Master-Planned Communities and the Energy Industry in Houston

Energy companies in Houston began transforming energy and land capital into large planned communities in the early 1960s, during the height of American suburbanization and during a booming era in Houston.Footnote ¹⁶ Energy and real estate development are both highly capital intensive, which favored large businesses and supported the growth of large financial institutions that were able to extend credit to these businesses. The oil industry required speculative real estate investments. Large tracts were purchased or leased and surveyed, and much of that land was untouched by exploration and drilling procedures. In the 1960s, both the federal government, with its wide array of real estate subsidies replete with guidelines that often required suburban-style designs, and middle class consumers preferred mass produced tract housing development on previously undeveloped land.Footnote ¹⁷ Oil companies had long engaged in exploration in what was fast becoming Houston’s suburbs. In 1938, Humble Oil (now Exxon) purchased about 30,000 acres of land known as the West Ranch southeast of Houston; the plot eventually became known as the Friendswood Field, one of Humble’s most important and lucrative projects, in close proximity to both Houston and the refineries on the nearby Houston Ship Channel.Footnote ¹⁸

As the Houston area rapidly grew after World War Two, diversification into real estate became an attractive second circuit of accumulation for energy businesses and their surplus land holding was key in investments that created wealth for them but also for the region as a whole. When National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) decided to locate the Manned Flight Center, which it would later name the Johnson Space Center (JSC), on ranch land southeast of Houston in 1961, energy companies took the lead in development. Humble, which had donated the land on which the space center was built and participated in the negotiations to bring the JSC to Houston, quickly established a real estate subsidiary called the Friendswood Development Corporation (FDC). In addition to bringing in thousands of jobs, the JSC was a publicity boon for Houston, and city leaders, along with oil executives, began to use it to promote the city. The chamber of commerce soon began calling Houston “Space City, USA,” and brought its full support behind the Astrodome, the futuristic indoor sports stadium they publicized endlessly. Already an outwardly expanding metro area and growing petrochemical, manufacturing, and medical hub, business elites and real estate developers sought to brand Houston as a city of the future, emphasizing Modernist architecture, a global outlook and white collar workforce, cheap transport and energy, and unlimited growth potential supported by free enterprise culture.Footnote ¹⁹

But the JSC was also an opportunity to create a new physical and social landscape in metropolitan Houston, one that catered to the tremendous influx of knowledge workers who would be manning the station, as well as the contractors and other aviation and aerospace professionals migrating to Houston. Linking newly developed suburban space to knowledge work was nothing new in the early 1960s, but the idea of a master-planned community that would develop side by side with the research facility was.Footnote ²⁰ Houston also provided a unique context. The city’s lack of zoning and haphazard growth patterns encouraged cheap and fast development, but they also allowed the city to become extremely polluted and feel disorganized and chaotic.Footnote ²¹ One journalist wrote that, “Like a runaway oil well, Houston spews people and wealth about the land totally at random, in ever-widening circles.”Footnote ²² This made FDC executives uneasy: the thousands of new white collar workers would likely want new, planned, and convenient suburban places to live, in close proximity to JSC.Footnote ²³ The facility was too far from the city’s more upscale residential district west of downtown to entice scientists and engineers. Humble deeded about 10,000 acres on the eastern side of their property to FDC to develop Clear Lake City (CLC), the first master-planned community in Houston.

CLC offered these white collar workers and their families amenities and convenience not available in much of Houston—fully developed parks and community buildings, pools and ballfields, as well as commercial development separated from residential areas by greenbelts. Humble Oil’s resources and profits derived from the rapid growth of U.S. automobile culture in the 1960s meant that FDC could think and plan longer term than many other Houston developers, and it tightly controlled land use policy via zoning and plans that laid out entire communities before they were built. By 1969, there were three shopping centers, thirty companies leasing office space, and nineteen more leasing land and buildings in Bayport, the adjacent industrial district along Galveston Bay. Most important of all, CLC abutted the JSC, making for an easy commute for scientists and engineers.Footnote ²⁴

By the mid-1970s, CLC had grown to over 23,000 residents. The development’s industrial area had doubled its number of tenants (almost all in the chemical business), and the University of Houston–Clear Lake opened, a graduate-focused university emphasizing engineering and space studies that catered to NASA workers looking for advanced training. Buoyed by CLC’s success, in 1971 FDC began plans for an even larger project northeast of Houston, Kingwood, which they dubbed “The Livable Forest.” This upscale development promised the same level of planning and amenities, but also offered a more undisturbed natural environment. The low-density neighborhoods were laid out around a championship golf course, connected by arterials with residential areas dispersed in wooded areas often separated by greenbelts. Kingswood promoted the “qualitative aspects of development as well as quantitative” and encouraged lifestyles that revolved around the development, “growth in an orderly, well-planned way” that was “a place where people can live, work, and play.” The company later developed Friendswood, adjacent to the west of CLC, as well as several other large master-planned communities north and northwest of Houston. CLC, Kingswood, and Friendswood were all forcibly annexed into Houston beginning in the 1970s.Footnote ²⁵

