THE CASE OF THE SPECULATIVE RUBE GOLDBERG-STYLE LONG DISTANCE HOME ARSON ATTEMPT Meanwhile, in Kerikeri: Gag orders surrounding a set of insurance fraud and blackmail investigations have recently expired, bringing to light details of New Zealand investigators’ suspicions that British expat Chris Robinson may have burned his own house down while out of town in 2013. Investigators of the fire, which destroyed Robinson’s multi-million-dollar home and Mercedes, found burn marks suggesting a flame accelerant, as well as records of a remote login to a home computer on the night of the fire. Traces of the software program used to access the home machine were found on Robinson’s travel laptop, though he deleted the program the morning after the blaze. The investigators eventually presented a proof of concept video in court demonstrating one theoretically possible method of starting a fire remotely: the investigators cued a printer to print, which pulled down a sheet of paper which was taped to a string, pulling a switch that caused a small heating element to set some matches on fire (enough to ignite the accelerant that appeared to have been splashed around the house). The case fell apart because investigators didn’t produce evidence of a sent print command; though the insurance company still won’t pay out for the house, Robinson was acquitted. He did, however, lose an associated court case over an attempt to blackmail the insurance company; during sentencing, the judge took into consideration a previous UK conviction for posing as an Irish priest to solicit-slash-extort donations to a nonexistent charity. [Stuff via The Independent]
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COMMENT OF THE DAY: ONE SET OF HOUSE RULES FOR ALL HOUSTON LOCATION GAMBLES 
“So, whenever anyone in Houston gets upset about the impact a new development will have on their neighborhood, the chorus rises up and yells at them about how they should have seen it coming when they bought in a no zoning area. Fingers wag in their face about expecting government to save them from the impact of development when they had a choice to buy in a deed restricted neighborhood in the ‘burbs but chose Houston’s zoning-free wilds instead. But, when it is Mother Nature at work, the same [logic] gets thrown out the window. Everyone buying land along the bayou knows that it is a very active waterway that is constantly reshaping its banks. But when a few dozen owners of very expensive real estate . . .  come crying to the government to protect them from a problem that was very open and obvious to them when they developed their properties, suddenly they are given a free pass from having to be responsible for their decisions. . . . Buffalo Bayou is just fine the way it is. Anyone with a stabilization issue can pay their own way to deal with it.” [Old School, commenting on  Comment of the Day: Keeping Buffalo Bayou in its Place] Photo of Buffalo Bayou: Save Buffalo Bayou
CITY NIXES WHITE OAK MUSIC HALL’S DEJA-VU STAGE PERMIT PLAN 
The city isn’t planning to renew a permit for White Oak Music Hall’s temporary-but-kinda-not-temporary outdoor stage once it expires next month, Erin Mulvaney reports this week. Tickets have already been sold for concerts scheduled later in October and November, but the public works department now says that the temporary stage’s operating permit will expire on October 5th when the structure has been up for 180 days — and no, says Mayor Turner, the venue can’t just take the stage down and put it back up again to get a new one, as the developers told Mulvaney they were planning to do. Mulvaney writes that the White Oak folks applied for permits for a planned permanent outdoor stage several times in the winter and spring, but took a break from resubmitting after the plans failed code review a few times; another set of application materials was submitted last Wednesday. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of White Oak Music Hall’s temporary stage during setup in April: Swamplot inbox
COMMENT OF THE DAY: KEEPING BUFFALO BAYOU IN ITS PLACE 
“Sounds nice — but that little part about the bayou being in the middle of the city, that’s why it can’t be left up to nature. . . . I understand the need to conserve and protect, but the Buffalo Bayou we know today is man-made. Ship Channel, Turning Basin, the resevoirs, Allen’s Landing, even the ill-fated Shepherd’s Dam all took a meandering stream and turned it into an industrial workhorse for Houston. Basically the ‘natural flow’ is impossible to get back; for that matter it never was something that the majority of Houstonians wanted. There are other bayous and creeks in the area that can take up the cause that don’t happen to be in one of the most expensive and sought-after flood plains in America. It is a noble battle but it was doomed to be one of beautification, not naturalization the moment the Allen Brothers decided to build a better New York City in Texas.” [SimplySid, commenting on Stop Trying To Fix Buffalo Bayou, Says Save Buffalo Bayou] Photo of Barker Dam outlet structure on Buffalo Bayou: Swamplot inbox
STOP TRYING TO FIX BUFFALO BAYOU, SAYS SAVE BUFFALO BAYOU 
