living car-free in houston
On my second day in Houston, I decided to walk to the nearest HEB (a supermarket chain in Texas) to get groceries. It was a 1.5 kilometer walk, of about 20 minutes – which was not so bad, although it was slightly inconvenient while carrying things back home. What was somewhat surprising to me was the lack of interesting buildings during my walk: there were no restaurants or shops – just a lot of houses.
Among the first things I noticed in Houston was how far one location is from another. Within a strip mall, the distance I would have to walk from one shop to another struck me as odd. In most parts of the town, I would only see buildings that were one – or at most two – stories tall. I had the expectation that cities constitute high-rise buildings, and that Houston was a city. All the roads in Houston were rather wide (which I thought was a sign of having “good roads”).
I did find the neighborhoods with the interesting buildings in Houston eventually. I also did find the neighborhoods with the tall buildings. The roads remained wide, however – and as of the time of writing, I can truly think of one passage which would count as an “alleyway”. The unusually large interstitial distance between the shops of the strip malls also remained. I also started noticing that these spaces around the city were not necessarily characterized by their human-friendliness (such as parks or public squares) but rather by roads (generally well-maintained) and parking lots.
