IMAGINING A PEOPLE-FRIENDLY ALLEN PKWY. CROSSING 
“Texas is not a safe place to walk and bike,” writes Allyn West on OffCite this morning, taking a closer look at one of the entries released by architects at Gensler as part of a January exhibition of speculative design projects for neglected sites and structures around Houston. The Integrated Urbanism plan sets a towering mixed-use commercial and residential development on a narrow 11-acre plot of land along Buffalo Bayou; the entire complex is sewn together by a zig-zagging “park link,” which connects areas of greenspace and culminates in a bridge across Allen Pkwy. into the Buffalo Bayou trail system. West notes that projects in Houston can only do so much to make themselves pedestrian-friendly if pedestrians can’t get to those spaces: “Even our best mixed-use projects tend to be islands — walkable from within, once you arrive, but disconnected from the city. Houston, it seems, is good at fences, less so at bridges.“ [OffCite] Rendering of Integrated Urbanism from Buffalo Bayou Park: Gensler
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COMMENT OF THE DAY: JOCKEYING FOR POSITION IN HOUSTON’S VERTICAL FUTURE 
“77004: THE new construction hotspot for townhomes, low/mid/highrises . . . Of course , the funny part is all of the leasing/real estate agents are going to tout the “views†from their respective buildings — which will probably get blocked by newer highrises. Just like on Post Oak Blvd., between Loop 610 and San Felipe Rd: The Hanover highrise apartment building had killer views south down Post Oak to the Galleria. Now Randall Davis built another awful high rise: the Astoria, which has some heinous, cheap-looking aluminum “crown†on top. And Interfin is completing its Four Leaf Place tower #5, where 24 Hour Fitness used to be . . . That stretch of Post Oak is becoming crowded. Thank Goodness my dentist’s office on the upper floors of the Wells Fargo Tower is on the NORTH side of the tower. Sitting in the chair, his patients have unobstructed views north over Tanglewood (which can never be built up) . . . Anyway, Houston keeps growing by leaps and bounds. Change: get in front of it, go with it, or get left behind. [Padraig, commenting on Strip Center Art Gallery Makes Room for Installation of Highrise in Museum Park] Illustration: Lulu
Greystar plans to squeeze a 375-unit apartment highrise on the same 1.35 acre lot at 6750 S. Main St. as an in-the-works hotel from Medistar. That Medistar project, which was originally planned as a 220-unit hotel-slash-apartment building on the same spot, will now be a 357-room just-hotel, and will share a lobby with Greystar’s apartment tower on the southern half of the block between Travis St. and S. Main at Old Main St. (across the street from the Texas Women’s University building.)
The two towers (rendered above styled as 1850, seemingly in reference to the Old Main address) will slip in between a Best Western and a Wyndham Hotel, and would total in the neighborhood of 800,000 sq.ft. of floorspace, Greystar’s David Reid tells the HBJ’s Cara Smith. The apartment unit floorplans range significantly in size— the largest 2 suites measure in around 3,800 sq.ft., and the smallest bottom out at an Ivy-Lofts-esque 349 sq.ft.
