STREET POOPING, WIPING, AND PHOTOGRAPHING IS BACK IN THE WOODLAND HEIGHTS 
According to a Houston Chronicle report, a resident of Byrne St. reported to police earlier today an encounter with yet another act of public pooping in the 77009. And it appears to be the work of a familiar figure from that neighborhood: that of the defecating, toilet-paper-toting man commonly referred to as the, uh, “serial pooper” of Woodland Heights. Back in May, a surveillance camera posted in a tree had caught images (above right) of the sidewalk hijinx of a man who, residents say, had repeatedly been defecating in and around the yards and driveways of the 500 block of Byrne St. A 56-year-old man had confessed to the defecatory acts after he was later picked up on a related charge of public urination near the Fiesta Mart at Quitman and Fulton  — but was not charged with a crime at the time, because “the man had serious mental health issues,” Heather Alexander reports. There’s apparently a photo of the man’s most recent exploits as well; Harris County precinct 1 spokesperson J.C. Mosier tells Alexander “there’s a very good chance it is the same guy,” but is waiting to receive a copy of the photo before confirming. [Houston Chronicle] Photo: Click2Houston
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Hazards
COMMENT OF THE DAY: YOU JUST DON’T KNOW 
“The driver might have been rich. They might been entitled. They might have been drunk. They might not respect traffic laws at all or such sentiment may be situationally limited. They might have a small penis. They might have no patience. They might be narcissistic. They might be egotistical. They might be a dumb-ass. (I will add to this list of possibilities, they might have been distracted, they might have been very tired, or they might have been subject to the influence of prescription medication; and there are in fact many other possibilities, so many that it is nigh impossible to enumerate all of them.)
The construction manager might have abided by recent history and changed protocols; they might have judged their protocols to be adequate. Barricades might not have been erected at all, or properly, or in a manner that would be appropriate for traffic in that location.
What we know for sure is that any combination of these possibilities might have contributed to the accident. Although being drunk certainly increases the odds of having an accident, even drunk drivers are usually responsive to barricades; and yet, I’ve also known a fair number of people that even on their best of days are capable of jumping curbs or driving into buildings.
The fact is, we don’t know very much about what happened. We do not know what the driver did. We do not know what the driver deserves. Even if we were capable of rendering judgment over-the-wires with such limited information, it does not stand to reason that the driver will get what they deserve in the legal system.
This is one of those instances when the commentary on a news item is more tragic than the news item. It exposes the ease with which people spin a tale, assign guilt, and express faith in the powers that be to mete out a poorly-conceived notion of justice. It is an unfortunate tendency.” [TheNiche, commenting on Notorious Wet Concrete, the Scourge of Upper Kirby, Claims the Shiny Red Mustang of Victim No. 3] Illustration: Lulu
It’s the kind of façade mangling that could only happen to a fifties-mod office building: A reader sends pics showing damage to the front of the 1959-vintage Search Homeless Services headquarters at 2505 Fannin St. just north of McGowen in Midtown in the aftermath of last month’s vehicle-meets-building drive-up accident. The collision twisted one of the embedded steel columns along the sidewalk into a nonprofit-organization-logo-worthy S shape. Where’d the extra steel come from to allow that to happen? Look up, and you’ll see:
A Unique Fifties Fender Bender
The closest thing Houston has to a Bermuda Triangle — also known as various patches of curing roadway concrete known to appear in and around the intersection of Kirby Dr. and the Southwest Fwy. — claimed its third (known) victim over the weekend. It wasn’t a Lexus this time, or a Jaguar, but a bright red Mustang that found itself solidly rooted in the recently poured stew on the westbound feeder road between Greenbriar and Kirby Dr. early Saturday morning.
