- Galleria Office Tower Replacing the Courtyard on St. James Place Gains 2 Floors; Will Break Ground on Sept. 8 [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot]
- Museum Park Cafe Opening Sept. 5 on Ground Floor of the Parc Binz Midrise [Food Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
- Chicago Deep-Dish Pizza Chain Gino’s East Coming to The Woodlands, Other Texas Cities [Houston Business Journal]
- Inversion Coffee House Removes Distinctive Window Stickers Depicting ‘Inversion’ Art Project [Culturemap; previously on Swamplot]
- Public Input Wanted on Short-Term Fixes for Southwest Fwy. Traffic Backups [Houston Chronicle]
- West Loop the Most Congested Freeway in the State, Reports Texas A&M Transportation Institute [Houston Chronicle]
- Metro Holding Public Meetings on Design of the Harrisburg Overpass [The Highwayman]
- Demolition of Historic Wheatley High School Begins, Angering Fifth Ward Alumni Who Say HISD Promised Preservation [Houston Chronicle]
- Officials Warn Western Montgomery County Residents Against Burning as Drought Conditions Worsen [Houston Chronicle]
- ‘Boys from Houston’ Documents the City’s Music Scene During the 1960s [Rocks Off]
- Photography Exhibition Documents Everyday Life and Labor Along the Houston Ship Channel [Houston Chronicle]
- What Joel Kotkin Gets Wrong About Suburban-Style Sunbelt Cities [Grist]
- Copperfield ‘Under Siege’ by Hundreds of White and Cattle Egrets; Forced To Close Playground [KHOU]
- Photos: The Pumpjacks, Oil Well Pumps, Decorated Oil Derricks, and Disguised Well Sites of Los Angeles [The Atlantic]
Photo of 1920 W. Alabama St.: Molly Block via Swamplot Flickr Pool
Headlines
That Grist article is a wonderful piece of comedic work.
The author completely misses the concept of supply and demand.
The Kotkin article is only half right (as always the case with militant urbanists). It’s true that demand increases prices but the lack of supply is just as strong of a factor. And it’s a fallacy to say because urban housing costs 3x as much as suburban then the urban housing is 3x more desirable. In fact suburban housing may be more desirable but is 3x cheaper because there’s 4x more of it available.
re: “Public Input Wanted on Short-Term Fixes for Southwest Fwy. Traffic Backups”
No idea how to fix the @!#! inbound 59. Today at 7:15 the traffic was very slow b/w 610 and 288 because THE SUN WAS IN THEIR EYES! Yes, my fellow drivers were spooked by this completely unexpected phenomenon, and had no idea how to deploy effective countermeasures like sunglasses. Or sun visors.
I have learned that when I head to the medical center at 2 or 3 pm on a Friday afternoon, I need to figure 25-30 minutes of travel time from the Galleria area rather than the normal 15. Also, when traffic is showing signs of bogging down, to immediately get off and take surface streets the rest of the way. You know, those huge, two-lane East-West surface streets like … Bissonnet, or maybe Sunset. Pray there’s no bus ahead of you on Bissonnet!
Except that they may start randomly closing onramps and offramps as suggested in the linked article! “”Maybe we don’t toll the entrance and exit ramps, but maybe we close them during peak times or incidents,” Tobin said.”) – WHAT THE ACTUAL PHOQUE?! Metering onramps, sure. Closing them?
Really, it is staggering that the City and TxDOT have managed to screw up commute routes to/from the Texas Medical Center, where 160,000 people visit daily. Why is there still no rational way to get on the 59 outbound from the medical center?
During the afternoon rush hour, why is there no one directing traffic near Ben Taub/Hermann/Zoo/Trainwreck alley? When a Metro bus blocks an entire lane for several minutes taking on passengers, throttling traffic down to one lane, then two or three trains go by, it can take five minutes to get from Fannin to Main. Where there is no right turn arrow to get from Cambridge onto Main. WHYYYYYY?
Why have they torn up the 59 Freeway’s perfectly serviceable frontage roads for months? All they needed was occasional pothole patches, but that was too much to expect from a city that steadily raises our property tax bills 10% per year.
You’re doing a helluva job, City of Houston!
So Inversion just removed their actual brand from their window? Brilliant.
Yeah, there’s a guy writing for PSMag.com that constantly tries to make the same argument as Grist, as though a demand curve doesn’t intersect somewhere with the supply curve. It gets old quickly. Journalists like these make their employers look bad, on an order of magnitude worse than Joe Stinebaker does to Ed Emmett.