“Houston is the beating heart of the region.”

Kinder Institute for Urban Research: Highways, flooding and sprawl: How Houston could have a bigger say in the region's future

“Houston is the beating heart of the region,” said Molly Cook, an organizer with Fair for Houston. “But unfortunately, if you don't have the voting structure, you get outvoted by different interests around the region.”

“If you assume horizontal population growth, and if you assume that every single person who moves the Houston region is going to move with a car … that sort of leads down this path of what the city ends up actually looking like and how much concrete is poured,” Cook said.

— Molly Cook, an organizer with Fair for Houston