Resurrecting Comey’s Green—Legacies of Inequity in Houston’s Park Planning

Abstract

This article critically examines the Bayou Greenways Initiative (BGI), a public-private partnership in Houston, Texas, through its claimed goal of completing city planner Arthur Comey’s 1913 park plan. It argues that by uncritically reproducing Comey’s envisioned threadlike bayou parks, the BGI risks perpetuating the plan’s profit-driven, racist, and classist inequities. The analysis identifies three key problems: prioritizing property values through design, privileging wealthier white neighborhoods through inequitable allocation and phasing, and misunderstanding transportation needs by emphasizing recreation that primarily benefits affluent residents. The BGI’s reliance on private philanthropy and profit-oriented design maintains a system where public park improvements are tied to financial gain, heightening the risk of gentrification and displacement for low-income communities. The article concludes that using historical planning documents for symbolic legitimization without socio-spatial reassessment perpetuates injustice, underscoring the need for critical historical engagement in contemporary planning.

“Bayou Greenways makes 3,000 acres of open space publicly accessible,” wrote the Houston Parks Board (HPB) in an executive summary in 2018. ¹ The Bayou Greenways Initiative (BGI), a public-private partnership (PPP) initiated as a park master plan between the nonprofit HPB and the city, began in 2012 following voter approval of Proposition B. This bond referendum aimed to establish new connections between existing parks and to construct new parks along the city's bayou waterways. With $220M in investment, $120M from private sources, and $100M in bond funding, they were to form a 150-mile network by 2020 (Figure 1). In collaboration with various design and engineering firms, contractors, and the Harris County Flood Control District, the HPB and the Houston Parks and Recreation Department (HPARD) claimed the completion of 160 miles of greenway trails and amenities along nine major bayous in 2024. ²

Figure 1.

The Bayou Greenways Initiative plans to turn Houston’s Bayous into threadlike parks—courtesy of the Houston Parks Board.

The image is a map of Houston, Texas, highlighting the Bayou Greenways Initiative, a project aimed at revitalizing the city's bayous and connecting them into a network of greenways. This project, sponsored by the Houston Parks Board, is expected to bring increased recreational opportunities, improved air quality, and enhanced biodiversity to Houston. However, there is a concern that this initiative could lead to green gentrification, particularly impacting low-income neighborhoods. The map uses a color-coded system to differentiate parks, Bayou greenway corridors, and city limits, offering a visual representation of the planned changes. The green tones of the map symbolize the environmental and community benefits of the initiative.

Two central goals guide the BGI: to increase public access to green spaces and enhance connectivity among existing green spaces, particularly in Houston’s bayous. In the same executive summary, the HPB also states that the BGI would “finally [create] the citywide linear park network envisioned by Comey a century before,” ³ citing a development plan submitted to Houston’s Park Commission in 1913 by city planner and landscape architect Arthur Coleman Comey (Figure 2). However, using his report to legitimize the BGI and an overall urgency to complete an unfinished project creates a range of problems. The BGI revives the vision of Arthur Comey’s plan for Houston’s parks and green spaces by citing its spatial layout, its threadlike bayou parks, green boulevards, and park belt, while concealing the plan’s inequitable distribution strategies. By aiming to realize Comey’s vision, the BGI risks replicating similar social inequities by overemphasizing the spatial layout without critically assessing the sociospatial context of Comey’s profit-oriented, racist, and classist allocation of green spaces. Without substantial changes, the BGI, like its role model, will once again advance the interests of the affluent at the expense of making green space more accessible to low-income residents and communities of color, rather than creating a more balanced, need-based greening plan that protects adjacent households from the risk of gentrification.

Figure 2.

This map has been replicated in several news releases and reports on the Bayou Greenway Initiative, often with the intention to “complete Comey’s vision.” Taken from Arthur C. Comey, Houston: Tentative Plans for its Development, Report to the Houston Park Commission, (Boston: Press of Geo. H. Ellis Co., 1913), 29—image courtesy of Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.

In three sections, this contribution will explain the principal problems by comparing the historical parks plan of Arthur Comey with its contemporary counterpart, aiming to revive the vision: design decisions driven by prioritizing park-adjacent property values, privileging white neighborhoods through the inequitable allocation of parks and project phasing, and misunderstanding transportation needs by privileging specific transportation modes. Each problem aims to identify how ideas embedded in the Comey plan are perpetuated in current-day efforts and concludes with possible alternatives if the legacies of the Comey plan were better understood. Unraveling the historical context and intentions of the Comey plan could take its meaning beyond the symbolic legitimization of contemporary planning politics. Besides gathering evidence and situating the misappropriated document within its historical context, this research ultimately offers possibilities for architectural and urban historians to intervene in public policy when identifying similar cases. The case of Houston’s green planning is just one example in a broader critique of U.S. cities, especially in the South, where public park improvements are continually tied to financial benefits while failing to adequately protect the intended beneficiaries from the resulting money-driven displacement processes.

Parks, Profit, and Exclusion

Before diving into the problems of Houston’s green space planning, recent literature on parks and inequity, both across the United States and in Houston, can contextualize Comey’s report and embed Houston’s history within a broader critique. The 1913 report maintains ongoing significance at the intersection of Jim Crow and real estate speculation in green space planning, leading to affluent interests shaping spatial configurations. Acting as a principal inspiration for the BGI, it is yet another link in a nationally pervasive fabric of reproduced inequity, as evidenced by its reference to a distinct historical precedent. A wealth of existing scholarship, represented by a few key contributions, establishes links between twentieth-century city planning of green spaces and real estate speculation serving the financial interests of wealthy, influential citizens. For example, Jennifer Light illustrates that Chicago’s twentieth-century expansion emerged from race-based, speculative neighborhood planning, which translated into three decades of racially driven, federally funded urban renewal schemes across the United States. ⁴ Sara Jensen Carr introduces a cross-disciplinary perspective in this discourse, weaving together insights from urban planning and public health to outline how designing with wellness in mind has often prioritized wealthier and predominantly white residents. ⁵