Feeder Road at a Standstill
KATY GARAGE APARTMENT FLOOR COLLAPSE ENDS CELEBRATION, INJURES DOZENS OF GUESTS 
Dozens of people were sent to area hospitals after the floor of an upstairs garage apartment collapsed this afternoon during a private religious ceremony attended by more than 100 people. The structure — in the back yard of a home on Park Mill Dr. near Park Brush Ln. just west of Memorial Parkway Junior High School in Katy — is still standing, but photos (at right) show the walls slightly bowed in spots and its siding popped out around the perimeter of what was once the second floor. According to reports, the apartment floor bowed, then fell onto the garage below. Three persons were reported to be in critical condition. [KHOU; Houston Chronicle] Photo: KHOU
From a top-floor perch in their tiny, handcrafted, award-winning live-work compound at 5910 Grace Ln. (featured a while back in Dwell magazine), architect Mark Schatz and designer Anne Eamon had front-row seats to the ongoing smelly, toxic, and deadly shitshow that marked the over-the-back-fence tenure of CES Environmental Services, in its facility at 4904 Griggs Rd., just a mile and a half south of the UH campus. Among the joys they were able to plug their noses and record was this tableau from July 2009: “In the first photograph [Schatz] took of the scene unfolding below him, shot like all the rest with the eye of an architect, perfectly framing the site, the tank farm is to the left, and a worker races from the right to the warehouse, which has a smoking hole blown through the roof. In a subsequent photo, oxygen tanks are wheeled in. Then the oxygen tanks fall over. Then a forklift shows up, and a crew starts setting the oxygen tanks upright. All this time, while they go through this Three Stooges routine, their co-worker is lying inside the warehouse covered in burns. You can see the back of a metal cylindrical tanker truck in the photos. [Schatz and Eamon] learn later that the fatally burned worker had opened the hatch on the tanker and switched on his flashlight to peer in. A spark from the flashlight set off a flash fire.”
Toxics by Design
A DIRE WARNING FOR HOUSTON, 1965: IN CASE OF NUCLEAR ATTACK, PROPERTY VALUES MAY RISE 
Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, creator of the online Nukemap nuclear-blast simulator, finds the following charming nugget in a September 1965 report issued by the nonprofit Institute for Defense Analyses, which wad been hired by the U.S. Army’s Office of Civil Defense to calculate the effects of the use of a nuclear weapon on an American city — using Houston as an example: “For single surface bursts of 3- and 10-Mt, about 64 percent and 46 percent of the property values survive, while only 32 and 18 percent of the unsheltered population survives. In a macabre sense, the surviving population would be individually ‘wealthier’ than before the attack. For a single 10-Mt weapon, surviving property value per capita nearly doubles from a preattack value of about $9,000 to slightly more than $16,000 and, as the weight of the attack increases, the greater the per capita gain in ‘wealth’ of the survivors. For a 100-Mt surface burst, the surviving population is nearly four times wealthier than pre-attack ($34,000). However, any joy among the surviving population may be quite shortlived; none of these gross estimates of the effects of nuclear attack indicate whether or not the immediate metropolitan area is viable, either by itself or with the assistance of the rest of the country.” [Lawyers, Guns, and Money; report (PDF)] Simulated image of 10-megaton mushroom cloud over Houston: Nukemap 3D
A Swamplot reader writes in with a report on the aftermath of last night’s collapse of a top-story section of the very long parking garage for the One Riverway office building north of the Galleria, on S. Post Oak just south of Riverway Dr. No one was hurt in the accident, which occurred before 8 pm, but abc13 reports that vehicles were still exiting the structure at that time. S. Post Oak Ln. is now closed to traffic while officials determine if the concrete structure is safe, and workers are already mourning the lost parking spaces.
Ramp Down
“The doors do actually open on that floor and the elevator is functional,” insists the Swamplot reader who sent us these photos of the elevator landing on the fifth floor of the attached parking garage for the Decorative Center Houston at 5120 Woodway Dr. north of the Galleria. Yes, getting in and out would likely be a little difficult for those wider of girth or packages. But if you do end up stuck, you can always go down to a lower floor, switch cars, and come back up where there’s a little more space to maneuver:
Sleek Designs
An enterprising Woodland Heights resident set up a camera in a tree in front of her home in order to capture images of the man who had been repeatedly pooping on the sidewalk and driveway of her residence and other homes in and around the 500 block of Byrne St. And . . . success! The animated image above, culled from surveillance footage provided to HPD and Channel 2 reporter Jennifer Bauer, shows the perpetrator in the act and its immediate aftermath — though, fortunately, the foreground leaves tastefully shield our view from most of the nastiness.
Bauer, though, provides helpful commentary:
The Poop on the Street
Welcome to lovely Villa by the Sea, the quaint Mediterranean-themed gated McMansion development off Todville Rd. in Seabrook that just happens to be built on the grounds of the former mansion where owner, trailer-rental mogul, and child predator Bill List was shot by some angry houseguests back in 1984. That last detail about the neighborhood’s history, apparently, was unknown to Nir Golan, who recently signed a lease to rent the house pictured above. The 4,550-sq.-ft. seaside home at 514 Villa Dr. was built in 2006 on a section of the land where part of List’s absurd 34,000-sq.-ft. mansion itself once stood, facing east toward Galveston Bay.
