09/24/08 5:22pm

Flooding at Elysian St. and Kelley St. Near Start of Hardy Toll Road, 11 Days after Hurricane Ike, Houston

Fox 26 reporter Isiah Carey finds a lot of water loitering around the intersection of Kelley and Elysian — a full 11 days after the storm:

What I was shocked to see is that 12 feet of water has yet to recede near the beginning of the Hardy Toll Road near 610. . . . The water still looked like a giant swimming pool. It’s a very scary to see. I can’t believe the city’s drainage system hasn’t been able to swallow the water. I think there’s likely a lot of debris at the bottom blocking the sewage system.

More pics below of water . . . standing still!

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09/24/08 4:41pm

SHOULD GALVESTON BE REBUILT? “The city and its environs rest on barrier islands, which are made of sand, low-lying and prone to significant geological shifts. In Galveston’s case, even before Ike’s landfall, the island was both sinking slowly and becoming sharply eroded along its west end. Moreover, a couple of years ago, the city itself commissioned University of Texas geologist Jim Gibeaut to create a geohazards map for the island, that is, where should development not occur? The research study found that nearly all the development along the beach front west of the seawall, which protects the core of the island, is in ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ zones, where Gibeaut says development should not occur.” [SciGuy]

09/18/08 3:34pm

Neighborhood Guessing Game 16: 1504 N. MacGregor Way, Idylwood, Houston

Remember this house from July, featured as the subject of our weekly Neighborhood Guessing Game? Yeah, the one with the wacky carpet in the garage apartment. On the corner of N. Macgregor and Wildwood Way, on the left bank of Brays Bayou in lowest Idylwood.

Well, the pre-Hurricane-Ike storm surge brought it some problems. Sad photos below:

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09/17/08 4:25pm

Aerial Photo of Villa Dr., Seabrook, Texas, after Hurricane Ike

Having trouble finding photos of your Iked house on Flickr? Try finding it from the air, using NOAA’s brand-new aerial photos, taken only a few days after Hurricane Ike.

Aerial photo of Villa Dr. in Seabrook after Hurricane Ike: NOAA

09/12/08 3:49pm

18224 Lakeside Ln., Bal Harbour Cove, Nassau Bay, Clear Lake, Houston

That Sunday open house scheduled for this townhome at 18224 Lakeside Ln. in Bal Harbour Cove on Clear Lake? Probably not going to happen. Sadly, it may be that the only open houses taking place in the Houston area this weekend will be unscheduled ones.

If you find any impromptu open houses taking place in Hurricane Ike’s wake, how about adding them to this weekend’s Open House Tour? Send pix to the Swamplot tip line, or add your comments or directions below. Have any other Hurricane Ike photos, videos, or stories you’d like to share?

09/11/08 4:07pm

Flooding in Houston after Hurricane Alicia, 1983

They didn’t name this site Swamplot for nothin’! Now’s as good a time as any to stake our claim on the Google as the go-to website for photos, videos, and salty tales from Hurricane Ike — of waterlogged, flooded, or otherwise fluid-besmirched homes and businesses in the greater Houston and Harris County areas. Have we stuffed enough sticky keywords into this post yet? How about real-estate damage resulting from Category 2, 3, 4, or 5 hurricane-force winds in Southeast Texas? Yeah, come here for that stuff, too.

And where will all these videos and photos and stories come from? How about . . . from you? You’re charging your camera phone anyway — and loading up the address book with email addresses . . . Why not add Swamplot’s tip line to the list?

Once you’ve captured it, send us that great shot of newly waterfronted property — just tell us where it was taken and who to credit. If your neighborhood stays high and dry, send in the pics to prove it! It might make things a whole lot easier a few years from now, when you’re trying to explain to a skeptical potential buyer that your house didn’t flood during Ike.

Of course, it may be a little while before we can post the stuff that comes in. It’s all gonna depend how long it takes our laptops to air dry.