- 12242 Innisfall Cir. [HAR]
MAPPING URBAN METHANE LEAKS BY DRIVING GOOGLE’S STREETVIEW CARS THROUGH THEM Meanwhile, in Los Angeles: Researchers are teaming up with Google to outfit Streetview camera vehicles with sensors to detect methane gas leaks in urban settings. The project, coordinated by the Environmental Defense Fund, found an average of 1 leak per every 4 miles driven around Pasadena, CA, and 1 leak per 5 miles in Chino and Inglewood. Drives through Boston and Staten Island registered as many as 1 leak per mile. The project is expanding to map more cities; no maps of Texas or Gulf Coast cities have yet been published. Researchers connected to the mapping initiative have also turned similar methane sensors on the neighborhood near the ongoing methane plume in Aliso Canyon, which has been uncontrollably leaking thousands of tons of natural gas since late October. [EDF via 538; Atlas Obscura]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: IT’S NOT THE SIZE OF INFRASTRUCTURE, IT’S HOW YOU USE IT 
“This is less about the size and population of cities, and more about growth and how it’s handled. . . . Growth has terrible problems; rapid growth makes those problems worse, and poor planning makes them worse. But the alternative of urban decline is far worse than even rapid, poorly planned growth. It’s easy to complain about traffic and overcrowded schools, higher housing costs and overextended public services. But would you really rather live with a decaying, unused infrastructure that local government can’t afford to maintain, and schools that are shutting down and neglected? Would you rather watch as the tax base erodes and the City government goes defunct? Would you want to sell your house at a steep loss? Not me. Look at Chicago. Look at what Detroit went through. Sure, the traffic jams are a thing of the past, but at what cost? One other thing to note is that small cities and rural areas can struggle with growth, too. Look at what happened in Karnes County when the Eagle Ford Shale boom was going on. They had problems with traffic, dangerous roads, a lack of housing and skyrocketing prices, overcrowded schools . . .” [ZAW, commenting on Comment of the Day: Drawing a Line on Urban Expansion] Illustration: Lulu
HOUSTON IS THE UBER OUTLIER 
Houston appears to be the only market in Texas in which Uber is willing to put up with regulations that complicate its business model, writes Madlin Mekelburg in the Texas Tribune — following the rideshare company’s abrupt cessations of service in Midland and Galveston on Monday. In Austin, Uber and competitor Lyft are currently funding a campaign against a recently passed city ordinance that would require more intensive background checks involving fingerprinting of drivers — a safeguard Uber accepted in Houston. “Sarfraz Maredia, Uber’s general manager over Houston, declined to say Tuesday why the company wouldn’t accept the same policy in Austin,” Mekelburg writes. “‘It has become clear that Houston is the outlier in how it has chosen to regulate,’ Maredia said. ‘The rest of our markets have focused on passing modern ride-sharing regulations. As a result, our expansion strategy in Texas has changed to focus on launching only in markets that are consistent with that policy.'” [Texas Tribune] Photo of Houston Uber HQ, 5714 Star Ln.: Uber Houston
Demolition began yesterday on one of the 11 remaining structures of Westbury Square at Chimney Rock Rd. and W. Belfort Ave., according to a post on the Westbury Civic Club’s Facebook page. The post indicates that the first building on the chopping block was one damaged by fire in 2010, but that the rest were not scheduled by the owners to meet their unmakers on Tuesday.
An agent for Camelot Realty Group told HBJ last July that the run-down 1960s shopping plaza was under contract by the Villas at Westbury Square, and that the buildings were slated for demolition at the start of last August to make way for more than 100 townhomes (or maybe a commercial development, depending on how things went). A Swamplot commenter noted, however, that the buildings were still standing in early January.
- Previously on Swamplot:Westbury Square Buyer Says All 11 Remaining Buildings Will Be Destroyed in 30 Days for Townhome Lots or Maybe Something Else; Westbury Square Headed for Sale, Exile of Remaining Tenants; Two Westbury Square Buildings Are Coming Down Now
Photo: Westbury Houston
The image above, showing a fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate (FGAN) facility loitering as close as 529 ft. from the edge of an unidentified school campus, appeared on slide 13 of a US Chemical Safety Board presentation in Waco last week. But where is this place? And where are the other Texas locations where similar facilities storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate are sited within half a mile of a school? The Board warns that there are 18 such cozy-ups in Texas, but doesn’t identify their locations — even the image shown above, grabbed from Google Earth and outlined, omits any street labels.
The Waco presentation talked through the safety agency’s recently released findings on the 2013 explosion in West, Texas (located in Central Texas). A school and a nursing home were among the nearby buildings that received serious damage from the fertilizer blast, which killed 15 people and injured hundreds; the safety board report indicates that holes in that city’s zoning laws allowed the storage facility to be slowly grandfathered into a residential area.
Finding out where chemical storage facilities are located, and what they store, is now more of a fun guessing game than it was before the West explosion: In 2014, then-attorney-general-now-governor Greg Abbott’s office ruled that state Tier II data, which documents hazardous chemical storage at private facilities, would no longer be accessible to the public. But those open records weren’t really necessary, not if you’re really trying to find the facilities: “You know where they are, if you drive around,” Abbott told reporters.
