Neighborhood Disputes

Afton Oaks
02/04/08 4:38pm

Billboard House: No Reason for a Front Porch Anyway

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Neighborhood Disputes
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House with Billboard at 4743 Banning Dr., Afton Oaks, Houston

With their Afton Oaks neighbors up in arms over their enterprising 90-foot-tall front-yard billboard, the owners of the home at the corner of Banning and Vossdale have apparently decided there won’t be much need to hang out on the front porch anymore. A Swamplot reader drove by the site Friday and sends in photos and comments:

Yes, the driveway is now where the front porch once was. Also, every shade on the house was drawn. I wonder if they have gotten threats from this? Oh wait, this is Afton Oaks. Of course they have.

The reader, who asked to be called “Buildergeek,” also reports on the yard improvements described in the Afton Oaks eNews:

As for landscaping, if you call not mowing a tuft of grass and leaving a mud track where your old sidewalk used to be landscaping, they did a really good job.

Below the fold: Buildergeek’s view from the front.

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Afton Oaks
02/01/08 8:20am

The House with the Very, Very Tall Sign in Front

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Neighborhood Disputes
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House and Billboard at 4743 Banning Dr., Afton Oaks, Houston

Yes, that’s a mighty big sign in the front yard of the house at 4743 Banning Dr. in Afton Oaks. And it’s not listing the house for sale.

A reader sends in photos and says they’re from a couple of months back. He adds, “What good is having a home at the edge of the West Loop if you can’t put up a 90 foot tall billboard in your front yard?”

Remember that hiccup in the city’s sign ordinance, back in October? Well, look how resourceful some people are! The Afton Oaks January eNews reports that the billboard is still there, but that there’s now . . . landscaping around the base!

Court date: postponed until the second week of February. After the jump: a few more pics from our tardy tipster.

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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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Boulevard Oaks
11/07/07 12:23pm

DelayAshbyHighRise.org

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Highrises, Neighborhood Disputes, Proposed Developments, Southampton
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Slow-motion news flash: City Council has just voted to put off a vote on the mayor’s whipped-up-in-a-jiffy highrise traffic ordinance for 90 days. The ordinance would have required traffic-impact studies for projects “very much like” the proposed Ashby Highrise, and allowed the director of public works to force building-size reductions as a result.

Guess those signs will be staying up through the holidays.

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Boulevard Oaks
10/01/07 9:43am

Uproar Update: Ashby Highrise

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Highrises, Neighborhood Disputes, Proposed Developments, Southampton
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Highrise Protest Sign on Rice Blvd. in Southampton

So much continuing excitement over the new 23-story tower proposed for the corner of Bissonnet and Ashby in Boulevard Oaks:

  • Mayor White sends the city a letter: “I will be prepared to use any appropriate power under law to alter the proposed project as currently planned.” Just wait’ll we get a mayor who’s actually an architect.
  • Next, the architect who wants to be mayor proposes a moratorium.
  • Gentle opposition guest editorial in the Chronicle: “Imagine the diminished joy of looking out from your peaceful garden . . .”
  • Wednesday: Protest rally!
  • Interesting traffic analysis from Off the Kuff commenter Trafficnerd:

    In my experience, the residents of the affected areas almost always object vociferously to the residential components of the project, yet give the typical ground level retail and restaurant uses a pass because they somewhat see those as desirable uses.

  • What’s it gonna look like? See an actual drawing of the proposed tower, after the jump! Yes, it’s cartoonish, but it doesn’t look like the cartoon.

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Apartments
09/20/07 8:16am

Can’t Stop This: Southampton Pop-Up Tower

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Boulevard Oaks, Condos, Development Strategy, Green Design and Development, Highrises, Mixed Use, Neighborhood Disputes, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments, Retail, Southampton, Trees
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Cartoon of Highrise Planned for 1717 BissonnetOne advantage of keeping your Houston-style Big Tower in a Wealthy Residential Neighborhood project secret: You can plat the property, prepare traffic-impact studies, and upgrade utilities before anyone notices. One downside: Media-savvy neighbors might catch on and announce your project before you do. Or at least release renderings.