Early city planners embraced the growing convergence between their recently born discipline and elite-driven suburban design in a “planner-realtor alliance.” ⁶ Phil Birge-Liberman provides evidence for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace in Boston, reflecting the ideologies and values of the “dominant cultural groups responsible for its production.” ⁷ Matthew Gandy continues to elaborate on how real estate speculation in urban design was decisive in the development of Olmsted’s Central Park, whose lobbyists were wealthy merchants and landowners admiring the parks of European capitals during their travels. ⁸ Catherine McNeur contextualizes the broader role of real estate speculation and elite interests in shaping New York’s green space planning. Here, developers and city officials used parks as tools to raise property values in the surrounding areas, thereby attracting affluent residents and disproportionately establishing green spaces in wealthy neighborhoods. Cloaked in the technical language of health and planning law, these strategies reinforced racial and class segregation through land distribution and landscape design. ⁹ A direct pedagogical lineage ties the Boston and New York contexts to Houston. Olmsted’s career as a traveling journalist and landscape architect across the United States offers one of the earliest records of Houston’s environmental features, while his son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., became Arthur Comey’s professor at Harvard. ¹⁰

More recently, the infamous New Yorker High Line drew similar criticism, underscoring the role of planners and designers in exploiting urban fallows and manipulating the aesthetic tension between a site’s productive past and its fading as a cultural motif to fuel nearby real estate speculation and increase housing prices. Gandy observes in his later work that this fragment of landscape design serves to ingrain political power into the urban landscape. ¹¹ The parallels between the High Line project and the BGI become particularly evident in their shared membership in the High Line Network, which gathers projects aimed at transforming “underutilized infrastructure into new urban landscapes.” ¹² Kevin Loughran pointedly observes the relationship between the High Line and Buffalo Bayou Park, noting that both cases represent transformations of former industrial transportation infrastructure into linear parks that offer an immersive experience between “city” and “nature” as economic engines. His work argues that Houston’s first bayou transformation, the Buffalo Bayou Park (2012–2015), was the result of entrepreneurial urbanism serving the interests of private groups, exemplified by catalyst gifts from pipeline billionaire and former Enron executive Richard D. Kinder. However, the focus on investments to attract a “creative class” puts equitable park development across the city at risk. ¹³ Regarding transport development, Kyle Shelton highlights how Houston’s highway projects have also disproportionately affected minority and lower-income communities in former Jim Crow neighborhoods, faced with displacement, social network disruption, and environmental burdens. Despite the narrative of Houston as a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism without government intervention, Shelton’s work outlines how powerful growth coalitions have historically channeled federal funds for large-scale infrastructure projects into the city while vehemently opposing social welfare programs. ¹⁴

Especially in the Houston context, Robert D. Bullard's work is fundamental, offering an interconnected analysis of the city’s urban development and inequality. During its expansion, Houston was home to one of the most significant Black communities in the Southern United States, which remained largely invisible to the mainstream narrative of a boomtown success. As the country’s largest city without zoning, the lack of land use controls made Black-majority neighborhoods particularly vulnerable to locating undesirable facilities, such as waste disposal sites. As these neighborhoods became de facto dumping grounds for the city’s waste, residents suffered numerous health and environmental consequences. ¹⁵ The business oligarchy that shaped Houston’s unregulated growth and prioritized business interests over social equity laid the groundwork for socioeconomic marginalization. Even with the increasing demographic shift, underlying power structures remain resilient, historically marginalizing communities of color. This power imbalance also becomes regularly exposed during climate catastrophes, such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which disproportionately flooded vulnerable neighborhoods.

These excerpts from the rich scholarship on the speculative nature and exclusionary tradition of early twentieth-century city expansion and associated greening plans highlight several issues that situate this research within the broader U.S. discourse. First, while some PPPs successfully enable long-term park maintenance after completion, there is a deep-seated relationship between the cooperation of urban elites and city officials in aligning the design and allocation of green spaces with property values and tax revenues. Second, this strategy spread rapidly through the commissioning of young graduates from city planning and landscape architecture programs at private East Coast universities, such as Arthur Comey, accustomed to planner-realtor alliances. Especially in the Southern U.S., a particular public service hostility has enabled an urban growth mechanism dependent on philanthropic investments. Lastly, Houston presents a particularly urgent and understudied case in which a contemporary development, aiming to complete an unfinished historical project, continues to prioritize private interests over public concerns at the expense of low-income residents and communities of color. Although Houston has become the nation’s third-largest minority-majority city, few scholars have critically considered Comey’s contribution as Houston’s first city planning effort. This gap necessitates establishing explicit connections between twentieth- and twenty-first-century planning documents, supplementing the existing literature on the history of “green belts in white cities.” ¹⁶ Instead of merely addressing structural issues implicit in much of American urban politics, studying the entangled relationships between BGI and Comey’s historical precedent can specifically explain how it fails to include minority voices by structuring the layout and phasing to prioritize high-income neighborhoods, neglecting substantive public dialogue in setting development priorities, and assuming threadlike parks, connectivity, and bicycle mobility as primary improvements for everyone. While the private HPB has very recently begun to focus on park development in underserved communities, this well-intentioned goal still depends on the goodwill of a select few rather than being treated as an essential public mandate issued by a city department. Research reports funded by private foundations that donate to high-visibility projects agree with this position, as these foundations typically avoid the perpetual, low-visibility costs of routine park maintenance. Parks departments in Houston and elsewhere have been consistently defunded as “non-essential services” for decades. For the time being, achieving equitable livability will remain secondary to high-profile downtown projects designed to compete in a global race for livability without first addressing the core question: livability for whom?

Problem One: Prioritizing Property Values

In the service of powerful clients, urban and landscape design often contributes to the further entrenchment of existing spatial inequities within the city fabric. Investigating Comey’s vision to integrate Houston’s bayous into his parks plan, thereby raising property values in specific neighborhoods, illustrates such discriminatory design against low-income residents. His plan reflected the real estate industry’s desire to increase land prices and the city’s desire for greater tax revenue to fund its rapid growth. With this approach, Comey intentionally failed communities of color and the BGI risks to underserve low-income groups if replicating the same design ambition.

