Hundreds of square miles of Houston greenscape –nearly a million acres - could vanish if the new forecasts for population and employment in 2035 turn out to be true. These new forecasts from the Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) are circulating around the community in draft form, and a careful look at the data reveals some worrisome effects of adding 3,538,000 more people to our region.

H-GAC has done a terrific job of using a new forecasting model to produce truly useful information about one possible future. This new data produces the best pictures we’ve ever had of where homes and jobs are today. The extrapolations into the future give us a dynamic picture of what we’ll have – and not have – in 2035 if recent trends continue for 30 more years.

It is staggering, the amount of land that all these people will need if we follow recent trends. We’ll have to provide about 1.4 million new housing units, not to mention billions of square feet of office, industrial, retail, and other commercial space, as well as fire and police stations, schools, libraries, government buildings, and all the rest. And roads.

The trend in Houston in recent decades has been to use land much faster than population grows, and to increase driving travel even faster. As trends have gone, we’ll use another 1,500 square miles or so of land - more than twice the size of the City of Houston. These forecasts show us where that land will be lost, and it is largely everywhere. Large wilderness and rural areas disappear in all directions, and Harris County is essentially stripped of such places.

We know there is strong consensus in America that we all want to keep the good things we have. In Houston we are no different, and we have choices to make about our natural areas and farmland, about our historic buildings, about our existing and future infrastructure. Not only do these choices determine the amount of greenscape and natural services we’ll retain, but the trend choice will cost far more than some of the other options.

Transportation infrastructure is the most intrusive land use, and the style of transportation infrastructure in the Houston region is perhaps the most intrusive on the planet. There is just no getting around the fact that roads and their associated development replace greenscape. Adding 3,538,000 people and all their car needs will replace greenscape relative to the extent of the new car-based infrastructure.

As it happens, we are at an opportune moment to be looking at this dilemma. One of the uses of these biennial forecasts is to inform transportation planning. H-GAC has already begun the three-year process of assembling the 2035 Regional Transportation Plan. These new numbers will have a lot to do with the shape and impact of that plan.

Current trends means current policies. The community, through its governments, can make policy decisions to influence large issues such as conservation of greenspace, and can implement strategies based on its spending for transportation infrastructure. Loss of greenscape to public enterprises like roads is effectively a community decision to delete that greenscape in favor of more opportunities to drive cars and trucks.

Should a community decide, for example, that it would prefer to have more places that are walkable, bikeable, with safe, convenient transit systems, it could produce this environment by shifting spending from roads to town- and neighborhood-based mobility architecture.

That is the basic wisdom that was expressed by the 400 people gathered to work at the first Envision Houston Region workshop in September. Envision Houston Region is an H-GAC that is the first big step in creation of the 2035 Regional Transportation Plan. It is the first such region-wide exercise in our history. It gives citizens the opportunity to get together and craft a vision and set of values for our region that tells our elected representatives and professional public employees the direction in which we wish Houston to grow. These kinds of values tend to be long term and broadly shared, so the set of them that we arrive at to guide the 2035 Regional Transportation Plan will determine what happens to our greenscape – and along with that what happens to our water, air, and even food supply.

The general themes from that workshop were these: save the greenscape, stay out of wetlands and floodplain, develop the legendary bayou linear parks plan, slow down the road-building, produce more and better transit, and create hundreds, even thousands, of cities, towns, villages, and urban neighborhoods increasingly linked by transit. To the extent many such places are created and connected, with increasing residential choices in all of them, the need for roads will diminish. There’s more than one way to look at the future.

David Crossley is president of the Gulf Coast Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to improve the quality of life in the Houston region. The maps referred to here are available at www.gulfcoastinstitute.org.