Texas Obesity
Houston's heavy issues By LISA GRAY
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
Why are Houstonians heftier than people in other cities? A few years ago the culprit seemed obvious. Urban sprawl, the argument went, packed on our pounds.
Several much-quoted studies found a correlation between obesity and spread-out, car-loving cities like ours. People who live in tight-packed metropolises tended to be thinner than people like us, whose suburban-style lives involve freeways and parking lots.
Researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Rand Corporation argued that living in a car-hostile city where walking is part of daily life naturally keeps people lean.
The difference between living in Manhattan or a spread-out, car-dependent suburb of Cleveland? For an average adult, it's six pounds, according to the University of Maryland's National Center for Smart Growth.
Sprawl was blamed for Americans' soaring obesity rates. And it seemed only natural that Houston, one of the most car-besotted places in the universe, was also one of the country's fattest. Here, only the intrepid dare to journey on foot to the corner store. In a loose-packed city like ours, places of interest often lie miles apart. Our streets, designed for drivers, leave pedestrians with daunting choices: slog across muddy sidewalk-less private yards or dodge SUVs in the road. It seemed no wonder that roughly two-thirds of Houstonians are either overweight or obese.
The researchers' arguments made intuitive sense, and the message seemed obvious. To avoid becoming XXXL tubs o' lard, we'd better move to Manhattan. Or make Houston more like it.
More like Manhattan
Not entirely by coincidence, dense, walkable mixed-use projects are now under construction all over Houston. New Urbanism is in vogue. It's supposed to be good for you.
Some of those new developments are centrally located, in relatively urban-feeling places like the Rice Village, Greenway Plaza, Midtown, the East End and the Galleria/Uptown area. But some are in the farthest reaches of the metropolitan area: Sugar Land, Katy, Galveston and unincorporated bits of northwest Harris County.
Those developments resemble Manhattan in that almost all of them cater to the wealthy. The luxury apartments perched atop the boutiques are pitched to people who could afford whatever they choose. By the developers' calculations, walking is a privilege the rich are willing to pay for.
Judging from the plans I've seen, though, many buyers won't be walking all that much. Many of the developments will be little pedestrian islands, surrounded by parking lots, unconnected to the city around them. From your apartment, you might be able to take an elevator downstairs to Whole Foods or Borders, but you probably couldn't stroll to work or the post office or your kid's school. Everyday life would still require a car.
If residents of those dense-packed developments drive far more than they walk, will they still be skinny?
Sprawl isn't all
Lately, a new round of research has raised objections to the original sprawl-makes-you-fat studies. Suburban sprawl, they point out, was around for decades before the obesity epidemic started. But in the '50s, '60s and '70s, Americans were much thinner than we are now.
Some academics say that the sprawl researchers' methods were flawed, that it makes little sense, for example, to compare whole counties to one another.
The University of Illinois' more specific ZIP-code analysis of Chicago found that race, education and income had much more to do with obesity than a neighborhood's density. In fact, that study found, the leanest Chicagoans lived in the city's near-in suburbs — places where residents tended to be white, wealthy and well-educated.
On average, rich Anglos are significantly thinner than poor minorities — not surprising, since wealthier people have healthier food, more time to exercise and loads of other advantages. The pattern is clear, and it's alarming in a wildly diverse city without Manhattan's extraordinary wealth. Sprawl isn't Houston's only challenge.
Other researchers say that there may be a correlation between a carless life and thinness, but that doesn't mean that a carless life causes leanness. Last year, University of Toronto economists tracked 6,000 Americans for six years, with special interest in the ones who moved from the city to the suburbs, or from the suburbs to the city. Would moving change their weights?
It didn't. On average, the former city dwellers didn't pack on pounds, and the former suburbanites didn't lose any.
Matthew Turner, one of those researchers, argues that it's not where you live, it's who you are. A fit person who likes to walk naturally gravitates toward places where walking is a pleasant part of daily life — but will tend to exercise anyway, even if it's inconvenient.
An obese person, for whom walking is miserable, will prefer life with an SUV — but is unlikely to grow much thinner even if having to sometimes schlep groceries from the corner store.
Who'll be attracted to all of Houston's new walkable developments? People who already like to walk. And who'll be able to afford them? The wealthy who are already thin.
There are lots of good reasons to build those dense, mixed-use developments. Done right, they could be far better for the environment than yet more sprawling suburbs. They're obviously something that Houstonians want. And they could be extremely satisfying places to live, work and shop.
But they probably won't make us six pounds thinner.
Texas Obesity
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