George Mitchell: The Social Aspects of Planned Communities

While the FDC provided the model for planned community development in the Houston area, George Mitchell’s interest in real estate development was increasingly based less in economic expediency and more in his frustrations with the tumultuous events of the 1960s and his rising environmental and social consciousness during that era. He believed, more strongly than most of his colleagues, that business was well positioned and had an obligation to address social problems. “Corporate America has the resources, but 90 of 100 of my counterparts could care less,” he quipped in an interview, a not-so-veiled shot at the harsh capitalist logic of the oil majors and the business culture of Houston—a culture from which he remained largely estranged.Footnote ²⁶ And indeed, Humble Oil’s plan to develop CLC was based almost entirely on the economic opportunity that NASA offered, not on ideology or beauty, but expediency. The property was developed harshly, the land scrubbed of any natural features and structures put up using mass production techniques, similar to the immediate postwar developments like Levittown, New York, and Lakewood, California (Figure 1). Clear Lake City in particular was also hindered by its location near the Houston Ship Channel, which by the 1960s contained one of the most polluted industrial agglomerations in the U.S. CLC abutted Bayport Industrial Park, a 10,500-acre hub of petrochemical manufacturing and oil shipping also developed by Humble Oil. It was in the southeast portion of the metro area that Houston’s chaotic structure was most thoroughly expressed. While CLC itself was highly planned, it was also subject to the mixed uses and pollution of its neighbors. As one architectural critic noted, upon entering CLC “the first thing one encounters . . . are large oil pipes, surfacing and resubmurging [sic] into the soil. The breezes from the Ship Channel are seasoned with the unmistakable trace of petrochemicals.”Footnote ²⁷

Figure 1.

Early subdivision in Clear Lake City with the Johnson Space Center in the background. Source: Courtesy Houston Public Library.

Mitchell himself tended to eschew the business traditions of Houston. The son of a Greek immigrant who could not read, Mitchell grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in Galveston and graduated from Texas A & M University with a degree in petroleum engineering and geology in 1940. He founded the energy business that would become Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation (MEDC) with his brother in 1946 after returning from World War II, and according to his biography “demonstrated a rare ability to spot natural gas deposits overlooked by others.”Footnote ²⁸ A modern wildcatter, Mitchell considered himself an outsider in the world of moneyed Houston energy businessmen and did not feel comfortable around Houston’s elite. He never joined the exclusive Petroleum Club, and he sought out engagement with non-traditional thinkers and organizations that spoke to his diverse interests.Footnote ²⁹

Mitchell’s intellectual and social pursuits often ran counter to the narrow capitalist growth machine ethic of many of his oil and gas counterparts. His interests in urban planning began when he heard the designer, inventor, and futurist Buckminster Fuller deliver a lecture on “Spaceship Earth,” which focused on the coming overpopulation crisis, at the Aspen Institute, a humanistic-focused retreat for businessmen and other elites, in 1959. At Aspen, Mitchell got to talk with Fuller and later with the environmental economist E. P. Schumacher, both of whom impressed him with their breadth of intelligence but also scared him with their theories of pending human–environmental catastrophe. He later credited Fuller with developing his interest in sustainability. Although he never joined, Mitchell was a fellow traveler in the Club of Rome, an eclectic and interdisciplinary group of academic and business elites who viewed the upheavals of the 1960s as the outcome of rapid technological industrial development of society in the twentieth century. Mitchell would go on to host club members Dennis and Dana Meadows, authors of the influential The Limits of Growth, at several Woodlands conferences dedicated to understanding the complex interdisciplinary problems of the 1970s. An advocate of unbridled capitalism he was not. Mitchell would remember these meetings and interactions as the foundation of his efforts to promote new ways to conceptualize communities as well as new systems that would limit damage to the Earth—what he began to think of as sustainability by the 1970s.Footnote ³⁰

Initially, Mitchell applied these new insights in two ways, by fighting against the channelization of Buffalo Bayou in Houston and in his engagement with a socially-focused group of entrepreneurs and businessmen as part of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO). In 1966, business leaders, many of whom were part of the oil and gas industry, sought to channelize and deepen the oft-flooded bayou. Mitchell saw channelization as a shortsighted decision typical of Houston’s oil and gas capitalists, one that prioritized crude profit over quality of life. He quickly joined with other neighborhood residents to form the Bayou Preservation Association and began talking to new Congressman George H. W. Bush about the bayou. Bush held hearings on the project in Congress and got it stopped. Mitchell’s opposition to the Houston business community both increased his distance from them and also strengthened his resolve that business must act responsibly to preserve the environment.Footnote ³¹

His relationship with the YPO was even more important in demonstrating the vital need for more social responsibility in business and in incorporating “philosophy and the humanities” in trying to rethink the role of business in society. YPO was an education and networking organization made up of younger corporate presidents and entrepreneurs with diverse interests. As the 1960s became more turbulent, many YPO members, including Mitchell, began to explore the role of business in addressing social problems. As part of a YPO seminar on poverty and urban problems, in 1965 he traveled to Harlem and spoke with several African American Harvard graduates who were unable to get a loan to start their businesses. “Black people were being mistreated,” he later remarked, and “urbanization was not working properly.” The following year Mitchell and a group of his YPO colleagues toured Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and Watts in Los Angeles, shortly after riots overwhelmed those almost entirely African American neighborhoods. He quickly realized that human talent was being wasted in such environments, and that more affluent people were leaving in droves and that without them, cities would be unable to support themselves. “I made the decision at that time,” he said, “we can do a better job in developing our cities.”Footnote ³²

