“Ronald McDonald will soon have all of his parking spaces back,” writes Swamplot tipster Michele, who also sends in these photos from yesterday. They show the sales office for Randall Davis’s canceled Titan highrise — which hung out in the McDonald’s parking lot on Post Oak for many months — boarded up and readied for its next location and rebranding assignment.
So where are all the half-built homes? That question, asked by a Swamplot reader last week, prompted a slew of comments from other readers eager to identify pockets and neighborhoods in and around Houston where construction has come to a halt because of problems connected to the nationwide housing-market collapse. (As well as a few where construction stopped for reasons of a more local nature.)
Swamplot reader subprimelandguy suggested looking at Northwest Houston:
You need to go to the suburban areas, particularly the non master planned communities between the Beltway and Highway 6 / 1960. The most aggressive one is actually inside the Beltway near West Road and Gessner – a former Royce Homes (go figure) development called Westwood Gardens. It is a bombed out poster child for the subprime fiasco.
Then late yesterday, subprimelandguy sent in photos!
A reader writes in wanting to know where all the half-built houses are. Sure, High Street came to a halt after producing a naked frame, but what neighborhoods in the greater Houston area feature finer examples of similarly dramatic frozen-in-time residential work that a real-estate gawker could appreciate? Abandoned slabs, lonely stick frames, flapping Tyvek — that sort of thing?