The waterway enthusiasts at Save Buffalo Bayou just issued their report on their recent tours of the waterway, with an eye toward how the scene has changed in the wake of the Tax Day flooding and the extended high flows from the try-not-to-make-things-worse paced drainage of the Addicks and Barker reservoirs. The photo above, taken during the organization’s scouting, shows an area of the bayou where the river channel dug through a curve and moved over, such that some landmarks previously on the north bank are now on the south side. The authors take issue with a number of current and proposed plans to keep the bayou’s banks in place, and suggest that the best way to end up with a relatively stable channel is to step back and let geology do the job: “When the bayou’s banks slump or collapse, the brush and fallen trees left in place collect sediment during subsequent high waters, gradually rebuilding naturally reinforced banks. These new nature-built banks are better able to withstand subsequent floods as well as the more powerful flows being released from the dams . . . The bayou itself then reseeds these and other sandy areas with the proper succession of plants that first colonize then stabilize the sediment, turning sand into soil, preparing the way for seedlings of trees. It’s part of the natural function of riverine flooding that we rarely have opportunity to observe, especially in the middle of a city where we have dug up and covered in concrete most of our bayous and streams.” [Save Buffalo Bayou; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Save Buffalo Bayou
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW HOUSTON LEARNED IT’S NOT FLOOR COUNT, IT’S HOW YOU USE IT 
“Competing for the tallest building is the civilizational equivalent of comparing certain body part sizes. Houston may have been ‘robbed‘ of it back when it was a headstrong teenager, but with maturity comes the realization that it’s really not necessary to spend ridiculous amounts of money just to have the tallest, shiniest building on the block.” [meh, commenting on ExxonMobil Backs Off Property Tax Dispute; Fiesta Wayside’s New Look]
CROSSWALKS GIVE RED LIGHT WALKERS THE FINGER IN MIDTOWN, EASTWOOD 
The DON’T WALK hand at the corner of Holman and San Jacinto streets has been straightened out after a post-paint spree of flipping the bird to pedestrians, Steve Romo reports this week. The offending intersection is home to a number of HCC buildings and the parking lot behind recently departed Adkins Architectural Antiques, as well as a retail strip;  Romo notes that his news team tracked down at least one other similarly altered sign over at the intersection of S. Lockwood Dr. and Leland St., near the Learn & Grow Academy daycare and Houston Fire Station 18.  The city tells Romo it’s not the first time this kind of paint job has shown up around town (nor is it a uniquely Houston occurrence), and that the graffiti is a quick fix but diverts city resources, adding that folks should let 311 know if any more intersection signals are rude to them. [ABC13] Photo of signal at Holman and San Jacinto streets: Kate Erin C.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: FLUSHING OUT CONTRIBUTORS TO HOUSTON’S UNEQUAL SEWAGE DISTRIBUTION 
“Resources should be allocated based on ‘worst first’. It’s very likely that areas of wealth are also areas of redevelopment and thus, improvement — whereas poorer areas are stagnant and don’t get the same type of improvement because there is no investment out there. I know when I’ve tried to invest in a rough area, the city shit on my face. So I’ve backed down quite a bit. My guess is that people smarter than me stopped well before I did.” [Cody, commenting on Houston’s Poor and Minority Neighborhoods Literally Deal with More Shit, City Data Shows] Illustration: Lulu
DOCUMENTING HOUSTON’S TOWNHOUSIFICATION, ONE TWEET AT A TIME 
While you’re waiting for Kuukibot’s polite but insistent stream of air toxics tweets to come back, another Houston-obsessed account has just hit the Twittersphere — this one documenting the city’s infill development, as evidenced by daily before-and-after shots pulled from Google Streetview (like the 2-house-t0-7-townhome transition shown above, from near the intersection of Gibson and Snover streets in Brunner).  The account’s Philadelphia-based author (who’s looking for submissions, by the way) points to the 1999 changes in minimum lot size requirements as the catalyst for the subsequent waves of tightly-packed townhouse do-overs in previously large-lot neighborhoods around town, as explained by Daniel Hertz earlier this summer: Hertz writes that  the decision to allow lots as small as 1,400 sq.ft. within the Inner Loop (a decree later expanded city-wide in 2013) allowed the building of way more housing stock in the city’s core without a switch to multifamily-style buildings. “An important research project in the coming years ,” Hertz notes, “will be to see if Houston’s willingness to allow more housing—and especially missing middle housing—in the center of a growing metropolitan area can reduce the growth of housing prices and keep neighborhoods more diverse and affordable than they would otherwise be.” [City Observatory] Screenshot of Densifying Houston tweet: @densifyingHOU
COMMENT OF THE DAY: CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING MCMANSION JUNKIE 
“There’s a mania that afflicts home-buyers. I was under the influence once. We had the money and the growing family and longed for a sort of rock to pin our hopes to . . .  (Granted, this was years ago, before the Tuscan Incursion.) The affliction is a cross between beer goggles and the Stockholm Syndrome: the falling-in-love with some ideal future life promised by a house and the suspension of critical thinking. Developers know how to woo with bike paths and landscaping — builders do it with niches, shutters and mantels, etc. The buyer really, desperately wants to see their stuff and their kiddos in that scene.” [movocelot, commenting on And Now, an Illustrated Series of Detailed Rants About McMansions]
FINDING THE RIGHT WORDS TO TALK THROUGH HOUSTON’S RELATIONSHIP WITH SIDEWALKS 