Houston’s environmental qualities have a deep-seated relationship with the desire for profit from the beginning of its colonial founding on the land of the dispossessed Akokisa (Atakapa-Ishak nation) and Karankawa Indigenous peoples. Twenty-one years before Olmsted arrived in 1857, the real estate speculators Augustus and John Allen had founded Houston and widely advertised the city’s weak legal development regulations to control property value and associated revenue. In newspapers from New Orleans to New York, they also promised “(. . .) when the rich lands (. . .) shall be settled, a trade will flow to it.” ¹⁷ The lack of Houston’s city planning and proximity to Galveston Bay through the Buffalo Bayou additionally benefited from the nineteenth-century expansion of the white supremacist cotton economy and chattel slavery in the South. ¹⁸ Olmsted’s career as a traveling journalist and landscape architect across the United States produced early written records of Houston’s topography and landscape features. During his travels, he captured a white man’s view of Houston’s bayou-furrowed prairie, with its river banks, pine forests, and prairie grasses (Figure 3). Resonating with the Allen brothers, his writing highlights Houston’s economic potential in relation to Buffalo Bayou while referring to the city as an unsanitary place waiting for development: “(. . .) the road lay across a flat surface, having a wet, sandy or ‘craw-fish’ soil, bearing a coarse, rushy grass, diversified by occasional belts of pine and black-jack (. . .). Houston, at the head of the navigation of Buffalo Bayou, has had for many years the advantage of being the point of transhipment (. . .) that enters or leaves the State. It shows many agreeable signs of the wealth accumulated (. . .). Near the bayou are extensive cotton sheds, and huge exposed piles of bales. Houston (. . .) has the reputation of being an unhealthy residence. The country around it is (. . .) settled by small farmers, many of whom are Germans, owning a few cattle, and drawing a meagre subsistence from the thin soil (. . .). In the bayou bottoms nearby, we noticed many magnolias, now in full glory of bloom, perfuming delicately the whole atmosphere.” ¹⁹

Figure 3.

Buffalo Bayou on a postcard in 1908, visualizing how Houston’s landscape might have looked before Comey’s arrival. Digital image courtesy of Houston Public Library, Digital Archives.

Around the time of Olmsted’s death in 1903, his son, Olmsted Jr., began teaching at Harvard and served as Arthur Comey’s landscape architecture professor until he graduated in 1907. ²⁰ Following the eponymous Hurricane that destroyed Galveston in 1900, leaving Houston as the region’s dominant city, the 1901 oil boom contributed to significant economic and population growth. Meanwhile, the relatively new profession and academic field of city planning emerged as an administrative tool to guide and design the ensuing industrial urban expansion. After the population had almost doubled within the decade by 1910, Mayor Horace Baldwin Rice appointed the lawyer Edwin B. Parker, the real estate investor and industrialist George H. Hermann, and the real estate developer William A. Wilson to the City Parks and Boulevards Commission. They, in turn, commissioned Comey at their own expense for $368 ($11,500 as of 2025) to establish non-binding design recommendations for a new system of parkways. ²¹ Comey had only graduated three years earlier and had just established an independent city planning consultancy after completing an extended trip through European cities, which began in June 1911. With the parkway system being his first contract in February 1912, the Commission chose an inexperienced, twenty-six-year-old city planner and landscape architect. Reasons for this choice are speculative, potentially a combination of cost savings, nationwide demand for planners to manage expanding cities, and the novelty of city planning as a field transitioning from the City Beautiful to City Functional. Comey visited Houston that spring and stayed for a year to gather numerical data on population, park acreage, commercial and industrial activities, and growth potential. During his stay in July 1912, Houstonians also approved a $250,000 bond ($8M as of 2025) to acquire new parkland. ²²

Following his analysis, Comey submitted his “Tentative Report” to the Park Commission on April 22, 1913. The “Proposed Park System for Houston” presented a landscape plan for the city’s current and anticipated expansion, covering an environmental and economic analysis, concept, and a design study for a recreation and civic center. ²³ For Texas, this document provided one of the first attempts to correlate isolated urban development activities in a broader scheme widely understood as city planning. ²⁴ Comey included street and railroad configurations, building height regulations, photographs, and zoning ordinances from European cities. ²⁵ Convinced that land value needed to be at the center of city planning, Comey published Houston’s assessed land value map in a separate article in Landscape Architecture Magazine before submitting his report to the Parks Commission. Here, he argued that spatialized economic data would “go far as a check on irrational city development,” expressing his dedication to a “rational” development logic based on raising land value through the development of green boulevards, parks, and bayou waterfronts. ²⁶ - Olmsted’s oncecaptured bayou prairie became another important cost-saving point for Comey’s park vision. The typical bayou, according to Comey, included lawns and playfields among wooded areas by default: As “natural parks already, (. . .) narrow bends furnish level playfields.” ²⁷ He seemed convinced that Houston’s park system should rely on the banks of the bayous for two economic considerations. First, the land required no acquisition and already offered park-like landscapes, reducing construction costs. Second, in contrast to insular spatial layouts like Central Park, threadlike and interconnected park development covered more adjacent land, increasing in value and extending naturally as the city grew. Thus, Comey pointed out that “the effect on land values and tax returns was equally beneficial,” ²⁸ as bayous had little economic value to a private owner, but as parks enhanced the value of many adjacent properties.

One hundred years after Houstonians approved a bond to acquire new parkland in 1912, the population again approved $100M in 2012 to initiate the BGI after the Kinder Foundation contributed $50 million to the project as a catalyst donation. While the primary argument had shifted from land value increases and beautification to establishing a sustainable quality of life for all Houstonians, the new initiative aimed to revive and complete Comey’s economically oriented concept. The BGI’s 2011 benefit report, “A Key to a Healthy Houston,” supported this economic interest in a threadlike park network. Besides healthcare cost savings, runoff reduction, and water filtration savings, the report envisioned a substantially enhanced property tax base and an improved environment for company retention and growth. ²⁹ Of course, the emphasis on increasing tax revenue is deeply embedded in the funding mechanisms of previous park development projects, not only in Houston but nationwide. The city’s historical preference for neoliberal urban governance contributed to the separate existence of the independent nonprofit Houston Parks Board (HPB), a private group whose name suggests a governmental body (*1976), and the public Parks and Recreation Department (HPARD) (*1916). While HPB acts as a fundraising entity, focusing on large-scale development planning and high-profile, measurable destination parks, HPARD handles the day-to-day maintenance and programming of all city parks, which have faced significant budget cuts since 2000. HPARD also manages numerous smaller parks to be integrated into the Bayou Greenways network, implements trail segments envisioned in the master plan, ensures their ongoing maintenance, and organizes events and programs. On a structural level, reliance on PPPs and a dependence on generosity from private donors has shifted decision-making power away from democratic processes toward prioritized improvements in areas where donors tend to either live or see economic returns.

