Housing Data

Demolitions
05/20/11 10:01am

Your Guide to This Weekend’s Dangerous Building Demolition Extravaganza

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Housing Data, Public Safety
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Where are all the demolitions scheduled to take place Saturday, in Houston’s annual mass celebration of destruction? Reader Ed from Westbury has put together a handy-dandy map using BatchGeo that shows the locations of the buildings targeted by the city’s Neighborhood Protection department that have received demolition permits since last Friday. There should be more than 400 in there. Is your favorite condemned building missing from the map? Ed promises to update it over the weekend with any permits taken out today. Click here to see a larger version.

Map: Ed from Westbury

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Housing Data
02/09/11 11:14am

Where the Grocery Stores Aren’t

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Retail
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A graphic produced by UH’s Community Design Resource Center late last year maps Houston’s “food deserts” — sections of town that are more than a mile from the nearest grocery store and where a high proportion of residents live below the federal poverty line. The group found grocery-poor areas in parts of the Third Ward, Alief, Sunnyside, South Park, Acres Homes, Independence Heights, East Jensen, Kashmere, the Fifth Ward, East Little York and West Oaks. In all, the group counts more than 250,000 low-income Houstonians living more than a mile from a grocery store; according to their calculations, more than a quarter of that number have no access to a vehicle. A larger version of the group’s preliminary map, where blue squares represent grocery stores and each red dot stands for 50 people with income below the poverty level, is here.

Map: University of Houston Community Design Resource Center

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Homebuying
11/21/07 10:27am

The Clearest Sign of Trouble in the Houston Housing Market

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Housing Data, Houston Data, Price Trends, Real Estate Investing, Real Estate Marketing
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Map Graphic from HoustonFacts.orgSure, there’s the latest numbers out from the Houston Association of Realtors, showing a continuing decline in home sales in October, an 8 percent upswing in the average number of days homes have sat on the market, and a slight drop in the median home price compared to this time last year.

But the most blatant sign that serious problems in Houston housing have already arrived is the new promotional blitz just unleashed by the Greater Houston Builders Association — telling us all not to panic: Everything’s just rosy in the wonderful world of Houston residential real estate. Hey, everybody back in the water!

The PR push, which includes a blanketing of radio and TV spots in local markets, is designed to reassure nervous would-be buyers that now’s the perfect time to buy a home way out on the latest subdivision frontier, even though lots of scary signs have been suggesting otherwise for quite a few months now. The heart of the homebuilders’ campaign is the ominous-sounding HoustonFacts.org website, which fills Houston homebuyers’ ears with fact-filled, sage advice like this:

If you try to wait and time the market until it hits rock bottom, you are likely to lose out. Just as no one can accurately predict the peaks and valleys of the stock market (name one person who sold their tech portfolio in April of 2000), the same holds true for housing. If you sit on the fence and wait for the absolute best deal, you could end up literally waiting for years. And most likely, your guess on market timing would be wrong. But if you choose to buy now, you will not only be in the driver’s seat during the buying process, you will also reap the gains of price appreciation once you become a home owner. Remember, those who purchased homes in the early 1990s during the last big economic and housing downturn came out as big winners.

There’s lots more of this kind of wisdom available on the site, but here’s a special challenge to eagle-eyed Swamplot readers: See if you can find the comparison of a home investment to a stock-market investment on the site that simplifies all those messy calculations by leaving out the cost of monthly mortgage payments and expenses!

Keep reading for a HoustonFacts.org tip on home foundations for the Houston climate!

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Homebuying
04/16/07 8:22am

Good Morning, Houston! Here’s Your Donut

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Housing Data, Houston Data, Price Trends
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Some highlights from the Chronicle‘s annual housing-price survey extravaganza, published Sunday:

  • Yeah, prices were up again last year, growing steadily since 1992 (a good year to start with if you’d rather forget Houston’s big busts). But price increases slowed down in the second half.
  • Anyone needing proof that Houston is still a donut need only glance at this map of sales activity inside and around the Loop and Beltway. We love that creamy filling as much as anyone, but there’s more dough to be made at the edges (eighty percent of sales are outside Beltway 8).
  • The front-page graphic, which at first glance appears to show steeper historical price growth for inside-the-loop homes (and a better rate for them this year), is a little misleading: Except for last year, average percentage price increases since 2001 have been highest outside the loop.

As usual, specifics on last year’s neighborhood price trends are hidden in the Chronicle‘s Homefront section.

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