- Generation Park Recruiting More Office Tenants with Walkable Mixed-Used Development [Houston Business Journal]
- Ziegler Cooper’s Plan for Renovating 1301 Fannin [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot]
- Museum of Telephone History Finds New Home in AT&T’s Bellaire Headquarters [Houston Chronicle ($); previously on Swamplot]
- Torchy’s Tacos To Open in Extensively Renovated Former Harold’s in the Heights Space This Month [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot]
- 62-Ft. Articulated Buses Making Room for More Passengers and Coming Back to Houston Streets Later This Month [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- New Downtown Parking Signs Aim To Demystify [abc13; previously on Swamplot]
- Looking at Hurricane Evacuation Plans, Five Years After Ike [KUHF]
Photo of Spotts Park: Bill Barfield via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Generation Park is going to be a huge & mostly positive game changer for Northeast Harris county.
As west Houston becomes suffocated by highway traffic, the Atascocita, Summerwood, and possibly Crosby areas will look more and appealing. One of the drawbacks to this area has been that you have to commute long distances to work. Even if 59, the new section of the beltway, and highway 90 are relatively traffic free, a commute of at least 20-25 minutes was necessary.
I worry, however, that there is not enough road infrastructure to support anything but this highway-centric traffic. The roads put in place by developers of neighborhoods do nothing but funnel traffic to a couple main thoroughfares. 1960, W. Lake Houston Parkway, and Atascocita Rd are already choked with traffic at rush hour. There are no real alternatives to getting to Atascocita than to take either of those 3 roads. This is going to get a lot worse when you consider that more people will move into this area.
River Oaks complains that the San Felipe tower will cause traffic problems. The Ashby Highrise met opposition b/c of traffic. This is mostly just BS. However, when you consider the traffic implications of a huge job center being plopped in an area that built up as a hodgepodge of less-than master planned communities, now you’re getting into a discussion that’s worth having about traffic.
Still don’t quite see the point of generation park. There are hundreds of empty/underutilized lots inside or near the loop to create entire master-planned business/residential complexes, but yet developers choose to go way out to the land of the pines to create these massive corporate campuses, which, although I hope it’s not the case, will probably look like greenspoint in the next 20 years. What a waste.
The largest plot of imminently developable land inside the loop is the KBR site, but that’s only a little over one hundred acres. South of the loop are some larger tracts, up to about 460 acres in size (albeit criss-crossed by pipelines). Slowly but surely, sites like these are getting filled in, however land prices already preclude many types of commercial land uses.
However, to put things in perspective, The Woodlands is 28,000 acres! Bridgelands is 11,401 acres. And that’s to speak nothing of the hundreds of thousands of acres of development outside of master-planned communities. At 4,000 acres, Generation Park is one of the few really big parcels left that is accessible to Beltway 8, its certainly in the path of development, sites are affordable, and its accessible both to the city and to acceptable school districts.
It’ll fill in. (Sooner or later.)