However, HPARD’s leadership never contested the budget cuts but celebrated the PPP as part of the department’s philosophy, which encouraged a sense of ownership to foster stewardship and parkland preservation. Although HPARD could have financed the BGI kickstarting Buffalo Bayou Park three times over if the city had maintained its 2005 public budget, the park development was more than 90 percent privately funded (Figure 4). The gradual weakening of public services eventually enabled the billionaires Nancy and Rich Kinder of the Kinder Foundation to tie specific legal requirements to their catalyst donations. For the $50M donation to the BGI, they required that tax increment financing (TIF) would secure the future management of the parks, thereby bringing budgetary decisions under the control of unelected economic development leaders, who would depend long-term on property value increases and developed interests. ³⁰ Of course, the donation, TIF, and subsequent PPP also enabled high-level park maintenance of a destination park that many Houstonians enjoy daily. Without addressing Houston’s broader underinvestment in public services, too much criticism of the Kinder Foundation gift would mistake a symptom for the root problem. Nevertheless, the tendency for private interests to influence large-scale park planning was translated without critical assessment from Comey’s plan to the BGI.

Figure 4.

A view of Buffalo Bayou Park today. Without constant budget cuts since 2005, Houston’s Parks Department could have financed this park independently of private donors—image by author.

The HPB maintains a lineage of affluent citizens involved in the decision-making process for urban development. Its current Board of Directors Chair, Cullen K. Geiselman Muse, is the great-granddaughter of Hugh Roy Cullen, an influential oil magnate and philanthropist, whose ideological stance in the 1940s framed zoning ordinances as German and contrary to American individualism, aligning with socialist principles. ³¹ While his contributions enabled institution-specific green spaces as a byproduct of his broader support for private interests, his opposition to zoning suggests that he resisted comprehensive city planning that could have included more public park development. Of course, the involvement of his great-granddaughter is not malevolent due to her personal ties to wealth. Yet, the persistence of private influence in planning decision-making underscores the historical entanglement of civic development with elite interests. A 2023 report by Rice University’s Kinder Institute, named after the Kinder Foundation, which donated to the BGI and the HPB, evaluates how Houston funds its parks and emphasizes that, despite its progress in creating destination parks, it ranks lowest in per-resident public spending on HPARD compared to major U.S. Cities. As a way forward, it suggests a new fee or dedicated bonds, as 70 percent of citizens are willing to increase park funding by two dollars per month in taxes, rather than reallocating existing budgets toward green space planning and maintenance. The report acknowledges that park quality varies widely across neighborhoods, that destination parks are unable to address park inequality, and that public funding would help revitalize neighborhood parks. Based on population and parc acreage, the report argues that HPARD should have two to three times its current budget. Thus, the philanthropic family foundations involved with the HPB, including Cullen and Kinder, also leverage stable public funding through a dedicated, voter-approved revenue stream. ³²

However, the combination of a laissez-faire urban development led by donations from influential individuals, paired with private-interest groups such as the HPB, makes relying on Comey’s design for a citywide bayou greenway network particularly attractive. Additionally, the availability and utilization of public resources and their physical improvement as a source of profit are at the core of the BGI’s design. While it is worth questioning the enduring disconnect between philanthropic investment and less photogenic neighborhood parks in high-need areas, the most troubling continuation of the Comey plan in the BGI is the seldom-acknowledged but implicit focus on increasing land and property values. Instead of continuing this legacy, a more future-oriented, alternative approach would be to jettison and revise the entire Comey report and rethink Houston’s green spaces as a comprehensive public system that treats parks as essential infrastructure, not optional amenities. Such a holistic plan would not only transform Houston’s bayous into prestigious parks but also intentionally integrate social needs with park development and restructure spending priorities across all of Houston from the very beginning.

Problem Two: Privileging White Neighborhoods

The BGI failed communities of color in particular by engaging, through Comey’s report, the lasting legacy of Houston’s Jim Crow laws and ongoing racial discrimination. After addressing design-related discriminatory practices affecting all low-income groups, this discussion focuses on allocation-related discrimination through legal and informal practices before and after the abolition of Jim Crow. As elsewhere in the Southern United States, Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation until the 1960s and provided the foundation for the city’s white supremacist social order. In this context, Comey veiled the segregated and murderous reality of Black everyday life in early twentieth-century Texas with scientific jargon. By acknowledging Houston’s “need of providing [recreation facilities] for the colored portion of its population (. . .) [and] adequate play space [that] has not been reserved around the colored schools,” he reduced the racial inequities to a pseudo-objective socio-spatial analysis. Rather than tying the identified deficit of the eight segregated schools for Black children to the provision of new facilities and play spaces, he loosely proposed (“can be located”) three detached playgrounds, one in each of the two segregated neighborhoods: on Emancipation Park in the Southeastern Third Ward, Military Park in the Northeast, and one on a disused cemetery adjacent to Houston’s Freedmen’s Town West of downtown. ³³ Unlike other “black belt” models seen in Southern cities, Houston’s segregation resulted in Black communities forming enclaves within multiple separate city wards. These areas later saw the arrival of diverse migrant groups, who established their own ethnic enclaves, seeking refuge among people with non-white backgrounds, and still reflect Houston’s racial distribution today. ³⁴ For Houston’s eighteen white schools, Comey’s report foresaw playgrounds to provide every child with a playground within one-half mile (“should be provided”). ³⁵ This condition illustrates how Comey specifically tied Houston’s future prosperity to securing the public health of white children through increased playground access.

As elsewhere in the United States, the links between white supremacist ideology and “nature” in Houston run deep, in which white southerners often racialized parks as spaces of purity for white enjoyment. Despite the exclusionary system of Jim Crow laws, Black resistance and negotiation of access to better facilities remain a legacy of this history, besides the lasting impact of restricted access to green spaces. ³⁶ While Houston’s Jim Crow never provided “separate but equal” equitable facilities for Black citizens, African American leaders, such as the high school principal Ernest O. Smith, still engaged in the establishment of high cultural institutions, classical architecture, and the engagement of external experts. Under their leadership, the community actively fought inequities, such as exclusions from public buildings like the Houston Lyceum and the Carnegie Library. A Carnegie Corporation grant helped acquire land in the Fourth Ward to build the Carnegie Colored Library, completed simultaneously with Comey’s report in 1913 and designed in the classical style by Booker T. Washington’s son-in-law, William Sydney Pittman, who had just moved his family and practice from Washington to Dallas. The library served the community until its demolition for freeway construction in 1962, as urban renewal and federal highway construction frequently targeted Black neighborhoods due to a lack of political power and inadequate legal protections for building preservation. ³⁷ Although Comey’s numerical analysis of Houston’s residents included one-third of Black residents, his cartographical analyses excluded them. In the Red Book of Houston, published in 1916, unknown authors documented the names, addresses, occupations, and selected biographical narratives of Black residents during the 1910s. ³⁸ In a unique instance of counter-mapping, as a predecessor to the Green Book, the Red Book resisted the Blue Book Society directories, which exclusively listed white people and businesses. ³⁹ A map produced for this research cross-referenced the included addresses of Black households and companies in Houston, based on a geographic survey from 1916 and Comey’s 1913 report, illustrating the location of Houston’s Black communities in relation to Comey’s parkway system (Figure 5). The distribution of households shows the enclave of Freedmen’s Town west of downtown, while Black households and businesses are spreading out more loosely in Houston’s East. As the West was predominantly white, Comey located his bayou parks here, leaving the eastern section of Buffalo Bayou for industry and water transportation infrastructure. Among other evidence, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) map from 1937 shows the lasting effects of Comey’s diverted investment more than twenty years later. The mapped-out Red Book household clusters align with those neighborhoods that the HOLC mapped as “hazardous,” thereby driving further neighborhood disinvestment and perpetuating urban economic inequality.

