Development planned for past 50 years

Land once considered the fringe areas of Houston will soon appear much different than it did in the 1960s, when the idea for the Grand Parkway was born.

The City of Houston's planning department determined the need for a third outer loop in the '60s, while Loop 610 was still under construction and Beltway 8 was in the planning stages. In 1950, almost 600,000 people lived in Houston, which increased to 1.2 million by 1970, according to census data. The population increase was one reason the Grand Parkway was approved by the state in the '80s. Afterwards, county officials and landowners drew a route for the highway and submitted it to the Texas Highway Commission, according to a 1992 environmental study on the Grand Parkway.

"As development occurs, developers have to build portions of the major roads so there is continuity in the city," said David Gornet, president of the Grand Parkway Association. "As they get to where future freeways would be, they have to set that land aside. There was pressure to TxDOT in the '80s from people who said the growth is coming and wanted them to adopt [the Grand Parkway] and bring it to fruition."

In 1984, the state created the Grand Parkway Association—a nonprofit entity that promotes and oversees the development of the freeway—to help save money for future highway projects.

According to the environmental overview, the Grand Parkway would be constructed in nine different segments instead of all at once because of the decrease in available construction money and the environmental areas on which the toll road would be built. Each section needed to stand alone in case only a few portions were completed, which is why plans call for each piece to connect two major thoroughfares or other freeways.

Construction is expected to begin on several segments of the toll road in the next few years, but there was a setback several years ago. When construction began in the early '90s on Segment D of the Grand Parkway, which runs from northern Fort Bend County to Katy, The Sierra Club filed a lawsuit in an attempt to preserve the Katy Prairie in western Harris County. The organization wanted a court-ordered study for an environmental impact statement on the area's wildlife.

According to a 1990 Houston Chronicle article, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service claimed the proper environmental studies were not completed for Segment D.

"If everybody decides they want the Katy Prairie to be another series of strip shopping centers and subdivisions, that's what we should do. But it shouldn't happen by default," Alan Mueller, representative with the service, said in the article. "Environmentalists and hunters long familiar with the area say transportation projects will hasten the march of development that is chasing the birds away."

The same article mentioned the beginning stages of development on Cinco Ranch, a heavily populated master-planned community that bisects Segment D. Additionally, it said construction would start on Segment E, slated to run from I-10 to Hwy. 290, a year later. That did not happen until last fall, more than 20 years later.

"I don't know that they planned when construction would start, rather that their vision would be more that when this much growth occurs, you would be far enough from other freeways that you would need to provide for mobility," Gornet said.