- Chevron Buying 103.2 Acres off Grand Pkwy. and Clay Rd. in Katy, for ‘Flexibility’Â [Houston Business Journal]
- Blackhaw Partners Buys Out All 21 Homes in Addicks Dam Subdivision Near Omni Hotel, Will Tear Them All Down for Apartments [Prime Property]
- Westin Homes To Build 44 ‘Villas’ in Clear Lake’s Tuscan Lakes Development [Houston Business Journal]
- Riverstone in Sugar Land Led the Region in New Home Starts with 756 Over the Past Year, According to MetroStudy [Houston Business Journal]
- New South African Restaurant Springbok Opening Downtown at 711 Main St. on June 12 [Eater Houston; previously on Swamplot]
- City Files Lawsuit Against Houston’s Biggest Landlord, Demanding He Repair 56 Dilapidated Homes [Click2Houston]
- Harris County May Back Out of Involvement with TxDOT on 290 Rebuilding, Lowering Number of Reversible Lanes [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Comcast Turning Home Routers of 50K Customers into Massive Network of Public Wi-Fi Hotspots [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- New Phone Area Code 346 Starts Work in Houston July 1 [Houston Chronicle]
- Detroit’s ‘Write A House’ Urban Homestead Program Now Accepting Applications from Writers to Occupy, Take Over Renovated Vacant Homes [Christian Science Monitor]
Photo of the Julia Ideson Building at 500 McKinney Ave.: Steve Oprea via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
Re: “City files lawsuit…”
Mr. Pfirman’s collection of 300+ neglected properties creates horrendous conditions for those of us who have to live in proximity to them, while also driving down our property values. One of his houses down the street is frequented by prostitutes and even had a dead body dumped in the front yard. He is a leech on society and I’m very pleased to see this much needed enforcement of the city building codes.
I’m not sure how he intends to make money off these properties, or why he accumulated so many. Hopefully this legal action will dissuade similar people from doing the same in the future.
If you have comcast immediately disconnect whatever comcast provided equipment and install your own. Buy your own wireless router and cable modem from best buy or other shop. Also do not connect to any unknown “hotspot” as a setup like this is a hacker’s dream.
Of course the actual number incidents of hacking is low, and such an attack will require drive-by proximity, I still would never trust any random person off the street with unknown credentials to access my home network.
Theoretically there should be a virtual firewall between the home network and public side but the router is running both of them on the same device and hackers have published the router’s administrator credentials sin the public as recently as February simply bypassing any such protection.
The stories about Richard Pfirman have made me wonder of some slum lords aren’t actually hoarders. They buy houses the way some people shop on HSN. It’s not about being a landlord or run if any semblance of a business. It’s about a compulsion to buy more houses even though they don’t take care of the ones they own.
So the cost of re-building 290 is $1.8 Billion. Wow. Why didn’t Culberson ask for a public vote on this project before it got off the ground? Seems the access to businesses along the frontage roads will be impacted in the same way rail construction along Richmond would.
Comcast/Xfinity has been publicly talking (for OVER a year) about this move to turn all their wifi equipped cable modems into free wifi APs for other Comcast/Xfinity customers. Anyone that has home phone through comcast is being held hostage by their short hairs since you can’t get a residential gateway from comcast that offers home phone WITHOUT the wireless feature. Another lovely tidbit: you can’t disable this new “feature”. Now I know, comcast says it will require a login, not be a detriment to your own internet experience because it is separate (streaming etc) and you would also not be held responsible for any illicit activities your neighbor engaged in while connected to your free xfinity internet. BUT, and this is a huge ‘ol but, if the past behavior of comcast is any indication you can’t trust them farther than you can throw your cable gateway.
Good advice for anyone that doesn’t have bundled services with comcast:
1. Promptly return your gateway to the nearest comcast service center. Be sure to let them know why you’re doing this. They seemed genuinely surprised when I spoke to them, although it was a bit over the heads of the folks behind the counter.
2. Buy the Motorola DOCSIS 3 cable modem (good review is over at thewirecutter site). Hooray! now you don’t pay a modem lease fee to comcast every month! Also- my anecdotal evidence from capturing packets via WireShark suggests that comcast loses the ability to do certain types of packet shaping (read slowing down Netflix) when they don’t have backend access to your cable modem. Your mileage may vary.
3. Buy a nice wireless access point for your house that you and ONLY you control. No more neighbors mooching your wifi for porn because they dont want to use their own internet.
Bliss
Re: “City files lawsuit…â€
Perhaps Cody would be kind enough to explain how Mr. Pfirman managed to get away with the violations as long has he has. Wouldn’t there have to have been red tags/fines before things got to where a lawsuit was filed? Did he/can he just ignore the Prius Patrol and their wrath?
Re: “Blackhaw Partners…”
How times have changed, when it comes to subdivision names. Apparently subdivisions used to be named for what was there (Addicks Dam), as opposed to what’s not there (Fill-in-the-Blank Forest/Ranch/Lakes). What a concept!