Figure 5.

Comey’s Master Plan overlaid with a 1916 survey and 1915 Red Book household data. The image shows Black households located East of downtown, foreshadowing the HOLC maps created twenty years later—Data Courtesy of Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University. Map by author.

The HOLC map (widely available online) also illustrates the correlation between white communities and investment, designating adjacent neighborhoods to Hermann and Memorial Park as “still desirable” and “best.” Comey’s park proposals in Houston’s West, such as Hermann Park, Memorial Park (both realized), and Timber Grove (unrealized), had no equivalents in East Houston’s Black neighborhoods. These areas instead entered a long phase of industrialization, initiated by the oil boom and exacerbated by the completion of the Ship Channel in 1913. ⁴⁰ The West would remain predominantly white, receiving park investments and single-family home construction for the next three decades. In 1923, the Black-owned newspaper The Houston Informer criticized the city for purchasing 133 additional acres to extend Hermann Park for $330,000 ($6.2M as of 2025), when there were more pressing needs that would have benefited all neighborhoods, such as comprehensive street paving. Meanwhile, Emancipation Park in Houston’s Third Ward, a symbol of freedom and empowerment in the African American community, remained “criminally and shamefully neglected and slighted (. . .) and white [city officials were] buying additional property for white parks (. . .).” ⁴¹ In addition to public parks, Comey’s plan incorporated the Rice Institute, founded in 1912 with the estate of William Marsh Rice, the commissioning Mayor Baldwin Rice’s recently deceased uncle. Comey intended to make the campus an accessible park: “Rice Institute will have many attractive features in its extensive grounds, which will doubtless be open to the public.” ⁴² However, the institute remained white-only until 1964, the year it also began to charge tuition, exemplifying how Jim Crow laws translated into economic boundaries, continuing to restrict access for poorer individuals. ⁴³ Additionally, the campus’s opulent live oak perimeter and park-like qualities raised adjacent land values, turning the nearby boulevard lots into the city’s most expensive properties. ⁴⁴ As elsewhere in the U.S., the absence of explicit segregation laws did not prevent informal segregation through white residents’ actions and park district inaction. ⁴⁵

Today’s Rice University, although racially and ethnically diverse, still maintains a student body with more than three-quarters from affluent households, who enjoy comfortable access to a green campus in contrast to a local public in need of green space. ⁴⁶ Thus, the BGI aims to improve connectivity among existing green spaces in Houston, based on a Master Plan Parks Survey by HPARD in 2014, in which Houstonians expressed that their parks should have more links via walking and biking connections. However, the majority of respondents were two-thirds of non-Hispanic whites with household incomes over $75,000 (Figure 6). Aligned with Comey’s report, the BGI and HPB initially focused on the desires of Houston’s wealthier residents. In contrast, a counter-survey on Underrepresented Populations for Houston Parks in 2016 found different demands, stating that neither access nor connectivity would matter much to Houston’s minority residents. The initiative’s lighthouse project, the centrally located Buffalo Bayou Park, completed in 2015, provided little parking space, thus complicating everyday walking or biking for minority residents in less central neighborhoods. The researchers’ open-ended survey questions about park improvements instead revealed concerns about improving existing and local recreation and leisure facilities, enhanced maintenance, and more robust safety measures. The call for improved facilities rather than high-visibility park development resembled the Houston Informer critique of Hermann Park’s extension in 1923. All of these concerns fell under the responsibilities of the publicly funded HPARD, which experienced drastic budget cuts since 2005. The study concluded that both HPB and HPARD should prioritize improving the amenities of existing green spaces in underserved communities before establishing new connections. ⁴⁷ Although renovating existing parks was a small part of the Greenways executive summary from the beginning, many early projects saw first construction in Houston’s wealthier western districts. ⁴⁸

Figure 6.

Buffalo Bayou Park focuses on cycling and walking paths—image courtesy of Ryan Weller.

Houston’s environmental activism also has a long tradition of predominantly white elite interests driving large-scale development, while minority groups frequently remain preoccupied with ensuring the operation of essential municipal services. ⁴⁹ While there is no evidence to suggest that the HPB or BGI willfully neglected the needs of low-income minority groups, few efforts incorporated these underrepresented voices into the parks planning process by addressing the above-mentioned counter-survey’s findings from the start. ⁵⁰ Despite showing GIS-based maps that spatialized high-need areas based on low income, density, and public health risks, the BGI failed to address the relationship between high-income regions close to the preexisting green spaces emerging from Comey’s plan. Instead, conceptual presentation decks and news reports referenced the seemingly neutral, geospatial representation of a bayou network, promoting the idea of greening and connecting the waterways as the “completion of a century-old vision.” ⁵¹ Journalists, design practitioners, and realtors alike referred to the program as a continuation of Comey’s parks plan, often citing the HPB’s regular news releases. ⁵² In the 2018 executive summary, the HPB stated that BGI was “finally creating the citywide linear park network envisioned by Comey a century before.” ⁵³ Indeed, Comey’s approach to creating a linear or threadlike park system based on the existing bayous was ambitious and novel for Houston at the time, envisioning parks to serve the citizens of an industrializing city with relief from its accelerated growth while raising the land value of adjacent properties. ⁵⁴ However, the reference to Comey’s plan conceals the risk of replicating a trajectory that keeps vulnerable citizens unprotected from the risk of gentrification induced by the relationship between real estate speculation and urban green space. The BGI’s design still serves the economic purpose of increasing land values to co-finance the construction cost, entangling private property with public green space.

