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Hockley
WORLD’S LARGEST AIR CONDITIONING MANUFACTURER TO BUILD GIANT COMFORTPLEX AT NORTHERN REACHES OF KATY PRAIRIE 
Ah, Houston industry! Oil may be down, but air conditioning is booming — and ready to do its part to further our fine city’s sprawl-ward spread. Ralph Bivins reports this morning that Japanese HVAC giant Daikin Industries, which paid $3.7 billion back in 2012 to buy Houston’s Goodman Global, will build a $417 million, 4,000,000-sq.-ft. manufacturing and logistics campus on virgin prairie southeast of Hockley, off U.S. 290 a good 3 miles west of the Grand Parkway. Dubbed the “Comfortplex,” the facility (portrayed in the rendering above) will consolidate current company operations in both Tennessee and Texas, and increase the company’s Houston-area workforce to approximately 4,000 employees. The Comfortplex will replace an existing 525,000-sq.-ft. Goodman air-conditioner factory near Loop 610 and 290 when it opens in 2016, Bivins notes. The company produces ducted and ductless AC systems under the Daikin, Goodman, and Amana brand names. [Realty News Report] Rendering: Daikin Industries
STEVE RADACK’S NEXT LITTLE IDEA “When people find out this is here — you wait!†commissioner Steve Radack tells the Chronicle‘s Chris Moran. He’s talking about his new $2.3 million soapbox derby park, set to open shortly at 28515 Old Washington Rd. in Hockley. It’s a 985-ft.-long, 46-ft.-high hill built up from Katy dirt, with 240 parking spaces. But Radack’s got more schemes in mind for the little ’uns: “His idea for the next publicly funded signature park scales back his ambition from four wheels to three. But it demonstrates no less imagination than a man-made hill made out of the bottoms of man-made lakes. Precinct 3 could one day be home to a tiny tricycle city, where kids can pedal down a Main Street between rows of dollhouse-size buildings.” [Houston Chronicle]