Ecological Design and the Local Scale

Aside from the social impact that the urban crisis had on him, pursuing a futuristic real estate development brought together several of Mitchell’s interests, including finding a more livable community for his family and diversifying his economic interests. In the early 1960s he first entered real estate development because he felt that “energy was in trouble,” a shrewd early prediction of the tumult the industry would undergo in the 1970s. He also surmised that gas had a stronger future than oil, and directed 80 percent of his exploration resources toward it in the mid-1960s. His earliest real estate projects were in his hometown of Galveston Island, where he developed a small vacation community and helped develop the Pelican Island campus that became Texas A & M University at Galveston. Soon after he bought about 400 acres in the Piney Woods, and “cut the timber so we could get some money,” an indication that the philosophy that undergirded The Woodlands was not fully formed.Footnote ³³

But by the mid-1960s Mitchell’s firsthand interactions with urban problems with the YPO encouraged him to pursue a model for what that better city might look like with vigor. By then, the urban issues seminar that Mitchell participated in also traveled widely to view cutting edge ideas in urban design—part of a renewed and genuine interest in urbanism and city building that many businessmen developed in the 1960s and 1970s as they witnessed inner cities collapse. Mitchell found himself in England studying Welwyn Garden City, a creation of Ebenezer Howard. Back home, Mitchell took time on his own to visit the San Antonio River Walk and Georgetown in Washington, DC, both places that he felt exemplified the sense of community and public-oriented life that modernist suburbs and decaying cities lacked. The YPO group then visited what were considered examples of modern urban design, the New Towns. They visited Westlake, Rancho Bernardo, and Irvine in Southern California as well as Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, in the Washington, DC, area. Mitchell particularly took inspiration from Columbia, the 14,000-acre parcel developed by James Rouse. He appreciated the town’s emphasis on face-to-face interaction and community, the way it combined positive urban and suburban qualities, and the ample land it set aside for natural space. As he liked to say, “men like to live among the trees.”Footnote ³⁴

Mitchell was also unconcerned about spending MEDC money on his pet projects, and he quickly got to work. The company had long been interested in land acquisition, and in 1964 MEDC began purchasing undeveloped land north of Houston, about 50,000 acres in total by the early 1970s. Like Humble Oil, Mitchell saw the diversification of MEDC as the next step in the company’s trajectory; in the early 1960s, he shrewdly predicted the U.S. energy bonanza would not last forever, and he sought out real estate as way to hedge against inevitable oil and gas shocks.Footnote ³⁵ Demographic projections painted a rosy picture for Houston and Texas in the 1970s and 1980s, and new migrants would need places to live. He found the area north-northwest of Houston attractive. The large forests were complimented by a new 21,000-acre reservoir called Lake Conroe, and despite some activity the region was still largely undeveloped, especially compared to the rapidly growing complex anchored by JSC southeast of the city. Between 1966 and the early 1970s, MEDC made several additional purchases to round out the proposed real estate portion of the property.Footnote ³⁶

After some early attempts to design the property working with local architect Karl Kamrath, Mitchell contacted Ian McHarg, whom he met through a mutual colleague several years earlier.Footnote ³⁷ McHarg’s interest in the project was intense, in part because of the topographical and geological challenges that the property posed and in part because he shared Mitchell’s vision that the core of the development should be retaining as much of the forest as possible. He quickly took the lead in developing a plan for HUD based on many of the principles he articulated in Design with Nature: a balance of human and natural landscapes; “layer-cake” mapping methods that layer geology, hydrology, and vegetation to determine proper land use; and focusing on local environmental threats (what became the core concept behind climate resilience planning). The challenge of developing an effective drainage system was especially interesting for McHarg. Southeast Texas is essentially a flat coastal plain, with a topography that offers almost no natural drainage. The property’s largely clay soil was also not conducive to good drainage and the major waterways on the property were particularly prone to flooding; about one-third of the property sat in the 100 year floodplain of three creeks. Houston is also subject to intense, long-lasting storms, not only from hurricanes but also from systems that stall out over the central Texas plains and produce consistent heavy rains, sometimes for days.Footnote ³⁸ Mitchell funded several ecological studies to determine how to make the plan as environmentally sensitive as possible, including what McHarg called an “ecological inventory” of the property and an evaluation of land-use programs’ impact on the natural landscape.Footnote ³⁹

It took McHarg close to a year to carry out all of his studies, and in all twenty-three planners and engineers participated. In mid-1971, he unveiled a plan that is still studied by landscape architects and designers as an example of sustainable ecological planning in a complicated and challenging ecosystem, the piney woods. It included several features unique to landscape design at the time, most of which focused on controlling water, including a system of overlays of natural and built features that prioritizes building on areas where drainage was particularly bad, to also to allow water to be absorbed by more porous soils in unbuilt areas. It called for a unique drainage system where channels cut through the back of properties to create small canals that discharged into a lake, and attempted to leave over 50 percent of the property either in its existing state or as open space (Figure 2).Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 2.

