MOON TOWER INN’S BICYCLE PARKING SCORE 
Whenever it gets around to reopening as a brewery, Second Ward hotdog HQ Moon Tower Inn will still have only a single off-street parking spot — thanks to an accommodation agreed to by the planning commission. Owner Evan Shannon agreed to provide rack space for 40 bicycles instead of the 5 additional car spaces that would have otherwise been required at 3004 Canal St. Helpful in securing the exception from the city: a few bike-riding employees — and plenty of on-street parking in the food stand’s mostly industrial neighborhood. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Marty E.
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DOWNTOWN PARKING LOT PLAYLAND 
The 4 full-block surface parking lots along the rail line just east of the ExxonMobil building bounded by Leeland, Fannin, Clay, and Travis streets downtown will soon have a small blot on their perfect cars-and-asphalt-only record: a 10,000-ft. childcare center for JPMorgan Chase employees. The new owner of the easternmost block, Skanska USA Commercial Development, plans to build the center on a third of it to replace the facility currently housed in Skanska’s other recent downtown purchase, the 18-story (soon-to-be-former) Houston Club Building at 811 Rusk St. Moving the tenants out of that building, which the company is considering demolishing and replacing, would give Skanska “more options,” a company spokesperson tells Nancy Sarnoff. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Bill Barfield
COMMENT OF THE DAY: PARKING LOT CITY “The mass produced and affordable automobile is the single greatest invention of all time. I’m happy to live in a city specifically designed [to] accommodate them.” [Bernard, commenting on Headlines: Trash in the Bayous, All the Surface Parking Downtown]
What’s going on at the east side of the Northwest Mall parking lot? a reader wants to know. It sure looks all torn up over something or other. The parking surface outside Macy’s looks freshly cleared, though planting season is at least a few months away.
TINY “FREESTANDING” INNER-LOOP BARS AND RESTAURANTS ESCAPE INCREASED PARKING REQUIREMENTS [Note: Story corrected and updated below.] The planning commission has made a few adjustments to the proposed changes to the city’s parking rules it’s likely to forward to city council after a meeting today. The revised draft ordinance exempts freestanding restaurants smaller than 2,000 sq. ft. and bars smaller than 1,000 2,000 sq. ft. from the major increase in parking spaces the new rules will be requiring of most new eat-and-drinkeries — as long as they’re inside the 610 Loop. Also included: a major potential boon for bike parking. By providing 4 bicycle spaces in place of each required car space, new Inside-the-Loop businesses would be able to reduce their parking requirements by up to 10 percent. [Planning & Development (see 3 PDF links at bottom of page); previously on Swamplot] Update, 1:45 pm: As a few local restaurateurs have noted, the exemption may turn out to be not much of a change at all: “The major bright, flashing verbiage in that should be ‘free-standing,’” notes chef Justin Yu of the just-announced Oxheart. “I’ve looked for the past 4 years for a quality free standing building under that size. Unless I build it myself, it doesn’t exist.”
COMMENT OF THE DAY: EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH? “In front of this building, to the right of the staircase, there used to be a sign that said ‘witch parking.’ Not sure why . . .” [Bill, commenting on The Feds Go After Houston’s Allied Home Mortgage]
When you use the city’s brand-new pay-by-phone parking setup to pay for a metered space — introduced by the mayor this morning — what are you giving up? Well, an extra 35 cents to the system’s vendor, Parkmobile, beyond the parking fee. Plus you’re telling city officials — and parking enforcement officers — where your car is parked, its license plate number, and a good way to reach you. But city Admin & Regulatory Affairs spokesperson Chris Newport tells Swamplot that’s all: “No credit card or email information will be accessed. We retain the plate/phone number parking transaction history to allow us to verify someone paid for parking in the event of a complaint regarding a citation that may have been issued in error.”
What if you’ve got a few outstanding tickets?
Three days in advance of its planned official introduction, the city department in charge of the brand-new citywide pay-your-parking-meter-by-mobile-phone setup has asked the Atlanta company running the program to can whatever spam it had planned on sending customers. “The City’s agreement with ParkMobile does not allow for promotional emails or texts to be sent to registered users,” Admin & Regulatory Affairs spokesperson Christopher Newport tells Swamplot.
Over the weekend, vendor Parkmobile’s CEO Albert Bogaard denied the company had any plans to send unsolicited emails or texts to the program’s users. But an item posted on InnerLooped (and noted on Swamplot) last week reported otherwise. It pointed to wording in the Terms and Conditions posted online by the company that warned users they could receive as many as 3 emails or SMS messages from Parkmobile or “other affiliated, third-party companies” after using a phone or mobile app for payment. The terms and conditions did indicate that customers could opt out of receiving all text messages or emails from the service, but didn’t describe a way to opt out of ads or marketing messages only.
Blog-about-town InnerLooped notices the new pay-by-phone signs that have gone up on Downtown parking meters, including this one near Frank’s Pizza on Travis St. The service should be convenient for drivers who are short on change but have extra capacity in their mobile phone text-messaging plans. Here’s a little surprise included in the terms of use for the service posted online (though not mentioned anywhere on the signs): notice that mobile meter payers may receive mobile application, SMS, or email ads from the company that runs the service — Atlanta’s Parkmobile — or “other affiliated, third-party companies” when they park.