We do hope everyone has a safe, dry, and floating-ball-of-crazed-fire-ants-free Hurricane Ike experience. Maybe this thing will simply blow over! In any case, why not have your camera ready?

Photo of flooding after Hurricane Alicia, Houston, 1983: Michael Glasgow

09/11/08 2:20pm

IKE TURNS HERE Apparently, some sort of storm is headed this way. If you live in the 77507, 77058, 77059, 77062, 77520, 77546, 77571, 77586, or 77598 zip codes, here’s a little advice: Surfing Swamplot for real-estate news is probably not the best use of your time right now. How about a little gettin’-out-of-town-ing instead? There’ll be plenty of time to gawk at photos of soggy homes right here — after we’ve been soaked and the power comes back on. On the other hand, all you shelter-in-place people: How’s the installation coming along on those foundation bolts and jacks? Got any tips for turning decorative shutters into something . . . useful? And who’s been buying up all the toilet paper? [Houston Chronicle]

07/25/08 2:07pm

BACK IN THE WATERWAY, EVERYONE! City Council voted earlier this week to relax restrictions on the construction and renovation of homes in frequently flooded areas. The restrictions had been enacted quietly 2 years ago and protested by floodway residents ever since. “Under the revised rules, permits for construction on vacant land in floodways will be issued only if the building uses a pier and beam rather than a slab foundation, and if the applicant pays for any necessary mitigation, [deputy public works director Andy] Icken said.” [Houston Chronicle]

07/18/08 4:31pm

COLLECTING RAINWATER: NOT JUST FOR PLANTS The Public Works Department may modify proposed regulations requiring detention ponds or barrels on new construction and residential additions — before they go into effect in October: “City officials acknowledge the proposal is too broad and does not do enough to differentiate big projects from small projects that have less of a flood impact. They said changes will probably still require detention ponds for big projects – like town homes — that contribute to flooding, but smaller construction projects may be exempt.” [11 News]

01/25/08 12:31pm

Here’s the setup: Evacuated from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a family moves in with relatives in Houston. Hilarity ensues.

Drat! We missed the premiere of “As For Me and My House,” which began showing locally this week on KNWS, Channel 51. It sure would be great to see more clips.

And yes, this is the sitcom’s actual tag line: “The Hurricane may be over . . . but the Real Storm is just beginning!”

12/31/07 11:01am

Smile Lounge, 4348 Telephone Rd., Houston

Telephone Road south of I-45 has changed forever, declares John Nova Lomax:

Gone is the Mexican Catholic blue-collar neighborhood to the north around Queen of Peace church, its place taken by a string of hot sheet motels, clip joints, massage parlors and other such venues of vice. This is what’s left of the Telephone Road Mark May, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, Culturcide and others have written songs about.

But it’s all impossibly sadder. The Telephone Road that Earle and Crowell sang about in the rollicking songs of that name is long gone. Crowell’s version is set in the ’50s and early ’60s, and Earle’s in the early ’70s. Today’s Telephone Road far better fits Earle’s “The Other Side of Town.”

There’s more street-level reporting in Lomax and David Beebe’s latest narrated and well-lubricated walking tour, which starts Downtown and heads east along Leeland, through a neighborhood called Edmondson Addition:

Boarded-up hovels line some streets, awaiting inevitable transformation into the (mostly shoddy) condos that are springing up like dandelions here. Other streets reminded us of some of Galveston’s less opulent older districts – one and two-story wood frame houses standing on bricks, interspersed with brick warehouses and workshops.

The story includes Lomax’s encounters with Golfcrest’s underground shopping-cart economy and his retelling of a Telephone Rd. crack-and-hookers tale too uh . . . racy to fit into a song lyric.

After the jump, a very different portrait of Telephone Rd. from an earlier era.