Drainage channels provide a simple and cost-effective method of channeling water away from structures. Source: Courtesy Houston Public Library.

The plan also found interesting ways to protect and often employ the property’s ecological resources. One of these was to create forested buffers between roads and commercial developments, which both hid commerce and retained natural growth. Trees dominated the visual landscape, as the trees hid the building from drivers, creating a sense that the forest was dense and undisturbed. These forested areas often also contained, and hid from view, drainage swells that funneled water into channels. McHarg especially valued retaining diverse vegetation and, while pine forest dominated the landscape, live oaks, magnolias, and several other species of trees thrived there as well. McHarg found that if the property’s hydraulic regime was augmented too aggressively, non-pine species were likely to die if planners dropped the water table too far. This led them to design the areas with less impervious cover to absorb more water while disrupting the soil as little as possible. Smaller scale ecological amenities included porous asphalt, advanced wastewater treatment systems, schools located at the center of neighborhoods that were walkable, and ubiquitous pedestrian pathways.

Urban planner Ann Forsythe argued that the wooded aesthetic and wildness of the development, relative to other master-planned communities, “reminds consumers that nature was central to the design.” Forsythe also argued that The Woodlands’ design reflected the “priority of ecological values,” where the built features were constructed around the landscape. McHarg, who was open about his preference for low-density and more bucolic design, considered The Woodlands as one of his best creations; Mitchell provided him with the resources to create a place that reflected the principles articulated in Design with Nature, even as the final engineering design did not employ all his recommendations. The Woodlands is still studied today as an example of inventive and thoughtful ecological planning. For Mitchell, the abundance of trees offered aesthetic, but also economic, incentives. “You had a lot with three trees, and you had one with no trees, and the one with three trees gets fifteen hundred dollars more. So we knew the value of the forest. The beauty.”Footnote ⁴¹ (Figure 3.)

Figure 3.

Map of tree canopy percentage in Houston Metro. Retaining the tree canopy had ecological and economic benefits for The Woodlands. Today the dense tree canopy keeps the area cooler than many surrounding areas. Source: Map courtesy of Roger Justus.

Suburban Space

And yet when viewed from a metropolitan spatial perspective, a much different picture of The Woodlands emerges. From a design perspective, The Woodlands was caught between the autocentric Modernism of the postwar era and the more sustainable design principles that would emerge in planning in the following decades. While neighborhoods were walkable, the overall development was not. Commercial strips and centers were built away from residences, forcing shoppers to drive. Residents fiercely resisted public transport services, demonstrating both the autocentric culture of The Woodlands and the socioeconomic exclusivity of many residents. Mitchell understood The Woodlands through the lens of a businessman; he originally entered real estate as a hedge against the volatility of the energy sector, and was willing to cater to residents’ preference for driving. “Many people with children simply want to live in a place with more spaces, more trees and more beauty than the inner city provides . . . . My idea,” he commented in 1993, “was that people would have the suburban lifestyle, in a carefully thought out new town, and yet they want to be part of the big whole.”Footnote ⁴²

Their physical connection to that big whole, though, was expressways. The Woodlands was consciously planned to be peripheral to Houston, yet it would also be integrated with Houston because many of its residents would work and spend leisure time there. While The Woodlands was conceptualized to employ one-third of its residents, two-thirds would still leave to work and the vast majority would travel by automobile. Mitchell chose the land for The Woodlands based on its natural features, but also because he thought it would form the core of a new growth corridor to the north of Houston. Most previous suburban growth happened to the city’s south, in places like Clear Lake. He used a 1964 forecast for metropolitan growth to decide where to begin purchasing land, and based it on the property’s remote location but also on predictions of robust demographic expansion in the area. The planning for both the Houston International Airport and Interstate Highway 45 also influenced his decision to locate north; he later supported the building of the Hardy toll road in 1987. In this way, The Woodlands was actually designed to facilitate sprawl, in part because anchoring a growing suburban core and attracting high-end retail would lower the economic risk inherent in a development of the scale of The Woodlands. Its growth was robust; even in the difficult period from the stagflation of the 1970s through the savings and loan crisis, The Woodlands flourished. In 1981, for example, it “continued to outpace the corresponding growth of any comparable project in Houston area history.”Footnote ⁴³ In that year, The Woodlands saw a 14 percent growth rate in new housing starts while the Houston metro overall rate declined by 26 percent.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the midst of recession, the Baltimore Sun reported that The Woodlands added more residential units than any major development in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Woodlands location far away from Houston and its polluting industries allowed for residents to escape the high incidence of pollution-related health problems that plagued many central Houston neighborhoods.Footnote ⁴⁶ Overall, Houston’s air quality was consistently among the worst in the United States, due in large part to energy and chemical plant pollution. (The city’s nonwhite populations have been especially subject to environmental risk from air pollution).Footnote ⁴⁷ But sprawl was also a contributing factor because of long commutes.Footnote ⁴⁸ Overall, residents of the Houston metro used a much larger than average amount of energy. Due largely to its decentralized geography, lack of public transport, and dependency on air conditioning, Texas residents used more energy per capita than those in any other state. Houstonites were among the worst culprits, with a hot and humid climate and one of the largest urban footprints in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁹

