Your Houston Master Plan: Tuesday’s Show (February 23, 2016)

We talk a lot about master planned communities like The Woodlands — carefully codified, mapped out, zoned, restricted — all with the goal of creating the best possible quality of life for its residents. It's a century or more too late for the city of Houston to operate like that. We even, at times, celebrate our general lack of zoning. But imagine you had carte blanche to rebuild all of the city of Houston and its surrounding communities. Build or level buildings, start over with sidewalks, transportation, everything. What would you do? Where would you start? What would it look like? What is your Houston Master Plan?

On today’s Houston Matters, we pose that question to you, and to a pair of area urban designers: Susan Rogers from the Community Design Resource Center at the University of Houston, and Kinder Baumgardner from the community design firm SWA Group. Imagine you could take a map of Greater Houston and completely remake it — like a Houston version of Sim City. Let us know what you’d do: e-mail us at talk@houstonmatters.org, or call 713-440-8870.

Also this hour: Scientists say they found worrisome levels of benzene in the air in some Houston-area neighborhoods. But it's where it may have come from that surprised them. News 88.7 energy and environment reporter Dave Fehling has details.

Then: Adolescence can be a challenge for the kid going through it — and for that adolescent’s family and friends. A new clinic recently opened at the University of Houston to help kids and parents to navigate. It’s called the Adolescent Diagnosis, Assessment, Prevention and Treatment Center — or ADAPT. We talk with the ADAPT director, Dr. Carla Sharp. She’s a professor of psychology at UH.

Plus: The battle of The Alamo began 180 years ago today. Texas history buffs know that also means we're just a week-and-a-half away from the 180th anniversary of Texas independence from Mexico. We explore that period over the next two days: tomorrow we talk with San Jacinto College history professor Eddie Weller about the events surrounding the period. But first, today, we focus on the story of the republic of Texas through its currency, as we listen back to an August 2014 conversation with James Bevill, author of The Paper Republic: The Struggle for Money, Credit and Independence in the Republic of Texas.

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