Taking together a recent rash of of essays complaining about Houston’s walkability, public transit, and sidewalk situation, Joe Cortwright over at City Observatory offers some thoughts on why it might be harder for city planners to buff up the city’s walking infrastructure than focus on its car standards: planners, both locally and nation-wide, don’t have as many ways to measure unpleasant walking experiences, or sufficient language to describe them. Cortwright writes that the anecdotes and narratives put forth by Houston’s frustrated would-be walkers are “rich and compelling in their detail, but lack the technocratic throw-weight of quantifiable statistics or industry standards to drive different policies and investments in our current planning system. [ . . . But] this isn’t simply a matter of somehow instrumenting bike riders and pedestrians with GPS and communication devices so they are as tech-enabled as vehicles. An exacting count of existing patterns of activity will only further enshrine a status quo where cars are dominant. For example, perfectly instrumented count of pedestrians, bicycles, cars in Houston would show — correctly — little to no bike or pedestrian activity. And no amount of calculation of vehicle flows will reveal whether a city is providing a high quality of life for its residents, much less meeting their desires for the kinds of places they really want to live in.” [City Observatory] Photo: Flickr userbpawlik
ESPERSON, PENNZOIL, 712 MAIN TUNNELS TO REOPEN NEXT THURSDAY AROUND STALLED SPROUT OF CAPITOL TOWER 
From the depths of the Esperson building, a reader sends a fresh shot of a sign announcing that tunnel connections from the building to nearby 712 Main and Pennzoil Place will be open again late next week. The phrasing implies that the connections beneath the site of Skanska’s planned-for-maybe-later Capitol Tower may not all be open by that time, but the Chase Tower (which itself connects to the lawsuit-embroiled former Houston Chronicle spot) will at least be accessible via a 712 Main detour. The tunnels beneath the former home of the previously-blown-away Houston Club building have been closed since 2014 as Skanska poured a tower foundation and built a parking garage; the company said earlier this year that it won’t be moving forward with the rest of the Capitol Tower until the market looks perkier. [Previously on Swamplot] Photo: ThaChadwick
A PORTRAIT OF THE SLEEPY WORK LIFE OF THE MATTRESS SALESPERSON 
James Haynes takes a look this afternoon at the other side of the mattress retail expansion equation that has led to the 9-stores-in-11-blocks Rice Village mattress district and other high-mattress-density landscapes around Houston: the salespeople who may work a full 10-hour shift alone with no customers. While employees can spend part of that time on tasks like cleaning, inventory, advertising, or sharpening their mattress expertise,  Haynes writes that its still usually the case that “Houston’s mattress salesforce spend hours upon hours with nothing to do but wait for customers to appear. At the Urban Mattress store on Kirby, [part time mattress salesman Rick Goulding runs a contracting business — on the three days of the week when he’s not at the mattress store, he makes site visits. Then, during the quiet hours at the store, he works on inspection reports, writes descriptions for photos and sends e-mails. Without anything to do, he says, the job can put many store managers to sleep. Literally. ‘One of the first weekends I was here by myself… there was one bed I really liked, and I was lying on there, not much happening,’ Goulding remembers. ‘I laid back there and was almost asleep when the front door opened.’” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of mattress stores on Kirby Dr.: Swamplot inbox
FOOT GUY BACK TO HARASSING HOUSTON’S FEMALE REAL ESTATE AGENTS, WARNS HAR 
The still-anonymous guy known for calling female real estate agents to get them to talk to him about their feet is back at it, a message on HAR’s blog notes this week. The caller, who among other noted habits often asks for descriptions of nail polish and footwear and “will usually request that [the agent] remove her shoes for improved cell phone reception,” has been on HPD’s radar for a while, but calls from a blocked number (and hangs up abruptly if male agents get on the line). HAR asks that any Realtor who gets a foot-centric call mention it to the police, and notes that “the real estate profession involves interaction with consumers who, in most cases, are complete strangers. It is therefore recommended that when meeting a prospective buyer at a property, conducting an open house or any other meeting between Realtor and consumer alone, you exercise caution and common sense.” [HAR via Houston Chronicle] Photo of HAR Central Office: HAR
RRC: YOUR DRINKING WATER PROBABLY HASN’T BEEN POISONED BY THOSE WELLS WE WEREN’T TRACKING Meanwhile, in Austin: The Texas Rail Road Commission is hiring a geologist to look through the 10,000-or-so permits for oilfield waste disposal wells it’s approved since 1982, in an effort to figure out which ones were drilled into potential drinking water supplies. Kiah Colliers reports this week that the agency (which since 2005 has had nothing to do with railroads) says it’s let through a “handful” of exceptions to the don’t-pump-fracking-liquids-into-water-zones-someone-might-need-later rules, and that they probably aren’t much of a risk, but the agency doesn’t actually know how many times it’s happened (and the EPA doesn’t have records of giving the required OKs). Colliers also notes that even other Texas officials in charge of water quality in frack-heavy areas of the state aren’t necessarily aware that disposal wells are ever allowed near potentially drinkable water supplies, quoting an assistant manager at the Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District’s response to a description of the policy as “Now why in the hell would they do that?†[Texas Tribune]