Perhaps most illuminating is the failure of Mitchell’s plan for The Woodlands to be annexed by the City of Houston. Mitchell’s interest in developing The Woodlands emerged from the social upheavals and urban unrest of the 1960s. He came back from a 1966 trip to Bedford-Stuyvesant convinced that better community design could mitigate some of the urban problems he witnessed firsthand there and in Watts: “people with talent and tax base were fleeing to the suburbs . . . It was not only a social problem but an economic problem.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The solution, to Mitchell, was annexation, because “what was destroying our cities was the proliferation of political subdivisions around the central core,” where suburban residents cared little about the city.Footnote ⁵¹ He also felt that business had a responsibility to help bring order to the chaos he and many others perceived in cities. This is what in part drove him to work with HUD, whose New Town program reflected the same ethos (and provided federal funding). By building The Woodlands on the periphery and then getting it annexed, the city could share in its resources and prosper. This was The Woodlands’ central development strategy: With white flight and sprawl seemingly unavoidable, an environmentally conscious development that filtered its resources and wealth back into Houston provided for both the residents and the city. Instead, the opposite happened.

This utopian vision for The Woodlands was undercut by Texas land use laws as well as the preferences of both Mitchell and the residents. Due to the Municipal Annexation Act of 1963, Texas had extremely permissive annexation laws that allowed larger cities to annex other developments in their “extraterritorial jurisdiction,” (ETJ), within five miles of their border. Cities over 100,000 residents had almost unlimited power to annex. Unlike most states in the North and East, in Texas the state also denied any financial assistance to cities. For city leaders, annexation was thus the only way to increase revenue and, in a rapidly growing state, it was one of the only vehicles to manage that growth. Finally, Texas urban leaders in the postwar decades witnessed how white and capital flight was devastating Northern and Eastern cities, many of which were locked in by growing suburbs but by the 1970s losing population and revenue rapidly. Annexation was thus viewed as a way to stave off urban decline by forcing outlying areas to share in the cost burden of urban development. Texas cities were among the most aggressive proponents of annexation in the United States from the late 1940s through the 1970s, and Houston was among the most ruthless, adding enough territory to become one of the largest cities in the world by area by the early 1960s. Many developments, such as the aforementioned and relatively affluent CLC and Kingswood, were forcibly annexed into the city from the 1970s through 1990s amid large protests from residents.Footnote ⁵²

Yet for cities, annexation only made sense if it was financially prudent, and that meant waiting until the development’s debt burden and cost of services were balanced by its revenues. While Mitchell began to pursue annexation with the City of Houston in 1971, before any homes were even built, he also knew that annexation would not make sense for many years because of The Woodlands’ enormous debt burden and how long it would take to grow large enough to be worthwhile. In the meantime, The Woodlands formed a Municipal Utility District (MUD), a type of special district that allowed it to deliver services and raise revenue via taxation and bonds without incorporating. Municipal Utility Districts allowed residents of unincorporated areas to govern themselves and provided tax-exempt bonds for developers to provide services, but they did not give them the legal power to stop annexation. As The Woodlands grew, it developed more MUDs; eleven were created to govern parts of The Woodlands from 1971 to 1985. Each MUD also took on new debt obligations to fund services for new residents. These totaled over $400 million by 1985, meaning that The Woodlands remained in substantial debt through the 1980s. And although The Woodlands was in Houston’s ETJ, it was still thirty miles away, prompting Houston Mayor Bill White to argue “it’s not the cheapest to provide city services 30 miles away” when asked about the possibility of annexation in 2006. While Houston leaders often discussed annexing The Woodlands, they never initiated the process, and in 1999 the Texas legislature passed S.B. 89, which regulated the annexation process by making cities formulate plans and procedures for annexation, effectively making annexation more difficult. That same year the City of Houston and The Woodlands signed a moratorium on annexation, delaying it until at least 2011.Footnote ⁵³

Aesthetically, Mitchell’s distaste for the lack of zoning and planning in Houston also played a role in his desire to build The Woodlands. He moved his family to new neighborhoods several times in the 1950s and 1960s, looking for more orderly areas. He was uncomfortable with Houston’s chaotic organization, articulating a desire to avoid “randomness and choked infrastructure that plagued so many other parts of Greater Houston.”Footnote ⁵⁴ His biographer claimed that “the design of The Woodlands was George’s rebuttal to everything he disliked about Houston, from the lack of trees and parks . . . to the plan to cement Buffalo Bayou that he fought against in the 1960s.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Mitchell spared no expense in physically planning The Woodlands, tightly controlling development and providing far more planning and amenities than other similar places in Houston and Montgomery County.Footnote ⁵⁶

The paradox here is clear: If residents are choosing to live in an area that is designed to be the antithesis of Houston, and trying to escape what they considered the ills of the large city, why would they want to become part of it? Building a community as a corrective to the disorder, chaos, and sprawl of Houston would likely attract residents who wanted to escape those conditions. Zoning and residents’ aesthetic and lifestyle preferences were not the only issue. In the 1970s, residents fleeing central cities also worried about busing, over-taxation, loss of autonomy, crime, and growing racial diversity—all things that propelled them out of large cities in the first place.Footnote ⁵⁷ Montgomery County developers used these fears to attract migrants to their subdivisions, which were often poorly designed and environmentally hazardous.Footnote ⁵⁸ Given the area’s relative abundance of economic resources compared to Houston and its highly privatized system of MUD governance, it is little wonder that those same residents would not desire to become part of the city they did not want to live in in the first place. This mistake became abundantly clear in 2000, when only one percent of residents surveyed expressed support for annexation. Mitchell himself acknowledged the lack of resident support for annexation in 1990, saying that “people in The Woodlands won’t like” annexation and that “maybe four or five percent would” be in favor of it.Footnote ⁵⁹

