a partition wall of concrete, brick, or masonry. We *do* have a 10-foot front yard requirement and a 15-foot corner “sight triangle” requirement, but these are often waived for smaller projects.
Thus does the inner loop rapidly densify, passing many “smart growth” cities – and all without the “regional district subarea framework plan” or the 37 different stakeholder committees or the 20-year property tax abatements. Nope, in Houston it just happens. Pretty cool.
5 responses so far ↓
Gus // February 6, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Where is this? Google doesn’t seem to have any entries for “Araiyukusushimae.”
keephoustonhouston // February 6, 2009 at 11:02 pm
That’s because I spelled it wrong. (somehow I added “sushi” to the name; I think I must have been hungry when I made this post.)
Type “Araiyakushimae Station, Japan” into Google Maps and it should pop up. The neighborhood in the screenshot is about 1/2 mile NNE of the station, in the triangular area between National Route 8 and National Route 440.
The Houston portion of the image is the block immediately south of Rose Street, between Blossom and Reinerman.
Tom Comstock // February 23, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Not sure it always works in our favor.
Cameron Armstrong // March 16, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Question: When did the West End start being called ‘Rice Military’? Old timers seemed always to call it the West End (after the trolley line from downtown). Rice Military is only one of many small subdivisions in the area… And the West End Civic Club is over in Magnolia Grove (?). Seems strange to have names passed out at random, and out of relation to historical usages.
keephoustonhouston // March 17, 2009 at 3:49 am
I’ve seen “Rice Military” used on HAR as a catch-all for the portion of the Washington Avenue corridor west of Shepherd and south of IH-10. (I spend way too much time perusing HAR.) In Realtor-ese, it seems like anything too far north to be “Memorial” and too far west to be “Heights” becomes “Rice Military.”
If you have a plat map showing the original extents of the various named additions and subdivisions, I’d love to see it. Someone with access to the full GIS dataset (not the buggy web-based version) could probably pull it up.