A new ordinance in the city of Houston will allow builders, homeowners and developers to opt out of putting sidewalk in front of homes. Houston City Council voted in favor of the ordinance on Wednesday.

The “Fee in Lieu of Sidewalk Construction” ordinance will go into effect on March 1. Under the new rule, sidewalks can be omitted from new construction for a fee of $12 per square foot that would have been built.

Mayor Sylvester Turner hopes the ordinance will prevent “sidewalks to nowhere” throughout Houston. “One of the reasons why we are doing this is because under the current system, people are having to build sidewalks, and if you look in certain places, they build a sidewalk and there’s no place for people to go,” he said.

The fees collected from the sidewalk construction ordinance will go to a fund for building and repairing sidewalks throughout the city. Seventy percent of collected fees will be spent in the area they were collected, while the other 30% will go towards citywide sidewalk expansion.

“We looked at the previous ordinance and heard our customers. Simply put, if you are building or rebuilding in a neighborhood that doesn’t have sidewalks, we’re not going to build an unconnected segment of sidewalk that does not support Houstonians’ needs,” said planning and development director Margaret Wallace Brown. “However, it is important to build out our sidewalk network, and this new fund will help make that possible.”