The Woodlands began as, and still remains, a separate entity from Houston—much more similar to surrounding communities in Montgomery County, although connected to Houston economically and via transportation infrastructure. One reason is that The Woodlands never came close to building its target number of Assisted Housing Units. While the plans for HUD included 27 percent of such units, in 1983 only 13 percent of them were assisted housing and The Woodlands contained only a 9 percent minority population. After the New Towns program folded and the Woodlands ended its obligation with HUD, the percentage of assisted units continued to decline as The Woodlands became more, rather than less, exclusive.Footnote ⁶⁰ Montgomery County is much whiter, wealthier, and more Republican than Houston’s Harris County. In 1992, The Woodlands itself was 90 percent white, while Houston was 37 percent, and the demographic discrepancy has remained glaring. As The Woodlands grew in the 1980s, the percentage of African American residents in Montgomery County declined, from 25 percent of the population in 1950 to just 13 percent by 1990. By the early 2000s, The Woodlands’ median household income was almost three times that of the City of Houston (Figure 4). Researchers have also documented recent racial discrimination within Montgomery County and The Woodlands. The first African American did not graduate from nearby Conroe Independent School District (in which parts of The Woodlands were enrolled) until 1977, and oral histories have documented racial issues in policing and the school system in The Woodlands as well.Footnote ⁶¹

Figure 4.

The Woodlands is among the wealthiest areas in the Houston metro. Source: Map courtesy of Roger Justus.

Figure 4. Long description

A map showing median income levels in the Houston metropolitan area, including The Woodlands. The map uses different shades to represent various income ranges, from below $10,000 to above $200,000. The Woodlands, located north of Houston, is highlighted with a bold border and is among the wealthiest areas in the region. Houston is centrally located and surrounded by areas with varying income levels. Major highways and roads are marked, indicating the transportation infrastructure connecting The Woodlands to Houston and other surrounding communities. The legend on the right side of the map provides the income ranges corresponding to the different shades used.

The contrasts in these statistics appear even more glaring within the context of the HUD’s New Town program and the funding that WDC received from it. One of the stipulations of HUD funding for the New Towns program was a requirement to provide low- and moderate-income housing in an effort to promote racial diversity. However, when The Woodlands ran into financial trouble during development, this emphasis was among the first things to be forgotten. Runaway construction costs, as well as a bloated staff, contributed to rapidly growing deficits before The Woodlands even opened in 1974.Footnote ⁶² HUD’s New Town program was faring even worse. The economic slowdown of the 1970s, combined with the Nixon administration’s belief that the urban crisis was over, meant that the lofty goals of the program’s architects would be swiftly abandoned—low-income and racial provisions among them. Several HUD-sponsored New Towns declared bankruptcy in rapid succession.Footnote ⁶³ Debt mounted for the WDC. Mitchell began cost-cutting measures like building the residential districts in concentric circles to make service delivery and infrastructure extension more efficient. He laid off over half of his staff, focusing on cuts to social planners and other non-essential positions. WDC wound up focusing on higher-profit development and largely omitted low- and moderate-cost housing from The Woodlands. Race and class diversity were not profitable the way that design features were, and demographically, The Woodlands mirrored similar segregated suburbs throughout the United States.Footnote ⁶⁴

Technology and Economic Decentralization

The Woodlands also became an economic funnel, siphoning off resources from Houston. Mitchell was able to attract lucrative knowledge businesses, high-end retail, and other profitable firms with the promise that residents could live in a desirable and convenient area. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, nearly one-third of adult residents also worked in The Woodlands. Many of the jobs there were lucrative, and Mitchell himself used the suburban space to develop economic activities based around research and development.Footnote ⁶⁵ The opening of HARC, a Texas Medical Center Campus, and the relocation of several other high-tech and research firms made The Woodlands a primary node of regional efforts to promote newer and cleaner economic sectors. Mitchell tried unsuccessfully to attract a University of Houston branch campus; he settled for a community college, which still generated about $14 million annually for the development.Footnote ⁶⁶

Houston Advanced Research Center was part of a statewide effort to diversify Texas’s economy away from energy and toward research and development. In the 1970s and 1980s, cities and regions became more entrepreneurial in an effort to combat the crisis in industrial capitalism and to better navigate emerging policies of austerity.Footnote ⁶⁷ In Houston and Texas, the perceived decline of the energy industry in the 1970s prompted leaders, both public and private, to pursue high technology as a development strategy.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Texas, as elsewhere, economic restructuring and global competition in the 1970s also meant that cities would need to find new regimes of development to pursue.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Reagan administration’s heavy investment in defense and other technology encouraged a range of actors to develop high-tech sectors that could attract new businesses and skilled workers and also help to make existing businesses more competitive.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Woodlands became an ideal space for high tech in the Houston metro because of its attractive environmental features, its emphasis on sustainability, its flexible spaces that could be quickly adapted to R&D, and the fact that its live-work-play design aligned well with the lifestyle preferences of knowledge workers and other executives.Footnote ⁷¹

