A conversation with Houston Parks Board president and CEO Beth White

Even the lattes Beth White orders are green.

It makes sense. Ten months ago, White moved to Houston for a job as president and CEO of the Houston Parks Board, the nonprofit behind the Bayou Greenways project, which is building 150 miles of trails along the city's nine major bayous and creeks.

"It's a very interesting time to be in Houston," she says between sips from a green tea latte. "Some of the most exciting urban work going on in the country is going on here."

Though new to Houston, White is familiar with a bayou landscape. She grew up in Pensacola, Fla., where she walked and biked along Bayou Texar. After studying urban planning in graduate school in Chicago, she took a job leading a downtown revitalization project in a nearby suburb. White was already thinking about the power that trails and open spaces can have on quality of life. As a young planner, she navigated the bureaucracies of 22 separate jurisdictions to coordinate the development of a 20-mile trail network.

Eventually, White was instrumental in the development of the 606, Chicago's version of New York City's High Line, a several-miles-long public park atop an overgrown, decommissioned elevated railroad line. "Having that experience in other parts of the planning world, I appreciate a holistic approach to cities and how they work."

So, when the Houston Parks Board went searching for someone who was as ambitious as the Bayou Greenways and its ability to connect issues of transportation, public health, quality of life and economic development, White was a natural fit.

Immediately, she noticed that Houston and Chicago were more similar than dissimilar. "They're both very entrepreneurial cities. There's this real bravado to both about what can be done," she says. "They just grew at very different points in their history. And at the points in history the dominant transportation mode had a huge influence on how the city is shaped. In Chicago, the dominant mode was trains. Houston's spurt of growth came nearly 100 years later, when cars dominated.

"And one of the endlessly fascinating things about Houston is the constant churn of change. It gives it a lot of vitality, and, at the same time, makes it a challenge to create a public realm around that dynamic."

On her third visit to Houston, White experienced much of that churn and vitality firsthand. She met Carter Stern, executive director of Houston Bike Share, which operates Houston B-cycle, and Michael Skelly, president of Clean Line Energy Partners, who's involved in the bicycling community.

"So," Skelly asked White. "Can you ride a bike?"

The three checked out B-cycles from the kiosk at Market Square Park and toured the Brays Bayou Greenway through Hermann Park, riding the light rail back downtown before driving out to Brady's Landing for dinner. While she concedes that the beauty of a city like Chicago can be "very apparent," she likes that in Houston it takes a while to find. "Here, you peel back and find the beauty. You may have to seek it out. But the beauty is there."

Though it was not easy to leave Chicago, the challenges that Houston presented were almost too rich for White to pass up. "Bayou Greenways is one of the biggest, most transformative parks projects in the country," she says. "And how do you turn that down in a city that is also doubling down on the public realm, making the city livable, embracing parks as equally important to transportation, housing, jobs, schools, libraries?

"And then the scale of Houston! Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Detroit can fit in the footprint of Houston. From a planning perspective, it's too intriguing. The opportunity to work at that scale just doesn't come along every day."

And White loves that the Bayou Greenways will help bring people in the Bayou City closer to water. "People don't think of Houston as a waterfront city. And it has over 1,000 miles of waterfront," she says. "Water gives people the sense of freedom and connection to not only nature but to each other."

Though the initial phase of Bayou Greenways - connecting existing trails and building new ones - is set to be completed in 2020, it's easy to wonder what happens in 2021.

"We are looking beyond the bayous. Once this canvas is in place, (we can ask) where are the connectors, north and south? How do you connect the bayous to one another? To regional parks? To work centers? Recreation? We're doing that work now, finding those connections," White says. "The canvas that will be put into place will be the natural spine of a system that ultimately could connect the whole city."

If any city can do it, it's Houston, White seems to think. The Parks Board has shown what she calls a "sustained commitment" to the ambitious project, growing from four people to 29 in four years. Meanwhile, White has found a "willingness to take on big projects" across the city.

"Three mayors have embraced this project," she says, as have many stakeholders, the philanthropic community, the development community, and city agency heads. "There's an understanding that we can compete against one another, or we can work together to raise up this issue in a much more effective way. And that's real."