As the above reassessment shows, the increase in access and connectivity played a less significant role for underrepresented communities in Houston today than it might have for white Houstonians in 1912. A certain ignorance toward the needs of the most vulnerable was evident in Comey’s report, as well as in the first decade of the BGI’s activities, particularly since the initiative began with the bayous and parks that the historical plan had proposed. While earlier phases of the BGI were located upstream in West Houston, along the Buffalo, Brays, and White Oak Bayou, later phases in East Houston remained in the planning and design stage for longer due to permitting and coordination issues. ⁵⁵ Though operating under a different PPP and funding scheme, the eastern portion of Buffalo Bayou still remains in a planning phase. As Comey situated his green bayous in Houston’s West, the report helped justify a contemporary pattern of construction phasing, from prestige projects in the West to less centrally located bayous in the East, which still approximates a geographic gradient from affluent to poor today. However, while the Houston Informer highlighted more pressing needs in other areas 100 years ago, an alternative path forward has now gained momentum. The HPB’s Fiscal Year 2024 report demonstrates an organizational pivot to address the park access disparity, as emphasized in both the 2023 Kinder Institute report and the 2016 minority community survey. Thus, the HPB adopted a five-year strategy plan, making the revitalization of neighborhood parks one of its core focuses, and has transformed seventeen underserved community parks in 2024. While this number included both pocket and regional parks, its most prominent project was the MacGregor Park in Houston’s historically Black Third Ward, ⁵⁶ which was notably undergoing gentrification and displacement of Black households between 2010 and 2020. ⁵⁷

Problem Three: Misunderstanding Transportation Needs

After illustrating the gentrification risks of threadlike parks and the allocation injustice of both plans, this final section highlights how mobility and transportation-related infrastructure issues both reinforce historical inequities and create new ones. The time of Comey’s arrival fell into a gap between aspirations and achievement in American city planning between 1911 and 1917. ⁵⁸ Representing an emergent discipline with a swiftly changing canon, city planners, still inspired by the City Beautiful movement, often recommended park systems as part of their urban development plans. Meanwhile, the national discourse had started shifting toward transportation and the automobile as leading principles for urban development. Besides bayou and neighborhood parks, Comey aimed to integrate Houston’s main traffic arteries as green boulevards (Figure 7). ⁵⁹ Citing European cities such as Vienna and London, he envisioned a drivable park belt connected by a network of residential boulevards and tree-lined, radial “parked highways.” The thin, continuous black lines on the master plan also demarcated his “residence boulevards” running through “expensive residence property (. . .) to increase property values” further (Figure 2). “Residence boulevards,” he continued, were “restricted to pleasure driving (. . .),” ⁶⁰ an exclusive pastime for less than 1 percent of Americans owning a private car in 1912. ⁶¹

Figure 7.

On one of Rice University’s adjacent live oak boulevards. Once planned by Arthur Comey, the adjoining land is today among the city’s most expensive properties—image by author.

Simultaneously, the increase in car mobility, fueled by an oil industry eager to promote car dependency, led to an accelerated expansion beyond Comey’s projections.He had underestimated the growth Houston would experience until 1960 at 600,000 inhabitants as opposed to an actual 940,000. Simultaneously, the economic fluctuations in municipal bond sales induced by the 1913 to 1914 depression and the outbreak of World War I in Europe led planners to retreat from deterministic master plans to “tentative” or “preliminary” reports. Despite a year of in-depth studies, Comey informed his readers that the recommendations would not be final, in part because of their ambitious nature. ⁶² Although the tentative report was too visionary as a whole to become policy, some suggestions had an immediate effect. In 1914, Parks Commission member and real estate investor George H. Hermann bequeathed one of the recommended park sites on Main Street to the city of Houston. The Board also adopted Comey’s proposed Main Street Boulevard and retained city planner and landscape architect George Edward Kessler in 1915 to design a more detailed master plan connecting Hermann Park and the Rice Institute, each named after their donors, with downtown. As Comey’s report had promised before, this connection could yield the highest land value returns. ⁶³

At least two reasons led to a shift away from Comey’s comprehensive plans after his departure. First, his research and report submission coincided with the transition from City Beautiful to City Functional, during which park master plans nationwide experienced a decline in favor of transportation priorities. Second, Comey underestimated the opposition of conservative business leaders to his proposals for zoning ordinances on land use and building heights, which drew on European examples. In contrast to today, his report never reached a broader audience beyond the Parks Commission and city officials, while the Houston Chamber of Commerce simultaneously circulated a book in 1913 among the population that advertised the commercial advantages of transport infrastructure, including the railroad and the Bayou Ship Channel. ⁶⁴ Alongside the growing street and highway network, the bayous contributed to an increasing environmental inequity between two competing opportunities: as industrial waterways and sewage discharge versus green parks. That same year, the eastern portion of Buffalo Bayou, Houston’s main waterway, officially became the Houston Ship Channel, connecting to the Gulf of Mexico after ten years of dredging and development. ⁶⁵ Until 1920, Houston had a channel and deepwater port, paved many streets, and built fragmented parks and green boulevards. ⁶⁶ In a final effort of city-planning advocates, the years between 1922 and 1929 saw the appointment and dissolution of three different City Planning Commissions. The first Commission followed Comey’s second park recommendation and acquired the former U.S. Army Training Camp Logan, now Memorial Park, from William and Michael Hogg. The two developers had recently founded the River Oaks neighborhood, located south of the future park: a restricted garden community for Houston’s wealthiest residents, which still boasts the city’s highest property values today. ⁶⁷ The Commission also hired the landscape firm Hare & Hare after Kessler died in 1923, which focused on developing the recently established parks, adding a zoo, golf course, and theater to Hermann Park, despite funding struggles during the Depression era. ⁶⁸

In Houston’s history, city planning was and remains a contested discipline. After the city’s rapid oil-boom growth, influential individuals developed strong beliefs in self-reliance, private action, and individualism. Led by Hugh Roy Cullen, the current HPB Director’s great-grandfather, a group of city planning opponents viewed zoning efforts as a threat to property interests. Ironically, alongside the need for broader participation, Houston’s planning advocates also insisted on private citizens’ involvement and individualism in implementing a rational city plan. In favor of planning opponents, the participation debate eventually slowed the implementation of 1920s city plans, which were already struggling to keep pace with Houston’s relentless expansion. The dependence on particular groups or individuals devoted to city planning, combined with the general public’s apathy in securing financial support for a planning agency, became city planning’s greatest weakness. ⁶⁹ Although the legacy of 1920s planning efforts had some isolated effects on development until the 1980s, the recurring growth periods repeatedly overtook the sporadic initiatives led by influential individuals or personally committed public officials. Eventually, Houston abandoned Comey’s vision in favor of expanding commerce and industrialization throughout the twentieth century, and the city remained without a zoning code as car traffic became the principal driver behind urban expansion.