- 680 Villa Dr. [HAR]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: DRAWING A LINE ON URBAN EXPANSION 
“Here is a thought: Cities are just too big. Look at Shanghai — great public transit system, but streets are choked with traffic. People on scooters ride almost shoulder to shoulder. People pay over $20k a year for a permit to be able to use the highways because you simply cannot move on the side streets in a passenger car. London has crazy vehicle congestion charges. Overnight garage contracts in NY, Boston, etc. cost as much as a decent sized house in the suburbs. Yet, every city in the US jumps up and down at the idea of growth. Maybe it is time for civic leaders to just tell people to stay away — no room on the roads. Or state legislatures could pass bans on moving to certain metro areas and require people to move to smaller towns/cities to help them revitalize. La Grange is a lovely place. Next time someone tries to move to Austin and choke up I-35 even more, Gov. Abbot could order them to move to La Grange instead.” [Old School, commenting on Comment of the Day: On the Other Side of the Tracks] Illustration: Lulu
JUDGE EMMETT HAS AT LEAST 6 THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THE ASTRODOME 
It’s time again this Groundhog Day afternoon for the County Judge’s annual State of the County address. Judge Emmett’s speech was slated to include 6 points about the State of the Astrodome (which, as Astros historian Mike Acosta notes, is now fence-free and getting some new landscaping, as pictured above). The points, as summarized by the Houston Chronicle: “1. The Dome is iconic and revered by ‘a large majority’ in the county. 2. The Dome belongs to Harris County and is fully paid for. Upkeep costs are minimal. 3. The Dome is structurally sound, but a major repurposing will cost hundreds of millions. 4. Anything done to alter the Dome must be approved by the Texas Historical Commission. 5. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the Houston Texans have contractual rights at NRG Park, and the county must keep its end of that bargain with maintenance. 6. No private interest has come up with the money to save the Dome.” The latest plans being batted around for the Dome: bring the first floor up to ground level to create parking or storage space underneath, then start talking about a public-private-retail-indoor-park space. [Houston Chronicle, previously on Swamplot] Photo: Mike Acosta
HOUSING, RETAIL, RAMP TO 59 PLANNED FOR I-45 AT CULLEN BLVD. 
New housing geared toward University of Houston and Texas Southern University students is planned near the U of H Main Campus’s main entrance on Cullen Blvd., according to PRNewswire. Plans for the Gateway at Cullen development include 531 beds (in single, double, quadruple, and quintuple groupings), mostly in townhome-esque 2-story configurations, which will contrast with most of Fountain Residential’s previous campus-geared housing projects in the area. PRNewswire also reports that plans are in the works to replace the nearby Bestway Motor Inn with a new on-ramp to 59, and that the former Fingers Furniture warehouse will be turning into a retail center anchored by a grocery store. [PRNewswire, previously on Swamplot] Rendering: Fountain Residential
The demo job on the strip center on Blodgett St. between Crawford and La Branch has finally been completed, following a multi-year pause. Until late last fall, the strip contained Sub-Saharan African art gallery Gallery Jatad (since departed to an Almeda Rd. location), while J Food Mart previously held down the fort on the opposite end of the row — but much of the middle of the complex (left, in the above photo) was gutted in 2013. Demo permits for the rest of the structure were issued on Thursday, and the building was down by late yesterday afternoon, a reader writes.
The land under the strip was bought by Trans Unity Partners in January 2015, with an eye toward developing the spot as the Chelsea at Museum District, an 18-story condo highrise. Back then, Trans Unity was uncertain about moving forward with the plan in light of predicted market conditions.
Specs for the Chelsea at Museum District (not to be confused with the highrise formerly known as Chelsea Montrose) mention 95-ish units atop 6 stories of parking. HAIF user urbannizer even dug up a draft rendering of the project, set artfully amid a field of flowers, last October:
- 825 Bayland Ave. [HAR]
