The Metropolitan Revolution: An Interview with Houston Mayor Annise Parker

First elected in 2009, Mayor Annise Parker is Houston, Texas’s 61^st mayor and is the first openly gay mayor of a major US city. Parker also is the second woman to serve as mayor of Houston. Before she entered public service, Parker worked for over 20 years as a software analyst in the oil and gas industry. On October 18, 2013, Parker spoke at The University of Chicago Harris in an event entitled “The Metropolitan Revolution,” which discussed themes from Bruce Katz’s book of the same name.

You just participated in a panel with Bruce Katz speaking about his book, The Metropolitan Revolution. What do you think of a question posed in his book that cities may be the most innovative units of government, given the gridlock in Washington and the belt-tightening at both federal and state levels?

I happen to agree, but I think it’s more fundamental than that. I believe that human beings have lived in cities for millennia and that cities are, by necessity, entrepreneurial and innovative. Gridlock cannot happen because human beings couldn’t continue to live together if it did. I don’t think that this is a new phenomenon. I think the contrast with what is happening in Washington has shined a light on what is happening in cities. We are increasingly, around the world, becoming a place where people live in massive urban areas. We’re not the rural agrarian economies of the past.

Is it necessity that makes cities more resistant to political gridlock?

I believe it is the necessity. It’s the fact of the fundamentals of cities. It doesn’t matter whether you live in a mud hut someplace or whether you live in Gotham. You have to know where the water source is, you have to have a latrine, you have to know what to do with the trash, you have to have a power source, and then you build out your city services from there.

When I say that, literally, human beings couldn’t live together without the functions that a city provides, they couldn’t, and when you face that daily, 24/7 necessity of providing that level of service, you quickly become very pragmatic and focused on results. It’s not about theory. It is about what works today, what’s going to work tomorrow, and you’re constantly adapting to that.

Could you give an example of what Houston has done under your leadership to generate that kind of economic growth, and, in particular, is there a situation where you were able to overcome something that could have been politically thorny thanks to this kind of pragmatism that you mentioned?

Any good public official has to figure out a way to navigate through thorny issues. I don’t know anyone who makes it through a political career without pitched battles about something, but I came into office as mayor with a very clear focus. I knew I had to work on stimulating jobs and economic development. I had to do all the things that cities need to do – public safety and so forth – but we had a critical need in infrastructure in Houston and I believed that I could both stimulate job growth and focus on infrastructure by launching massive public works projects. We’re engaged now in Houston in a comprehensive overhaul of our water sewer system and a comprehensive overhaul of our street and storm drainage system. That second one is particularly exciting.

In the midst of the recession, in November of 2010, I actually went to the voters and laid out for them the scope of the problem we had in infrastructure, explained what we needed to do to fix it and how much it was going to cost to fix it, and the voters approved a dedicated revenue source to do that. They imposed a fee on themselves in the midst of a recession. What I offered back to the voters was that we would do it on a pay-as-you-go basis, which was really unprecedented among cities. We’re the only big city in America, I believe, now, where the debt-per-capita is going down because we’ve chosen not to do debt financing of major public works projects.

In addition to changing the built environment of Houston, those projects are providing jobs at good wages that stay in the community, because at the same time I also created a “Hire Houston First” initiative where we give preference to companies that will keep jobs local.

As you see economic growth generated from these policies, how do you make sure that the benefits are shared widely, that we don’t see rising inequality between rich and poor?

I don’t know that it is the job of cities to prevent rising inequality between one particular group and another. It is the job of a city to make sure that the services are available equitably across the community, and that those institutions that support access to mobility within the society are, again, equitable across communities, so that you don’t have bad schools in poor parts of town and good schools in good parts of town.

Frankly, in terms of bringing new jobs to Houston, bringing manufacturing into Houston, direct foreign investment, we’re engaged very heavily. Where is the most likely place to place those new jobs and those new factories? It is in areas where the property values are lower and you have a workforce that is desperately interested in having those jobs, so there is a natural affinity there for that. I’m a believer in the rising tide that lifts all boats, obviously.

What do you find most difficult in working with county and state governments, as well as with other municipalities, and what would you do to improve those relationships where there are challenges?

I work very well with the smaller cities around Houston, and, actually, Houston has a number of smaller cities that are completely encapsulated by Houston. I work well with county officials as well. Houston lops into four counties because, again, those of us on a local level are focused on the 24/7, day-to-day running of our entities. The state and the federal government are where partisan gridlock occurs, where too much time is spent on dogma and not enough time on the direct provision of services. Fortunately, in Texas we are a low-tax, low-service state. Not a lot of revenue flows from the state of Texas to the cities. We’re pretty much self-governing and we have worked out how to do that over the years.

You are particularly proud of Houston’s diversity. How is it an asset you are leveraging as a city, and what are Houston’s other greatest assets?

We are arguably the most diverse major city in America now, since the last census, and about 20 percent of Houstonians are foreign-born, which a lot of the rest of America doesn’t understand. We’re actually better known across the US borders than across state lines. We are not the Houston of 40, 30, or even 20 years ago. We are a very dynamic global metropolis. We are what the future of America will look like. We are increasingly brown-skinned, with an array of native languages spoken. There is a very fluid population, particularly because we are the oil and gas capital of the world, and that’s about 50 percent of our economy. For the major oil and gas companies, they rotate their executives in every three years, so there is a lot of new talent that washes in and washes away again.

So what has kept Houston going is the attitude that anything is possible in Houston. If you come and you want to work hard, we don’t care where you’re from, we want to know what you can do, but we’re going to put you to work, and you can succeed. You don’t have that stratification that you see in a lot of cities.

The other thing that is important about Houston is, because there are so many people from other places, it was a very tolerant city for the diversity that’s there. You can have the tolerance of, “Yeah, yeah, I don’t like that person but I’ll put up with them,” or you can have a tolerance that says, “That person may have some really good ideas, maybe I can learn from them,” and that’s really what we have in Houston. That has fueled an amazingly entrepreneurial and flexible workforce, population, and attitude.

The other thing that is unique about Houston in addition to the fact that we are so internationally diverse is that we are the largest un-zoned city in America. That means that parts of the city reinvent themselves very rapidly. There is no zoning board of investment that tells you what you can build or not; there is a set of building codes, and you can pretty much go and do what you want within limits. It means that while there are areas of Houston with clear poverty, it also means that ten years from now that area could be completely redeveloped and a vibrant neighborhood again. All cities have ebb and flow areas of the city; they become hot, or passé and people move on. In Houston we just keep refreshing, and it has kept our property values stable and our cost of living low. That’s another reason that we’re such a magnet.

Feature Photo: cc/Almond Dhukka