- Park here and we’ll send you junk mail [InnerLooped]
- Finally, a Smarter Way To Park [Parkmobile]
Photo: InnerLooped
A new 6-story apartment building is being planned for the now-cleared Midtown block surrounded by Elgin, Smith, Rosalie, and Louisiana streets — one block north of the Calais at Courtland Square apartment complex and a block west of High Fashion Fabrics. A variance request for the 147-unit building doesn’t name the developer or show any renderings, but indicates that the bottom 2 stories of the building will consist of a parking garage, topped by 4 floors of apartments wrapped around an interior courtyard.
That’s similar to the configuration of some sections of the Calais — notably the dramatic arched streetfront along Smith St. (shown in the photo above), which contributes a dynamic tableau of headlights, bumpers, license plates, and the occasional hood ornament to passersby at street level. (The view changes daily.) The developers of this new apartment building are looking to recreate some of that Calais streetside magic, according to the variance:
The recommendations of a planning commission subcommittee aren’t going to get any Houstonians in the growing anti-free-parking crowd too excited — they only propose a series of incremental adjustments to the city’s existing off-street parking regulations. Among the newly issued report’s more notable suggestions: requiring shared-driveway townhome developments to provide a single guest parking space for every 6 units, or at least preserve on-street spaces; allowing takeout- or drive-thru-only restaurants and dessert shops to provide fewer off-street spaces and requiring all other restaurants, bars, and clubs to provide more; a minimum 5-year length for any parking lease agreements used to meet minimums, as well as language that automatically revokes an establishment’s certificate of occupancy when they expire; extending the maximum distance to offsite parking to 800 ft. and giving the planning director the authority to stretch it further in some instances; more notification — including signs — when parking variances are applied for; adjusting the rules for how locations can be “grandfathered” under previous parking requirements; and allowing the creation of new “parking districts” in free-for-all areas such as Washington Ave.
YOUR NEW DOWNTOWN PARKING HANDICAP That borrowed disabled parking placard trick you’ve been using to get free parking all day in metered spaces Downtown? It won’t work for much longer, Mayor Parker announced today, calling the abuse of the hanging tags an “epidemic.” That’s right: After October 8th you’ll only be able to park free with a placard for about 2 hours, or whatever the posted limit is. After that, you’ll have to feed the meter, or face a $30 fine. Downtown has 4,200 metered spaces; parking officials say as many as 500 of them are occupied for most of the day by vehicles displaying the disabled placards. [Houston Politics]
WATCHING WHERE YOU PARK IN RAINTREE PLACE 
A resident of Raintree Place received an email complaint from the community’s property owners association approximately 10 minutes after her parked car was spotted in her own driveway. Dianne Josephs, who rents her home, tells the Houston Press she had been loading up her vehicle with clothing and household goods to donate to wildfire victims. Regulations in the private gated neighborhood of 86 lots inside the Loop at 10 South Briar Hollow Ln. between San Felipe and Post Oak Blvd. prohibit residents from leaving cars anywhere other than in their garages or in a few designated visitor spaces. This isn’t Josephs’s first run-in with neighborhood authorities: “Josephs says her neighbor circles the complex several times a day to report open garages and cars parked in driveways. Once, she reported him for having his garage open, and she says he flipped her daughter off with both hands. ‘I wanna buy it [the house], but the people here are so mean!!’ squealed Josephs. ‘They yell at me and say, “You’re nothing but trouble.”…but I question authority. When I think it’s crazy, I question it.'” [Hair Balls] Photo: Raintree Place
THE COMING LOCAL HP IMPLOSION 
Two former Hewlett-Packard office buildings from the original Compaq World Headquarters campus at the corner of Hwy. 249 and Louetta will be demolished in a “controlled demolition” on September 18th. The 2 buildings, a 1,200-car parking garage, and a central chiller plant were purchased for $12.6 million by the Lone Star College System last year, as an extension to the 8 buildings the former North Harris Montgomery Community College System bought a year earlier to create its new University Park campus. But it’s clear the college was mostly interested in the parking spaces that came with the latest purchase. According to the terms of the sale, HP itself will manage the implosion of the 2 buildings, before turning over the resulting “usable green space” to the school. LSCS facilities guy Jimmy Martin explains the reasoning: “The cost to properly maintain the buildings in a ‘mothball’ state until they might have been needed in the future is $1.25 million annually. It was more cost-effective to have the contractor tear the buildings down as part of the purchase agreement.” [Champions Sun; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Geoff Sloan [license]
An enormous flock of Purple Martins has gathered in and around the parking lot of the Fountains Shopping Center facing the Southwest Freeway in Stafford, where they’ve taken up a noisy nighttime roost on nearby power lines and the allée of oak trees that leads through the concrete expanse to Rack Room Shoes and Old Navy. This is likely the same group that hung out in Sharpstown or the eastside KBR campus in previous years, on its way to Brazil; it appears to be the birds’ first window-shopping experience at Mattress Giant.
