I'm surprised you list Houston as a walkable city. I don't know what neighborhood you were in but I always use Houston as the prime example of the hollowed-out city. I flew in and out of there for several years and always stayed at a downtown hotel. During the hot afternoons, all the office workers traveled in the glass skywalks or tunnels, and no one would set foot in the street, except for the poor waiting for buses and the homeless. And in the evening I would take walks after dinner to clear my mind, and I could walk the entire circuit of the downtown area (more than 2 miles) and would see at the most half a dozen people. It was like neutron bomb had been dropped on the place. Maybe it's changed in the last decade (I heard there was a move afoot to add downtown apartments) but as far as I could tell, Houston was the worst when it came to downtown life.
As for DC, they've done a pretty good job filling in the downtown again. After the MLK assasination riots in the 60s, downtown DC was not a place that one would have wanted to live. Capitol Hill was crime ridden; white flight was rampant. Several large companies located across the Potomac in Arlington VA because there were no height limitations on buildings. The big department stores shut down in DC in the 80s. When I moved there in the 1990s, there were pockets of neighborhoods that were revitalized, Dupont Circle being the prime example, but that was still not downtown proper (generally the Pennsylvania Ave corridor from the Capitol to the White House). The housing boom changed that; gentrification crept toward downtown. The prostitution havens like Logan Circle and Thomas Circle (which are walking distance to the downtown offices) have now become hot places to live. A magnificent redo of Union Station, the train station, and the adjoining Federal Law Center building spurred development on the Capitol Hill side of Downtown. And the new convention center and the MCI sports arena filled in the middle. There are now a number of luxury towers right in Downtown that make the city very livable. You can hopscotch from coffee shop to coffee shop or restaurant to restaurant all across the span of downtown. And the final piece of the puzzle is to revitalize the SW or Anacostia area, which has been seemingly immune to economic recovery over the years. That may change with the FCC and Fannie Mae moving their offices there, and the new ballpark. DC is a model for urban revitalization, but I wonder if it may be unique in that the feds have thrown a lot of money at it (including a tax credit for first time home buyers in the district) and DC has had explosive job growth for nearly 15-20 years without interruption. |