Golan says his Realtor didn’t tell him about the homesite’s history, but that he simply can’t live there now that he knows what happened. “People say that they wouldn’t come to my house as a guest,” he tells KHOU’s Jacqueline Crea. Crea reports that the homeowner has agreed to terminate Golan’s lease, but won’t return the deposit; he tells her he had no obligation to disclose any information about the Todville mansion. (Law professor Gerald Treece, who appears in the story, seems to agree on the disclosure issue.) Golan plans to sue to the current owner to get his money back, he tells KHOU.
Spooked by a Bit of Seabrook History
You may have seen some harrowing home listings in your day, but for sheer, ballsy “abandon hope, all ye who enter here” bravado, it would be hard to imagine outdoing the agent’s MLS presentation of the single-bedroom condo at 12748 Huntingwick Dr.
How fearsome is this place? Well, let’s just say the featured photo in the listing is the down-the-hole toilet-bowl shot shown at right. Yes, if while trawling through listings, you are attracted by a full-on view of dank toilet water, surrounded on the floor and porcelain by brown bits that bear more than a passing resemblance to dead cockroaches, this might be the place for you. If, that is, the agent’s sage discouragement, dispensed in contract-friendly all-caps, doesn’t drive you away:
Fair Warning
COMMENT OF THE DAY: MAKING THE WHEELS SQUEAK 
“. . . It sounds like a total douche move, and I guess it is, but if the property really is blighted, you can use the City to coerce them to sell. Keep reporting the property to 311. Code violations are largely complaint based in Houston. so if people make a stink, the inspectors will be out there issuing red tags. Are there crimes occurring on the property? Report them to HPD and the Harris County DA. Graffiti? Report it. Get neighbors in on the complaints, too — the more the better. Keep at it. Eventually it’ll be such a pain in the ass for the owners to keep the property that they’ll be eager to sell.
Just be forewarned, it can be a long process. We were at it for over half a decade with a slum lord who owned most of a crimeridden, gang-infested, horrifically blighted condo complex. It wasn’t until someone found evidence of possible fraud on the condo HOA’s books — and he was looking at possible jail time — that he gave it up.
I know people will react angrily to what I’m saying here. It’s a really horrible thing to do — I admit that. But Texas Law doesn’t give us many other alternatives. And when it’s real blight — dragging down whole neighborhoods, costing the City tons of money and ruining our quality of life — most neighbors would argue that it’s worth it.” [ZAW, commenting on Comment of the Day: Prying Dilapidated Properties from Shy Owners] Illustration: Lulu
COMMENT OF THE DAY: EVERYTHING NEW IS SO MUCH BETTER 
“Your house was built in 1923? My condolences to you and your family. But do not despair, I know things seem now like it can’t get any worse, and it probably can’t, but one day with hard work and perseverance you will get out of the carcinogen and disease packed shelter of last resort and live in a actual house with modern plumbing and insulation. But do not wait too long, the current one can catch on fire and burn to the ground in mere minutes, due to that first growth wood, no fire blocking construction, and lack of sprinklers.” [commonsense, commenting on How It Was Before Air Conditioning Even] Illustration: Lulu
You know the old joke about suburban developments: That they’re typically named after the natural features that they replace. But in proudly announcing the name it has chosen for the new 692-acre residential development the company is planning near the yet-to-be-built northern segment of the Grand Parkway between I-45 and U.S. 59, Toll Brothers may have made that cliché seem quaint. According to the publicly traded homebuilder, which is working with Cernus Development on the project, the top selling point for this new community is its proximity to the new corporate campus ExxonMobil is building just 6 miles to the west. Northwoods will have room for 1,000 homes built by Toll Brothers and other builders, along with “resort-style amenities that take advantage of the mature trees and topography,” including trails, parks, lakes, and a recreation center.
It’ll also have the same name as a 62-home subdivision in the Little Rock suburb of Mayflower, Arkansas, where an ExxonMobil pipeline accident last March resulted in the release of 210,000 gallons of diluted bitumen from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, onto the streets and back yards of the middle-class neighborhood.
Northwoods, Your Name Is Leaking
