Articles by

Christine Gerbode

10/12/16 11:30am

AirBnB Mapping Tool Showing Nightly Income as Percentage of Average Area Rent

This patchy map of the Houston region, from the national tool released last week by Airbnb, shades the area’s zip codes by what percentage of monthly rent could purportedly be covered by a single night of Airbnb rental. The map is the DIY-hotel company’s submission to this spring’s federal call for more public data tools related to housing and economics. And the rental rates used for the comparison come from the so-called small area fair market rates set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which this summer proposed breaking up the flat city-wide rates currently used for Section 8 housing voucher payouts into smaller pieces (with the intent that offering higher subsidy rates in higher income areas might reverse a trend of concentrating housing voucher recipients into already-high-poverty neighborhoods).

Topping the company’s list in Houston is 77018, the quasi-trapezoid covering much of the Garden Oaks and Oak Forest area; the tool says the federal market rental rate for the zone is $830 per month, but that earnings for renting out a private room in the area via Airbnb average around 22 percent of that amount, or $179 a night:

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AirBnB R&D
10/11/16 3:45pm

Memorial Conoco Car Care, 13202 Memorial Dr., Wilchester, Houston, 77079

The Memorial Conoco Car Care station at Memorial and Wycliffe drives is now fully back in the swing of things following the shootout and subsequent fire at the station over Memorial Day weekend, a reader notes. The station reopened its garage for repair and maintenance services within about a week of the May incident, during which police and a SWAT team faced off with a gunman who had begun to unload an AR-15 on passers by. The shooting spree resulted in 2 deaths (including the gunman), 6 injuries (including 2 officers and an armed guy mistaken for another gunman), and the gasoline fire that burned down the fuel pumps and canopy; the reader reports that the station is back to dispensing gasoline as of last week. That’s a new peaked canopy visible in the background over the sign shown above — here’s what the old one looked like:

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Tanks Full on Wilchester
10/11/16 12:45pm

October 2016 look around Discovery Green and George R. Brown Convention Center, 1001 Avenida De Las Americas, Downtown, Houston, 77010

Supercolumn Going Up on George R. Brown Convention Center, Downtown HoustonBob Russell sends a fresh slew of downtown updates, this time checking up on the state of the George R. Brown Convention Center area’s ongoing redo. The structure’s main entrance on Avenida De Las Americas has been getting a major facelift — the supercolumns installed last summer have since turned white, and the glassy  facade has stepped outward and dropped a few stripes, in line with the plans released previously by semi-public city branding organization Houston First:

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Super Bowl Conditioning
10/11/16 10:45am

YOU MIGHT WANT TO CHECK WHETHER THAT LA MARQUE HOUSE YOU ARE BUYING IS SLATED FOR DEMOLITION La Marque City Hall, 1111 Bayou Rd., La Marque, TX 77568A rep from Greenspoint Investors, which last September reportedly sold Whendy Carreon’s mother a house on the city of La Marque’s teardown list for about $25,000 in cash, tells Kaitlin McCulley that the company didn’t receive notification that the house was condemned until a month after the sale. Reps from the city, however, maintain that the company was notified before the transaction; city manager Carol Buttler says she’s heard of at least 2 other cases in which demo-doomed homes have been sold by other companies to buyers unaware of impending knock-down plans. The city has given Carreon’s family a year to try to get the structure, between SH 146 and Spencer Hwy., up to habitable standards; Joe Compian of Interfaith Gulf Coast, who’s been helping the family with that process, says would-be buyers in the area should check for any city holds on properties before paying in cash. [ABC13] Image of La Marque City Hall: Galveston County Clerk’s Office  

10/10/16 5:00pm

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church renderings, 3511 Yoakum Blvd., WAMM, Houston, 77006

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, 3511 Yoakum Blvd., WAMM, Houston, 77006A look at the latest plans for bulking up the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Yoakum Blvd. at Kipling St. come from the diagrams submitted with a recent variance request for the project (and a few more now up on the church’s website). For comparison, a reader sends some leafy shots of the cathedral at its current width, snapped a few days before the setup for the annual Houston Greek Festival (which wrapped up on the church’s campus for the 50th time yesterday evening).

The expansion would widen the 1952 cathedral building to the north and south (toward and away from Kipling), about doubling the current seating capacity; the design also adds that big dome to the top (while the smaller dome along the Yoakum-side bell tower would get a new nitrate finish stainless-steel top-off to match). The church submitted the request for a 1-ft. building line setback last month, including this drawing from Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie architects (which shows a leaf-free perspective from the corner of Yoakum and Kipling):

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Toward the Heavens, To the Curb
10/10/16 1:00pm

DEEP: SeaspaceDEEP: Seaspace

To cap off a series of Houston-landmark-linked performances carried out over the past few years, Karen Stoke’s dance company will put on bayou-and-space-themed DEEP: Seaspace at Hobby Center the weekend after next (that’s October 20th through 22nd). Stokes, whose previous work includes that well-timed dance about flooding in Discovery Green right after Memorial Day last year, tells Swamplot she has been mulling over appropriately grand Ship Channel choreographies since at least 2003, when she cut a related section from her piece Hometown with plans to tackle the topic later in greater depth.