Here’s what Buckhead Investment Partners is saying about the 23-story mixed-use tower the company is planning for the current site of the Maryland Manor apartments, on the south side of Bissonnet near Dunlavy: A six-story base will include a 467-car parking garage, space for retail and a restaurant on the ground floor, and five live-work townhomes. An “amenity plaza” level on the sixth floor will have an exercise room, spa, and office space. Above it all: 17 floors of either apartments or condos.

Rainwater collection. LEED-Silver rating. Red-brick exterior with cast-stone details. But best of all is the spin:

The project design has been chosen so that all building residential units will be above the tree line, ensuring the greatest level of privacy for the surrounding neighborhood and the maximum view of Houston’s skylines and tree canopy from the units.

Emerging Boulevard Oaks development strategy: You won’t be able to see us, because we’ll be above the trees.

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Landscape
09/11/07 9:37am

Kirby Oaks Dress Up for Street Fight

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Neighborhood Disputes, Trees, Upper Kirby
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Green Ribbons on Kirby Dr. Trees

The oaks along Kirby Dr. between Richmond and Westheimer have spoken, and they appear to be against being removed so that traffic lanes can be widened by twenty inches.

Since FEMA is providing funding to install massive 72-inch culverts under Kirby from 59 to San Felipe anyway, folks at the Upper Kirby TIRZ figured, why not go all the way and make the street safer for buses and fat-ass trucks? And while we’re at it, why not pave those intersections with giant stars? Sure, that might mean less space for trees and sidewalks, but we’ll be able to squeeze some new ones in.

None of this is making Trees for Houston, the organization that planted many of those trees umpteen years ago, very happy. But maybe they’re just not being appreciative enough of the new 14-foot-wide median they’ll be able to drop their tiny saplings into. Got it? On Kirby everything gets rebuilt.

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Attractions
09/06/07 11:21am

The Roller Coaster Next Door

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Kemah, Neighborhood Disputes, Tourism
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Roller Coaster on the Kemah Boardwalk Under Construction, June 2007

Worried that deed restrictions won’t protect your home from someone putting up ugly townhouses on your street?

Big whup. On the Kemah Boardwalk, the next-door neighbors of Coy and Carol Killion decided to build a 96-foot-tall roller coaster.

The Boardwalk Bullet is now a few dozen feet from the house. For 12 hours a day, the family listens to the coaster’s squeaks and rattles and the screams of 800 passengers an hour rolling by at 50 mph.

“It’s such a shame, really. We all used to just love the peaceful quiet,” said Carol Killion, who built the house in 1962. “It’s what we enjoyed about it, away from the big city.”

The Killions, of course, still refuse to sell their home to Landry’s.

“As long as I live, it will not be sold to him,” she declared, referring to Landry’s President Tilman Fertitta.

This weekend, the coaster’s noise drove them all from the porch: Killion, her husband, Coy, and her son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons. “You can’t even carry on a conversation,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll even be able to barbecue.”

No public hearing was ever held to inform residents about the coaster.

The city has no zoning, and the coaster met all setback requirements, a Kemah city administrator told the Houston Chronicle in July. Carol Killion said a lawsuit would be just too exhausting.

Boardwalk Bullet photo: Kira Hamilton

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Medical Buildings
08/30/07 7:42am

Sunrise for the Sunset Medical Clinic

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Neighborhood Disputes, New Construction, Parking, Sharpstown
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New Six-Story Medical Clinic of Houston Tower in Southampton

The construction permit for the Medical Clinic of Houston’s new six-story building on Sunset Blvd. in Southampton has been approved by the city. So up it goes! Behind the new building, facing Rice Blvd., will be a new seven-story, 600-space parking garage.

After the jump, a view of the new garage from the adjacent alley.

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Apartments
08/01/07 6:00pm

Mood in Former Hospital on Former Cemetery: Not So Lofty

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First Ward, Historic Preservation, Lofts, Neighborhood Disputes, Renting
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Elder Street Artist Lofts in the Former Old Jefferson Davis HospitalSome residents of the new Elder St. Artist Lofts (formerly the Old Jefferson Davis Hospital) in the First Ward are upset with the building’s management:

“To me it’s not an artist loft anymore,” says one resident who’s been there since the beginning. “We receive the newsletters from ArtSpace in Minneapolis and we see the artist live-work spaces that are opening up in Buffalo, New York and in San Francisco and other parts of the country, and they’re active and they’re artist-run and they’ve got the support of the city, they’ve got the support of the community and they’re vibrant. And we’re not on that level, and I don’t know if we ever will be.”

