Water Damage Restoration in Dickinson, TX

Dickinson, Texas, has nowhere to go but up.

The city, 30 miles south of Houston, covers a mere 10 square miles. Surrounded by other cities, it has no room to expand. “I always say we’re ‘landlocked,’” said Theo Melancon, Dickinson’s city manager.

Greater Houston is exploding. Only one other US metro area—Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston’s neighbor to the north—is adding more new residents. Much of that growth has rippled south, to cities like Dickinson along the I-45 freeway.

When Houston grows, it sprawls. Over a recent 19-year period, the metro area added enough concrete and asphalt to fill 187,000 football fields.

Sprawl is not an option for landlocked Dickinson. While the populations of the surrounding cities expand at a rate of around 17 percent, Dickinson holds steady at 22,000 people.

“We can’t have the suburban sprawl growth,” Melancon said. “But we can have something with much more impact per square foot on the property that we do have.”

With the help of a geographic information system (GIS), Dickinson is about to grow up—literally.

When Melancon and his team of urban planners pondered the situation, they saw only one option.

“We needed to look at going vertical, not horizontal,” he said. “Especially if we want a viable city center, we had to talk about increasing density.”

Other landlocked cities around the world have reached the same conclusion. Vienna, which regularly tops lists of Europe’s most livable cities, is surrounded by Austria’s federated states. With no room to grow, Austria’s capital is managing population pressures by transforming a disused airfield into one of the continent’s most ambitious planned communities.

However, in a place like the Lone Star State, where single-family homes on the range are highly prized, it can be a tough sell.

The team developed a tentative plan to transform 12 square blocks of Dickinson’s downtown into a new kind of neighborhood—with mixed-use buildings that are home to both residents and retail.

Planners anticipated a skeptical city council and dubious developers. So they decided to build the city first, in the form of a 3D geospatial model.

Historically, Dickinson has been seen more as a pit stop than a destination, with travelers bound for Houston or Galveston pausing briefly to refuel along I-45.

Dickinson’s rep as a waystation precedes the freeway. In the early 20th century, the city was the midway stop on the Houston/Galveston interurban rail. The main attraction was a picnic grounds that hosted harrowing horse-and-buggy races on a figure-8 track.

“You’d get off the train with your packed lunch, watch the races, maybe bet on them, and then you get back on and continue to Galveston or Houston,” Melancon said.

Reinventing Dickinson meant overcoming this deeply engrained idea that the city is neither here nor there.

“How do we differentiate ourselves from our sister cities?” Melancon said, summarizing the problem. “Why would someone go to Dickinson, rather than League City, Texas City, or Webster?”

For a Texas city, Dickinson is attempting a radically different approach to urban growth.

League City, where the amount of undeveloped land could fit two Dickinsons, may soon build 4,000 acres of new homes on the edge of town, west of I-45.

Meanwhile, Dickinson’s plan to go vertical involves building structures that have retail at the base, topped by a few stories of apartments. Overall, the new downtown will hold between 200 and 400 new apartments, along with some semi-detached single-family townhomes.

The neighborhood will de-emphasize car use, with one parking space per 2,000 square-feet of built space. (For single-family rentals in Texas cities, the typical allotment is two spaces per dwelling unit.)

With so many amenities available in the neighborhood, the Dickinson planners expect cars to be less of a necessity. In place of spaces that might otherwise be dedicated to driving, downtown will feature more pedestrian and cycling paths. The team hopes the convenience of downtown will also give those who live in the old neighborhoods near the city center more car-free options.

The team envisions the new downtown as not merely a place to live, but also a place to be, knit together by public spaces. So far, two anchor spaces have emerged.

ELS Construction has purchased a long-vacant former First Baptist church, which it hopes to turn into a brewpub, along with outdoor pickleball courts.

A few blocks away, the city is developing a park near the old interurban tracks, now used by freight trains to haul chemicals to and from the Texas Gulf Coast. Winking at Dickinson’s way station past, the park will be called the Picnic Grounds. An on-site figure-eight path will pay homage to the old racetrack.

This is a lot to convey in writing.

“Historically, planners and city councils have had ideas that they communicate with words,” Melancon said. “But it’s hard to explain what we’re going for with these high-density figures. Everybody knows how Texas cities develop. They’re horizontal and they sprawl.”

Using GIS, the planners first built a 3D model of the new downtown. Working with ViewPro, an urban planning consulting agency, they used the planning software ArcGIS Urban and the design solution ArcGIS CityEngine. Then they moved the model into the Twinmotion game engine to create a 3D immersive experience.

Now, a five-minute video takes the viewer on a tour of the proposed downtown.

When explaining the model, the planners emphasized that it was a vision of the city, but not the vision. As with many new urban projects, the zoning applies a system called form-based coding. (The church development came about after ELS Construction saw the video, then understood the total context of the project.)

Instead of designating zones based on use, such as residential or commercial, a form-based code establishes some physical parameters to provide a unified look. For Dickinson’s downtown, if developers follow those rules and adhere to density-related requirements, they have a large leeway for their projects.

The planners fed these rules into the GIS model. People can explore different ways to structure the downtown by dragging and dropping to create streetscapes. What if we added a floor to this building? Or put more parking there? If a change violates the rules, it turns red on the model.

In this way, the model provides contextual knowledge and shows how every building is part of a larger unified project.

Along with physical context, the model provides economic context. A city manager can plug in figures to determine, for example, how much tax revenue a space is likely to generate, now and in the future.

This will help downtown projects obtain financing. Potential investors in Texas “have no experience with this kind of development,” Melancon said. “But when you can show a broader picture of what downtown could be, what we’re committed to doing over several city blocks, they realize every parcel is part of a bigger picture.”

So far, the plan is working. Dickinson’s city council and the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) have become enthusiastic converts. ELS Construction has demonstrated its long-term commitment in a major way. The company is transforming the gym in the renovated church downtown into its new corporate headquarters.

The difficult conversation about a Texas town going vertical has gotten easier. “It’s changed the mindset of the council and the EDC,” Melancon said. “Instead of seeing Dickinson as landlocked, now it’s ‘we have very limited space, but we’re exclusive.’”

With its downtown development project, the city of Dickinson hopes to attract residents who value a new approach to urban living in a location that offers non-urban recreational possibilities. One possible demographic is remote workers who won’t mind the distance from Houston and may value the proximity to the outdoor attractions of the Texas Gulf Coast.

Dickinson planners are emphasizing the city’s connection with the outdoors. The region lies underneath one of North America’s largest bird migration routes. Bird-watchers seek out Dickinson Bayou, which winds through town on its way to Galveston Bay. Statues depicting the great blue heron are displayed in front of several local businesses.

Near the bayou on the far east side of Dickinson, the city is redeveloping a 34-acre piece of property. It will become a mixed-use district and a 20-acre bayou-front park. To prepare for environmental reviews, planners use GIS to map pipelines that cross the property.

“We have an opportunity to bring in people who only have to commute to Houston once or twice a week, not five,” Melancon said. “They might like being so close to the bayou, and love being closer to Galveston than Houston.”

Learn more about ArcGIS Urban for collaborative, data-driven urban planning. Visit ViewPro, an Esri-certified partner offering advanced GIS solutions for urban planning and zoning to local governments.

Keith Cooke

Keith Cooke is the Global Industry Manager for Community Development at Esri. A graduate of Auburn University, he has been a GIS professional since 1994 and has worked for planning and community development agencies at the regional and municipal level in Alabama and North Carolina. Prior to this role, he was an account executive at Esri for 15 years working with over 100 local governments.