Within the state, HARC was prompted by Texas 2000, a statewide economic planning initiative undertaken by Governor Bill Clements in 1981 that identified technology and research and development as the primary mechanism to diversify away from oil and gas and make that sector more profitable.Footnote ⁷² Several reports in the 1970s predicted that peak oil had already occurred and that Texas was likely to become a net energy importer by the mid-1980s.Footnote ⁷³ In 1982, Mitchell founded HARC, a collaboration among Rice University, the University of Houston, and Texas A&M (and later the University of Texas at Austin), in response. The project sought to address the changing economic needs of the city and region, but for Mitchell it was also a way to promote The Woodlands as an upscale development geared toward knowledge workers. HARC thus also represents a third circuit of petrocapital, as energy revenue not only undergirded real estate development in Houston, but also supported diversification into high technology research and development.Footnote ⁷⁴

Houston Advanced Research Center was conceived as Houston’s contribution to the state effort, an institution “to promote the economic well-being of Texas, the region, and the nation by developing new working relationships between academia, business, and government that will improve technological and resource development and implementation.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The facility also provided a support staff and “specialized research services not currently available in the area,” which would “maximize collaborative research activities among the three universities” and “enhance the participation of Houston based corporations.”Footnote ⁷⁶ It also served as a symbol of Houston’s emerging dedication to technology, a vision of the area that contrasted with its reputation for pollution and disorganization.Footnote ⁷⁷ Mitchell had long had a love–hate relationship with the city, simultaneously appreciating the opportunity he got there while also never feeling fully comfortable with the city’s business community, environmental irresponsibility, and unorganized sprawling landscape. HARC could help further cement his vision of the city’s future as progressive and more sustainable, and the research focused largely on fields that were important to Houston such as biotechnology, energy, material science, and chemistry, as well as the Center for Growth Studies that focused on sustainable development. He also sought to promote The Woodlands and give the high-tech industrial park an anchor that could act as a magnet. For Mitchell, HARC was a perfect combination of the two: It could help to rectify some of Houston’s wrongs while also helping The Woodlands to attract the kind of businesses and residents he desired.Footnote ⁷⁸

As the spatial division of labor encouraged the decentralization of knowledge work during this period, highly planned and pastoral communities like The Woodlands stood out for their order, access to nature and other amenities, secluded location, and flexibility.Footnote ⁷⁹ Houston Advanced Research Center’s campus located in an area of The Woodlands called the “Research Forest,” a 650-acre tech and business complex modeled on the Stanford Research Institute and Research Triangle Park.Footnote ⁸⁰ Woodlands Development Corporation gave HARC 100 acres. The Texas Medical Center, among the largest medical research facilities, agreed to accept $5.2 million from MEDC to open a research center focused on biotechnology, biomedical engineering, epidemiology, and analytical chemistry on 150 acres in the Research Forest.Footnote ⁸¹ Houston Advanced Research Center would eventually house and administer the ill-fated Superconducting Supercollider, one of the largest federally funded research programs in the 1980s. Shortly after founding HARC, Mitchell funded Woodlands Venture Capital through MEDC, as a new means to commercialize biotechnology research being done at the University of Texas’s Health Science Center at The Woodlands.Footnote ⁸²

The large undeveloped natural spaces at The Woodlands made it flexible and attractive enough to develop a small research cluster very quickly. The campus reflected contemporary ideas about the role that pastoral environments played in facilitating high-level science and engineering as well as emerging ideas about living and working in close proximity.Footnote ⁸³ The Woodlands benefited from increased tax revenue as well as prestige associated with science. But what benefited The Woodlands was not always positive for Houston. Scientists from Rice and the University of Houston, both in the city, migrated to the suburbs to do their research. Tax and research dollars flowed to The Woodlands rather than to Houston. And corporate headquarters, including MEDC, migrated from Houston to The Woodlands. While Mitchell and HARC clearly benefited the Houston metropolitan region, Houston actually lost resources, and the jobs that were produced by technology in The Woodlands were geared toward highly educated and mostly white workers, further exacerbating racial and socioeconomic exclusivity and differentiating The Woodlands from Houston, as income and racial gaps between the two cities grew in the 1980s and 1990sFootnote ⁸⁴

Global Energy Flows

While The Woodlands expedited sprawl and added to economic decentralization and segregation in Houston, perhaps the most insidious way that it illuminated the class and geographic parameters of who benefited from sustainable community development was at the scale of global energy flows. As a global industry, the web of oil and gas production, distribution, and consumption constitutes a broad geography that connects faraway places. Just as pipelines and tankers take oil and gas around the world, money generated by extractive practices in one place flows into developments in other places. Circuits of capital are connected to one another via these vast and often hidden networks, where lucrative but environmentally damaging practices fund real estate development, research, and other activities.Footnote ⁸⁵

