What Do You Mean, Qualify of Life?
By Lily Auliff

Environmentalists, urban planners, elected officials, and the Greater Houston Partnership are all talking about it. Houston’s city council even has a committee for it. But what is “quality of life” anyway?

Defining Quality of Life
David Crossley, president of the Gulf Coast Institute, which started the Livable Houston Initiative in 1998, contrasts “quality of life” with “standard of living.” “For 50 years or more, the country has been focused on standard of living, a set of accounting tools not necessarily designed to produce high quality of life, which has a different meaning,” he explains. You can have a high standard of living with a low quality of life, and vise versa.

How does Crossley define quality of life? “It’s clearly about three environments: the social environment, the built environment, and the economic environment. Each has a long list of issues, and each of those usually has a champion that is not focused on the others. When we started doing this we could see that the set of principles called Smart Growth embraces all those areas, so we embraced Smart Growth.”

Among the top values uncovered in surveys, Crossley says, are health, safety, diverse cultural and recreational opportunities, a sense of community, a sense of place, and a sense of beauty, Often, quality of life is explained by listing the things that people don’t like, including traffic congestion, air pollution, loss of open space, overcrowded schools, threatened neighborhoods, loss of community, suburban crime, increasing poverty, decaying infrastructure, rising taxes, and – particularly in low-income areas – anxiety and a feeling of loss of control.

Ann Lents, cofounder of the Quality of Life Coalition, prefers not to attempt to define quality of life, but the organization’s mission is to “create a place that is green, clean, and economically prosperous, that is environmentally and aesthetically appealing, and that offers healthy recreational opportunities to individuals and families in all parts of the city.”

“We don’t pretend that we are dealing with every issue that is relevant to the question of quality of life,” Lents explains. “What we’ve tried to do is focus on some areas in which we think there are some immediate and concrete things that can be done over the relatively short term that will substantially improve the quality of life in Houston.” To that end, the group concentrates on four areas: trees and landscaping, parks and bayous, billboards and signage, and litter and graffiti.

“Quality of life is completely in the eye of the beholder,” says Jeff Taebel, manager of the Community & Environmental Planning Department at the Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC). Even so, H-GAC is leading an effort to support the creation of “quality places.” Although the yet unnamed project is only in its development stages, Taebel hopes that H-GAC, in collaboration with the group of government officials, developers, and nonprofit leaders he has gathered, will be able to create a consensus document that lists the principles surrounding “quality places.”

The Mid-America Regional Council, which represents city and county governments in the bi-state Kansas City metro area, developed a similar document, which Taebel looks to as a model. Their Creating Quality Places: Successful Communities By Design divides 20 principles into four categories: Homes and Neighborhoods, Commercial Areas, Transportation and Public Places, and Environmental Quality.

Quality neighborhoods, the document says, offer choices in housing type and size, linkages to surrounding areas, green space, unique identities, and opportunities to live and work within the neighborhood where appropriate. They are also pedestrian friendly and encourage reinvestment. Quality commercial areas have mixed uses, are walkable but offer convenient parking choices, and are durably built to a scale that is compatible with surroundings. Quality transportation systems are multimodal; they support transit and bicycle and pedestrian access. Local streets are designed to keep local traffic off of major arterials, and public spaces are key. Finally, a clean and healthy environment is a critical element of a quality place.

Why Quality of Life?
There are as many reasons for supporting quality of life as there are definitions of it.

Business groups see quality of life improvements as essential to attracting and maintaining qualified workers, explains Lents, while others may be interested in enhancing recreational opportunities, reducing urban blight, or using trees to alleviate the urban heat island effect and air pollution.

Taebel sees that quality of life links environmental and economic issues, two things H-GAC embraces. “Its not just nice to do,” he explains. “If we’re going to be competitive economically, we have to offer quality of life because – it sounds cliché, but – the economy is really becoming more talent based and human resource based. The best people tend to have a lot of choices in where they live and work. They don’t have to live by natural resources or by traditional geographic things that shaped our initial settlement.”

“The pursuit of happiness is a very serious desire for Americans,” Crossley says. “All these other justifications for pursuing quality of life are important but the truth is people are mad as hell and they just plain want a higher quality of life. And the further truth is different things impact our quality of life, so concern about planting live oaks along urban boulevards is not, probably, a regular passion for the single mother of two who washes dishes on North Main. Nor is the dream of moving his family from a one to a two-bedroom apartment a typical ambition of the wealthy citizen who lobbies tirelessly for more parks. We’re going to have to recognize each other’s issues.”

Quality of Life in Action
Groups are working toward quality of life in a variety of ways:

The Livable Houston Initiative focuses on “smart growth,” an overarching set of principles that are shown in the accompanying box. Crossley says, “We’re pursuing these ideas to improve the quality of life because these are the things that people in Houston have said they want. The whole purpose of the quality of life movement is to try to produce the kind of world people say they want.”

The Quality of Life Coalition seeks to mobilize the public and government around their core issues. Before the recent election, they fought to pass local, county, and state bond issues for parks. Their current focus includes ensuring that the bond monies are spend efficiently and effectively, as well as a variety of issues that will come before city council this year.

H-GAC plans to develop a set of quality principles, similar to those from Kansas City. They then will create some mechanisms to support those principles, such as a clearinghouse or website that offers advice on best practices and highlights successful projects.

For more information on the Livable Houston Initiative, visit www.livablehouston.org. For the Quality of Life Coalition, see www.qolhouston.org. And for H-GAC’s project, contact Jeff Taebel at jtaebel@hgac.cog.tx.us.

Accompanying article: Principles to Improve Quality of Life