{"id":75742,"date":"2025-07-19T15:56:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T15:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/75742\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T15:56:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T15:56:15","slug":"houston-waived-more-than-230-sidewalk-construction-requirements-since-rule-change-in-september-houston-public-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/75742\/","title":{"rendered":"Houston waived more than 230 sidewalk construction requirements since rule change in September \u2013 Houston Public Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\"On<\/a><\/p>\n

Gail Delaughter\/Houston Public Media<\/p>\n

On the northeast corner of Lockwood at Rand Street there\u2019s a landing pad for pedestrians but it doesn\u2019t connect to a sidewalk.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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 \u2014 so-called “sidewalks to nowhere.”<\/p>\n

“In government, unintended consequences is the worst thing that you have to be concerned with,\u201d Whitmire said in September, when he issued a memo instructing the planning department to waive the requirement<\/a> if it resulted in a sidewalk to nowhere. \u201cThere are unintended consequences to the original ordinance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kevin Strickland, co-founder of mobility-focused advocacy group Walk and Roll Houston, argued the phrase “sidewalk to nowhere” is “propaganda.”<\/p>\n

“These aren\u2019t sidewalks to nowhere. They\u2019re sidewalks to somewhere,” Strickland said. “You don\u2019t add by subtracting, meaning we don\u2019t get more sidewalks by issuing waivers for people not to have sidewalks just because it might be the only sidewalk on their block.”<\/p>\n

The planning department issued about 3,700 permits for single-family construction projects from late September through May. Among those, 2,247 projects \u201cwere approved to build sidewalks,\u201d according to the planning department.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

“They don\u2019t know because they don\u2019t 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 \u2014 don\u2019t bother tracking it because we have no interest in sharing it with the public.”<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\"Edgemoor<\/a><\/p>\n

Gail Delaughter\/Houston Public Media <\/p>\n

Edgemoor Street near Renwick. Only one side of the street has a sidewalk, and the Kinder survey found that was a common complaint in Gulfton.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019t sidewalks on the same block and the site isn\u2019t within 1,400 feet of a school, library or church.<\/p>\n

The department hosted a series of community meetings<\/a> in October and planned to present a proposal to the city council in December \u2014 but that never happened. <\/p>\n

“We have so many balls in the air, and so I am hoping that I can get this back up moving, and we\u2019re 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 \u2014 just lots of moving pieces. A part of it was we wanted to give it time. And so we\u2019re about to circle back to it.”<\/p>\n

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 Government: The Legal Future 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.”<\/p>\n

“That said, a system of ad hoc waivers from that law … that\u2019s really problematic, too,” Pollack said. “If the whole point of this, of what I\u2019m saying, is we need more efficient and coherent and thoughtful planning, that is the exact opposite of all of that.”<\/p>\n

In September, at-large council member Sallie Alcorn raised the prospect of a voter-approved bond for more intentional sidewalk construction. <\/p>\n

\u201cLet’s do it,\u201d Alcorn said at the time. \u201cOther cities do it. That’s how they get great sidewalks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gail Delaughter\/Houston Public Media On the northeast corner of Lockwood at Rand Street there\u2019s a landing pad for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":75743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5130],"tags":[10882,4345,17617,52617,52618,5173,425,50,52619,52620,52621,358,522,3187],"class_list":{"0":"post-75742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-city-of-houston","9":"tag-houston","10":"tag-houston-mayor-john-whitmire","11":"tag-houston-planning-and-development","12":"tag-houston-sidewalks","13":"tag-infrastructure","14":"tag-local","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-sidewalk-ordinance","17":"tag-sidewalks-in-houston","18":"tag-sidewalks-to-nowhere","19":"tag-texas","20":"tag-transportation","21":"tag-tx"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114880721200899834","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}