Snarls of Traffic and Politics Amid Freestyle Design

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON

"No Handguns Allowed in Meeting" cautions a sign outside the City Council's Art Deco chamber here. Maybe it is just as well, with Houstonians on edge from monster traffic jams, budget woes, bitterly partisan politics, police scandals and the sting of being called too ugly for company.

(First the guns: the Texas Legislature decided this year to allow people to carry a licensed pistol into any public building that is not a school, courthouse or polling place. Houston 's answer was to give out red badges marking armed visitors as carriers of, uh, concealed weapons and barring them from the City Council chamber.)

The city's anxiety is being fanned from several directions. There is a heated mayoral race, as Mayor Lee P. Brown nears the end of his three permissible two-year terms. As hard-hat armies rush to complete Houston 's first light-rail line in time for Super Bowl XXXVIII at Reliant Stadium in February, traffic snarls from a torn-up downtown and a sharply accelerated highway expansion program have tempers flaring, with traffic reports detailing the carnage every rush hour.

And, oh, there is mold growing on the plastic roof of Minute Maid (formerly Enron) Park, home of the National League's almost playoff team, the Astros.

Most troubling, many say, are the questions now clouding potentially hundreds of prosecutions, including death penalty cases, based on flawed work at the Houston police laboratory, which was shut down last December. Houston 's longtime police chief, C. O. Bradford, resigned last month in what he called a planned retirement, but not before Mayor Brown awarded him a $1,054 yearly raise, which pumped up his pension. Enraged City Council members tried fruitlessly to block it. Mayor Brown said he was just keeping a promise to the chief, who had done "a good job." As for the revelations about the laboratory, the mayor said, "I was very disappointed."

On top of all that, there is the issue of civic insecurity. Houstonians have always been a bit defensive about their brash oil boomtown carved from the bayous of East Texas, and now they are grappling with an existential question: Is their city too ugly?

A leading Houston architect and civic planner, Daniel B. Barnum, posed the question recently on the op-ed page of The Houston Chronicle. He reported that the city had been ruled out as a contender for the 2012 Summer Olympics by a member of the selection committee who told a booster, "We can't bring the world to all this ugliness."

Mr. Barnum, a member of the advisory Midtown Management District, did not quibble. With the Super Bowl less than half a year away, "we are finally waking up to fact that much of our city is in fact ugly," he wrote. "Why does it take a Super Bowl to wake us from our slumber? Can't we see the ugliness around us every day? Are we forever condemned to being this way?"

Mr. Barnum said later that he was particularly referring to the welter of commercial signs along U.S. 59 the route into the city from George Bush Intercontinental Airport . "We ought to be embarrassed," Mr. Barnum said in an interview. "It's awful. I don't know any other city where that kind of introduction awaits you."

His remarks elicited a storm of reaction, much of it positive, but some of it hostile. Mayor Brown, for one, took exception. "I wouldn't accept that Houstonians don't care the way the city looks," the mayor said. What about all the abundant greenery? he asked. The clean streets, the landmark downtown buildings?

One perennial flash point is traffic, as recounted in a new book, "Houston Freeways," by Erik Slotboom, a computer specialist and a longtime student of the road system. The problems may have been brewing for a long time, as Mr. Slotboom says, but never before, it seems, has so much work been going on all at once.

The first seven and a half miles of the $340 million light-rail line along Main Street from downtown to Reliant Stadium are to be completed by New Year's Day. Metro, the regional transportation authority, is seeking approval from voters in November for a local transit tax to finance a 22-mile addition at a cost of $640 million. The antirail and prohighway forces have been running commercials contending it would be cheaper to buy every commuter a Ferrari.

The project's fate has become entangled in the mayor's race. One of the three candidates, Orlando Sanchez, a Republican and former councilman who almost beat Mayor Brown in 2001, has made opposing the rail line a keystone of his campaign.

Mr. Sanchez's two opponents are Democrats who support the rail plan, Sylvester Turner, a member of the Texas House of Representatives who almost became the first African-American to be elected mayor, six years before Mr. Brown did in 1997, and Bill White, a former Texas Democratic Party chairman, who is white.

In the latest twist, Mr. White charged the Turner campaign with trying to undercut him by slipping another candidate named Bill White onto the ballot, thus splitting his vote. Mr. Turner denied involvement.

Although Mayor Brown has yet to announce an endorsement — he says he has eliminated Mr. Sanchez — none of the candidates have a good word to say about City Hall's handling of the road mess and the traffic lights, which are maddeningly unsynchronized. Mr. Brown insists that the work was carefully planned.

"We have to complete it in a given time or lose federal funds," he said. "I chose to do it in 4 years instead of 10 or 12. Is that a mistake? No."

Many drivers would differ. Growing numbers of Houstonians are voting with their feet, or wheels, giving up on nightmare drives to work to move downtown. Every vacant plot there seems to be sprouting new houses, mostly cutesy, suburbanesque garden apartments that give the willies to architectural critics like Stephen Fox, an adjunct lecturer at Rice University and a celebrated leader of walking tours. Looking at one complex of what he called "pretend lofts," Mr. Fox said, "The sudden unreality of this little mirage of urban life becomes apparent." But such builders, he said, were doing "appallingly well."

Yet the urban housing boom, which ties into Mayor Brown's goal to raise the percentage of home ownership to 50 percent or more from 45 percent now, has produced its triumphs, Mr. Fox said. He showed a visitor the growing clusters of innovative metal houses by noted architects like Larry Davis and sleek townhouses by a young Vietnamese immigrant, Chung Nguyen, in Montrose and other historic neighborhoods now stirring with new urban life.

One innovative homesteader in the booming West End, Frank Zeni, an artist and architect, has erected a temple-like residence using metal pipes for columns and other scrounged materials. "I have reinvented the house," he declared.