Although the city commissioned Hare & Hare again twenty years later to establish both a Parks Plan and a Thoroughfare Plan, the latter ultimately replaced parks and greenways as leading principles for Houston’s territorial expansion. ⁷⁰ It laid out a long-term framework for the city’s street and roadway systems, aiming to organize Houston’s rapid growth in a hierarchy of major arteries, connectors, and local streets to improve circulation and accommodate future expansion. ⁷¹ What Comey had proposed as a park belt in a double function as a street and linear park turned into Houston’s inner highway loop. The industrial transformation of the city’s bayous, increasingly pushed by a booming oil industry, heralded a century of economic prosperity for some and environmental hazards for others. The gradual conversion of natural watercourses into concrete-walled sewers and drainage systems, with highways built alongside or above them, made their use as public greenways increasingly unlikely. When the Harris County Flood Control District and the Army Corps of Engineers began to channel the bayous, Comey’s visions of green parks turned into gray infrastructures for flood control (Figure 8). ⁷² The constantly increasing flood risk and pollution from industrial expansion now moved downstream with the water toward the poorer East. In contrast, the rising income from the expanding infrastructure, including roads, railroads, and water traffic, moved West from the industrial areas to the greener and whiter neighborhoods. ⁷³ The rapid growth rate initiated a self-reinforcing feedback loop, further incentivizing reactive management tactics over proactive planning and projection.

Figure 8.

The Eastern section of Buffalo Bayou shows the industrial remnants of its transformation from a natural waterway into an infrastructure for transportation and commerce in the twentieth century—image by author.

Both park and transportation development share the strategy of increasing land value. While automobility signaled wealth and development in 1913, the BGI today argues that Houston required more transport alternatives, particularly bicycle infrastructure built alongside threadlike bayou parks on a West-East axis and linear boulevard connectors on a South-North axis. The provision of such options is relevant, but it is worthwhile to ask in what way contemporary advocacy for pedestrian and bicycle mobility reflects the most urgent desires of Houston’s entire population. The 2016 survey of Houston’s minority residents showed that their communities favored rehabilitating existing parks over park connectivity and ranked improving cycling as a mode of transport as a low priority. ⁷⁴ Due to Houston’s extensive car-centric development and the resulting danger to cyclists on most roads, cycling has never been widely promoted and advocated as a viable everyday mode of transportation through the urban fabric. Instead, cycling through the few green boulevards and relatively spread-out bayou parks has become a pastime for wealthier residents living near such routes. Meanwhile, the current mayor, John Whitmire, has partially rolled back recent efforts to genuinely expand and improve the city’s road bicycle infrastructure. ⁷⁵

The added mobility function further supports the recreational benefits of linear or threadlike park developments. As seen with former train infrastructure or green park belts, these urban morphologies seem particularly interesting to developers, as they affect more adjacent land than a centrally located park. Reading these ideas critically, Houston should prioritize actual needs before developing all nine bayou waterfronts, including connector bike paths. Privately incentivized park developments may be just one among many solutions to increase access to green spaces. Instead, a well-distributed park concept for low-income neighborhoods focusing on local improvements, paired with safe bike lanes on major thoroughfares for daily commutes, could be a viable alternative or addition to the BGI. Learning from Comey’s past mistakes means understanding that increased access to urban green spaces does not guarantee long-term accessibility for low-income residents. Such a provision would require park-related anti-displacement strategies (PRADS) for renters, homeowners, local businesses, private-sector developers, and nonprofit organizations that protect those who already live on the land. Some examples include rent control and anti-eviction protections for renters, property tax freezes and forgivable loans for homeowners, density bonuses for developers, and, most importantly, anti-displacement strategies in the proposals of park funding agencies like the HPB. ⁷⁶ A central failure of Comey’s plan was a misunderstanding of public needs, prioritizing the automobile at a time when cars were still inaccessible to most. Furthermore, this choice competed with the focus on park planning, lacking the flexibility to adapt when planning priorities shifted. A similar critique applies to the BGI, laudably implementing bayous and connectors as biking greenways, yet misaligning this central goal with the actual desires of a broader population. Cycling generally remains a weekend leisure activity for the city’s middle and upper classes, making the infrastructure less effective for daily commutes. Houston should learn from this historical failure by treating contemporary green planning with the same foresight that Hare & Hare applied to traffic planning: accommodating future development on various scales rather than relying on piecemeal renovation. Such a lesson would involve, for example, using parks as guiding principles in the management of urban heat islands, rather than merely as prestige projects, and developing advocacy to establish greenways and bike trails as a genuine and everyday mode of transportation, not just for recreation.

Ruptures and Continuities in Houston’s Parks Planning

Without accounting for the similarities and differences between inequitable contexts in 1913 and 2012, pursuing a century-old vision risks becoming a regressive approach to landscape planning. While the Jim Crow legal framework of segregation was dismantled, de facto segregation continued to exist through redlining and lending practices. ⁷⁷ The legacy of past policies, combined with economic development patterns, continues to produce unequal access to green spaces and transportation infrastructure. In this sense, the spatial allocation of resources in Houston has retained similar patterns of exclusion. The central difference between then and now lies in a much greater contemporary awareness of this problematic mechanism of perpetuation that shifts from explicit, discriminatory mandates to subtle, systemic, and market-driven forces. This awareness should enable the BGI to make a greater impact and clearly state why completing a historical parkway vision is insufficient to disrupt perpetual inequity in access to urban resources. Tragically, such awareness once again faces growing political resistance amid a national backlash against equity-oriented planning initiatives.

