Downtown

Commercial Real Estate
08/06/07 10:39am

Downtown Rents: Going Up

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Downtown, Leasing, New Construction, Office Buildings
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5 Houston CenterLeasing rates at Five Houston Center downtown have reached $30 a square foot triple net, reports Globe St. That’s quite a jump from the building’s $18 rate a year ago. Other Class A buildings are not far behind.

Will prices stay high after all those new downtown buildings get built?

[Transwestern senior vice president David] Lee points out that when newer product comes on line, older buildings will work to catch up by making rates competitive. But with new buildings still 18 months to two years from completion in the CBD, current owners have an interesting advantage, he adds. “The guys that got their stuff in the ground a year and a half to two years ago and before are in great shape now,” he says. “In a two-year period, rates have essentially doubled Downtown.”

Photo of 5 Houston Center: HKS

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Downtown
07/31/07 12:03pm

Eye-Opening Parking Garage Design

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Lofts, Neighborhood Disputes, New Construction, Parking
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Hines Parking Garage at Walker and Main downtown

Hines’s new parking garage at the corner of Walker and Main downtown features an innovative lighting design that delivers benefits to neighbors. The problem: drivers parking at night in the unscreened 14-story garage might shine their headlights across the street, directly into residences in the Commerce Towers building across the street. The solution: flood the garage with so much light that cars won’t need to use their headlights at all.

Unfortunately, Commerce Towers residents don’t seem to appreciate all that attention to detail:

it is an extravagant eyesore that expands from Travis to Main (ironically, grossly overshadowing the light rail) and right on Walker. There is no skin on it, and so sits a concrete skeletal nightmare.

Not only is this grotesque structure visually nauseating, it also is a seizure-inducing brightly-lit nightmare! The structure is fleshed out with intensely BRIGHT floodlights on each of its 14 floors, including the roof, that release their ungodly glow (24/7) without obstruction into the living and bedroom units of the Commerce Towers Condominiums!

Hines vice president Clark Davis told the Chronicle two years ago that the garage, which sits on land cleared by demolishing the San Jacinto building, would be “architecturally significant.” Hines developed the garage for the company they sold the property to, Sunbelt Management of Florida.

Photo: HAIF user sevfiv

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Commercial Real Estate
07/26/07 8:05pm

The Beatles Slept Here

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Downtown, Hotels, Proposed Developments, Renovations
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Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel

And so, apparently, did Jack Ruby. The 28-story former Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel at 711 Polk downtown, vacant for more than 20 years and asbestos-free for almost nine, has a new suitor, reports the Houston Business Journal:

Omni [Hotels Corp.] said it and Atlanta-based Songy will transform the Houston hotel, near the George R. Brown Convention Center and what will be the new Houston Pavilions project, into an all-suites hotel featuring more than 400 suites, 30,000 square feet of meeting space and multiple culinary venues.

Other amenities will include a 13,000-square-foot wellness center with outside accessibility for nearby office workers, a fitness area with a Mokara Salon & Spa and personal trainers and nutritionists on staff to assist with creating customized wellness and fitness regimens.

After the jump, swank pix from the Sheraton-Lincoln’s sixties heyday.

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Downtown
06/20/07 12:01pm

Downtown Skatepark: Build It and Maybe They Will Go Away

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New Construction, Old Sixth Ward, Parks
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Downtown Houston Skatepark

“If your city doesn’t have a skatepark, then your city is a skatepark,” reads a headline on a Skaters for Public Skateparks website. And really: Houston has so many better uses for its concrete surfaces—like channeling floodwaters.

In the words of one proponent, speaking in a Public Use Skateparks for Houston (PUSH) video:

If you want to get the kids off the streets, get them to quit tearing up your ledges and your rails, and put them some place where they can actually have some fun and stay out of trouble, a place where families can come hang out — there’s a real need for it in a city this big.

It’s the flypaper theory of city planning: Build it, and maybe those annoying skaters will go there and leave your property alone.

You might have expected building owners bothered by scrapes and skate wax to have been bigger proponents of the newly announced downtown Skatepark. Instead, it took a $1.5 million donation from Joe Jamail for the Houston Parks Board to meet its fundraising goals.

The park will be 35,000 square feet of sculpted concrete on the west side of Sabine St. at Memorial Dr., just under the Sabine Bridge over Buffalo Bayou. There better be some drains in those bowls.

PUSH spokesman Barry Blumenthal told city council to expect 200 skaters and hundreds of onlookers at the park on a typical Saturday.

After the jump, more views of the new skatepark.

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Downtown
06/15/07 10:42am

What’s So Frustrating About the Downtown Tunnels

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Shopping Centers
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Downtown Houston Tunnel and Frustrating Shopper

The mysterious Tunnel Mole, posting on Houstoned, provides a succinct list of shopping features missing from the not-so-glamorous Downtown daytime underground scene:

It’s got infinite ways to get annoying chores done, except it’s devoid of the most annoying ones that you want to do while you’re on the clock, like upgrading your cell phone. And here’s what else you don’t have in the tunnel:

*Music
*Movies
*Television
*Sex (not that we’ve noticed, anyway)
*Liquor
*Dreams of a Houston team snaring the pennant/Super Bowl

In short, anything that could sweep you up from the realities of life. The tunnel’s very grounded, because duh, it is in the ground.

Photo: “In space no one can hear you scream,” by Flickr user Matthew Wedgwood

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Condos
05/15/07 10:21am

Stanford Lofts: Luxury Boxes at Midfield

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Downtown, Lofts, Proposed Developments
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The Stanford Lofts

Note: See below for an update.

The new stadium for the Houston Dynamo soccer team will likely be built downtown, on some surface parking lots across the highway from Minute Maid park. Negotiations between the city and the team focusing on that site are set to take place very soon. That’s big news for residents of the Stanford Lofts, until now a lonely building set a few blocks away from downtown’s hubbub. Miya Shay explains:

This is good news for sports fans, bad news for people who paid a premium for the Stanford Lofts. When those guys bought the high priced condos, they were told the parking lot in front of the lofts will NEVER be built on. Oh well, such is progress. Now, a portion of the parking lot will be used for the Dynamo stadium. No more unobstructed views of downtown!

Well, just wait until the new stadium plans are unveiled, okay? Maybe there’ll be a nice gap in the stands right at midfield, and the folks looking out their windows from the Stanford Lofts will have great views of all the games, for free. No lines at the restrooms, either.

After the jump, some unobstructed views.

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