Can mixed-use alone make a real neighborhood?

Located at the intersection of I-10 and Beltway 8 in West Houston’s Memorial Villages area, Midway Companies’ City Centre development has an incredible location. By most measures it looks like a very successful project. There’s a great mix on its 37 acres – shopping, housing, hotel and meeting facilities, dining, a spa, a dental clinic, even a weekly outdoor art market. The place has substantial traffic every time I visit. However, it’s design and that of other similar lifestyle centers make me question whether places like this will ever feel like a neighborhood to its residents.

Lack of integration is the issue. The different uses are simply laid side by side: residential along one edge, office with a little retail elsewhere, concentrated retail in the middle, hotel to another side. Each piece might end up successful. But in separating these activities horizontally, the result lacks sensitivity to what makes great urban places. Real neighborhoods need more than just variety; they need all those activities mixed together, too.

Like many others before it, City Centre’s plan replicates suburban zoning that separates uses, and the expectations that come with it. Standard apartment product sits by itself, at the periphery of the site. There are no flats above retail, live-work housing, or apartment buildings interspersed with shops and restaurants. There’s ample evidence that integrating residential and commercial components makes a place more lively, and that people who want apartment and townhouse living find it desirable. City Centre has a great Life Time Fitness center – but with parking located right at its back door. Consequently foot traffic in that part of the retail zone is thin, even when the adjacent area is busy. So Life Time’s anchor function in creating a neighborhood feel is defeated.

Tying new mixed-use development into existing street grids is one way to help make them urbanistic. For an expressway-adjacent development like this, that might not be so easy. It’s a good reminder of the challenges associated with integrating uses and balancing the needs of all product types.