Hazards

Air Quality
01/16/08 5:52pm

Living the High Life at Live Oak Lofts

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Crime, Hazards, Lofts, Neighborhood Disputes, Warehouse District
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Live Oak Lofts, Houston

Residents of the Live Oak Lofts, you have been warned! Whoever among you has been smoking weed and stinking up the whole joint, you must cease immediately — the Live Oak Lofts Homeowners Association is on the case!

Don’t want to get all up in your business and all, but now that this has happened, the Association will not fail to contact the proper authorities if anything incriminating is further sniffed — or if you are caught doing anything illegal whatsoever!

After the jump, the scathing marijuana memo distributed to all residents of the Live Oak Lofts!

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Air Quality
01/08/08 12:35pm

Happy New Year from Baytown!

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Baytown, Deer Park, Hazards, Public Health
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Baytown Sunrise

That beautiful flare glowing from atop ExxonMobil Chemical’s Olefins plant in Baytown last Thursday night wasn’t just a pretty New Year’s display for the city. It came with a couple of bonuses: two “not specifically authorized” releases, including 6,857 pounds of benzene, plus a bunch of other fun toxins.

Not to be outdone, the nearby ExxonMobil oil refinery decided to celebrate the new year in its own special way, releasing a bouquet of smelly agents including 3,010 lbs. of neurotoxicant carbonyl sulfide into our lovely Gulf air.

Now when Houston visitors ask you why the east side of the city has an odor reminiscent of cooked cabbage, you’ll be able to explain why.

Meanwhile, two environmental organizations are interrupting the normal course of business over in Deer Park with a pesky lawsuit:

“On average of more than once a week for at least the past five years, Shell has reported that it violated its own permit limits by spewing a wide range of harmful pollutants into the air around the Deer Park plant,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas.

Photo of Baytown sunrise: Bill Jacobus

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Crown Oaks
12/27/07 11:31am

The Leaky Lakes of Crown Oaks

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Environmental, Flooding, Hazards, Homeowners' Associations, Lakes, Land Development, Landscape, Master-Planned Communities, Montgomery County, Real Estate Marketing
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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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Flooding
12/07/07 12:54pm

Real Estate and Poetry: Please Do Not Mix

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Hazards, Shady Acres
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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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Development Strategy
12/06/07 2:35pm

Fifth Ward: New Urbanists Meet Old Toxic Waste

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Environmental, Fifth Ward, Hazards, Land Development, Master-Planned Communities, Proposed Developments, Toxic Sites
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Residences at Seventh at 5th, by DPZ

A reader who lives in the neighborhood points us to drawings and information from New Urbanist planners Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. about the firm’s designs for the former MDI Superfund site in the Fifth Ward. DPZ, of course, is most famous for the enormous small-town-sized stage-set the company designed for the 1998 Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show, which became so popular that it was kept on and is now used as a Florida Panhandle resort named Seaside.

InTown Homes and Lovett Homes owner Frank Liu bought the MDI site — a former metal foundry and spent-catalyst “recycling” facility famously polluted with lead and several thousand chemistry sets’ worth of other toxic substances — from the EPA late last year, with promises that he’ll spend a couple of years and $6.7 million remediating the property before letting Houstonians live there. Still, 36+ acres of inner-loop land at $5 a square foot doesn’t sound like too bad a deal.

After the jump: a look at DPZ’s MDI plans, plus large grains of salt.

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Hazards
11/16/07 3:30pm

Bee Moving: U of H’s End-of-Semester Surprise

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University of Houston
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Hive of 100,000 Bees Removed from UH College of Engineering BuildingUH students: Beware of “secluded spots” on campus!

Just a few days ago, University of Houston officials called in Pearland beekeeper Mike Knuckey to remove a giant colony of 100,000 bees from behind a 40-foot-high section of wall in the engineering college’s Building 1. The wall had been dripping with honey.

But now the bees are coming back . . . to an undisclosed location on campus! From a UH press release:

UH plans to build a new nest for the bees in a wooden, isolated area of campus. The bees should be in their new home on Friday, Nov. 16.

A report from the Houston Chronicle is a little more ominous:

While moving the hive was a bit of a headache, university officials ended up with a sweet surprise: five gallons of fresh honey.

“We’re gonna think of something clever to do with it here on campus,” Alexander said.

Uh . . . with the honey? Or with the hive?

Photo: Diego Almazan/The Daily Cougar

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Attractions
11/15/07 12:05am

Remaking Blow-Up, or Was Everybody Out When the Crowne Went Down?

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Crime, Demolitions, Hazards, Hotels, Texas Medical Center
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[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=3dkfv0e2GCk 400 330]

Watch this video very closely. Do you see someone entering the building before the demolition begins? Maybe on the left side of the screen?

No? Well, keep looking. How about enlarging the video — or breaking it down frame by frame — so you can examine it more carefully?

Apparently someone who shot a video of the same event from the same angle saw something in it so disturbing that he brought the footage to the attention of the Houston Police Department. And officers found the evidence credible enough that they spent the greater part of Wednesday searching through rubble to see if maybe someone got into the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the Texas Medical Center shortly before it was imploded Sunday morning.

KHOU-TV reports that police are focusing their search on the Fannin side of the building, which would be the street on the left. The station also says that the video used as evidence was in fact taken from the St. Luke’s Medical Tower — the same vantage point as the YouTube video above.

So is the video above the same one the police are studying?

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Apartments
09/26/07 9:52am

From New Orleans, with Love: Le Maison on Revere

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Development Strategy, Flooding, Hazards, Lofts, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments, Real Estate Marketing, Upper Kirby
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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.

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Environmental
09/18/07 9:07am

When Bats Attack Your Home

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Hazards, TSU
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Ever wonder what it would be like if hundreds of mating-season-crazed bats infested your home? If your home happens to be a men’s dorm at Texas Southern University, there’s no need to imagine.

Yes, last weekend was batting practice time again at TSU’s Lanier Hall East dormitory. Before the 211 students living there were moved into area hotels, some of them got in a few swings, as documented in this YouTube video. Sure, the delivery may have included some wild pitches, but the bats may also have been throwing rabies spitballs.

Extermination teams are reportedly working on clearing out the (now obviously mosquito-free) dorm.

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