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12/27/07 11:31am

Lake at Crown Oaks, ConroeThe charms of gated acreage near Lake Conroe: large, wooded lakefront homesites, plus only a 25 minute commute . . . to The Woodlands! Oh, and if we’re talking about 1400-acre Crown Oaks in Montgomery County, lots of lawsuits, too!

Last year, the Crown Oaks Property Owners Association, along with individual homeowners, sued Affiliated Crown Development LTD, citing poor structure of the two manmade lakes in the development, located outside Montgomery.

But so much has happened since then: After new board members decided the developer would finally work with them to solve the lakes’ problems, the property owners association dropped its suit this fall. But now two groups of 10 individual homeowners have hired separate legal teams to continue their lawsuit against the developer. And in turn, the developer is now suing the engineering and construction firms it hired to build the dams on both lakes.

But there’s even more lawsuit fun:

“The POA tried to get out of the suit as a plaintiff, so my group has also sued them,” [homeowner attorney Kevin] Forsberg said. “The individuals were not satisfied. … Even though the POA started working with the developer in the hopes that the lakes would be fixed, nothing has actually been done.”

What’s it like to build your home on a lake that doesn’t bother to show up? Thanks to the amazing power of the internets, you can experience all the highs and lows of manmade-lakefront real-estate investing yourself — from the comfort of your own computer! Watch videos and read details of the whole dam story . . . after the jump!

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12/07/07 12:54pm

Having perhaps exhausted other methods of communicating his distress at City of Houston Ordinance 19, Article III, Division 3, Sec. 19-43 — which now restricts the abilities of homeowners in floodways to improve their properties — White Oak Bayou-area resident Jay Green has, unfortunately, turned to poetry. And wouldn’t you know it, his poem begins “’Twas the night before . . .” but for some reason changes the holiday from Christmas to New Year’s and the tale from a rooftop landing to a collapse in property values.

Most of the poem would be too painful to reprint here, but let’s just say Mr. Green doesn’t think much of Mayor White, and throws just about every rhyme in the book at him. As a caution to readers against any future forays into the real-estate-poetry genre, only a couple of the uh . . . better stanzas are excerpted below:

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11/20/07 11:06am

4608 Roseneath Dr., Houston

Why has this property in Riverside Terrace been floating aimlessly on the market for almost five months? Sure, it’s being sold “as is” — and the “is” apparently doesn’t merit an interior photo. But the home has four bedrooms, contains 2,875 square feet of living space, and is apparently salvageable. Plus it sits on a 11,100-square-foot lot on a “lovely, tree-lined street” in a part of town that’s been pretty hot recently, no?

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09/26/07 9:52am

Le Maison on Revere Apartments

Worried that there still aren’t going to be enough places to live near the corner of Westheimer and Kirby after all the construction is done? Relax. The Texas division of Orlando, Florida’s ZOM Development just got a slew of construction permits approved yesterday for their next fancy apartment complex just a few blocks to the east of that busy intersection, at the corner of Revere and Cameron, at 2701 Revere St. (Cleverly, the address on the permits is listed as 2727 Revere. Why would they give it that number?)

Going up: Le Maison on Revere, 431 rental units on a just-under-six-acre site, a five-story mix of “flats and high-end loft units.”

But it looks like there’s more to it. Not satisfied with the Beaux-Arts-meets-the-Alamo stylings of the Bel Air Apartments they recently developed and filled up not too far away on Allen Parkway, the sleek modern look of the 2727 Kirby tower now going up across the street from their new development, or the apparent Superman-in-Gotham City theme of West Ave on the other side of Kirby, ZOM has apparently decided that their new complex will, at last, point out the absurdities of the area’s stylistic hodgepodge.

How? By theming the building with a higher, more symbolic purpose in mind.

That’s right: The Le Maison on Revere apartments will be marketed and dressed up to look like “New Orleans garden style apartments,” and thereby perform the public service of reminding residents of the former glory of their neighboring city and the dangers of living at low elevations in a high-water town.

Expect the top floors to fill up first.