Across America, a new class of developers are building car-free neighborhoods from scratch — or at least, they're building places where residents don't need to drive quite as much as their suburban neighbors.
But can these greenfield developments really serve as a model for communities across the U.S., or will they always be a rare and coveted commodity for those who can afford the luxury of living at human scale?
Today on the Brake, we sit down with Scott Snodgrass of Meristem Communities, whose new development, Indigo, is bringing slow streets, hyper-local agriculture, and "mews" to and suburban Houston. And along the way, we have a deeper conversation about "new suburbanism," childhood autonomy, and how car-light living can scale.
The following excerpt has been edited for clarity and length.
Streetsblog: Start with like the elevator pitch: tell me a little bit about the genesis of Indigo.
Scott Snodgrass: The genesis of Indigo is really our origin story as developers. This is our first project that we're working on. But Clayton [Garrett, a co-founder of the firm] and I own another business called Agmenity, where we design, install and operate farms for other developers, for neighborhoods, hospitals, school districts, all that stuff; we do, basically, urban farming and residential and educational contexts.
So we had been doing that, and [as] we started working with developers and master plan communities on installing farms for them, we started to see the development process. I'd never thought of myself as an urbanist prior to that point. But in seeing how, especially, master-planned communities are developed Clay and I started asking a lot of questions.
A lot of the decisions [about these new developments] seem to be made based on either short-term needs, or we saw a lot of decisions made because the lender required it, or an equity partner required it. And it may not have made sense for anyone living in that community. It may not have made sense for the developer. It only made sense for the money behind the whole thing.
Our tagline is: "What if places were designed for people, not cars, corporations, and capital?" And so we wanted to find a way to develop a community that that kind of shifted the emphasis back to people. Because ultimately, we're creating a place where people are going to spend most of their time. And so we wanted our focus and design to be on that and not on serving the car, primarily, not on serving large corporations.
So we had a piece of property; we had actually been farming it. We had a 60-acre vegetable farm, and we realized we were never going to grow the vegetable farm larger than that; that was just way too many vegetables to start with. And so we said, "Okay, we've been putting farms into neighborhoods for other people; What if we take our farm and put a neighborhood in it?" And so we paused the farm.
That was back we started this early ideation in 2019, and really, in earnest in 2021. Indigo just launched; we delivered lots to home builders this year, and have been under construction for a year and a half now. And the response has just been through the roof.
Streetsblog: What is the significance of doing this kind of people-first development in suburban Houston in particular? What are the challenges of doing that? And what are the challenges of integrating this community within a notoriously car centric place?
Snodgrass: Yeah, it's probably one of the most car-centric places in the country, right? Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta — Atlanta, I think is getting a little better in some ways. But we're certainly known for being a car-centric place.
Clayton and I both grew up here in Houston; we're not crazy. We don't think that there's going to be a lot of people who abandon owning any sort of automobile. But we saw the effects that cars have on the way we live, and it's multivariate, right? Take environmental issues: in Houston we are seeing an even broader range [of climate impacts,] with the severity of storms that we're seeing, and that people who grew up here know that it didn't used to be this way. ... I think we've had something like three 500-year storms in the past decade, and so we're only supposed to have one every 500 years ...
And so we saw that and said, "Okay, well, how do we work on reducing vehicle miles traveled?" And as you can see behind me, I've read all these books in the past three years — probably 250 books on urbanism — and there were a lot of them that talked about sustainability and green design. And over and over again, [they made] the point that Manhattan is probably one of the greenest places around, and it's just because of the density, public transit, and the mixing of uses, so that everyone's lives become so much more proximate, and you don't have to travel as far to do the things you need to do on a daily basis.
So Houston's the opposite, right? We have these segregated neighborhoods that are just homes only. There may be a retail strip center that's 50 feet from your house, but you may have to drive half a mile to get to it because of the street patterns, and you can't walk to it because of the walls that are built. And so we just started looking through [how to deal with] all those things.
We already owned this land, so we didn't select this place specifically to do this. But we knew we were in the suburbs; we knew the communities that have been developed around us were very much that dendritic, cul-de-sac pattern, [where you have] one main entrance and the [the road network] just splits and splits and splits and splits. That doesn't really serve people who aren't in a car.
But there are people who can't drive for health reasons; they can't drive because they're kids, can't drive because they're older and starting to lose vision and response times, or they don't want to drive. We're not serving any of those groups with the traditional Houston suburban design framework.
So we wanted to find out, what are the things we can do to design a different sort of of street layout, a different sort of pedestrian mobility network, mixing of uses, and all those things that would lead to a place that served that whole group of people. Then, we had to start looking into: what are all the things we have to do to help reduce that car dependency, [because reducing it] provides so many benefits in so many different ways.