Current and former tenants gripe to the Houston Press that the resident managers play favorites and will only rent month-to-month, and that there aren’t enough artists in the building.

Photo of Elder St. Artists Lofts: Greater Houston Preservation Alliance

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Downtown
07/31/07 12:03pm

Eye-Opening Parking Garage Design

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Lofts, Neighborhood Disputes, New Construction, Parking
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Hines Parking Garage at Walker and Main downtown

Hines’s new parking garage at the corner of Walker and Main downtown features an innovative lighting design that delivers benefits to neighbors. The problem: drivers parking at night in the unscreened 14-story garage might shine their headlights across the street, directly into residences in the Commerce Towers building across the street. The solution: flood the garage with so much light that cars won’t need to use their headlights at all.

Unfortunately, Commerce Towers residents don’t seem to appreciate all that attention to detail:

it is an extravagant eyesore that expands from Travis to Main (ironically, grossly overshadowing the light rail) and right on Walker. There is no skin on it, and so sits a concrete skeletal nightmare.

Not only is this grotesque structure visually nauseating, it also is a seizure-inducing brightly-lit nightmare! The structure is fleshed out with intensely BRIGHT floodlights on each of its 14 floors, including the roof, that release their ungodly glow (24/7) without obstruction into the living and bedroom units of the Commerce Towers Condominiums!

Hines vice president Clark Davis told the Chronicle two years ago that the garage, which sits on land cleared by demolishing the San Jacinto building, would be “architecturally significant.” Hines developed the garage for the company they sold the property to, Sunbelt Management of Florida.

Photo: HAIF user sevfiv

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Blue Creek Ranch
06/08/07 9:30am

Blue Creek Ranch HOA to Residents: Stop Living in Your Garages

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Homeowners' Associations, Neighborhood Disputes
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Fountain Hills Ct, Blue Creek Ranch

Channel 26 news reporter Isiah Carey’s Insite blog features scans of a scalding memo distributed recently to residents of the Blue Creek Ranch subdivision, near Highway 249 and Beltway 8. The memo scolds four residents by name (and address) who “wish to make the neighborhood a ghetto” and urges residents to attend a Blue Creek Homeowners Association meeting at Doss Community Center last Wednesday night, with this gentle rejoinder:

IF YOU REMAIN SILENT AND DO NOT SHOW UP THEN YOUR HOME WILL BE WORTHLESS AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD WILL BE A GHETTO. [original emphasis]

Way to increase attendance at neighborhood meetings!

Among the attendees: reporter Vicente Arenas from Channel 11 News, who asked association president and memo author Tamika Harris exactly what she meant by the term “ghetto.” Maybe he hadn’t read the memo carefully enough:

The Ghetto Agenda:

  • Play loud music
  • Allow the kids to play in the street
  • Barbeque in the front
  • Let the gang roam the neighborhood
  • Use the garage and driveway as a place for family meals, hanging out, parties, and hair dressing
  • No deed restriction enforcement
  • Get rid of security
  • No consideration for the many cultures in this neighborhood
  • Allow trucks, trailers, and commercial vehicles in the neighborhood
  • Not concerned with the books being in proper order
  • Allow people not to pay their assessments
  • Use the Association as a social club
  • Increase annual assessments

The memo ends with what appears to be an invitation to some sort of real-estate duel:

. . . PUT UP or SHUT UP. If you lose, you move. The Board challenges these women to sign a legally binding contract where each side agrees to put their house up for sale and move if they lose at the Special Meeting. This Board is willing to put their money where their mouths are. Ellen, Lorraine, Patricia, and Wendy are you? We are waiting to hear from you to set a time to sign the contract.

No word if this strange challenge was accepted, but after an election, Harris did survive the meeting as board president.

Photo: View from 13426 Fountain Hills Ct., on HAR

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