On the list of historical places given a nod in the choreography (or in the short film to be shown during the live performance): Ship-Channel-side spots like the site of Santa Anna’s capture near the San Jacinto battlegrounds (the historical marker for which is located along Federal Rd. where the Washburn Tunnel crosses under the waterway); Allen’s Landing in Downtown; and the area around the former Willow St. Pump Station (just north of where White Oak Bayou meets Buffalo, by the Harris County Jail) — that spot is shown below, with dancers placed for atmosphere:

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Industrial Art
10/10/16 10:45am

H-E-B WILL DOUBLE DOWN ON A HEIGHTS DRY ZONE STORE OR NOT BUILD AT ALL 2-story H-E-B proposed at 5106 Bissonnet St., Bellaire, TX 77401The H-E-B proposed for the former N. Shepherd Fiesta site at W. 24th St. would be another 2-story store, Houston H-E-B president Scott McClelland tells Jack Witthaus. The grocery chain is backing the Houston Heights Beverage Coalition’s dry-zone dampening campaign and showed up for the press conference last week on the now-cleared 4-ish-acre site. The company has already been planning its first double-decker Houston location (rendered above) on the 3-acre site of the existing H-E-B in Bellaire; plans for that development show about 75,000 sq. ft. of store stacked on top of an all-parking ground level. McClelland tells Witthaus that the proposed H-E-B in the dry area of the Heights would be about 80,000 sq. ft. and come with a 2018 expected completion date, but that H-E-B won’t build in the zone at all if the upcoming election doesn’t go their way. [Houston Business Journal; previously on Swamplot] Rendering of proposed 2-story H-E-B in Bellaire: Terra Associates

10/07/16 2:15pm

CITY TO PUSH ALL 146 HOUSTON TAXI COMPANIES ONTO SINGLE SMARTPHONE APP Uber HQ in Houston, 5714 Star Lane, Houston, 77057On Wednesday city council approved a plan to require that all licensed Houston cab drivers start taking hails via the same smartphone app, Rebecca Elliott reports. Arro, which rolled out in New York last year and several other major cities since, will tack a $1.50 fee onto the normal cab fare for riders (with a 50 cent-plus-3-percent fee for drivers), and will centralize taxi dispatch across the city. (Limo drivers can get in on the action too, if they want to.) The plan comes in response to not-technically-a-cab-company Uber’s recent threats to pull out of Houston over requirements for fingerprinted background checks for its drivers; Elliott writes that the city wants to have the system up and running by the end of the month.  [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Houston Uber HQ, 5714 Star Ln.: Uber Houston

10/07/16 11:30am

Sugar Land Memorial Park and Brazos River Corridor, 15300 University Blvd, Sugar Land, TX 77479

A fresh shot shows the veteran’s memorial at Sugar Land Memorial Park last weekend, which has been relatively high and dry since its brief closure following all that June flooding along the Brazos. The park is right alongside the river channel (southeast of the 59 crossing, where University and Commonwealth boulevards meet), and is designed to protect and serve the surrounding neighborhoods by storing excess floodwater in a pinch. The memorial is also designed to showcase tilt-up concrete construction methods (and was the focus of the Tilt Up Concrete Association’s annual tilt-up-related do-gooding project in 2013). Here’s an aerial view from early June from the Sugar Land Parks & Recreation folks, showing exactly why this year’s Memorial Day event at the park was cancelled (and why the neighboring Pawm Springs Dog Park, in the foreground, was closed):

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On Duty on the Brazos
10/07/16 10:30am

WAIT, DID THE 2008 RECESSION UP THE CHANCES OF A FUTURE HOUSTON CHEMICAL CATASTROPHE? Predicted Before and After Flood Map, 500 Year Flood EventRoy Scranton imagines “a wave of water sweeping toxic waste into playgrounds, shops and houses” in Magnolia Park in his op-ed this morning, written after touring the Ship Channel and speaking with the local A&M and Rice research teams pushing for variations on a series of region-scale coastal barriers to hunker down behind whenever the next gigantic hurricane hits the Houston region, in hopes of avoiding deadly flooding and catastrophic chemical spills. But the researchers tell Scranton that pushing for federal and state funding for a response is a slow endeavor; Jim Blackburn (a main player on the Rice team) tells Scranton that he’s “heard more than one person say our plan is to wait until the next hurricane comes, then depend on guilt money from Washington to fix the problem.” Scranton writes that the best chance for that guilt money so far might have been in 2008, when Hurricane Ike landed just 30 miles northeast of the zone that modelers say could have caused thousands of deaths and irreparable ecological devastation to the area, on September 13th — 2 days before the Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, pulling global attention and national funds to other issues as markets began to crash. [NY Times; previously on Swamplot] Model maps of potential storm surge flooding along the ship channel, with chemical storage marked in red: Texas Tribune

10/06/16 5:30pm

H-E-B Heights Proposed Dry Zone Site

The marker above (showing a now-officially-proposed H-E-B on N. Shepherd Dr.) is a little out of place, if it’s aiming for the former Fiesta site on N. Shepherd between W. 23rd and W. 24th streets as H-E-B says — but you get the idea, and the Houston Heights Beverage Coalition held a press conference on the site this morning to drive the point home. The red line on the map also only roughly shows the boundary of the nominal dry zone that the H-E-B-backed PAC is hoping to get loosened up a bit via that upcoming local election on take-home beer and wine sales. But you can find out for sure whether or not you’re close enough to be eligible to vote in the Houston-Heights-only election by checking your ballot at at HarrisVotes.com — and also check whether or not you’re registered, which you’ve only got until Tuesday to do. (If printing out a form is too much of a hassle, maybe try your nearest taco truck.)

Map of proposed H-E-B in Heights Dry Zone: Houston Heights Beverage Coalition

Campaign Fiesta