At Houston Tomorrow, we’re focused on 2036, when Houston will have its 200th birthday. So our 25-year vision is that the Houston region will be home to the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous people in the United States.

Our mission has always been to improve the quality of life of all people in the Houston region, and we view health, happiness, and prosperity to be the keys. Our job is to understand and engage with the drivers of change for those.

Health, for instance, is essentially driven by genetics, inputs (air, food, water), and the environment, both the natural one and the one we humans have built. For 12 years, we’ve worked on most of those issues, particularly the built environment and the ways in which that impacts the others. We don’t now work with genetics, but we realize we are going to have to study and communicate about that.

Drivers for prosperity include education and knowledge, resources, innovation, access and mobility, and energy efficiency. We’ve worked on all of those except education, so we’ve now embarked on an program to get engaged in the broad regional effort to improve the system of education here.

Happiness is our favorite goal. In the Kingdom of Bhutan, happiness is the top priority of the government. That nation’s Secretary of Gross National Happiness, Karma Tshiteem, lists nine measures of happiness: psychological well-being, community vitality, cultural diversity, time use/balance, good governance, health, education, ecology, and standard of living.

In that list, psychological well-being, time use, and to some extent good governance have not been significant areas of research and discussion at Houston Tomorrow. But they will be soon.

People who know about Houston Tomorrow may think of us as being focused on transportation, walkable urbanism, and environmental issues. We have certainly invested a lot of time, energy, and money in those, but we’ve also been working hard with food and health and many of the other drivers within our work.

Early on, we saw clearly that one big problem is cars. Huge amounts of measured study of what happens to us when we drive has made it clear that driving itself is a terrible cause of stress, that the time lost in cars is damaging to families and work, and that nothing kills people under 34 more than car crashes. That is, the automobile is the leading cause of death of our young people.

Around the world, people are settling in clusters of many sizes and densities in order to gain easy access to jobs, schools, goods, services, and fun without having to drive a car to do everything. Not everybody desires this, but perhaps half do, around 3 billion people. In Harris County, Dr. Stephen Klineberg’s survey tells us about 40 percent of Houstonians want that kind of lifestyle - more than two million people.

Exercise is a powerful driver of health, and also of happiness. Presumably, people who are healthy and happy have a better shot at achieving prosperity. So exercise is key, and we need to do everything we can to make exercise a normal part of our daily routine. It takes about 10,000 steps a day to maintain your weight, and that’s extremely difficult to do in Houston, even given intentional walks. But in places like Manhattan, that can routinely be accomplished In the course of the day.

In places where the lifestyle is more about walking than driving, people tend to be much thinner than in places like Houston, where obesity is almost epidemic, and almost nobody walks from place to place. People in Manhattan live longer than people in Houston.

So to achieve health, happiness, and prosperity, we have to produce places — towns and neighborhood — where a car is a wonderful convenience that is rarely needed. Many people, given the opportunity, would be content to live without owning a car.

Working with hundreds of people and dozens of organizations, we are all slowly coming to certain principles for moving in the direction of high quality of life. Corporations like IBM, Siemens, Home Depot, and many others are wrestling with the idea of sustainability, for their own sakes but also to maintain the number and ability of their customers to participate in the economy.

Another enormous possible deterrent to our 2036 vision is the vast dynamic called climate change. It should be absolutely clear that it is happening right now — has been happening —and is beginning to take thousands of lives, particularly because of flooding, but also because of new extremes of cold and heat. Disease is next, they say, and then frightening agricultural problems.

One study suggests that by the end of this century places like Texas will be uninhabitable if current trends continue, and that South Dakota could be the southern part of the inhabited United State. Another shows “extreme unsustainability” related to drought in a huge swath beginning in Texas and proceeding up into Canada.

Transportation is about 40% of the carbon emissions problem that is contributing to climate change, so it’s a nice benefit that walkable urbanism allows huge reductions in such emissions. It also conserves natural land, so that trees and grasses can pull carbon out of the air and sequester it in the ground.

It seems pretty clear that if we’re to move in the direction of our vision, in which people in the Houston region are the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous people in the nation, we’re going to have to enable walkability in many places. There is a lot of public policy that will have to change if we are to go toward that vision, and many people are working to redirect public policy in a sustainable direction. That means conserving land — especially prime farmland — and living in more convenient neighborhoods.

David Crossley is president and founder of Houston Tomorrow, an independent nonprofit organization working to improve the quality of life of all people in the Houston region through research, education, and discussion.