Plans for what is to come to the master-planned, eco-minded Springwoods Village were revealed yesterday; this rendering shows the Town Center, to be located in this 1,800-acre development near the Grand Pkwy. and I-45, just a few miles south of the new ExxonMobil campus. What’s gonna be here? At first, anyway? 250 apartments — with ground-floor retail; 100,000 sq. ft. of other retail; a hotel; office space (including the brand-new Southwestern Energy HQ); stranded kayakers; and a bunch of hiking trails that encircle the Town Lake.
“The idea of requiring on-site parking to be put somewhere else beside the primary frontage along the street was considered during the Urban Corridors process (that led to the current Transit Corridor ordinance). The message from the development community was loud and clear: you cannot prohibit front-door parking within a certain area — that makes properties just outside the boundary of the restriction more valuable and attractive to a greater range of potential occupants, and therefore unfairly diminishes the value of the restricted properties. The idea of making such a restriction mandatory was thus scrapped; it is now an ‘opt-in’ feature of the ordinance in return for the ability to do a reduced setback. Only on streets in light rail corridors though — it doesn’t apply in places like Washington and Rice Village, sadly.” [
“IMO people in Houston do not walk as much as they do in other cities. I have a friend who lives at West Ave and drives to Whole foods across the street, stuff like that. This is why Houston hasn’t had more ground floor retail in the past and we require 2375646523 parking spaces per 200 unit apt complex. Now everyone blames the heat for not walking, but I blame it on laziness and crime. If you build a walker friendly area that is safe like on west gray or west ave then people will come.” [
Culturemap reports that Caroline Collective, the coworking complex with that friendly fake zebra, is closing, after 5 years behind these gates in Museum Park: “
It must be that like attracts like: Another restaurant is getting ready to open near Market Square Park, reports Culturemap’s Eric Sandler: 
“In my line of work I look at parking requirements for different cities around the country all day long, and Houston’s are pretty high. 10 per 1,000 SF for a restaurant means you need a parking space for every 100 square feet. This means for every 10 ft x 10 ft block of floor space in your restaurant, you’re expecting that the people occupying that space drove ten different cars to get there. Is any restaurant ever so packed that there are 10 people for every 100 SF of space (including the whole area of the restaurant, not just the dining area), and all of them driving a separate car?
I guarantee you this: a city that requires that ten paved parking spots exist every time there’s 100 square feet of people dining somewhere will never be an interesting city. If you need that much flat pavement everywhere that people like to hang out and cluster, you’re going to concrete and asphalt yourself away from ever having an interesting district. You might manage to get something going in the parts of town that were built before the draconian regulations took effect, but pretty soon people are going to want to build new things in those areas, the new requirements will kick in, and pavement will start spreading like a cancer.” [