In a 2022 news release, the HPB stated that newly acquired parkland for future development would be 83 percent in neighborhoods with low-to-moderate incomes or intraditionally underserved areas, aligning with the results of its 2024 Fiscal Year Report. However, new or improved green spaces might put these communities at risk of green gentrification if the HPB remains silent on measures to prevent it. The Board also omits funding mechanisms for the future maintenance of improved parkland, presumably leaving this question to an underfunded Parks Department. While “sustainability” might appear politically neutral and inclusive, it regularly masks a governance style that sidelines justice and debate in favor of green improvements serving high-end redevelopment. ⁷⁸ Of course, building parks remains a worthy goal in the face of a global climate crisis, but more green space does not necessarily equate to more accessible green space. Especially when increasing equity is the BGI’s goal, improvement of existing green space in low-income neighborhoods must be linked to PRADS when extending Houston’s bayou parks into these communities. ⁷⁹ Although keeping neighborhoods affordable often opposes the economic benefits of increasing land value through park planning, lasting protection is the only path to disrupt continuities between then and now, and toward meaningful improvements over elite-driven profit ventures. Not only does the Buffalo Bayou parkland need to “be preserved and protected (. . .) in perpetuity,” ⁸⁰ but also the affordable land that houses nearby Houstonians. For now, the resurrection of Comey’s plan, now in the form of the BGI, which is funded mainly by and thus reliant on private interests, seeks continuity.

Connecting the twenty-first-century BGI and the Comey report also brings up plan-specific questions about Houston’s landscape planning. How does the contemporary plan intentionally resurrect the Comey plan, and how are the contemporary problems a result of relying on the old plan? The BGI first and foremost revives Comey’s vision through the widely circulated plan sketch, most recognizable for its threadlike parks around the meandering Bayous, three larger parks, green boulevards, and a wide park belt (Figure 2). The Initiative assigns its motivation to Houston’s general population with quotes such as “Bayou Greenways 2020 builds on (. . .) Arthur Comey (. . .) [as] voters and donors wanted to create more connected green space in Houston, and following Comey’s plans (. . .), [will do] so but on a larger scale.” ⁸¹ This motivation occludes both Comey’s and the BGI’s prioritization of property values through the spatial layout of park development. While the intentionality of this continuity remains unresolved, it undoubtedly relates to broader, unjust development patterns in U.S. cities that Houston has never adequately addressed. Second, Comey’s plan is perpetuated by privileging wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods through the park allocation and development phasing. None of the planning documentation or news releases mentions Comey’s inequitable distribution strategies. Thus, the plan’s layout in relationship to the neighborhoods’ class and race signifies a silent translation between the current and historical landscape plan, omitting the social context of century-old problems. Instead of establishing a more balanced, need-based greening plan from the beginning, HPB and HPARD initially centered on a park network inspired by a translocal planning discourse on bicycle connectivity and on an inequitable planning scheme that coincides with profit-oriented park plans. Lastly, Comey’s plan is resurrected through a misunderstanding of transportation needs, focusing on specific transport modes without assessing the population’s needs. While cycling as a mode of transport certainly contributes to healthier, more qualitative urban environments, focusing on it as a driver of development requires placing it in relation to the city’s actual everyday commuting patterns. Without a larger transition away from cars, improving local neighborhood parks should always take precedence over cycling connectivity between high-profile bayou park developments.

In conclusion, the risk of the BGI replicating inequity results less from a willful exclusion but rather from a significant negligence in reading Comey’s report in its entirety beyond a superficially convincing idea of transforming Houston’s bayous into parks. Comey’s racially unjust allocation of green space might have been a typical condition for a twentieth-century Texan city, but using an excerpt for a contemporary planning project with the stated objective of “completing the vision” requires a much more rigorous, critical reassessment. Bringing the 1913 Comey plan for Houston’s waterways and the 2012 BGI into a direct dialogue demonstrates the significance of such a critical engagement and provides new reference points for urban historians to intervene in threefold ways. First, as attempted here, they could prove to planners and designers how superficial historical evidence contributes to the continuity of inequity from the past to the present. A closer critical reading of historical references by these groups could instead lead to more socio-spatial justice and meaningful environmental improvements. Second, urban historians could advocate for, engage in, or initiate a substantive public dialogue to educate through talks outside academia about the ways specific documents perpetuate problems rather than becoming romantic symbols of a desirable legacy. Lastly, they could collaborate with scholars in design history and design studio teachers to incorporate more critical readings of historical context into the education of future practitioners. Relentlessly disentangling the meaning of historical sources, such as landscape master plans, can make their dubious continuities visible. In academia and practice, historical representations that remain isolated from their roots will never provide firm ground for contemporary practice and, more often, reinforce prevailing injustice.

An article about Comey’s tentative report in Landscape Architecture Magazine, the same publication in which Comey himself once advocated spatializing land value, laments that “despite the best intentions, good ideas in urban planning sometimes take a century or more to bear fruit.” ⁸² As his greening plans were once abandoned for industrial expansion as a faster profit source, the rise of greening the now-defunct industrial infrastructures, like the bayous, under a new banner of “sustainability,” offers once again a fresh outlook for land-value-driven profits. Therefore, completing Comey’s spatial dimension also implies completing its financial and social dimension, harvesting the profit from a continually rising land value that “bears its fruits” after more than a century. Today, Houston’s privately-driven environmentalism still follows the same trajectory that was embedded in its foundation by real estate speculators, with the “whiteness of green” remaining a silent companion to its development. ⁸³ However, there are positive outlooks. MacGregor Park, one of the HPB’s most recent 65-acre park projects on Brays Bayou in Houston’s Third Ward, is set to undergo a renovation led by Walter Hood’s Design Studio to revitalize its aging infrastructure while honoring its cultural significance to minority Houstonians. In 1923, The Houston Informer, founded by Clifton Frederick Richardson Sr., lamented the disinvestment in Black community parks during the purchase of today’s Memorial Park. In 2024, The Houston Defender, also founded by Richardson Sr., celebrates the $54M invested by the Kinder Foundation and the HPB to revitalize the culturally significant park by 2026, along with another $33M that enabled the renovation of Houston’s first traditionally Black Emancipation Park. ⁸⁴ Meanwhile, the HPB’s Fiscal Year 2024 Report declares the successful improvement of seventeen neighborhood parks in underserved communities.

While Olmsted once hoped in the 1860s that Central Park would reflect the values of the dominant elites upon New York’s working class, his partner, Calvert Vaux, imagined the park as an agent for cultural democracy. Even before the nineteenth century ended, the uses of Central Park had shifted from an elite ideology to entertainment for a wider audience, appropriating the park with diverse recreational choices. ⁸⁵ Walking through Houston’s prominent Hermann Park today displays the city’s character at its best, uniting people of all economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds in a space that feels truly public. Houston’s parks, once envisioned and still partially managed by a ruling elite, offer hope for a future of just coexistence, even as the surrounding properties are likely to remain among the city’s most expensive for the foreseeable future.