The concept of circuits of capital is important for understanding The Woodlands’ relationship to the oil and gas industry. The cost-cutting measures that WDC implemented in the 1970s came just before the Oil Embargo in 1973. As part of a broad economic downturn that included stagflation and deindustrialization, the oil shocks effectively ended the postwar boom and became a stark reminder of the country’s woes. Lines at gas stations were among the most visceral symbols of economic anxieties in the 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁶ Initially, potential buyers worried about The Woodlands’ peripheral location given the fear of extended high gas prices, and they struggled with rising interest rates.Footnote ⁸⁷ But those same high oil prices that hurt most of the United States helped Texas and especially those in the energy industry. As the center of energy production, Houston especially benefited, adding 700,000 jobs and 1.1 million new residents from 1972 to 1983, over three times the national increase. The state grew rapidly in the 1970s, both economically and demographically.Footnote ⁸⁸

The money that MEDC made in the 1970s was vital to saving The Woodlands. Mitchell brought MEDC public in 1972, but the share prices were disappointing. The spike in oil and gas prices, though, reinvigorated the corporation, boosting its lagging share prices and providing an injection of liquid capital that Mitchell drew upon aggressively to subsidize the WDC. One of his executives frankly commented, “the Arabs saved The Woodlands.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1974, MEDC injected $28 million into The Woodlands. That same year HUD came through with a $15-million loan that stipulated MEDC must guarantee that it would cover any shortfalls through 1978. The WDC also received $5 million in bank loans. Even after transferring the money, by 1975 MEDC had five times the cash reserves it held in 1970, enough to subsidize the WDC at an average of over $30 million per year through the 1970s. Throughout Mitchell’s ownership of The Woodlands, “the company was taking profits from the gas business and using them to cover losses in real estate.”Footnote ⁹⁰

While Mitchell believed wholeheartedly in the necessity for more sustainable places, The Woodlands was reliant on money from MEDC; time and again, Mitchell used funds from his drilling and exploration business to subsidize The Woodlands and keep the development afloat through the economic turbulence of the 1970s and into the severe Texas recession of the mid-1980s. The chasm between the upscale, sustainability-focused residential and commercial development and the working class, often rural location of energy extraction became pronounced in the 1980s, as MEDC’s interest in fracking rose. For Mitchell, fracking was a decades-long interest and one that, like The Woodlands, he poured millions of dollars into. The process was not new; it emerged in the 1940s, but was quite rudimentary and ineffective. Yet in his logic, fracking had the potential to provide a cheaper and more sustainable energy source than coal. Mitchell began funding research into technical improvements in the process in the early 1980s when most energy firms had written off fracking as unprofitable. By the 2010s, many in the energy business recognized him as the “Father of Fracking” and credited him as the architect of the Shale Revolution and a key figure in pulling the United States out of the Great Recession.Footnote ⁹¹

Given Mitchell’s deep commitment to environmental sustainability, it is tempting to view The Woodlands as a type of climate reparation, to weigh the use of funding generated by fossil fuels against its environmental benefits, as both a development and as a model for future attempts to create more sustainable built environments. But Mitchell himself would not agree with this argument. Indeed, according to his biographies and interviews, Mitchell did not see fracking or any extractive industry as fundamentally harmful. He strongly believed that cheap energy was a humanistic pursuit that improved lives, and especially the lives of more disadvantaged people, more than it harmed the Earth. He thought, probably correctly, that natural gas was less environmentally damaging than other types of fossil fuels. While more sustainable types of energy were desirable, Mitchell was pragmatic (and arguably self-interested) in thinking that the development of alternatives would take a long time and also require abundant energy from fossil fuels. He was simultaneously funding research for alternative energy through HARC (which became a sustainability-oriented center after universities pulled out in the early 1990s) and pouring millions into fracking research, an obvious example of how his long-term thinking assuaged the tension between energy and environment.Footnote ⁹²

Yet the burdens of The Woodlands’ development were borne by people who could not afford to live there, nor in any middle-class neighborhood. The stark contrast between The Woodlands and the social and economic costs of extraction was illuminated by events in Wise County, Texas, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. MEDC’s most lucrative field, the Boonesville Bend, had been central to the firm’s expansion for several decades. By the late 1980s, the area was a primary location for fracking. As a result, it experienced dozens of minor earthquakes; residents complained of odiferous tap water, methane leaks, and other problems associated with fracking. MEDC endured lawsuits from dozens of residents; although the largest of these were adjudicated in the company’s favor, MEDC was forced to pay out tens of millions of dollars in fines, awards, and royalties, in addition to litigation fees. Partially as a result of these costs, Mitchell was forced to sell The Woodlands to mollify shareholders, who for years had viewed the Woodlands as a drain on MEDC’s profitability, and make sure the business did not go bankrupt. The 1997 sale was among the saddest events of Mitchell’s life. The point here is not to measure the environmental costs and economic benefits of fracking. It is rather to consider the socioeconomic consequences of extractive practices, which benefited the largely middle class and wealthy residents of The Woodlands. The burdens of these practices often fell on poorer rural populations who lived near extraction sites. In addition to environmental insecurity, they also were likely to suffer from declining real estate values as well as social costs such as lower tax revenues and lower quality of life. For them, the far-off Woodlands was part of a larger system that detracted from their sustainability.Footnote ⁹³